Masque of the Red Death

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Masque of the Red Death (Book 1)
Bethany Griffin

This is another book that started a little slow for me.  The players took a few chapters to transform from cardboard cutouts to fully fledged people.  I found the main character, Araby, to be overly fatalistic at times, but on another level, it’s not hard to see how one would have difficulty living in a plague ridden world having lost their twin.  She starts out very bland and one dimensional, existing more as a ghostly reflection of a human than one that has blood circulating through her veins, but I was pleased to see that she was allowed room to expand out of that single role. Towards the end, her fatalism transforms to a more palatable selflessness, although I’m still not sure if I’d want to meet her in real life, nevertheless know her in any meaningful way.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Everything is in ruins.

A devastating plague has decimated the population, and those who are left live in fear of catching it as the city crumbles around them.

So what does Araby Worth have to live for?

Nights in the Debauchery Club, beautiful dresses, glittery makeup . . . and tantalizing ways to forget it all.

But in the depths of the club—in the depths of her own despair—Araby will find more than oblivion. She will find Will, the terribly handsome proprietor of the club, and Elliott, the wickedly smart aristocrat. Neither is what he seems. Both have secrets. Everyone does.

And Araby may find not just something to live for, but something to fight for—no matter what it costs her.

This story falls victim to something that I’ve seen a lot of recently.  Having a main character/narrator who is so very world weary/bland/trusting/disconnected that they create a story that lacks resonance with the reader.  If the main character spends most of her time wishing that she was dead, then it follows that at least some of your readers will grow to agree with said opinion.  Here’s the thing, I didn’t want Araby to die and I truly can’t imagine the amount of pain and grief comes from losing a twin, but there comes a time when you crave some other emotion from the character.  Some tiny spark of life over the ambivalence of mourning and I’ll tell you that this didn’t hold true throughout the entire book, but for the first third-ish, it most certainly does.

There was also a fair bit of ambiguity built into the story and not necessarily to the story’s benefit.  I’m all for a good caped menace, but there are certain shadows that are never fully explained in the story.  There’s a fair bit of political intrigue in the various rebellious factions, but they didn’t really do anything for me.  While I understand that it’s impossible to understand what’s going on in someone else’s head when using first person, it would have been nice to gain a little bit more insight into Araby’s parents.  Their motivations are never really even hinted at and I find that I’m curious about them, even now.  Admittedly, all of the ambiguity could be dispelled in the subsequent books since this is a series.

I’m not even going to get into the love triangle, except to say that I’m kind of over them.

In the end, once the momentum gets going this story chugs along nicely.  For a book that’s inspired by a Poe short story, it does well to differentiate itself from its source material.  It’s entertaining and it’s a pretty quick read, but I wouldn’t exactly call it riveting.

I will say this: I intend to pick up the sequel.  I’m curious to see what happens next and I find the person that Araby was becoming to be compelling, much more so than that person she was.  I’m also hoping that all the hints of how she wasn’t always rich will come to fruition in some form of interesting exposition.

3.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 3 Buffys
Character Investibility:  3 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language:  4 Feegles
Mystery:  3.5 Sherlocks
Bubonic Factor:  4 Ebolas

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher 

Insurgent

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Insurgent (Divergent Trilogy, Book 2)
Veronica Roth

Yep, it’s another one of those reviews wherein my thoughts are incondensable.  You know the drill.

Publisher’s Blurb:

One choice can transform you—or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves—and herself—while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.

Tris’s initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable—and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.

It’s comforting to know that Roth picks up a few moments after she leaves off.  Why, you might ask?   It’s because I’ve finished this book and now have to wait until sometime next year to learn what happens next and it helps me to wait to know that I’ll hopefully get to pick up where I left off.  It’s also pretty awesome given the amount of completely fraked up stuff that had happened right before the end of Divergent.  This story picks up with Tris suffering from what I can only imagine to be a particularly soul rending combination of grief for her lost parents, guilt for what happened to Will and PTSD for bloody well everything else.

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For a good portion of the book, Tris is going through a process that isn’t necessarily pleasant to experience in life, nevertheless read about in fiction.  There are periods when she isn’t exactly likable.  I read an interview that Roth did with Shelf Awareness that gave me a bit of perspective on this aspect of the book when I was about 80% of the way through it.  Within the book, however, Roth did an amazing job of not falling prey to the Josh Problem.  The Josh Problem became a term at here at the Platypus, when I read The Magician, by Michael Scott.  While it was clear that one of the main characters, Josh, was likely going through something emotionally, he came off as being pathologically whiny and appeared to be drowning in angst.  The Josh Problem is now used to describe characters that have gone too far into the unlikable realm, having been reduced to the worst available qualities of the prevalent stereotype under which they fall.  Another prominent example would be Quentin from The Magicians by Lev Grossman.  (Total coincidence on the titles being so similar.)  I think one of the reasons why Tris never truly falls off of the cliff into Joshdom is that you already know her from Book 1.  You know she’s this incredibly brave, strong, intelligent woman wrapped up into a tiny body and you want her to come back from whatever she’s dealing with.  You want for her to process everything so that she can get back to normal as soon as possible.  Roth skates over the thin ice with seeming ease.  Tris might be unlikable for a portion of this book, but she’s not that way for 100% of it and there’s still plenty of drama to keep your eyes glued to the page.

