Very LeFreak (by Rachel Cohn)

Rachel Cohn came to the cat by way of David Levithan. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares are up there with some of the coolest, hippest, and genuinely touching books in contemporary YA. However, it has become all too obvious now that Rachel Cohn is at her best when she’s collaborating with another writer/editor. Very LeFreak even seems too much a rehashing of the Cyd Charisse books, and the hipster-speak that seemed kinda cool in those books, now just feels as hollow and fake as the hipsters she’s describing… at the very least the language employed by Cohn here  is a true reflection of the shallowness that is the character of Very LeFreak.

I may have fallen out of love with Rachel Cohn, because this book… not the first time I was majorly let down with what I’d hoped to be a fresh take on an old tale: addiction. In Very’s case the addiction is to “new technology”, you know the hipsters whose iPhones and iPads and whathaveyous are merely extensions of their otherwise meaningless bodies and no-original-thought brains? But by the time you actually get to the addiction part of the plot, readers have to spend about a 100 pages with the uber-obnoxious egomaniac that is Very LeFreak…  And that is a tough 100 pages to get through, when *nothing* really happens,  nothing but establishing Very as this unlikeable character (that, for one, is something Cohn has achieved: establishing her main character).

However, my main issues with this book are the plot and the dramatic structure, the minor characters (who basically serve no other purpose than to orbit around Very) and the convoluted language. I don’t care if a (main) character is “unlikable”. I mean, seriously what’s to like for instance about Bounce in Adam Rapp’s The Children and the Wolves?  I do care about how that character is used in the plot of the book, in what way the other characters are developed (or not) and what their purpose is in the book, and the language and style used to make me, the reader, believe that what I read is true, honest, as genuine as can be.

As for the plot and its structure? The dramatic structure (and the pacing!) is cleverly hidden amidst Very’s abundance of mocca-frappa-cino-lattes . I already mentioned we get about a 100 pages of establishing Very as a character… then there’s the big intervention thing that makes her go into rehab, and then at the very end of it all there are things thrown into the plot so randomly, that it’s hard to think that a serious editor had a closer look at this book! The pacing here is so incredibly off!

And the language? What I’d once called witty and sharp, I can now only describe as annoying and too try-hard.  Cohn has a tendency to write run-on sentences. You haven’t even hit page 2 and you’ve already had to stomach something like: “Hey, she wasn’t even bothered that yesterday she’d been fired from her work-study “security” job checking student IDs – a feat that, contrary to her university career services advisor, was not, like, impossible to pull off – yet Very probably could be counted on later today to blow the remaining credit on her maxed-out card for primary wants like new headphones rather than for secondary needs such as food and tuition.” Oh, I get what she’s saying, that’s not it. But imagine reading page after page after page after page of this type of sentence… oh, now I get it, *that* is where the plot was hiding!!! So these overly long and intricately plotted (Get it? Get it?) sentences just stand in the way of genuineness.

Rachel Cohn, get your butt in gear, find that great editor who brought out the best possible writer in you and be great again! And no, I don’t mean that lackluster uninspired dystopian ditty you’ve been working on!

Bleeding Violet (by Dia Reeves)

You know a book is not for you when you have read 250 pages and you’re still WTF-ing every single page and you still have more than 200 to go and dreading every single sentence to come. Bleeding Violet is the weirdest of weird books, but sadly not in a good way. Reeves obviously strives to write a different kind of paranormal fantasy novel and to an extent she succeeds in that: Hannah is not just another paranormal romance weak girly angelic mermaidy protagonist in a nice flowing silky satin dress…  She’s a completely insane bipolar bitch who’s literally all over the place, mother-complex, father issue, love & sex issues, issues all over the place. On the kookiness meter, this book scores off the charts, but structurally as well as logically this is just such a mess that it doesn’t work at all for and falls flat and will be shelved as a “WTF was I thinking?” book…

Just some random questions: Is there a reason why Portero is full of monsters? Is there a reason why every other place in the whole wide world (of the book) is a normal town, and has never heard of Portero and doesn’t even know there’s a town like Portero with doors and keys to monsters? Why is Wyatt kick ass commando style monsterfighter on one page and a doormat BF on the next? Why the hell is there never an explanation about the whole worldbuilding? Hannah never gets an answer, but the reader just has to guess as well. Even though this books goes on and on (just shy of 500 pages, which is way too long!), it’s page after page guessing what the whole point of it is. Everything in the book is random, chaotic, and ill-explained.

I guess the cat should do the magnanimous thing here and say that the whole reading experience is just one big  metaphor for how fucked up the main character is as well,… well in that respect Dia Reeves totally succeeded. Did she also manage to write a good book in the process? Not for me, she didn’t!

Days of Blood and Starlight (by Laini Taylor)

The cat’s done with the angels. And the chimaera for that matter. Cat’s had enough, no more mixing it up with the supernatural. Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone succeeded in enticing the cat, even more, for like half a book there, it looked like fantasy/supernatural stuff might become a regular on the cat’s bookshelves, but no, this one proves it: had it, schluss, over, done, there’s the door, I’m out!  And here’s a Lance Armstrong-sized confession: read this one carefully, painstakingly, up until page 200… then , what the hell, … skimming is reading too, right?

At the beginning of Days of Blood and Starlight, we learn that Karou has disappeared from Prague. After the things that happened in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, the media has practically gone berserk, I mean dude, flying angels and superweird blue-haired girls and all that?  Of course, Karou isn’t dead (this being a trilogy and all), but through some not so cryptic email even her friend Zuzana (Yay! She’s still there!) figures out she’s down in Morrocco, not to get a suntan, but to bring back all those slaughtered chimaera. See, Karou has sort of joined forces with the White Wolf, or Thiago, another resurrectionist… Oh, btw, Karou totally took over Brimstone’s job of bringing back chimaera… building an army and all that… yep, the same sort of creatures that her ex-beau Akiva totally slaughtered. It gets kind of confusing here ‘cause, yeah, Karou/Madrigal, one and the same, but not quite, different bodies, old memories, whatevs.  Anyway, Akiva? Total emo-angel, with tons of guilt over having been genocide-boy and killing everyone in Madrigal/Karou’s family.  So, he wants to make it right again… like being a genocidaire can be atoned for, right? But whatever, he’s building his own private angel-army so he can join Karou’s army, and end the war to end all wars.

Maybe the one and only redeeming quality of Daughter of Smoke and Bone was – in hindsight – the fact that Taylor’s writing was so incredibly generous… but those aesthetically pleasing sentences just end up being veneer and they seriously wear off after a while if there’s no pay-off (plotwise, characterwise, …), and that’s made abundantly clear in this sequel. When you have the two most lackluster protagonists imaginable who just bend over backwards to please an evil master – especially Karou, who is nothing like the fiery girl she was in the previous book, not to mention how eye-rollingly clueless she is here – then no matter how great that language … well, suffice it to say that this reader just started to gloss over sentences. Laini Taylor so much wants her Akiva and Karou be like Romeo and Juliet (“Your family sucks, my family sucks”, “I don’t care.” “Me either.” “Let’s be together.” “We can’t.” “I know, but let’s…” ), but you know what…Those two? Also just two spoiled brats and a badly-ending case of insta-love. Not something you want to repeat… but she does, over and over and over again.

Another weak point of this middle book is definitely the lack of focus, or rather the fact that we get viewpoints galore and just when you’re about to get into one of them, pew…. gone … temporarily or just killed off or whatever.  And then when we do get back to that viewpoint, obviously Taylor has to repeat the backstory over and over again, and this book, guys…seriously, at 517 pages, it’s at least 200 pages too long!

There’s a point where as a reader you just don’t want to put any more energy in your reading. And not just because this story of war and brutality is incredibly draining, but also because the opulent writing style that Taylor has just enhances that whole feeling of being tired as a reader,… . The cat found  Daughter of Smoke and Bone also way more interesting in the Here world of Prague and Karou’s interactions with her real human friends where Taylor’s writing felt like a lush yet welcome breeze on an incredibly hot summer day. The whole alternate universe stuff – and especially when Madrigal popped up – felt like a copout. Now that it’s obvious that this is really the focus of it all, well… I guess this is where this trilogy stops for the cat.

The DUFF (by Kody Keplinger)

The cat’s gonna go old school here and talk about The Message. Yeah, yeah, we all know by now that it’s not done anymore to discuss The Message of books or even worse to discuss questions like “what is the moral of the story?” or because books (and by extension their authors) have their own raison d’être and discussing such petty things like Message or Moral… big no-no…  But, considering that an author puts something out there, for everyone to read, I figure they’re OK with people critiquing and criticizing what they have to say. So what does Kody Keplinger have to say with The DUFF?

Bianca is our 17-year-old protagonist, she’s what one would call “snarky”. She’s smart, has 2 very good friends – both of whom she considers to be way prettier than she is – but doesn’t really think she’s got all that much in common with the rest of the teenage population. When her two girlfriends go out clubbing, she’d rather spend time talking to the barman than partying with her friends. She doesn’t get why girls swoon over boys and why they don’t use their common sense more. She’s had her heart trampled on by an older guy when she was I dunno, 14, and ever since she has issues with love. Then one evening, the high-school man-whore, Wesley Rush, calls her the DUFF – Designated Ugly Fat Friend – and would like her two hot friends to see him associating with her, because that’s a guarantee way for him to get them to have sex with him. If they see him taking pity on her, they’ll think it’s adorable and … well, you get it. Obviously Bianca is furious, as she rightly should be, but then the story takes on this almost cartoonish twist in that Bianca starts having random sex with Wesley…to get things out of her system… As a distraction. And Wesley is her drug. That she can’t get enough of. She’s like addicted. So there. That’s the story.

Silly (and predictable!) story aside, I can get the whole frustration thing for not being the one that gets noticed in a group of friends. This is 100% teenage reality. The way that Bianca felt after this is indeed very pertinent. Every teenager at some point will feel like the odd one out in a group. Part of growing up is the whole idea of figuring out what your “issues” are and then either working through them or learning how do make the best of things despite them. But what does Bianca do? She works out her problems by escaping from them WHILE HAVING SEX WITH THE GUY WHO POINTED THEM OUT TO HER AND KEEPS ON DOING SO. The guy she hated even before she called him the DUFF. And she feels dirty after having had sex with him (Bianca: “What is wrong with me?”). The guy who keeps on calling her Duffy, who keeps on insulting her, even when they’re having their escapist no strings attached sex thing. Who she keeps on hating. Until of course she doesn’t anymore, because we all know that good girls like bad boys that are no good to them. Now, if that stereotype doesn’t infuriate you enough, then let’s get to The Message: it’s OK to use a person – sexually – if you have issues. Also, Bianca seems to be thinking she’s “ a feminist”, chastising her female friends for gushing and lusting after boys, but clearly she has no clue whatsoever what the word means. Does Kody Keplinger? Oh, I did read the ending too, of course, where both protagonists come to an insight about their issues, but yet again the message is: it’s ok to do so, as long as you feel remorseful afterwards. What Kody Keplinger’s message also entails is that sex is something to feel disgusted by (Bianca felt dirty after the sex, the sex was a coping mechanism, etc). And that I’m sure, is not something she set out to do. I’m sure in her opinion, she’s being open about teenagers’ sexuality, what with Bianca being on the pill and them using condoms (thank the heavens!).

Anyway, let’s not dwell on the Message-thing too much, and just try to avoid that other elephant in the room…  Let’s move on to the writing. And that, ladies and gentleman, reads like it was written by a high school senior. Oopsie…I did just talk about that elephant, didn’t I? Yes, Kody Keplinger wrote this when she was 17, and to be honest, it also reads like it was written by a 17-year-old. The language – though obviously you can’t get a more Authentic Teenage Voice then this – is too obvious, there’s very little subtlety in the descriptive parts of the book. When you do it right I don’t need another adverb to tell me that something was said “sarcastically”. The whole book actually oozes inexperience: plot threads that are wrapped up too neatly (the whole Toby thing, WTF?); issues that are thrown out there, then dealt with very carelessly (the OCD, the alcoholism, the divorce), characters that are flat and hardly developed.

I’m sorry, but these are the sorts of things that should be weeded out by a good editor. Don’t be taken aback by the fact that the writer is “only 17”. Just try to get the best story out of the writer as possible, the best possible language. And if this is the best Kody Keplinger can do then age 17 or age 35,… that doesn’t matter anymore.   The DUFF is nothing but an unoriginal, badly executed, teenage fantasy.

Shadows (by Ilsa J Bick)

When writers set out to write trilogies or other series-books, they tend to forget that people often read other books in the period leading up to the publication of the next one in the series. Michael Grant has a tendency to forget that, Veronica Roth forgot it too…and now Ilsa J. Bick has also forgotten there are so many other books out there. So often you get that confused feeling when you start reading that second book , especially when there’s no reminder whatsoever about what happened towards the end of the previous book. That’s OK, though…if you have the book at your disposal (which lots of readers just don’t).  But if you do, you can just have a look at the last couple of pages. If not, you quickly read a few online summaries or reviews and you’re all set to go. Grant’s Gone books and Roth’s Insurgent both grabbed the cat after about 10 pages again, but Ilsa J. Bick just didn’t do that at all…not even 230 pages into the novel, when I just called it quits.

Shadows was just too damn confusing from the get go and there is one main reason for that (besides getting no heads up about what happened at the end of Ashes): the multiple points of view and the myriad of characters that are thrown at you in a short span of time. Reading Shadows is a friggin’ chore. And if there’s one thing you don’t what your book to be it’s a chore for the reader to get through. It’s completely incomprehensible that there wasn’t an editor or an assistant-editor or anyone at all who pointed this out to Bick: “hey, I think you might be losing more than half your readership here… Tone it down on the characters, or at least flesh them out a little before you let them get into the action and the gore all the frickin’ time!” As a reader you have no time to connect to any of the characters because before you know , we’re someplace else, with another character that you don’t know, don’t know what their relation to Alex – the purported protagonist – is.

Despite the fact that Ashes was clearly a book with an immense flaw (namely the entire 2^nd part of the book that was set in Rule), at least what you got was a consistency in the voice. In Shadows there’s nothing of the sort. It’s just one ugly complicated confused heap of action, action and more action.  There’s hardly any sort of continuation with regards to the previous book (in terms of character development, that is) because there’s never a point in the book where I dunno…nothing happens and there’s some chance to catch your breath as a reader and to reflect on what’s going on with the main character(s). Oh, the cat is sure the action and gore scenes are pretty well written, but she just felt herself skipping them because “OK, I get it, gore, gore and more gore, let’s get on with the actual story why don’t you? Or maybe some character development, if it’s not too much to ask?”

At the end of Ashes the cat postponed her judgment, primarily because the first half of the book was absolutely stellar: great sense of place, good pacing, interesting characters. The second half seemed to have been written by a completely different writer. Unfortunately Rule and its inhabitants play an important role in Shadows and since the cat didn’t care one bit for those characters, she’ll gladly give the rest of this series a miss.

P.S. Did I mention it’s about flesh-eating zombies?