The Great Big Sample Post: Part 1 ft. Kate
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.
Love It, Lick it, Buy it (Devour it, Never Let it Go):
Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
I 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?
Heist Society
by Ally Carter
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 Violet
by Dia Reeves
It 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 Princess
by Eilis O’Neal
Imagine 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 Halpin
by Josh Berk
Long 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.
Honorable mentions (the rest of the “Top 10″, really):
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.]
Burn it (and Then, Burn the Ashes):
Tutored
by Allison Whittenberg
I 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 Hedgehog
by Murial Barbery
Elle 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 Fox
by Mary Pearson
Elle 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.
Willow
by Julia Hoban
If 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 Runner
by James Dashner
I 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?