As to the action, I’m really impressed with where the story ended.  I won’t give anything away, but I will say this: I’m not a reader that goes of my way to figure out the mystery.  Hell yeah, there’s a section of my brain working at it in the back of my mind the whole time, but it’s not like I’m sitting at lunch staring at my salad trying to figure out what it could possibly be.  That being said, I love it when I think I have everything figured out and the author rips the rug out from underneath me.  I want them to surprise me.  It’s part of the reason I read so much.

In the end, this book is a heart-stopping tale of action, grief, love, and betrayal.  You will not be able to put it down.  Go to the bathroom first.  You’ve been warned.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4 Doctors
Pace/Tension/Urgency:  4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  4.5 Snyders
Language:  5 Feegles
Mystery:  4.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

Divergent

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Divergent (Divergent #1)
Veronica Roth

I’m not sure how this book could have been out for the better part of a year before I got to it.  A friend has been telling me that I need to read this for a while now, but now that I’ve read it, I kind of wish she had smacked me upside the head and called me an idiot for delaying.  I absorbed this book.  Once the story sunk its tenterhooks into me (so, like, page 2ish), it was nearly impossible to put down.  I was actually a little put out when I had to stop and eat half way through.  Seriously.  I want to use all of my trite descriptions for this book, but it somehow feels like it wouldn’t sufficiently communicate the level to which I enjoyed it.  Compelling and vivid seem bland.  This story feels more like riding a roller coaster over open flames, sharp rocks, jagged steel, and giant icy waves; all while being strapped in by a few pieces of flimsy string.  There’s adrenaline soaked action, but the story and the characters are remarkably well written.  The pages disappeared to the points where I was completely surprised when I came across the final page and more than a little upset about it.  I can’t lie, I’m kind of glad that I drug my feet about picking up this book for so long because while some people had to wait a whole year, I only had to wait a few days.

Publisher’s Blurb:

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she’s kept hidden from everyone because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.

The primary reason this story is so incredibly compelling is the characters. Roth writes them above and beyond believable.  They’re real and if you have real characters who can walk around and tell you where your story needs to go, then you have a book that’s worthy of the bestsellers list.  The secrets her characters walk around with are delicious to discover and they add such dimension to the story.  Though she didn’t just apply this attention and care to her characters alone, no, she also created a world in vividly real color that is so easy to see in my mind’s eye it felt like watching a movie.

I have to say, though, that the biggest reason I loved this story as much as I did was Tris. It’s rare in literature for a woman to be written as such a total and complete bad ass.  Over and over, Roth re-enforces that the one thing Tris is above all else is steely.  When embarrassed by a prank, she kicks the crap out of one of the prankers in the next scheduled fight and then doesn’t feel bad about it.  Why is this awesome?  In our world currently drowning in the blowback to second wave feminism it’s not usually okay for women to stand up and defend themselves, even verbally.  If we do, we’re called all sorts of things, from bitch to whore.  Tris seems immune to that and it’s incredibly refreshing to find that there’s at least another person on the planet that wants to see strong women who can stand up and not melt down into puddles of glop at the first sign of embarrassment.  This story is about more than just proving a girl can throw a punch without crying about it, but in some ways, it was that aspect that had my eyes glued to the pages so much.  I can’t help it, I was raised on Buffy.

As a side note to that, it’s incredibly enheartening to find that young girls are being given these very strong examples to look to whether it be Katniss Everdeen or Tris Prior.  Both of these girls stand up and fight when they have to and yet somehow never really sacrifice who they are on a deeper core level.  After the waifishly lovesick Bella Swan, it’s kind of awesome to see girls looking up to people who have a backbone.

In the end, there aren’t words small enough to summarize this story.  It’s huge and dangerous and incredibly entertaining.  It feels more like reading 150 pages than 487.

5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pace/Urgency/Tension:  5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language:  4.5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

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Born Wicked

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Born Wicked (The Cahill Witch Chronicles:  Book 1)
Jessica Spotswood

This book is surprising in all the best ways.  I would not have thought it possible to pack so much action into a story of an older sister trying to protect her younger sisters without any abusive parents.  In fact, if anything, with one parent dead and the other travelling for business for 95% of the book, it’s kind of hard to get further away from abusive parents. No, Spotwood’s genius lies in the world of fear and paranoia she creates for Cate.  An oldest daughter left to care for her two sisters makes for an interesting story.  Throw in the fact that all three of them are witches living in a time when witchcraft is used as an excuse to keep women in line and you have a story that’s enthralling.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Blessed with a gift…cursed with a secret.

