Zero K - Don DeLillo

Rating: ★★★☆☆

GOODREADS

FIVE MOST IMPORTANT POINTS

1. Unlike any other read

2. Dystopian

3. Confusing

4. Short, easy language that carries a punch

5. Makes you think for day after

Let me introduce myself: my name is Emma and I'm the last person on this planet to hear about Don DeLillo. When the release of Zero K was announced, the press jumped on the book of this amazing 'best American author ever', and I was clueless who he was. And I hate that. So the first thing I did was pick up Zero K when I could and read through it so I finally also know who Don DeLillo is.

Jeffrey Lockhart is called to a compound in the middle of nowhere to witness his stepmother dying. But not just ordinarily dying - Artis is incurably ill and instead of waiting out her days, she wants to be frozen and preserved until medicine can save her. Jeffrey and his father Ross are there to support. Though Jeffrey understand and supports Artis decision, his father then tells him he wants to do the same, because he hates the world he has to live in. But how much can we humans decide about life and death?

Zero K is the perfect read for this day and age. We live in a world where every day we wake up to some horrible news story about murder, rape and unhappiness. It's not a big jump to be in Don DeLillo's world and to see Ross' point of view: this day and age can be tough at best. That's what I so loved reading this novel. Though I felt like it took place in a more future period of time, solely because of the writing, it could take place right now. We have technology, we have war, we have people looking for a way out. This book raises so many interesting questions about life and I bet not one reader will walk away not asking themselves if they agree with Ross.

However, this book is really a more mental game. Not a whole lot actually happens plot-wise. As a reader, it's a lot about putting your own experiences in there and really reading between the lines at what the meaning of this novel is. While I enjoyed the writing, it was really fast-paced and I finished it in a day, there just wasn't enough in there for me. I left this book feeling kinda 'so what?' about all the characters. Because of the minimalist style of Don DeLillo's writing, I didn't get to connect with anyone well enough to truly enjoy this story.

Overall, I would compare this book to a meal at a really fancy restaurant. You are awed by the beauty of the food and will think for days about what exactly was put on your plate and how it was achieved. However, you also won't really be full, because there was barely any food. The writing was great, the plot was original; there just wasn't enough in this story to drive me crazy about it. I can see why Don DeLillo is praised so much, but he might just not be the writer for me. 

Girls on Fire - Robin Wasserman

Rating: ★★★★☆

Publication Date: May 5, 2016
Publisher: Little, Brown
Genre: Contemporary
Pages: 368 pages
Goodreads

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review. This in no way influenced my opinion of the book.

It seems that since Gone Girl, the amount of suspenseful literary novels is just increasing. Girls on Fire is contemporary, beautifully written and revolves all around a plot that has twists and turns on every single page. It's been praised by so many people that I was excited to read this and I wasn't disappointed.

Girls on Fire is the story of Hannah and Lacey and starts off in a Thirteen kinda way: girls become friends and one drags the other one on the path of teenage rebellion and destruction. Except, there's more to this story. Lacey isn't just a bad influence; she somehow seems to have information on the suicide of one of their classmates. What does she know? And how far will Hannah go in this friendship?

What I loved most about this book is the amazing writing. We alternate between Hannah and Lacey's perspective and though they're both teenage girls, they have distinctively different reading voices and both manipulate the reader in different ways. Hannah just tells the story, while Lacey's narrative is like a letter to Hannah explaining her past. I loved Lacey's dark sense of humour and her seemingly 'smart' thinking about the most dumb decisions. They're real teenagers and I loved the portrayal of their friendship.

The plot is also perfectly worked out. A story like this revolves all around the element of shock and I definitely was shocked - though personally, I found the ending a little bit far fetched and unrealistic, which is why it's not a perfect read for me. The author had to wrap everything up in a neat way, and that happened, but I was left unsatisfied with the reasoning and the actions of the characters I grew so close to throughout the story.

Girls on Fire is a suspenseful read that you won't want to put down until you finish it. And then you'll be thinking about it for a long time after. I won't forget these characters, these voices that remain so lively in my head. It's the perfect summer read for when you need a break from all those loved up contemporary books and want to take a walk on the dark side.

The Paris Wife - Paula McLain

Rating: ★★★★★

Publication Date: February 27, 2011
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Genre: Contemporary
Pages: 314 pages
Goodreads

The Paris Wife is based on the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Hadley. While often written about, by Hemingway himself and scholars researching his life, Paula McLain's story focuses on Hadley's point of view and what her life was like living with one of the most talented, and complicated, man of the 20th century.  

When I started this book, I wasn't too sure what I'd think of it. I know quite a bit about Hemingway by now, but I knew close to nothing about Hadley and she came across as one of the most boring characters ever. She falls in love with Ernest the moment she sees him and suddenly her whole life is revolving around this man she barely knows. However, somewhere between their engagement and wedding, I fell in love with Hadley. 

Hadley is definitely one of the most simple characters in the beginning of the story. She's quite old (mid to end twenties) and is eager to find someone she can love and start a family with. But that need for something so simple, happiness and family, turns out to be her strength throughout the story. While all the other characters, mostly writers, strive for life long acknowledgment, greatness, wildness,... Hadley is the calm in the storm and the easiest character to relate to in the story. She might want something simple, but she's incredibly strong and able to handle any situation Ernest throws at her - and best belief that he involves her in many difficult situations.

Paula McLain's writing is beautiful and she really takes Hadley on a journey from young girl to grown woman, across continents and in many different situations. Hadley evolves, but always stays true to herself and I can't deny that I teared up at the end of the story. Because Hadley's wish for happiness is so easy I wanted her to succeed so badly at this. She's willing to give so much and to comprise so much of who she is, just to keep her family, midway through the book enriched with a son, together. And yet, as we all know through the myth of Hemingway, she doesn't succeed. And knowing that, seeing things slowly falling apart and knowing Hadley won't be able to bring them back together, is heartbreaking.

It's not easy to tell a story that has become general knowledge for so many people. Hemingway is known as the womanizer with four wives and yet never faithful to any of them. It's a task and Paula McLain navigates it beautifully. Knowing the ending only enhances the story and the depth the characters are given means you'll never look at Hemingway, or Hadley, the same way again.

Perfect Days - Raphael Montes

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Publication Date: February 16, 2016
Publisher: Penguin Press
Genre: Contemporary
Pages: 272 pages
Goodreads

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review. This in no way influenced my opinion of the book.

After the success of Gone Girl, contemporary fiction has been constantly trying to find more shocking story lines that will draw readers, and hopefully eventually viewers, into their world. Perfect Days by Raphael Montes is the perfect example of this trend. Every chapter makes you think that this book has become as crazy as possible and then every next chapter will prove that it is possible for the story to get more crazy and sick. 

Reading Perfect Days is like driving past a car crash. You know you shouldn’t look, but you can’t help slowing down and trying to figure out what happens. Teo is a med student with an obsession of corpses, especially Gertrude, his best friend who is an old dead lady and the corpse he has to cut open in class. At a party he meets Clarice and immediately feels connected to her. As a reader, it’s easy to tell that Theo is off, he barely talks to Clarice and yet his narrative shows that he feels deeply connected to her and is convinced she is madly in love with him, even though she barely talked to him.

Instead of trying to build a normal relationship, Teo kidnaps ‘his girlfriend’ and decides to take a trip with her so she’ll realise how madly in love with him she really is. While they are on this trip, everything gets messed up and it turns out that both Teo and Clarice are quite eccentric in their ways of dealing with each other.

This book has left me really conflicted. On the one hand, I couldn’t wait to find out what the characters would do next, but at the same time, I felt like it was drama for the sake of drama. A lot of readers find dark humour in this book, but that completely passed me by and I never found it really funny. I get the irony of someone saying what a perfect boyfriend should do and then doing the most horrendous things to a girl because he thinks that’s the thing to do, but the actions were so dark that it was impossible to laugh about. Yet, I kept reading and finished this book in two days.

The writing draws you in and Teo is so fascinating in his thought process that it was hard to get out of his head, but there are so many gimmicks in the plot that it didn’t feel as organic as Gone Girl. While the twists there were unexpected, yet completely natural, the twists here were just too many towards the end and I couldn’t help but feel certain events were just put in there to shock readers.

Is Perfect Days a compelling read? Definitely. Does it set a dangerous trends of book being written just for the shock value? Definitely. In the end, it really depends on what kind of reader you are whether you’ll love this book, hate it, or feel as conflicted as I did.

My Life Next Door - Huntley Fitzpatrick

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Publication Date: June 14, 2012
Publisher: Dial Books for Young Readers
Genre: YA
Pages: 394 pages
Goodreads

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review. This in no way influenced my opinion of the book.

It's a week later than expected, due to a really bad cold, but I am finally back and will continue posting reviews on my regular schedule (twice a week)! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Year and that you all got wonderful books that you can read!

One of my first reads of the year was My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick ; a novel that already seems to be very popular in America, but was only released in the UK last week. The story is contemporary and fluffy romantic, exactly what you would expect from the cover.

Samantha Reed has a very proper family with a politician mother and a rebel sister who leaves her no room to do anything wrong. However, she lives next door to the Garretts, who are everything she is not. They have more kids than anyone count, have a messy house that annoys Samantha's mother to no end, and most of all they always look extremely happy. After years of looking in from the outside, Samantha meets one of the boys, Jase. Their love happens fast, but along the way their different home situations turn out to be more difficult to converge than imagined.

I really enjoyed the love story in this one. It was done in a cute way without being too barf-worthy. Jase and Samantha fall in love fast, but also spend a lot of time together and both seem kind of lonely generally in life. This combination makes it pretty believable that they would cling on to each other fast. At the point where I really started to root for them, everything went downhill and that's where my only trouble with this book started.

Samantha is an enjoyable character, but undoubtably really really messes everything up towards the end of the book. She makes some awful choices and continues to drag out lies that she shouldn't have. Though it is explained in the book why she does this, it's really no justification for the amount she lies. But in the story, once she confesses to everything, she is immediately forgiven by everyone. Now I love a good Disney movie, so I get the happy ending concept, but I didn't buy this ending at all. You can't just mess things up for a hundred pages and be forgiven in one. Life is not a fairytale and while the romance aspect of this book does a very good job at portraying that, the unrealistic fast wrap-up at the end left me completely confused.

So while this is a good book, very similar in style to Sarah Dessen who I love as a writer, I felt like the ending needed more depth. I get that this book is light and fluffy, but if serious issues are brought in, they should have been dealt with accordingly. It's perfect to read if you want to really focus on the story, and the writing is amazing so it's easy to do, but only if you also want to forget all about real life, and real consequences.

The DUFF - Kody Keplinger

RATING: ★★☆☆☆

There's one thing I absolutely love: books being turned into movies. It means that I can experience a story twice - once on paper and once on screen. So when I heard that The DUFF was being made into a movie, I wanted to read the book. It's a YA contemporary classic and I figured that if it is a movie, the story has to be good.

Plot 

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is cynical and loyal, and she doesn’t think she’s the prettiest of her friends by a long shot. She’s also way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush. In fact, Bianca hates him. And when he nicknames her “the Duff,” she throws her Coke in his face. 

But things aren’t so great at home right now, and Bianca is desperate for a distraction. She ends up kissing Wesley. Worse, she likes it. Eager for escape, Bianca throws herself into a closeted enemies-with-benefits relationship with him.

Until it all goes horribly awry. It turns out Wesley isn’t such a bad listener, and his life is pretty screwed up, too. Suddenly Bianca realizes with absolute horror that she’s falling for the guy she thought she hated more than anyone.

Cliché after cliché after cliché

Turns out that not only good books are being made into movies, but just popular uncreative books become movies too. The premise of The DUFF is great. Reading the Goodreads summary, there seems to be a lot of potential for feminism kick-assing. I wanted Bianca to take control of her nickname, to show people what's she worth. But as the last paragraph of that summary already shows, she falls in love. With a guy who called her ugly and fat. Who ALWAYS calls her Duffie. Who is an asshole to every single girl.

I get it. I was a teen too and yes, we've all been through our bad boy phase. And I don't mind reading about it, but what I do hate is authors that have the "omg he's such a bad boy! Oh no wait he's a good guy now because he just loves me soooo much". This can happen in life I guess, but it doesn't happen to every single girl. It won't happen to the majority of girls dating bad boys. Authors have no moral obligation to teach readers anything, but I'm getting sick and tired of reading this cliché romantic story. And by the way, Bianca and Wesley? They're a sinking ship.

Quick read

What I did like about this book is that it's a breeze to read. The writing is easy, flows and if you just ignore the clichés, is quite enjoyable actually. Kody Keplinger knows how teenagers read and makes sure that there is not a single point in the book where you'll be bored. The pacing is excellent and you'll be completely in this fiction world.

Rating

So this is a short review, because there really isn't much to discuss about this book. It is exactly what you think it will be - which can be a good or bad thing depending on what you're looking for. For me, it fell flat and was completely ruined by all the clichés. I think Kody Keplinger has a good writing voice and I'm excited to read more of her books to see if they get more original as she gets more experienced as a writer. But this book has to be a two out of five.

We All Looked Up - Tommy Wallach

RATING: ★★★★☆

I got this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.

Multiple people narration seems to be the trendy thing in YA literature. It's safe in that, if you give a reader several narrators, they'll probably really relate to one of those. It's risky because many times it gets confusing to read and there's not enough depth to any of the characters to make the story really interesting.

However, YA writers keep trying and Tommy Wallach is no exception. But how well did he pull this off?

Plot

Four high school seniors put their hopes, hearts, and humanity on the line as an asteroid hurtles toward Earth in this contemporary novel.

They always say that high school is the best time of your life.

Peter, the star basketball player at his school, is worried “they” might actually be right. Meanwhile Eliza can’t wait to escape Seattle—and her reputation—and perfect-on-paper Anita wonders if admission to Princeton is worth the price of abandoning her real dreams. Andy, for his part, doesn’t understand all the fuss about college and career—the future can wait.

Or can it? Because it turns out the future is hurtling through space with the potential to wipe out life on Earth. As these four seniors—along with the rest of the planet—wait to see what damage an asteroid will cause, they must abandon all thoughts of the future and decide how they’re going to spend what remains of the present.

Main Characters

So four main characters means that this book reads mostly like a character piece. To review it fairly, I'll discuss the story of all four characters from favourite to least favourite. 

1. Peter

Oh Peter. His narrative is the first one in the book and also my favourite. Though he starts off so very cliché (dumb jock that wants more from life but can't figure out how), the reader soon figures out that he's anything but cliché. The thing I really liked about Peter? He's nice. Just really really nice. No alternative motives or big plans - Peter is just nice to people and always believes the best in everyone. I loved that about him, because there are not many nice guy narrators around. He's a jock, he's kinda dumb and you can't help but love him because he loves everyone else. Just a small warning: he will break your heart.

2. Anita

Anita; another cliché at the beginning who turns out to be so much more. I loved the fact that she's the brainy girl and she's African American! Finally some diversity! She's trying to please her parents while also finding her own way and she really struggles with that more than the average teen does. In the end, she's so likeable because she's witty and tries to do the right thing whenever she can and you can't help but admire her for that. 

3. Andy

I wasn't sure whether to rate Andy or Eliza third, since they both really annoyed me for several different reasons. With Andy, I just didn't get him. At all. I didn't get why he did what he did, I didn't understand his thought process and if I had to read one more time about him thinking about sex, I would have gone crazy. I couldn't relate to him at all, but he did do some entertaining things that made the story more fun to read so I could handle him. Plus I think other readers will understand him better than I did.

4. Eliza

Who I couldn't handle was Eliza - the gorgeous girl who doesn't believe she's gorgeous but everyone else thinks she is. Yawn. I liked her in the beginning because she slept around and she talked about it like it was empowering to her. Finally a YA book where female virginity isn't held up like the crème de la crème - Eliza wasn't scared to use her sexuality to please herself and others. Unfortunately at the end, she says she regrets all the guys she has slept with, she's embarrassed and doesn't want to do it anymore. I felt bad for her, her father is dying and her mother is missing, but I wish she would have been so much less cliché at the end. Maybe what I hated most about Eliza was the fact that I really liked her in the beginning and was just so disappointed in her character development.

So multiple people as narrators...

Did it work? I think Tommy Wallach is one of the few authors I've read who was really successful in juggling four different narrations. Though I didn't like all the characters, they all had enough depth to be enjoyable to read and I think other people will like the characters I disliked - it's a taste thing. Since it's a tale about the world possibly ending, I think seeing how that fact changes several people's lives is very effective - it just makes it more interesting and realistic. Everyone is different and everyone responds different to the threat of an ending world.

Rating

We All Looked Up is a solid four. I didn't really like the ending nor all the characters, but the writing is fast paced, easy to read and the concept of an ending world in a contemporary book works really well. I definitely enjoyed it and I think almost everyone can find something to love in this book.