Keeping the Moon (by Sarah Dessen)

In light of the upcoming publication of Sarah Dessen’s new novel, The Moon and More, in June of this year, the cat wanted to get another Sarah Dessen fix real quick! There’s nothing better to pick you up after a slew of average books than a Sarah Dessen book! Even when she’s not at the top of her game, her books are always entertaining, immensely readable and like chocolate for my inner girl!

In Keeping the Moon – a Dessen oldie, her 3^rd novel and originally published in 1999 – 15-year-old Colie Sparks is our protagonist. She used to be fat, but once her mom found comfort in exercising and found out that not only was she really good at it, but she also loved it with an unabashed enthusiasm that made her into one of the nation’s most famous fitness gurus, Colie lost 45 pounds. What she didn’t lose, though, was her insecurity. When her mom is off to Europe to tour with her fitness program, Colie is sent to her unconventional aunt Mira in Colby. In Colby she starts working at the Last Chance* diner, where she also meets Morgan and Isabel, who are potentially the first friends she ever has in her life.

Like in many of her other books, Dessen is very good at pointing out similarities and differences in people’s relationships and the reasons why people behave the way they behave. Dessen is a character-writer. She seems to love all of her (female) protagonists a lot (despite and because of their flaws!), which is very infectious! It’s hard not to feel with Colie and her insecurities. Dessen usually takes a lot of time to have her main characters build relationships with the people around her (including the love interests! No insta-loves here!), who all have their own past to deal with,… nothing is ever rushed in a Dessen novel. In Keeping the Moon, she hasn’t yet fully acquired that skill yet (it’s a slender novel, compared to some of her more recent work), but it’s great to see some really believably female friendships so early on in her writing career, and to see her be such a champion of self-esteem! I’m greatly looking forward to The Moon and More (which is apparently also set in Colby!).

* This book can also be found under another title: Last Chance. The 2012 Speak Reissue I read (cf. cover photo), has the original title, though.

The Madness Underneath (by Maureen Johnson)

A big part of the charm of Maureen Johnson’s first Shades of London installment was the very successful mix of humor (typically Johnson witticisms in the dialogues) and a scary story arc. As such The Name of the Star could almost have been a story on its own: good set-up, good story development, and a fitting ending to the main plot,… except of course some of the characters belonged to the Secret Ghost Police and there were oodles of possibilities to franchise this and make it into a series,… which Johnson did.

The Madness Underneath picks up just a few weeks after the very eventful finale of The Name of the Star. We find Rory in Bristol, and no longer in London, to recover from the Ripper attack. Because she can’t really come clean about what really happened (“Yeah, so I was attacked by a ghost, and now I have these really freak ghost-zapping powers.”) without being put in the loony bin permanently, the therapy sessions she has with her therapist aren’t really that successful. Rory feels the need to open up, but there really isn’t anyone. However, for a reason that will become clear later on, her therapist decides that the best for Rory might be to go back to London and pick up her old life again, have some sort of “normal” routine again. The entire first half of the book is actually a very convincing rendering of Rory as a victim of a violent crime (even though she doesn’t really want to be considered as a victim) and her having to come to terms with what happened. Once she is back at Wexford she (consciously or not) pushes away her old friends. That means that this book is a Jazza- and Jerome-light book (not to mention that also Boo and Callum are well…afterthoughts really). I totally believed “Rory as a victim” the first 150 pages of the book. I bought it. It made sense why she’d be the whiny talkative Rory rather than the funny talkative Rory. Hey, if you’d been stabbed by the ghost of a serial killer you might be whiny too!  Unfortunately, this aspect of characterization might also be a reason for this book to be accused of suffering from “middle book syndrome” (of a 4-part series, that is), though.

Anyway, I can pinpoint exactly where Johnson lost the cat…. Actually, there were two things. The first occurred when it became clear that she is basically setting Wexford up as the Hellmouth (Like, the cracks? Really?).  Still, that in and of itself could have worked, when done right, and more importantly exclusively… Sadly, that doesn’t happen. Let me explain. The book starts with a murder. This murder plotline is abandoned for about 150 pages to focus on Rory and her settling back into school but not really being able to just resume her “normal” routine of studying for exams and all that school stuff because of all the shit that happened to her there. Now, one would hope that the second part of the novel were about that prologue murder right (that’s also how the first book was structured, btw)?

But is it? Mèh…not so much. There are a few hints here and there, but the main subplot is my second (and main) beef with this book: that totally lame-ass subplot involving a therapist and a cult. Had Johnson focused on just the one subplot – that of the murder and “the madness underneath” – this book would have been so much more exciting (without losing the victimization of Rory aspect of the book) and believable. However, as it is now, Johnson will have a hard time trying to reconcile the Buffy subplot with the True Blood subplot. I dunno, I can’t shake the impression that this books reeks of (dare I say it?) derivativeness …

In any case, this book is clearly not as developed as the first book.  Maybe with some more attention to structure (and pacing! I hate it when all the action is crammed into the 30 or so last pages of a book!), it might have been possible to successfully “conclude” this “madness underneath” murder? This book is a mere 290 pages (as opposed to the first book, which was more than 370 pages), so it just really seems only half a book.  The cat still gives this book 3 stars, though, because as always, Johnson’s writing style is very engaging, and she just has you going page after page. I’m not pleased with how half-finished this book seemed, but I’m definitely interested enough to continue with the series.

 

PS. Cover photo taken @ Soul Coffee (lemon-lime lemonade & cassis-lime lemonade)

Light (by Michael Grant)

It seems the cat is suffering from Gone fatigue…  Leaving a year between installments just didn’t seem like such a good idea. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still finished this book is record time, but it was more of a “let’s see how this ends and we’re over and done with it” kind of thing, than a “Wow, what a great and earth-shattering conclusion this really is!”

If you’ve made it till Fear – the previous book – you’re obviously going to read Light, so it’s not as if Michael Grant will lose any readers because of this book, but I doubt he’ll make any new fans either. Somehow the fights, the explosions, the violence… all of it doesn’t seem as grand anymore as in some of the previous books. The utter evil that Penny seemed to be in Fear, for instance, is somehow lost now. The only real “villain” is Gaia – the gaiaphage – but (and I blame this on Gone fatigue – she (or it) s no longer as convincingly bad as she was for instance when Caine or Lana were under its spell. Now that the gaiaphage is ‘out in the open’, so to speak, the evil that comes from her seems…expected, and her wanting to kill all and everything just for the sake of it, without any other obvious plans for what comes after… well it’s a mute sort of evilness.

Also, all the fights and near misses are just that: another fight, and another explosion, and people are just running around from Perdido Beach to wherever the gaiaphage might be next and then they fight some more, and run some more, and… you know, what was once über-electrifying (“wow, he/she fights like that, how neat is that!” or “you have got to be kidding me, killer mutant worms?????” and edge-of-your-seat excitement , is now almost normal (even the fact that some beloved characters die!) and yes, I hesitate to say it… a chore to get through until you get to the end game.

And actually, when you think about the end game and the ultimate fight… for a lot of these characters there was no conclusion, and as a result this whole last book even seemed anti-climactic, which is a weird feeling to have when your main villain is defeated, right?

Oh, one final note. The cat bought Light in a Waterstones store in Canterbury (England). Waterstones apparently got a bunch of signed books. So yeah!

Short cuts continued…

Bone by bone by bone (by Tony Johnston)

Tony Johnston’s Bone by Bone by Bone sketches what it was like to grow up in the 1950s is Tennessee in an atmosphere of racial inequality, tension and outright hatred.  David is 10, has a best friends who’s black, Malcolm, and a racist dad who threatens to kill Malcolm if he even sets a foot in the house. Bone by Bone by Bone will undoubtedly be compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but it misses the urgency and poignancy of that  powerful novel. Moreover, the characterization of the side character leaves a lot to be desired, as does the undeveloped ending.

2.5 stars

Heist Society (by Ally Carter)

Another book that has a perfect movie counterpart is Ally Carter’s Heist Society, which could be best described as Ocean’s Eleven with teens in the lead roles. Obviously this means you have to get past the ludicrous premise that a couple of 15 and 16-year-olds would have the means, not to mention the opportunity to travel all over the world (Unaccompanied Minors much?) to steal all that important art. Anyway, once past that, the book is fairly enjoyable.

Katharina Bishop comes from a family of conmen and thieves. At 15 she’s ready to put that life behind her, but alas, an emergency involving her dad, a couple of lost paintings and a mysterious villain call her back to her old tricks and she sets up her very own “heist society” to make things better for her dad again. Ally Carter hasn’t really sold me on the third person authorial narrator, though.   Especially not because almost ever chapter starts in the *exact same way* (E.g. Kat didn’t know it yet but… or “She would later realize that…”). Anyway, fun while it last, but nothing more…

PS. There are however a few too many typos in this editions!

3 stars

Beautiful (by Amy Reed)

Beautiful by Amy Reed is Thirteen as a book, focusing on a good girl – 13 years of age – gone terribly bad: (unwanted) sex, alcohol, drugs,… you name it, and Cassie is experiencing it. Moved from tiny Bainbridge Island to one of Seattle’s suburbs, Cassie consciously wants leave her good girl image behind. We learn in the beginning that at her previous school she was not one of the popular girl which she desperately wanted to. There the “good girls” were the popular ones. At her new school she wants to be different, popular… and here the popular people aren’t the goody two-shoes, but the bad boys and girls. As such, Cassie befriends Alex, who introduces her to the world of sex, drugs and more.

There’s nothing uplifting about a story like Cassie’s: the friendship with Alex is one based on power. The relationship Cassie has with a popular high schooler is equally one that is based on power and submission. At no point you get the impression that this is something Cassie really wants – despite her initial resolve to “change her image”. It quickly becomes a downward spiral, which is both realistic – such is the way of drugs when mixed with hormonal 13-year-olds apparently – and unrealistic at the same time. Time and again the reader is pointed to the fact that Cassie is really smart, but none of her actions show that. Also the fact that she continues to get all As in the smart classes despite her increasing drug habit is not exactly realistic. At one point there’s a glimmer of hope, when Cassie makes friends with Sarah, Alex’s half-sister who’s been placed in Alex’s family because her father abused her. With Sarah there seems to be a real bond, until that too is of course nipped in the bud.

Beautiful hardly tells an original story (Ellen Hopkins fans will love this!), but luckily Amy Reed’s style is fluent and entertaining enough to keep you going. Plotwise, it’s also hard to get past the derivative nature of this book (it really is exactly like Thirteen), but Reed manages to keep her reader guessing at times, for better or worse… What happened to Cassie’s family to have them move in the first place. What’s up exactly with Alex and her mother? What about Cassie’s parents? Again, some of these elements add to the tension, but others just feel more like “underdevelopment. All in all, Beautiful is a bit of a mixed bag: compelling for the tale that is being told, but not exactly standing out in originality or execution…