Everybody knows Cate Cahill and her sisters are eccentric. Too pretty, too reclusive, and far too educated for their own good. But the truth is even worse: they’re witches. And if their secret is discovered by the priests of the Brotherhood, it would mean an asylum, a prison ship – or an early grave.

Before her mother died, Cate promised to protect her sisters. But with only six months left to choose between marriage and the Sisterhood, she might not be able to keep her word . . . especially after she finds her mother’s diary, uncovering a secret that could spell her family’s destruction. Desperate to find alternatives to their fate, Cate starts scouring banned books and questioning rebellious new friends, all while juggling tea parties, shocking marriage proposals, and a forbidden romance with the completely unsuitable Finn Belastra.

If what her mother wrote is true, the Cahill girls aren’t safe. Not from the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood – not even from each other.

Primarily this story made me extraordinarily grateful that I was born in this place in this time.  For most of the history of our world women weren’t entitled to their opinions.  Hell, there are whole parts of the globe where the notion that women should be seen and not heard in not only accepted, but lauded.  The scariest part of this book, for me, is that they had advanced as a society past women’s rights and gay rights, but then somehow all of that was abolished and everyone’s rights were revoked.  The very basis of rights is that they are inalienable and therefore un-revoke-able, but in Spotwood’s world they did it with terrifying results.  The amount of stress Cate faces in this book is haunting in large part because of her revoked rights.  She gets angry about it and generally looks at it as the hypocritical bullshit that it is which serves to strengthen her character and make her into a Real Human Being.

As to the story, it’s gut wrenching.  There’s so much mystery and intrigue swirling throughout, but it never gets bogged down.  It feels like a dead sprint to the end because I needed to know.  Spotswood paints a vivid setting that lends the story further realism, but it’s her characters that really make the story.  I fell in love with them immediately, investing in their safety and well being whole heartedly.

I was surprised with how much I loved this story.  It’s spellbinding and lyrical, but urgent and tense at the same time.  I’m already looking forward to book 2.

4 ink bottles.

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

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Harbinger

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Harbinger
Sara Wilson Etienne

I’m not sure what I was expecting going into this story, but it wasn’t even close to my pre-conceived notions.  Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I’ve yet to really flesh out.  I got the book based off of nothing more than the tagline “to save the world, she might have to destroy it.”  I wasn’t expecting a slightly New Agey, archaeological, time traveling sort of fantasy book.  I don’t know why, but I never quite achieved full buy in with this book.  It’s not that the characters were wooden.  I think it’s because, although I have no problems imagining a world ravaged by humanity, I just couldn’t quite buy this particular version of it and I can’t quite put my finger on why.  Maybe it’s because I can’t imagine a world where parents abandon their children to be tasered, pepper sprayed, and bound in solitary confinement.  Maybe it was the whiff of the supernatural that permeated the story.  Whatever it was, I spent half of this story slightly baffled.  However, there were still some pretty amazing parts wherein the pages flew by.  The story was sufficiently compelling for me to have read it in a fairly short period of time.  It just lacked that extra little bit that would have made it addicting.

Publisher’s Blurb:

When sixteen-year-old Faye arrives at Holbrook Academy, she doesn’t expect to find herself exactly where she needs to be. After years of strange waking visions and nightmares, her only comfort the bones of dead animals, Faye is afraid she’s going crazy. Fast.

But her first night at Holbrook, she feels strangely connected to the school and the island it sits on, like she’s come home. She’s even made her first real friends, but odd things keep happening to them. Every morning they wake on the floors of their dorm rooms with their hands stained red.

Faye knows she’s the reason, but what does it all mean? The handsome Kel tries to help her unravel the mystery, but Faye is certain she can’t trust him; in fact, he may be trying to kill her – and the rest of the world too.

I was expecting something a little more Harbinger of Doomy than this story turned out to me.  The ending that reminded me more of Avatar than anything else seemed incongruous with the rest of the story.  I knew she had to save the world.  I wasn’t expecting for her to do it in that unique way.  It only furthered my bafflement.  Maybe I’m just being thick headed.  I’ll admit it’s happened before and will likely happen again.  It’s just that when things in the story took a turn, I spent most of the chapter assuming it was a dream because surely these Things weren’t actually happening.  It’s not that they struck me as somehow false, I just couldn’t believe in them on a very basic level.  I’ve read some dark novels in my day, but this one really achieves a unique level of it.  Sure, Harry Dresden is usually getting kicked in the head, but at least he’s fighting back.  The ambiguity of the characters, down to whether everything is just some elaborate delusion, called the Happenings of the story into question, which made the ending that much harder to swallow because maybe there’s just some fungus in their rye bread and everyone’s seeing witches again.  (For context to this reference, see here.)

In the end, it’s a quick read that’s certainly entertaining, if a little on the quirky side.

3 ink bottles.

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher