Panic - Lauren Oliver

RATING: ★★★★

The more I blog about books, the more I realize that there are a ton of "young adult classics" (yes, I just invented that term) that I should have read, but haven't. So it means that besides feeling pressured to read all the "original classics", my booklist keeps growing with YA books too. One of the authors that is on the must-read-YA-books-list is Lauren Oliver, author of the Delirium series and of Panic - which I finally picked up.

It sounds like the Hunger Games meets Divergent, but it actually isn't.

When I tried to explain the plot of the story to my roommate, she immediately thought Panic was some kind of Divergent or Hunger Games and I realised that my summary did make it sound like that. So first off I have to say - ban that idea from your mind. The book might sound the same with certain elements, but the feel of it is completely different.

Panic is a story about Carp, a deadbeat town in NY where high school seniors participate in a game called Panic each year. It's a competition with a hefty cash prize for the person who wins. But not everyone survives Panic - the challenges focus on fear and creating a sense of panic -- - almost each year, someone gets seriously hurts or dies. 

This doesn't stop Heather and Dodge, the two narrators, from competing. Heather enters the game to show her ex-boyfriend, who cheated on her, that she isn't what he thinks she is (average and boring). Dodge enters to avenge his sister, who is wheelchair bound after a serious accident in the last round of her Panic games. At least, they start with those intentions. But as the game grows, people and situations change. Do they have what it takes to win?

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The biggest difference between Panic and other challenge-driven books is that Panic is set in our society. These are normal teenagers, they could have been me, who have to function within our own world. They have pressures and worries that I also have, which made it really easy to relate to them. Would I participate in Panic? I'm not sure, but I do understand why they did it.

Team Heather!

As I said before, the store alternates between Heather and Dodge. Heather is a pretty typical YA-narrator in the sense that she doesn't think she's beautiful, but then at the end of the book everyone finds her gorgeous blabla. Is this old? Definitely. Do I think it's worth dealing with those parts? Definitely.

She doesn't only find her beauty, but Heather finds her strength. She is put in situations that seemed beyond her abilities, but it turns out that she can be successful. Not only is Heather strong, but she is also a rock for people around her. I don't want to give too much away about her story, but I'm not sure who wouldn't like her as a character. She really grows from a stupid teenager to a great mature woman. Kudos to Heather.

Dodge on the other hand was a lot more foreign to me. His main drive is revenge and I just didn't really understand it. it's not like Lauren Oliver didn't explain it properly, but I just couldn't relate to it. What good would revenge do? But the fact that Dodge is so different from Heather means that everyone will find a character they like in the book. Whether you're "soft" like Heather or "hard" like Dodge (at least in the beginning of the book they are), you'll relate to someone and stay interested in the journey.

Finally some originality.

YA seems to be flooded with Dystopian novels and who can blame the writers? We readers are devouring one after another. However, sometimes I need a change of pace and Panic is the perfect in between of Dystopian and normal fiction. It's not quite another world, so as a reader you can relate to the universe the characters are in. Dodge and Heather also felt like they could have been my friends, like we could hang out over the weekend. Another bonus is that though this is "real life", the love stories in the book were never the main focus. This was about the challenges and any love complications were a side-story. Finally a novel set in this world without a love story! The challenges however, seemed so out of this world for me that there was plenty of room to let my mind wander. What would I do? How would I respond? Could I win Panic? 

Rating

This book really was a thrill to read, with some excellent character developments and originality in the plot. However, I wasn't quite satisfied with the ending. It was so incredibly open, which might be beautiful and realistic for some people, but I can't let the story go! I want to know more about what happens to the characters and Carp. So it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn close. Four out of five for Panic.

 

Let's Get Lost - Adi Alsaid

RATING: ★★☆☆☆

In case you couldn’t tell you from my previous reviews, I am a feminist. A proud gender studies student, who is not very extreme or loud in her beliefs, but very convinced that men and women should be on the same level and who believes society’s view on women (as just beautiful, quiet, “they have to love me” dolls) is very unfair.

So when there is a book that is well-written and has a charming and endearing female lead in it, but an entitled, rude guy who is not called out at all on the way he treats this girl, I’m done. 

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Plot

Let’s Get Lost by Adi Alsaid is the story of Leila, a young girl who is making a road trip to the Northern Lights. It’s a long trip and on the way she meets Hudson, Bree, Elliot and Sonia. The story is mostly about them - until the last chapter, where we finally find out what happened to Leila.

I adored Leila, who is very reminiscent of Alaska in John Green’s Looking for Alaska. She’s lost and confused but has a really good heart. She’s also intelligent, a go-getter and has an amazing warmth to her that make people open up to her (I call it warmth, because if it would just be her good looks, I would like her a lot less - she would be another cliché). She leaves her home and goes to a garage to get her car fixed right before the big journey to Canada. The car fixer? Rude, entitled, stuck-up Hudson, who she somehow falls in love with?!

At this part of the book, I was already confused. I didn’t know Leila at all at that point, but Hudson’s true colours shone through pretty fast and I don’t know why Leila didn’t get into her fixed car and thanked her lucky stars that she got rid of him. But she didn’t do that - she actually writes him cards throughout her whole journey and she misses him.

But then came Hudson....

Why do I hate Hudson so much? Hudson is a mechanic/future med student who has the biggest interview on his life the day after he meets Leila. However, Leila is hot so he drops everything to go to an island with her. He falls asleep, he misses his interview and even though he suggested they would go to the island and she offered to go back home, Hudson blames Leila for ruining his future. And not in a silent treatment way, but in a very crude way that makes you cringe while reading it.

The effect of this? Every reader hates Hudson. But maybe a positive side effect was that I instantly became protective of Leila. I felt bad for her and her inability to stand up for herself and I wanted to protect her from Hudson - at least for a bit.

Leila continues her journey and meets Bree, a runaway teen, Elliot, a dumped teen on prom night and Sonia, my second favourite character who has to deal with the death of her boyfriend. And while Leila helps all of them, she’s also thinking about Hudson, which gets old really fast. They spend a day/night together and then he treated her like trash, yet she misses him? I didn’t get it and I must admit that I skimmed over the parts where she was talking about Hudson. I loved Leila and I didn’t want her to be ruined by her silly notion of love. So maybe I didn’t really love her, but certain parts of her. I’m not sure.

I don’t want to get into too much detail about the other characters, since it will ruin the whole book for any readers. All I can say: Stick it out until the end, because there will be a plot twist.

What I can say about them is that I hated how everything always had some kind of happy ending - Leila is only with them for 48 hours max and yet she helps them get their happy ending. As far as I know, not everyone immediately gets what they want and that would have been good to have incorporated in the book. Especially since I feel the author read a lot of John Green and really tried to tap into his audience. Unfortunately, what he missed is that John Green teaches us that life cannot be controlled and you get what you get and you have to deal with it.

Conclusion

So my aching feminist heart cannot give this book more than 2 stars. I hope Leila returns in another story and can be salvaged, but right now, Hudson just ruined the whole book for me. I wish he would Get Lost.

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

There is such a fulfilling feeling after reading a classic. The feeling that you finally belong to a club that so many people already joined. Suddenly, a world of word-puns and movie-references open up to you.

"You're dating such a Mr. Rochester." "Haha, yeah..." (Wait, what? Who is Mr. Rochester? Was he our gym teacher in high school?)

Finally, I joined the club. I moved from the "I can never finish a classic"-club to the "I know what you mean with 'a Mr. Rochester'!"-club. It's a good feeling and the moment I finished Jane Eyre, I was elated and proud.

But then an eery feeling set it: Was I just elated because I finished the book and conformed to what society thinks I should read or because I finished a book that I actually really enjoyed?

In the case of Jane Eyre, it's hard to decide.

The outline of the story is well known to most people: Jane Eyre is an orphan who ends up as a governess at Thornfield Hall. The house is owned by Mr. Rochester, an older, and rather cold, gentleman. Through ups and downs, Jane and Mr. Rochester fall in love. But as always, things are not as simple as they seem.

When I started the story, I really got into it and fell in love with Jane. Her childhood is awful, but somehow Jane does learn how to stand up for herself. I even would say that she was a feminist, and just generally a humanist, for that time. 

Then Jane goes to a boarding school and I really got into the story. The characters she meets there are interesting and well developed. Especially Helen Burns, an older student who takes Jane under her wings, is forever a favorite of mine. Jane stays at the institute, Lowood, for 8 years and those 8 years fly by in the book. No unnecessary details, no boring blabbing, just plot element after plot element.

I loved it and I loved it even more when I discovered that this speed is kept throughout the whole second half of the novel too: the part where Jane arrives at Thornfield Hall.

Where I started to lose my patience with this novel, is the point where Jane decides to leave Thornfield for several, and way spoilery, events. She wanders around and God, reading it felt like I was wandering around aimlessly too. Too many descriptions, too much unnecessary conversation, too much like a Jane Austen novel. I must admit that I skimmed from this point on, until the last 30 pages, when a plot twist makes everything interesting again.

Jane captured my heart in this novel and, even though I despised Mr. Rochester, there is definitely something very romantic about this book. However, it just doesn't captivate me like so many other books do. Is it the old English? Is it because it's talking about such a remote world? Is it because Mr. Rochester was a bit of a prick? 

I think it was all of the above combined. Added to that, I often got lost in Jane's thoughts. She went back and forth about things so many times, that she confused me. This meant that I had to get out of the story and really think about what Jane was doing. I was judging Jane at times and I don't want to judge my protagonists - I want to enjoy them. I want to start reading and keeping going and going until I'm completely sucked in the story. Because of Jane's quirky ways of thinking, I just couldn't do that.

So who should read this book? Everyone, like myself, who wants to join the "I read classics"-book club. I've read Jane Austen, I've attempted to read Vanity Fair, but none of those books read as easily and entertaining as Jane Eyre. So I think this is a great book to get your feet wet in the classics. However there are so many books and our lives are so short - I wish I would have spend the time reading a book I truly enjoyed, instead of reading something because "everyone reads it". 

But that fulfilling feeling when ending these 400 pages? That was priceless and I would almost consider reading a classic again - just for that.



We Were Liars - E. Lockhart

We Were Liars might be the most hyped-up Young Adult book released this year. E. Lockhart has been praised by John Green and Scott Westerfeld for her haunting novel about the Sinclair family and Beechwood Island.

Usually when I write a review, I don’t like to include the opinions of other authors or reviewers. Obviously the book cover is going to boast how amazing the book is - it’s called marketing. However, We Were Liars is actually 10 times better than the review quotes claim it to be. Want to know why?

It starts of with the writing, which is so beautiful. I know beautiful is a meaningless and overrated word in reviews, but I’ll prove it. Take the opening sentences of the book:

Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.

No one is a criminal.

No one is an addict.

No one is a failure.

The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive.

Every creative writing class I took, focussed at least 5 lessons on characterisation and the narrative voice - this opening paragraph shows how to set a scene and give a sense of the narrator and her family.

This narrator is called Cadence and she’s the oldest grandchild in the Sinclair family. Each summer, the whole family (grandparents, three beautiful daughters and their children) meet on a private island. In Cadence’s “Summer 15” something goes horribly wrong and she wakes up at a hospital on the mainland without her memory. What happened in summer 15?

The journey of Cadence is the journey of retrieving her memory and learning that not everything is what it seems. As a reader, you feel bad for Cadence who is slowly learning that the opening paragraph of the book is the furthest thing from the truth. She is a teenager, just 17 when she tries to uncover the truth, who has to learn some horrible truths about her family and herself. How can anyone cope with it?

Cadence deals with it in a very mature and raw way. She didn’t read like a teenager to me, she analysed things and thinks everything through before she acts. I guess if you really want a teenage-y narrator, this is a negative, but I adored a more mature narrator. 

The plot takes twists and turns that completely threw me off every single time. You want to keep reading. You want to find out what happened in Summer 15 almost more than Cadence was to know.

Another bonus is the length of the book - 224 pages means that you don’t have to read for hours to find out what happens. There is definitely suspense and things don’t start to make sense until page 180, but the story is constantly moving and progressing.

We all know the pressures and expectations of belonging in your family, but if your family turns out to be complete strangers, what can you do?

Tease - Amanda Maciel

I promised a review of Tease by Amanda Maciel yesterday, but since the title is Tease, I figured I would honour it and tease everyone with posting it late.

Anyway, that’s the excuse I told myself when I realised this morning that I forgot to write the review yesterday - whoops.

The title of the book needs to be interpreted in two ways: “Tease” is someone who teases guys and makes them sexually frustrated (hopefully fall in love with them if you’re a teen) and “Tease” stands for the act of the light bullying or harassing of someone.

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The second definition of tease is what Sara Wharton thinks she is doing. She’s teasing the school’s tease Emma Putnam. Sara and Brielle, bff's and queen B of the school, hate Emma for stealing Sara’s boyfriend, and just generally because she is so pretty.

However, teasing is an understatement for the way the girls treat Emma - they are violent and mean and Emma commits suicide. Her parents blame the girls and their friends and sue all of them for the death of Emma. 

This is the point where the book starts; Sara explains what happened and how totally unfair it is. Throughout the book, all the details of the bullying (because it’s definitely not teasing) and the details of the court case are revealed in an interesting plot order that jumps from present to past.

The major story elements in the book are based on true events, which makes this book a difficult read. It’s shocking that these events can happen in real life and you’ll ask yourself “but how??” at the end of the book.

Because that’s the strength of this book - it’s not overly moralistic or preachy in its message. It shows the dangers of bullying, but it also tries to show the causes of bullying. I feel like there are not enough books like that on the market and I hope this is the first of many.

Sara is insecure and just lost. She doesn’t know who she is or who she wants to be, so she just clings to people she thinks are perfect. This includes Brielle, who is the meanest teenager I ever read about, and her boyfriend who doesn’t really care about her too much. He proves this when he makes out with Emma at the Valentine Dance after-party. 

Let the slutshaming begin. 

I knew teenagers were cruel and mean and “oh god, don’t you dare be prettier than them or to be sexually confident”. But the intense slutshaming Sara puts Emma through makes it very hard to like her as a narrator. She starts off likeable enough, but as more details of the bullying are revealed, I started distancing from her. Especially since there is no real point in the story where I felt that Sara was actually truly sorry for what she did. I feel like there could be a sequel and Sara would slutshame the next girl who takes her boyfriend.

This makes it difficult to stay invested in the book, because you just want to punch Sara in the face for being so naive and dumb, but it also makes the book very realistic. Not everyone in life has a big changing moment - definitely not within a few days/ months/ years, like most novels portray. Some people just don’t get certain things and never will, no matter what happens. Sara is one of them, no matter how hard we root for her to change.

The author says she wanted to show the story from several angles; not just the one of the victim that the media always shows. Unfortunately, due to Sara’s immature behaviour, there is really no sympathy for her. I felt bad for her family, who had to suffer immensely due to the big court case. I felt bad for Emma and her family, and even for Sara’s boyfriend, who seemed to have actually really liked Emma (even though he does make some very questionably decision, none of them are illegal). 

However, the topic is important enough that this book should be read by teenagers and older readers - we can all lose the plot, we can all forget the line between innocent teasing and bullying, we can all slutshame s, but this book reminds the reader how many danger lies in all those things.

Rebel Belle - Rachel Hawkins

When there is a book about a boy that kicks ass and has super powers, we just call them comic books or science fiction with a nice vague title stuck on it.

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When a girl has superpowers and suddenly has to protect a boy (what?), we call it Rebel Belle.

I bought the book fully expecting a nice chick-lit book a la gossip girl. But I was really wrong - again I could have read the back of the book or the goodreads summary but hey, I’ll never ever learn.


As someone who despises most supernatural stories, this book started off as a challenge for me. Harper Price is the main character - a Southern beauty queen-ish girl who is suddenly given the responsibility to protect David Stark. She’s his Paladin, an ancient protector who has supernatural powers.


Obviously, Harper can’t stand David - though for unexplainable reasons, they ALWAYS interact with each other. Harper is worried that this new “job” will ruin her relationship with her flat-charactered boyfriend Ryan and her friendship with her best friend. Instead of trusting people, and showing them that she has superpowers, she decides to hide everything from everyone (because that’s always a good idea?).


Rachel Hawkins, the author, knows how to write, which makes this book a pleasant read. It’s difficult enough to keep a reader interested while at the same time keeping a good, and quick, flow in the story. This is a skill - one that Rachel has managed to master. Action scenes are followed by conversations and there is enough diversity in this book to please any YA reader.


Harper is not an unpleasant main character, but she didn’t really do much for me. She makes a journey from average high school pretty girl to kickass protector of the most important person on earth. I would expect some major personality changes to accompany this transformation, but there really weren’t. She has some doubts about accepting her role, but she knows that David will die if she doesn’t help him, so it’s not a real surprise that she casts those doubts aside pretty soon.


David Stark is the cliché quiet guy who turns out to be pretty damn charming. Does he really change? No. But we do get to see more and more from him as the book progresses.


The real disappointment in this story comes from Ryan and his role in the story. He’s described as the perfect boyfriend - handsome, sporty, popular… Everything a teenage girl dreams of. BUT when he’s in scenes in the book, he just falls completely flat for me. He was boring, uninteresting and really, does he have nothing to say about anything at all? Ryan was also doomed from the being to end up in a love triangle with his complete opposite David.


Is that love triangle necessary? Not really, but teenage girls these days apparently love to read about a girl who has two guys drooling away after her (I don’t know why there are so many of these books anyway). Is the flat boyfriend and love story a reason to not read this book? No. There is enough action to please an anti-romance reader and the Paladin thing is original enough to keep a reader interested. 


Overall, Rebel Belle is a good YA read and one of the more original ones I’ve read so far. It would have been totally perfect if some characters were less flat and just more… like teenagers.