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YouTube cut off the end of my thank you to Daph (thank you a MILLION, Daph! 
) and my last few books so looks like it’s split with next week!
Books I mentioned in this IMM:
Dear Bully edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones | Goodreads | Dear Bully website | Stomp Out Bullying
Eve by Anna Carey | Goodreads
Variant by Robison Wells | Goodreads
Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan | Goodreads
People I mentioned in this IMM:
Daph @ Loving Books
And once again, it’s time for The Passage readalong! This week is Viv’s week to host, and you can find that main post here If you’re trying to catch up or wondering what exactly we’re up to, please see our guide to reading along with us, found here.
Elle’s a bit swamped with uni right now (and Kate will soon be taking that position, but more about that coming soon!), so we’ll be sticking with Kate’s thoughts this week. Elle has promised a massive thought-dump when she’s a little less bogged down, so worry not; you’ll be getting her counter-point soon enough!
And abruptly, The Passage is a whole different book.
I’m not overstating the experience. Starting Part IV felt like starting an entirely different book. At first, I was frustrated, annoyed, and just – disengaged with the entire thing. It took me probably an hour, all-told, to read the first 10 or so pages; I started it several times and always opted to do other things (including homework!) rather than climb in. I’ve come to distrust Justin Cronin – said in present tense because I still don’t trust him, not after I’ve been jerked here and there into caring about characters that are only stolen from me a half-dozen pages later – and couldn’t get back into the book when it had such a hugely different tone. I had no Wolgast to pull me in, and from the looks of it, no Amy. I simply could not bring myself to care.
Until I started getting into it.
It’s hard to explain how the experience and mood of the settlement struck me. It’s a bit like if Lois Lowry’s The Giver grew up and proceeded to have a love child with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. There’s this gritty, post-apocalyptic bleakness that is somehow combined with this larger-than-life fantastical element that I really actually came to enjoy by the end of this week’s reading. And for all of my grousing that he jerks around my emotions, Cronin is an excellent character writer. Within the first chapter I adored Alicia, Peter, and Theo, thought Michael was interesting and found Elton delightfully curious while still being strange. I connected in a way I hadn’t since Wolgast took Amy to the carnival, because I believed in these characters. I wanted them to be real people, I had aspirations for them (and theories on romantic attraction – hey, who doesn’t read a book and think about that?!) and I cared about what they were going through. The scene in the station, with Peter and Alicia on the roof and then the attack, put my heart in my throat. The library made my stomach churn and actually horrified me. The mall scene was haunting, mysterious, and brilliantly done. All told, I have to say that I –
I almost don’t have any complaints about Part IV this far.
It’s cautious optimism, though, which bring me to my overall criticism of the book as a whole. My first point, which I’ve said before and I’ll say again, is that I feel jerked around. I want to be invested in these characters and fully involved but it’s so hard when Cronin basically set up the first 250 pages of the book to ensure that every time I got attached to a character, he or she died a gruesome death! I understand, of course, that not every character can ride off into the sunset on an armored white horse, but I just feel that Cronin works too hard to keep his readers off-balance and shock them for the sake of shock. Plus, once again, there are no minor characters; everyone is so fleshed out that I kind of want to beat my head into a wall. I don’t need to know that dying Gabe (who is mentioned about once) has a mentally disabled son, that some random character has four children (complete with their names), or that Arlo and Hollis are identical except for the beard (but Sara can see the difference even if they both have beards). It’s simply too much information. And in a lot of ways, it was why Part IV was hard to get into; it was so laden with description and character information right off the bat that I didn’t have a chance to hit the “flow” of the chapters until something like 15 or 20 pages in.
My second criticism is that I’m sort of wondering what the first part of the book was for. Every composition teacher I’ve ever had, be it for fiction writing or creative non-fiction, has given me the exact same piece of advice: start in the middle. There has to be backstory, has to be exposition, and has to be something that happened before the meat of the plot. Here, it really feels like the first three parts was exposition that, instead of leaving somewhere on his computer labeled “first draft,” Cronin decided to incorporate into the actual novel. As much as I am in love with Wolgast, I have to wonder if the whole wouldn’t have been more coherent and more interesting to read if it’d started with Peter on the Watch than with Amy’s mother trying to cope. I hope that the beginning ends up synching up with the rest of the book more than it has thus far, but more than that? I hope this doesn’t sow the seeds that in Part VII, we’ll be moving on to some other era of human existence, a few thousand miles and a hundred years away from this one, and forced to learn a whole new set of characters in a whole new setting with a whole new primary conflict.
I want to believe that maybe the book has gotten marginally better, but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
Welcome to our third installment of The Passage readalong! As we’ve finished Part III, we’re back with new thoughts on the latest chapters! If you’re looking to catch up or wondering what this is all about, please see our guide to the readalong, which you can find here.
Please note: a lot happened in this section of the book, and there was absolutely no way to avoid some pretty major spoilers. If you’re not caught up, or you’re thinking about reading the book, please proceed with caution. There was literally no way to describe this section of the book or comment thoughtfully on it without some spoilers. Nature of the beast, I’m afraid!
Chapter Twelve begins with a sickly, exhausted Sikes arriving at Wolgast’s cell within the compound with a purpose: Amy is in the compound as well, and they suspect she’s dying. Wolgast finds Amy in isolation, in a coma, and is told that he can only see her if he wears a special suit that will prevent him from contracting the virus. He goes in unprotected, itself. Meanwhile, Grey has started to lose hours, unable to recount them, and spends most of his time feeling ill and off-center. He begins to notice changes in the people he works with, both in their physiques and their demeanors. Another change has come in the form of Anthony Carter, who is now not really Anthony at all, and who manages to kill one of the men who cares for him, drinking his blood. Richards, who in his own right is as haunted as Grey and the others, suspects Anthony is the meanest of the lot. Richards also gets the disturbing news that a young black woman has arrived looking for Wolgast.
The black woman is in fact Sister Lacey, whose trip to the compound is recounted in Chapter Thirteen. Following the voice of God in her head, she walked, hitchhiked, and stowed-away to Colorado, eventually making it into the facility by hiding in the back of an Army-issue supply truck. Richards, who isn’t sure how to deal with her, goes to release Doyle from his cell, only to find that Doyle somehow knew she was coming. Before Doyle and Lacey are reunited, however, Grey – guided once again by the voice of Zero in the back of his mind – walks into Zero’s chamber and allows Zero to kill him and also, to escape.
The security breach picks up steam in Chapter Fourteen, when Richards discovers that all of the subjects have escaped and the soldiers throughout the facility are panicking rather than following protocol. One destroys the elevator and then power is lost, trapping Wolgast and a barely-conscious Amy in her isolation room. Dr. Lear comes in to rescue them, helping them to maneuver past the dead and dying and into an air vent, but ultimately stays behind to ensure Amy’s safety. Wolgast manages to get Amy through the ducts, up a ladder, and into the main area of the facility. He’s reunited both with Doyle and Lacey, where Doyle provides him keys to a get-away car. Despite the fact they exit together, both Doyle and Lacey stay in order to distract the subjects.
Chapter Fifteen begins Part III and chronicles Wolgast and Amy’s escape from Colorado to Oregon. They make their way to a camp Wolgast spent summers at as a boy, and as they settle in, Wolgast remembers meeting and falling in love with his ex-wife, Lila. He thinks of her often as they settle in at the camp, as well as detailing the changes in Amy: she no longer can tolerate the feel of the sun on her skin or in her eyes, she sleeps during the day but stays up at night, and she seems to know things she otherwise shouldn’t. But they can’t stay at the camp without supplies, forcing Wolgast to go down to a small store. There, he discovers that the virus and its carriers has spread from the incident at the compound to cover a large portion of the Midwest, putting the country into panic. The man at the store wars Wolgast that the virus is even worse than mentioned in the newspaper.
Wolgast and Amy continue to stay at the camp throughout Chapter Sixteen, as well, though the situation continually becomes more dire. Forest fires ravage the area and nearly destroy the camp; Chicago falls to those with the virus and California secedes from the union; the man who runs the general store is found dead. As they settle in for the winter in Chapter Seventeen, though, it appears that they may be safe from the woes of the rest of the world. A man arrives from nearby Washington after having been attacked by someone with the virus, confirming Wolgast’s fears that they weren’t as safe as they thought. Though he shoots the man to protect them, the damage has been done; soon, a nearby city is “cleansed” by a nuclear blast (as rumors’d said was happening to other infected areas) and blows out the window in the front of the lodge where Amy and Wolgast are staying. Though Amy is unharmed, Wolgast’s leg is pierced by a large piece of glass. Despite his very best efforts, Wolgast is unable to mend the wound properly and it gets infected. Amy takes care of him as best she can, but when he wakes up one night with the realization that he’s dying, he discovers that the trees are full of those with the virus – and Amy is gone.
Chapter Eighteen is entirely an excerpt from the diaries of a woman named Ida Jaxon, called “Auntie,” recounting her experiences during the evacuation of Philidelphia during some point we can only assume was contemporaneous to Wolgast’s last stand. In it, Ida recalls the restrictive lives of her family as the city was placed under martial law during the run-up to the “jumps” arriving, as well as her father’s decision to place her on a FEMA train that was leaving the city for safer places. She is eventually delivered to the newly-seceded California, where she is reunited with her cousin Terrence and proceeds to settle into a FEMA facility. She mentions things we’ve not heard of before, such as First Families, Watchers, the Chous, and the Time Before, but doesn’t elaborate. The end of the chapter marks the end of Part III.
I can officially say, with meaning, that this book has turned into a disappointment.
I mentioned this to Elle on the phone this morning, and I think it bears repeating: Cronin’s habit of killing people off arbitrarily and without any real warning is now a full-out gimmick. I cannot even describe to you in words how frustrating it is that he builds up literally dozens of characters with all these meaningful details only to tear them down pages or chapters later with absolutely no remorse. Deaths in literature should mean something. They should make your heart climb into your throat, should make you want to weep, should stand on your belly and choke you, but in The Passage, they just feel – empty. Throughout the compound being destroyed and dozens of established characters all dying, I had absolutely no emotional connection to the experience. I didn’t care if they got out alive or not, because I knew some would and some wouldn’t and that the decision of who fit in which category was completely arbitrary. Because there’s absolutely no way to tell which characters matter, you either are forced to become emotionally connected to all of them – or none. And sadly, I think or none is much more likely.
I think that’s my biggest beef with this book, all things considered: there’s no emotional connection. I don’t really care about any of the characters, or what happens to them; there’s no impetuous for me to keep reading. I tend to forget the book even exists until Sunday or Monday, where I read my five chapters, put it down, and then forget about it again. There’s not enough there to compel me to keep going, to light a fire where I am desperate to follow Amy to the next step of her adventure, and honestly? Killing Wolgast has stripped me of the only character I actually liked, which is just going to make it harder for me to feel anything about this book. Instead of connecting with it like a novel, I connect with it like I do my casebook for class, reading what I have to and then being finished when I turn the last page of the assignment.
The camping chapters in this section, though, were probably my favorite, I think in part because of Wolgast and part simply because it was a break from the disjointed, sharply segmented point-of-view jumping which’d taken place up until then. For the first time, it felt like a discreet narrative, and it made me really want to just take that part of the story and turn it into a novella. Man rescues little girl, protects her from the crazy world outside his control, man dies. Instead, those chapters were over too quickly, and we were back to another disjointed segment, one I’m not even sure belonged there. And I am back to not caring, because now the only emotional tie I had to the book is gone.
It’s funny, because the American edition starts with no fewer than four pages of quotes that just sing absolute praises of The Passage. I think nearly every newspaper on the planet is quoted somewhere at the beginning – and I can’t figure out why. I can’t figure out what in this book is so amazing that the world’s newspapers are writing odes to it. I’m a third of the way into it. You’d think I’d have some idea by now.
Instead, I’m just continually let down and disappointed, and frankly, very tired of it. I’m glad it’s a fast read, but mostly, I just want it to be done. And that is just sad.
Elle is feeling a bit under the weather right now, but I’m authorized to tell you her thoughts will be coming very soon!
The Passage ReadalongWelcome to our second dealing of The Passage thoughts. We’re late getting our thoughts up on this one (in fact, we only have Kate’s!) but don’t worry, next week we’ll be right back on the ball.
For the main post this week, please go here. For all posts so far, please go here.
This past week was a very busy one for me, such that I worried I wouldn’t be able to get to The Passage at all. Of course, part of this is that I judge how much I’m enjoying a book on my urgency about it (if I’m loving it, I will find the half-hour to read; if I’m feeling torn, I will spend that half-hour playing SimCity or watching television), and so, as Sunday night arrived and I’d read very little, I took it as confirmation of the flaws I talked about last week. The disjointed nature of the book, and the way it jumped around, was starting to grate on me; the dozens of unanswered questions and microscopic red herrings were forcing me away from The Passage and onto other activities.
Then, Sunday night, I sat down to read.
And within less than 24 hours, I’d finished the 80-odd pages to bring me through Chapter 11 – and then read a good portion of Chapter 12, too, because I couldn’t stop.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still of two minds about The Passage. I feel like the book is a bit schizophrenic in its approach in that every paragraph on every page is stuffed with meaning. Every character, even the minor ones, burst with personality, which was charming at first but now is just frustrating; I don’t need to know every detail about the girl Doyle is flirting with or the woman at the zoo with the baby, thank you. I think I know why Cronin is doing it, attempting to make the reader care about every individual in the book on his or her merits so, when something happens, it’s all the more shocking!, but it over-fills the pages. The book would feel like a much tighter read if some of that detailing were removed. Instead, it feels like Charles Dickens and Dan Brown had a supernatural love child and named him Justin Cronin.
In the same way, the plot is starting to irk on me. The atmosphere is still perfect – the facility is incredibly creepy, the “subjects” have honestly made my stomach twist and my heart pound a few different times, and seeing the slow changes through some of the characters feels like watching a really well-executed movie – but there are just too many holes. Everything goes unexplained while hundreds of little hints are dropped here, there, and everywhere, and it feels incredibly disjointed to me. I feel like I’m supposed to feel a bit like Wolgast – just someone doing his job, dragged into this insane situation without any idea what it actually is, and slowly coming to the realization that something very wrong is happening – but Cronin fails to execute that point of view properly. It feels like a flawed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in that I, the reader, am meant to be just as confused and clueless as the characters in the book, but there isn’t enough there for me to feel fully included, either. The best comparison I can draw is walking into a room where a friend is watching a movie and trying to figure out what is going on. Actually, it’s more like walking into a room where a friend is watching the second movie in a trilogy and trying to figure out what was going on.
That said, there are elements I absolutely love. Amy is interesting and the more we see of her, the more I want to know. The scene with her at the zoo made my belly twist (but was then promptly forgotten; I wish the threads were better followed through); her relationship with Wolgast is absolutely perfect. I love the theme of lying/hiding the truth that is running throughout and the ease with which people deceive each other. Wolgast is possibly my favorite character and the scene with he and Amy at the fun fair really pulled at my heartstrings. The scenes Subject Zero and his moments with Grey made me grateful I was reading in the well-lit library. I want to know what the actual virus is and what really is happening in the facility. I definitely want to know more.
I just wish the knowing would happen more quickly. Instead, I’m starting to get the feeling that The Passage is about 200 pages longer than it needs to be – a bit, again, like Dickens.
The Passage ReadalongWelcome to the The Passage Readalong! Thanks for stopping by and joining in with us, we’re hoping for lots of interesting discussions in the coming weeks. If you’re looking for the schedule for each week or for a catch-up of past posts and discussions, you can bookmark our The Passage Readalong page and find everything linked up.
Before we kick off this week, we’d like to announce the winners of the two copies of the novel which were advertised for our giveaway over at Vivienne’s blog! Our international winner is Carlyle and our UK winner is Jules. Congratulations, gals, your copies will be winging their way to you soon!
One last quick note: there will be spoilers for The Passage in the following synopsis. I’ve tried to keep them light, particularly on chapter five, but as we progress along they will be a necessary evil. Beware those who have not kept up!
And now on with the show…
As The Passage begins, we are introduced to Jeanette, a woman who works in a small diner in Iowa. Jeanette finds herself pregnant by a married man whom she never identifies to her father and goes through with the pregnancy, giving birth to her beloved child Amy. Unfortunately, Bill Reynolds refuses to stay out of Jeanette’s life and inexplicably reappears, forcing himself upon her and Amy and moving into Jeanette’s house. Bill is violent to Jeanette in front of toddler Amy and she eventually throws him out but she finds herself unable to make rent and has no choice but to sleep in her car with Amy until she’s made enough money sleeping with men to keep a regular hotel room. Jeanette finds herself on the wrong end of a hire one night and shoots the young man, fleeing with Amy to a nunnery before leaving her there and vanishing without a trace.
We are then introduced to Jonas Lear, PHD, a molecular scientist who sends a series of letters to his friend and fellow professor, Paul. The emails detail a mission which is being undertaken deep into the jungle in conjunction with the army – something which not everyone is pleased about – but unfortunately the party is attacked by swarms of bats and is left scattered, injured and dead. The professor calls for an evacuation, although some of the scientists are slowly healing despite the disease killing others.
The following chapter introduces us to Brad Wolgast, a divorcee FBI agent who is part of Project NOAH. This military project, we discover, is a means to finding human test subjects for an antiviral drug which can cure any disease and prolong human life indefinitely. Wolgast is uncomfortable and uneasy about his assignment as we watch him recruit Death Row inmate Anthony Carter. In the end, Wolgast is given an assignment to travel to pick up the abandoned Amy in the nunnery.
Finally, we are introduced to Grey, an attendant who minds Patient Zero, a man who perhaps floats, hangs or levitates (no one is sure which) and glows in the glow from heatlights. Grey works for Project Noah as a condition of his release as one of the many attendees of the various ‘Subjects’ kept within the compound. And let’s not forget the mysterious Richards, who knows bad jobs when he sees them and wants to know what anyone would want with a little girl named Amy…
I was terrified when I first started The Passage. Not, you must understand, because I was worried about its subject matter but because of the first chapter. I had, as Kate below notes, extreme problems with the first chapter. I dislike the decayed, dismal atmosphere of the tiny dust town with no way out. I disagree that you have to be a mid-westerner to understand the feeling that such a setting carries – Cronin’s first chapter creates the kind of setting that I would expect to find in some Australian fiction, John Steinbeck’s bleaker works and some particularly bleak and endless films like Halle Berry’s 2001 Monster’s Ball.
If I’m honest, I had problems with Jeanette’s inevitability, with her seeming unwillingness to fight and the way she invited a man she didn’t want into her home and did nothing about it. I have problems with the concept that she was on a spiral that she couldn’t stop and that no matter what happened, she was going to be the victim of men. I see the potential for this theme to continue with Amy and I’m interested – and a little worried, still – for where Justin Cronin takes the rest of his female characters.
The following chapters, however, sold the book to me. Unlike Kate, I loved the choppy nature of the first few chapters, which just seemed to work for me until the threads came together, and I have to be completely honest in that I’ll keep reading to see what happens to Brad Wolgast who I love. There were some stunning lines in Brad’s chapter such as:
Wolgast looked down at himself to discover he’d slept the night in his clothes. This was becoming something of a habit; ever since he’d gotten the email from Lila, he’d spent most nights on the sofa of his apartment, watching television until he fell asleep, as if going to bed like a normal person was something he was no longer qualified to do.
Brad kills me and I feel like there’s more to his decision to accept the job for Project NOAH than meets the eye.
I loved the epistolary style of the emails – I love emails in fiction the same way I love letters and telegrams in nineteenth-century fiction – and I loved feeling the way that the tension mounted in the emails from Jonas. I thought the blank one was particularly clever. They reminded me of the importance of letters rather like some scenes from Wilkie Collins and sensationalist fiction. The atmosphere also reminded me of some of the early scenes of Heart of Darkness.
So, I’m hooked. Gimme more.
There is good and there’s bad about The Passage, and I’m not going to pretend that, if the book ended right now, I would give it a perfect 10.
On the one hand, and arguably the best hand, the book is incredibly atmospheric. It gripped me from the first and dragged me down into its dark depths. And “dark” is the right word, because from the first page, there is something haunting about Cronin’s tone. As early as the first few pages, I kept expecting something scary to happen because of the bleak desolation I felt while I read. I gazed upon the run-down, empty Iowa town with not much more there than a restaurant and a gas station; I sweated through the oppressive heat and humidity of the South American jungle. Every detail feels calculated to make you keep your lights on and look behind you, even if you know nothing’s there. I especially (unlike Elle) liked the first chapter’s bleak helplessness and the inevitable feeling of Jeanette’s fate. Granted, I think you have to be a Midwesterner to fully appreciate it, or spend some time in another depressed, rural area that most people leave only when they die (and sometimes, not even then), but it really gripped me. I could’ve read a whole story about Jeanette and her downtrodden Midwestern life and never complained, but I am a bit of a sucker for Americana in that respect. The atmosphere has yet to let me down.
Similarly, I really like the characters. I thought Jeanette was sympathetic and I really like the complexities of Sister Lacey – and the nuns with whom she works. Amy interests me in a cautious way, like when you’re reading a mystery and know someone coming out of the bathroom is a clue but don’t yet know whether it’s a red herring or something you should care about. And I was most impressed by chapter three, watching as Wolgast and Doyle went from empty shells to actual characters (especially Wolgast) and wondering how Cronin’d managed to evolve them so seamlessly. I wouldn’t mind watching a television show that’s The Adventures of Wolgast and Doyle, I liked them so much! There’s clearly a complexity in every single character, this wonderful creation of very real people, with very real personalities and quirks. I like that.
But I do have one great big glaring gripe that is set apart from the rest of my praise, and that is this: the beginning of the book is so disjointed. I read the first chapter after dinner one night and then couldn’t start the second for a few days, and I was shocked at how dramatically different the two were. Not just in structure (I quite like the e-mails in the second chapter), but in content. The story of Jeanette and Amy was replaced by researchers in the wilds of South America, and I just – couldn’t see the connection. And they were followed up by Wolgast and Doyle, who again didn’t seem to fit into the scheme of the previous chapters. Each chapter was great, in isolation –pitch-perfect, really well-organized, atmospheric and addicting and worth reading more of – but that was exactly the problem: they felt like isolated chapters. Parts of a different whole and I couldn’t really thread them together. There was a reference to South America in the third chapter that tied in into the second, but it really wasn’t until well into the fourth chapter that I stopped feeling like The Passage was three books in one, and I didn’t like that feeling. I don’t want a disjointed jumble of characters and plots, I want a coherent thread running through everything. I didn’t feel like I had that, and it was incredibly jarring.
I obviously can’t rate a book at this point, so I’ll just say “so far, so good.” I’m enjoying it but it’s not my favorite, it’s picking up but I am not yet glued to my seat like all the quotes all over the U.S. edition promises I will be, and I think I will probably quite like it – once it gets moving the rest of the way. Until then, I will remain cautiously optimistic that it keeps improving the way the first few chapters did, and that it really will become a coherent whole.
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The lovely girls from The Book Memoirs have invited me to come over and talk about my three favorite books – so here I am! I have so many favorites that it was like picking your favorite child, but these three books have a special little place in my heart.
Where I heard about this book? To be honest, I have no idea where I first saw it! It suddenly was all over the blogosphere so I had to pick it up. I was expecting to like it – but I wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I do. Lauren Oliver’s writing style is beautiful and she really knows how to write from the perspective of a teenage girl. The message within the book is wonderful – you never know how you change someone’s life when you do the slightest thing different. When you say you appreciate someone when they don’t expect it. Because the book is about Samantha Kingston, who dies at the beginning of the book and gets to live her last day over 6 more times, changing a little bit in her life every time. Yes, I cried during this book, and I still do when I reread it. It has a special place in my heart.
I was very late in picking this book up. I had seen it in stores in The Netherlands, but read the back of the book and was somewhat disgusted by the story. When I started blogging, I saw so much love going around that I eventually ordered the boxed set of the trilogy. And how horrifying the story may sound, I love this book to bits. The Hunger Games is about a dystopian world in which northern America doesn’t exist anymore – instead, there’s Panem and a yearly event named the Hunger Games, in which children between 12 and 18 are forced to kill each other until there’s only one teen standing. What I love about the story most of all is the world building. The ability that Collins has in making me queasy just by reading – I really felt the anxiety that Katniss must have felt in the Arena. But of course, I would be silly not to mention Peeta, who is one of my favorite characters of all time.
Sing me to Sleep by Angela MorrisonAfter watching a video in which this book was mentioned, I decided to pick it up. I hadn’t heard anything about the book itself – I just loved the cover and the synopsis sounded good. And I ended up bawling my eyes out. It was that emotional for me. This book tells you about a girl who is called ‘The Beast’ because she is, in her own words, so ugly. She then gets a makeover (a really extreme one though) and on a trip abroad, she meets a guy and feels like she found love for the first time. The book was an emotional ride for me and in the last 60 pages or so I couldn’t get my eyes to stop leaking. This is not a happy read whatsoever, but it really touched me and because of that, it’s one of my absolute favorites. It deserves a lot more love than it’s getting at the moment, and even though the makeover is way too much, I really hope that people will start picking this book up more.
PS: If you know me, you’re probably surprised that I haven’t included one of the Harry Potter books in this post. I decided that I couldn’t mention one book and just leave the rest of the books aside – because I truly love them all. My favorite however, would be Deathly Hallows.
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* The giveaway is, as always, international but please make sure either The Book Depository or Amazon ships to your country before entering.
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Matched by Ally Condie
Publication information: Dutton Juvenile / 30 November 2010 / 384 pages
Format: Kindle edition, because I am a heathen convert of the 21st century.
Where I heard about it: Found it when I was trolling Amazon for popular new releases. Yes, yes, I am that kind of a reader.
Spoilers: No worse than on Amazon, I’m sure.
Review:
Cassia Reyes is a model student, daughter, and citizen. How could she not be when the Society has everything planned and functioning perfectly? All of her needs are met: food, shelter, education, career training, and even her future husband are selected by officials who know what is best for each individual by studying statistical data and probable odds. She even knows when she will die, on her 80th birthday, just as the Society dictates. At her Match Banquet she is paired with Xander, her best friend and certainly her soul mate. But when a computer error shows her the face of Ky, an Aberration, instead of Xander, cracks begin to appear in the Society’s facade of perfection.
I am all over the futuristic distopian novel. No, seriously. Ever since reading The Giver in fourth grade, I’ve been fascinated with stories wherein characters can’t make choices for themselves. In everything I’d read, Matched was instantly compared to The Giver. I can see the similarities: in the mysterious future, everything is controlled for Cassia, her family, and her friends, from morning into night and stretching until the very day they die. Good!, I thought to myself. The Giver is one of my favorite books. How could anything go wrong with a best-seller that’s being compared to it again and again?
And you know, technically, nothing went wrong with Matched. The story was interesting and well-paced. The characters were likeable enough. It wasn’t a long read, and I was surprised by a few twists and turns, but… It reminded me a bit of the last time I went to Olive Garden. I ordered my favorite dish on their menu, with mussels and shrimp in a cream sauce, prepared myself for an amazing meal – and only found it to be average. Like the magic my memory and stomach promised me was missing. It was good, sure, and I cleaned my plate. It just wasn’t great.
That’s what Matched is for me, then: good, but not great.
I look at the seed resting in the palm of my hand. There is still mystery in it after all, in that little brown core. I’m not sure what to do with it, so I tuck it into my pocket next to my tablet container.
The almost-snow reminds me of a line from a poem we studied this year in Language and Literacy: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It is one of my favorites of the Hundred Poems, the ones our Society chose to keep, back when they decided our culture was too cluttered. They created commissions to choose the hundred best everything: Hundred Songs, Hundred Paintings, Hundred Stories, Hundred Poems. The rest were eliminated. Gone forever.
I think my core problem with Matched is that it’s a novel with two faces. The core story is about Cassia, torn as she is between two boys (the inevitable love triangle!): Xander, her best friend who she’s been Matched with and will marry, and Ky, an Aberration who is not permitted to ever take a Match. Cassia’s struggle is real and organic, and I can’t say I disliked watching her come into her own. But I never really was gripped by her as an individual, and some of the teenage authenticity I make grabby-hands towards all the time was definitely lacking. She worked, though. Xander was likable, Ky was mysterious, and were this a teenage romance I could happily check all the must-have boxes.
But the problem with the book, and the one I keep coming back to, is that Condie wants it to be more than a teenage romance. There are hints of it early on, and tiny Orwellian glimmers throughout that made my ears prick up, but I feel like she set the story on a treadmill that was running too fast for it and it never quite found its footing. It wanted to run, and I could watch it struggle, little hints of something more substantial between Cassia’s nightly Xander-or-Ky debates, but it never really got there.
“It’s not screaming,” my mother says, her voice sad. “You’re hearing the saws. They’re cutting down the maple trees.”
I hurry out onto the front steps where Bram and my father also stand. Other families wait outside, too, many of them still wearing their sleepclothes like us. this is another intimacy so shocking and unusual that I am taken aback. I can’t thick of another time when I’ve seen any of my neighbors dressed like this.
Or maybe I can. The time when Patrick Markham went out and walked up and down the street in his sleepclothes after his son died, and Xander’s father found him and brought him home.
Somewhere around halfway through the story, I commented to Elle that nothing in this book struck me as remarkable. There were no “I want to write this down and keep it forever” quotes, no moments that I wanted burned in my memory, no characters so addicting that I wanted to keep them on my desk with my X-Men and Star Trek action figures. This isn’t completely true, but I don’t want to take it back either.
Because here’s the secret of this book, hidden deep enough that even I had a hard time parsing it out: there is a better story hidden under the layers of Cassia and her boyfriend debate. Deep within, there’s something intelligent and compelling, something I’m desperate to know more about. The problem is that Cassia’s whining and the slow build-up shoves aside the more compelling story about the Society and exactly what is going on in Cassia’s world. Only in the last fifty-odd pages do you suddenly get that belly-jerking need to find out what happens next – and then discover that in order to do that, you have to buy the sequel this coming November.
I let it go like a child with a handful of balloons on her First Day at First School. They float away from me, bright and dancing on the breeze, but I don’t look up and I don’t try to grab them back. Only when I hold onto nothing can I be the best, only then can I be what they expect me to be.
In November, there will be other books for me to love. There will be characters who grab me from the first page, plots that don’t amp up so subtly that discovering them feels like a gut punch, hidden gems of stories that do so much more than Matched ever could. And that’s a shame. If it’d started on page 200 and went straight onto the sequel, I would be gripping you by the t-shirt and begging you to buy it. Instead? I’m suggesting another menu item:
If you really want a good distopian novel, do yourself a favor and just read The Giver.
Over the last few weeks, while my school life was far too frantic to even look at my Kindle, I found solace in amassing samples. Non-fiction, YA, fantasy, sci-fi — you name it, I sent something in the genre to my Kindle in hopes of reading it later. As it turns out, “later” was a week of plowing through more than 40 samples, trying to decide what I did and did not want to read.
(I haven’t actually gotten through all of them, but non-fiction and books that are tangentially related to school can wait!)
For that reason, I present to you the five very best and five very worst samples I read, not necessarily listed in true order of preference. The top five is actually more a top 10 that changed every third time I looked at the list, but I think I’m solid now.
Maybe.
We’ll see.
Dash & Lily’s Book of DaresI think, rather than try to explain why I loved this sample (and in fact told Elle to read it immediately), I’ll let Dash do the talking:
Wherever I went, I was on the wrong end of the stampede. I was not willing to grant ‘salvation’ through an ‘army.’ I would never care about the whiteness of Christmas. I was a Decemberist, a Bolshevik, a career criminal, a philatelist trapped by unknowable anguish–whatever everyone else was not, I was willing to be.
I’ve always felt that teenagers in fiction have a habit of not coming across as teenagers. Their cynicism (and joy!) comes across as muted and disingenuous, reminding you constantly that this is an adult trying to recreate their younger years. Both Dash and Lily, from the first page, feel real to me. Damaged and genuine, which is just how I like my characters. Plus, the book’s set in The Strand, that famous New York City bookstore, and features the characters writing back and forth to each other in a red moleskine. C’mon, bibliophiles. How could I resist?
Here comes the big confession: I can be an incredibly shallow reader. Sometimes, I just need pretty-funny-shiny to grab me and suck me in. Combine this with my lifelong love of heist movies, and I think Heist Society was meant for me. The setup is laugh-out-loud funny even if the premise is a bit out there (teenage con artists?) and every word just sung. From the fate of the Headmaster’s car to the introduction of Hale, I was sucked in. Even if it won’t ever be the most heart-wrenching, life-changing read, I’m a law student. I appreciate flirty, frivolous, and fun.
Bleeding VioletIt takes a special author to write a character who grabs you from the first moment. It takes an especially special one to do the same with a deeply damaged character. Hanna, from the first page, is broken. It’s not even a spoiler to say that; from the first instant, something is wrong with Hanna. Full stop. But somehow, despite that — maybe because of that — you want deeply to care about her while she tries to make a home for herself with the mother she doesn’t know.
I set my bag on the floor and unpacked: seven purple dresses, purple underclothes, my purple purse, the big wooden swan Poppa had carved for me, and my cell phone. Since the room had no closet, I placed everything on the built-in shelves along the wall opposite the door, including my pills, which took up almost all the top shelf. I put the few toiletries I’d packed into the medicine cabinet. And that was it.
I was home.
There’s something beautiful in the choppy, disconnected way Hanna tells her story. In her imperfections. And that’s special.
The False PrincessImagine a Disney movie made into a book. Now imagine it with fewer talking animals and a girl whose life is about to be turned upside down, and you have The False Princess. High fantasy can feel like a trope parade down main street, but something about Princess Nalia and her trouble-making best friend Kiernan is addictive from the first. What starts as two teenagers trying to keep themselves amused by looking for an invisible door leads to Nalia discovering her entire life is a lie. One part prince-and-pauper, one part just solid fantasy, this book promises to wrap me up in its world and I’m desperately looking forward to it.
The Dark Days of Hamburger HalpinLong before I met Elle, a friend accused me of preferring male characters over females. I’m sure Elle would agree. When a man (or boy!) is written well, when I feel he’s real — I don’t think I could really ask for more than that. And Will Halpin, a deaf boy who’s embarking on his journey to mainstream school, is written perfectly.
Arterberry keeps turning around or covering his mouth with his flabby arm while writing on the board. Plus, although I realize that the American with Disabilities Act can’t force him to get rid of his bushy lip beast, a basic sense of fashion and/or hygiene should compel him to at least trim his ‘stache.
The class ends before I have any idea what era of history we were even talking about.
Will’s disability, too, is dealt with realistically and feels teenage (like stashing the hearing aids he promised to wear). You might as well just call the book This Will Make Kate Shell Out Her Cash, because really, that’s what it is.
Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King, Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, Paper Towns by John Green, Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles and White Cat by Holly Black.
[Editor note: Elle would like to point out that 7 of these were recs by her and that she owns a pretty copy of White Cat, too. Neener.]
TutoredI once read a book about a “fat” girl (bear with me) that promised to be an uplifting story but really focused on the horrors of being fat. This sample felt like that with poverty. Oh, the story is one of my favorites — bright girl from a good home, poor boy who struggles in school — but something about the tone of the book just made my skin crawl. Without going so far as to say poor people are icky, it felt that way and I couldn’t detach myself from that connection. There’s no sympathy for Hakiam, the “downtrodden” boy of the story, even from the prose itself, and that’s a problem.
Elegance of the HedgehogElle informed me this was a translation from the original French after I read and loathed the sample, which explained a lot. Namely, why this book is so unreadably verbose. Every paragraph beats you over the head with ten-dollar words, which would be great if the story was about winning a Scrabble tournament but not so much when it’s about — uhm. Well. I’m not even sure what it’s talking about, half the time.
I then obligingly flaunt these pauper’s victuals–now much improved by the noteworthy fact that they do not smell–because I am a pauper in a house full of rich people and this display nourishes both the consensual cliche and my cat Leo, who has become rather large by virtue of these meals that should have been mine, and who stuffs himself liberally and noisily with macaroni and butter, and pork from the delicatessen, while I am free–without any olfactory disturbances or anyone suspecting a thing–to indulge my own culinary proclivity.
Worse, both the fifty-four-year-old concierge and the twelve-year-old who lives in the building sound exactly alike, florid language and too-long rambling about everything. I honestly couldn’t figure out that it’d moved from one character to another until the girl said she was twelve. I’d say this is either the world’s worst translation, or someone liked thesaurus.com a bit too much when writing.
The Adoration of Jenna FoxElle told me this sounded like a me-book, and maybe it would be were it not so incredibly choppy. Reading the sample — which attempts to set up how Jenna lost her memory and remembers nothing of her life — is like trying to understand a television show by flipping the TV off every few minutes. The narrative is choppy and jumps around too unevenly for me to really engage. Really, that’s the issue: it’s not poorly written (though sometimes, the sentences are so short and jerky, I think Hemingway is probably rolling over in his grave) as much as it is distracting. Instead of being intriguing, the tiny-boat-in-a-storm feeling made me give up on the sample halfway through. I think I might’ve enjoyed it otherwise.
WillowIf you’ve watched my Book Babble, you’ve heard this rant, but if not, it goes something like this: the introduction of plot shouldn’t feel like being beaten to death with a baseball bat. From the first page — literally, the very first page, this isn’t exaggeration (for once) — Willow is so obsessed with cutting and scratches and pain that the book might as well have a giant THIS IS ABOUT CUTTING! sign. Maybe with fireworks, just in case you missed it.
But Willow’s eyes are riveted by something else: an angry red welt, about three inches long, that runs from the girl’s elbow to her wrist. If Willow squints hard enough, she can just about make out a few flecks of dried blood.
How did she get it? She doesn’t look the type.
Maybe she has a cat. A whole bunch of kittens.
Yeah, that’s it. Playing with her kitty. That’s probably how it happened.
Willow slumps down in her seat.
(And in case that’s not enough blunt force trauma, she’s crouching in the school bathroom and cutting herself by the end of the first chapter.)
I’m not against books about timely topics, and definitely not about getting the issue of cutting out there, but this feels more like an 80s after-school-special than a book. Shallow and painful for it.
The Maze RunnerI should love this book. A bit dystopian, a bit Lord of the Flies, about boys being taken to a strange place and forced to survive by cultivating land and raising animals. But in trying to make the reader feel what Thomas feels, waking up in the elevator that delivers him to his new life, the book ends up leaving the reader in the total dark. There’s no frame of reference or context for anything that’s going on, and the book isn’t written tightly enough for the reader to feel Thomas’s situation. It ends of reading like poorly-written YA fiction, all bombastic confusion and no real meat. I couldn’t even get through the sample, so what does that say for the whole book?
So what about you? Do you download the Kindle sample or does it feel like cheating like the gals from The Book Memoirs? Do you hoarde them? And what’s on your radar?
