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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The Hunger Games

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I finally got to see this movie Wednesday night and I have to say:  it’s exactly what I wanted it to be and a little bit more.  The cinematography is astoundingly beautiful, but that plays second fiddle to a couple things.  First and most important to we nerds who can’t pull our noses out of a book for more than the five seconds was that the movie kept to the core values of the book  magnificently.  The huge plot points are still the huge plot points and the tiny plot points that were the most important stayed true to the books.  A few things were changed, but it didn’t detract from the story too much.  Yes, I imagine the significance of the mockingjay as a rebel symbol will have to be emphasized in later films, but that’s okay, they have plenty of time for that.  The most important part to me was that, although they changed a few things for time, they didn’t willy nilly invent things that had to be explained after the fact, thereby nullifying the alleged point of ignoring the source material (see the random attack on the Burrow in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). They created a compelling, heart wrenching, intense film and they did it without bastardizing the source material.  It’s not something that happens often and for that I can only thank the team behind the film.  They acheived something that no other youth fiction story has been able to do.  They took something that already had a loyal and passionate fan base and gave them exactly what they were asking for.

Now, the second reason this film was so very compelling was the acting.  I had heard that most of the younger cast were complete unknowns prior to this film, but looking into it, Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson have both been in science fiction films I’ve seen before.  It’s just that they did such an amazing job of blending into their characters that I didn’t have the eureka moments of recognition until I was staring at IMDB.  Here’s the thing though, whether they had been in a major Sci Fi blockbuster before or not, these roles were cast with absolute perfection.  Every single actor seemed exactly right for this role.  I had my reservations about Lenny Kravitz, but they were completely unfounded.  He played it with so much heart that any doubts I had vanished in an instant.  Now, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland can do no wrong for me and they didn’t disappoint.  Tucci will always been my favorite Puck and now he will always be my favorite Caesar.  Sutherland really surprised me with the way that he made me hate him.  I wouldn’t have thought it possible.  The acting added such gravitas to a story that is already filled to the brim with it.  It took the words from the page and literally made it come to life before my eyes.  There was never a moment of doubt when my mind dipped back into reality.

Image via Goodreads

Side Note:  To everyone who has beef with the fact that they cast Rue and Thresh with African Americans, read the damn book.  They’re supposed to be.  Also, it really shouldn’t matter since those two characters had some of the most empathetic acting in the whole damn movie.  The actors were incredible.  It doesn’t matter what color their skin is, their acting rose above it.

I mentioned the cineamatography earlier, but I want to revisit it.  When books are transformed into movies, something truly magical happens.  Everything that I normally see in my imagination comes to life in front of my eyes.  Sometimes, it’s spot on, like with this film.  Other times, it’s a little off.  I know quite a few people who still say that their favorite Harry Potter movie is the first one because it was the first time they got to see the world in all its candle lit, whizzing spell glory.  The cinematographers did a stunning job of bringing the world of Panam to life both in the brightly ridiculous colors of The Capital and the faded out grays of the outer districts.  The colors of the two separate worlds did so much to dictate the moods in each location, or perhaps vice versa.  They captured the world of Panam in exquisite beauty, even the ugly bits.

I really can’t recommend this movie enough.  It’s not every day Hollywood takes something we love and simply turns around and gives us more of it.  Lets make sure they know that we genuinely appreciate it.

Under the Never Sky

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Under the Never Sky (Under the Never Sky #1)
Veronica Rossi

It took me a little while to get into this story.  Talk of airlocks, Outsiders, and pods tripped up my brain at first, giving me the sense that the story would be taking place on a space ship of some kind; so when the story roared to life on a planet covered in Aether it took me a few minutes to get my feet under me.  Luckily, Rossi gave me a few pages to get my bearings and in those pages the story sunk its tenterhooks into me.  Brilliantly written, Rossi does a superb job of taking something that initially feels very much like sci fi and transforming it into something infinitely more complex and subtle.  She weaves in magic, Senses, love, cannibalism, and even a touch of anthropology.  The result is a vividly wrought tapestry filled with color, light, and a couple forms of electricity.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Since she’d been on the outside, she’d survived an Aether storm, she’d had a knife held to her throat, and she’d seen men murdered. This was worse.

Exiled from her home, the enclosed city of Reverie, Aria knows her chances of surviving in the outer wasteland—known as The Death Shop—are slim. If the cannibals don’t get her, the violent, electrified energy storms will. She’s been taught that the very air she breathes can kill her. Then Aria meets an Outsider named Perry. He’s wild—a savage—and her only hope of staying alive.

A hunter for his tribe in a merciless landscape, Perry views Aria as sheltered and fragile—everything he would expect from a Dweller. But he needs Aria’s help too; she alone holds the key to his redemption. Opposites in nearly every way, Aria and Perry must accept each other to survive. Their unlikely alliance forges a bond that will determine the fate of all who live under the never sky.

I’m going to save my absolute favorite thing about this book for last because I have something else I want to touch on first and it’s pretty important to the story.  The world.  Rossi build a thoroughly detailed world that encompasses all of the senses in a fully actualized and delightful way.  You don’t just see the flashes of the Aether storms, you feel the tingle Perry gets in the back of his nose and smell the burning dryness of the ash.  But even more than that, I love, love, love the juxtaposition of the super modern enclosed pod living of the Dwellers versus the tribal survivalist nature of the Outsiders.  The whole time I was reading this book, there was a small part of my brain in the background niggling about how this could totally be Earth post-nuclear apocalypse.  It would explain the increase in mutation and the enclosed living of the Dwellers.  But that’s beside the point.  The point is: Rossi did a magnificent job of highlighting the differences in their lives without being hamhanded about it. After a while, you know the difference between the smell of the pods versus the smell of the open air by the sea.  It’s exceptionally well written.

Side-Nerd-Note:  I completely loved the genetics that Rossi worked into the story.  She didn’t get into the sometimes complex details on why the Aether would increase the incidence of mutation or how the Outsiders had evolved to survive their mutations, but she worked it in expertly.  There were no scientific inconsistencies.  She wove the science in, while keeping it a little vague, which was awesome because it meant that my brain started postulating hypotheses on what the Aether could consist of that would cause the kinds of mutations she describes.  It served to draw me further into the story, waiting to see whether she would lay out a theory or let me pick the one I like the best.

Now, to my favorite part: the characters.  (Surprising, I know.)  Aria is poignantly written.  It’s fantastically easy to relate to her if you’ve been seventeen and had a mother at the time.  The way she rebels even when deep inside she just wants to curl up in her mom’s arms, I don’t know about everyone else, but I had several moments like that when I was that age.  At the same time, she’s strong in a way that I wish I could be more like.  Peregrine strikes me in the same way, minus the age and parenting empathy.  I’m quite glad that I can’t empathize with Perry’s parenting, but that didn’t take away from my ability to love his character.  His love for his nephew is where I can empathize with Perry.  Perry and Aria, the tests and trials they have to overcome, yield a vibrant tale of bravery, courage, strength, and sacrifice.  This story is so gripping that I started to worry at page 300 that there weren’t enough pages left for everything to happen.  I can’t tell you how happy I was to learn that this is a series.  Now, I just have to wait for Book 2. *impatiently curses under her breath*

5 ink bottles.

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Cinder

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Cinder
Marissa Meyer

Holy crap!  This book is EVERYTHING youth science fiction should be and to be honest, it’s everything adult science fiction should be too.  The plot is amazing.  Cybernetic Cinderella in a post-apocalyptic plague-ridden world?  YES PLEASE.  I haven’t enjoyed a book to this degree since Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  Everything is exactly perfect.  The characters aren’t just real Human Beings, they are artfully crafted human beings who will consume your heart until you’re mentally yelling at the book that no, the evil queen couldn’t possibly get her way.  Meyer brings the setting to life in dingy, over-crowded, vivid light.  You can see Cinder in her cargo pants working on the prince’s android, the purple splotches that are the harbinger of plague and the silver light reflecting off of Peony’s dress.  Meyer wrote this story in dazzling detail and that doesn’t even get to the action.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . .

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

You know going into the story that it’s a Cinderella re-boot, so in the back of your mind there’s a tiny voice telling you that everything’s going to be okay.  It whispers that she gets her happy ending.  However, Meyer created this world filled with potential war and impossible political decisions and shoves Cinder into the middle of it so that you’re not completely sure that everything will work out okay.  As a result of this, I could not turn the pages fast enough.  I needed to know if Cinder would be okay or if the superbly evil queen would get her way and to be honest I’m literally vibrating in my chair as I write this because the energy from the book is still flooding through my system and my brain is trying to figure out when the next book comes out.

Oh!  Oh!  And another thing: Prince Kai.  In the old fairy tales (we’ll go with the Disney version for the sake of the point since in the Grimm version someone usually ends up blind or turned into sea foam) there’s very little character development with regards to Prince Charming.  We’re just supposed to automatically buy in that he’s a solid, upstanding gentleman who is capable of falling in love and not being a total douche-canoe after the wedding (Beauty and the Beast being the one exception that I can think of off the top of my head).  Meyer, however, made me adore Kai.  She made him into a real Human Being, but she also made him into the kind of guy you want to protect because they really don’t come around all that often.  I invested in him as much as I invested in Cinder which only served to make me care that much more about how two people could survive in such a horrifying world.  I was practically willing the words on the page to turn into Happily Ever After.  I needed them to have a happy ending because Meyer crafted them so incredibly artfully. It’s kind of rare for me to root for the Prince, but Meyer succeeded in spades.

(Seriously, it’s really hard for me to not start every paragraph with “Oh! Oh!” because those are the words that are preceding my every reason for why I love this book so much.)

The step-sisters.  Normally both are completely onerous and in my life I’ve had zero qualms with loathing the both of them.  Meyer’s re-imagining of this tale is magical, in no small part because of how she makes you love the littlest step-sister.  She’s not horrible in any way. She’s just a tiny little ball of adorableness that you can’t help, but love.  It adds such a depth to the story that at the core of it, there’s this tiny girl who wants nothing more than to dance with the prince.  She softened the story a bit and acted as a mote of light shining through the gray of an overcrowded city.

In the end, this story blew my mind.  It sucked me into the pages and didn’t let go once I’d finished.  I know there’s a lot of talk about how amazing this book is and I have to tell you, they’re all right.

5 ink bottles and whatever fairy tales can be found on the shelf.

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher