Review: Since You've Been Gone by Morgan Matson

Emily's life is shattered when she finds out that her best friend, Sloane, suddenly disappears. It's kinda freaky. Her house is empty and she doesn't answer her calls or texts. Emily's a bit of a recluse before Sloane comes along, so Sloane's disappearance shakes her pretty badly. She belatedly realizes that she has no friend whatsoever beside Sloane, which means she will have to spend the summer alone. However, a letter from Sloane arrives one day. It has no return address or a "hi", just a list of things that Emily should do. Somehow she manages to convince herself that if she does everything in the list, Sloane will magically come back like a genie. So she sets out to do so.

Since You've Been Gone is a typical YA coming-of-age story. Emily is a reclusive girl who finally gets to open up and acquire new friends while doing quirky things. At first I really hate this girl, because she acts like a 10-year-old child instead of a 17-year-old girl. I mean, I'm a recluse who only has like four friends in high school too, but this girl really grates my nerves. Her outlook in life is so child-like and she virtually can't do anything without Sloane telling her to do. She's also incredibly naive. I'm okay with an innocent, naive protagonist, since this is YA we're talking about and all their protagonists tend to be in the "good girls" category, but Emily's childlike-ness is so overtly childish. I feel like I'm reading a story about an elementary school child instead of a high school girl. Even the girls in Jacqueline Wilson's novels have more maturity and they're supposed to be in junior high.

But it gets better as the story progress, although Emily remains annoyingly innocent halfway into the book. Maybe because her initial childishness is so exaggerated, her character development is so satisfying to me. In fact, I grow to like, and even love Emily. I sympathize with her, and I get her fears of being left alone in the world. Though, I find it hard to understand why Emily, an American teenager who shops vintage clothes and goes upstate for flea markets, does not know who Lykke Li and Arcade Fire and Death Cab for Cutie are. "I Follow Rivers" is a pretty big hit for someone like Lykke Li's stature and Arcade Fire is a freaking superstar in terms of indie artists. Hell, even the mainstream knows who Arcade Fire is. I mean, she's into 80s music.

I like the female friendships in this novel. Too often the cool, popular girls like Sloane would be the Mean Girl (tm) but it's not the case in this book, which I find refreshing. The friendship between Sloane and Emily is very sweet and is not poisoned by an undercurrent of "frenemy-ness" that usually makes you wonder why these girls are friends in the first place.

I would've given this book a four star, if it were not for the INCREDIBLY stupid conflict in the end that feels tacked on. And by "incredibly" I mean not even letting the other party finish his sentence. I feel like we could've saved several pages if that freaking party is allowed to finish his sentence. It's stupid and unnecessary, so it gets a one star downgrade. Overall, I think Since You've Been Gone is good and refreshing, light enough for a quick read. Though not the best YA I've ever read, I'd recommend it for anyone that's looking for a good contemporary YA or a palate cleanser after a heavy read (I'm looking at you Lolita).

Review: Adorkable by Sara Manning

Hey all, sorry for being MIA these past couple of months. I'm currently busy with moot court + uni coursework + mid-term exams so I haven't got many chances to update the blog. I don't think I'm able to be very active for the next couple of weeks since I'm busy preparing for mid-term and my upcoming trip. But I finished reading this yesterday and this London-set book fits my whole mood for the month since I'm going to London in late October for the first time and I'm pretty excited! So here be a review

Review: The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan

The Countess Conspiracy is the third book in the Brothers Sinister series by Courtney Milan and it's really, really damn good y'all.  Like, "so-good-that-it-actually-transported-me-to-Feels-City" kind of good. Yes.

Review: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Alice Munro's stories are not thrillers or detective fiction, but they always have this sense of everyday mystery that keeps you turning the pages and wondering, what do we have in store this time?

Review: Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Uprooted is a standalone novel by Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series. Ms. Novik has a certain style of writing that I really like, even when she writes in first person POV, which I usually hate. The premise of Uprooted is very straightforward, almost cliche: a plucky young girl gets picked by the gruff wizard to stay with him in his tower over her beautiful friend who everybody expects to be picked. There, in the tower, she discover that she has magical talent and learns to control it in order to combat the mysterious and malevolent entity of the Wood. Even from the first page I can tell where this is going. But what's great about Ms. Novik is her ability to turn the trope on its head.

Review: For My Lady's Heart by Laura Kinsale

THIS BOOK. Oh my god, this book. It's like someone gathered all of my favorite tropes and rolled it in one neat book-package.

This book has everything I want: a stoic tortured knight, his cunning and equally tortured lady, Medieval politics, courtly intrigue, knightly devotion, courtly love, pining, and loyalty. AND THE LOYALTY. My god, let me tell you all about the loyalty.

Loyalty is one of my assured catnips. Any book that has the hero being quietly loyal and devoted to the heroine that he will do anything, even sacrifice his own life, for her happiness and safety, and I will be rolling in the floor, squealing like a happy cat. And Sir Ruck, the hero of this book, is pretty much slathered in all the good knightly devotion and courtly love tropes. He is like succulent braised pig in terms of satisfying my hunger for loyalty kink.

Sir Ruck is my favorite kind of hero: quietly tortured and utterly loyal and devoted to his lady. He's been through a lot: his house's not truly his due to some legal entanglements and his first common-born wife entered a convent and then "donated" all of his money and horse and armor and arms to the Church. A mysterious benefactress helped him get himself a horse and armor and arms by giving him a pouch of emeralds, and he had pledged himself to her forevermore. Little did he know, thirteen years later, that he would see his benefactress again. The Princess Melanthe is cold and calculating, nothing like the perfect, saintly lady that had sustained him in chastity for thirteen years. He was shattered at first, and yet he grew to love her still, despite her ruthlessness, despite her demons.

The Princess Melanthe had gone through a lot in her life. She was wedded, when she's twelve, to a man old enough to be her father. Her husband had taught her everything she knew about surviving the deadly intrigues of the Italian court, but when he died, Melanthe found herself suffocating there and conspired to be installed in her father's lands in Bowland, England, her childhood home. To achieve this gain, she must tell lies upon lies, break promises upon promises, and woo dukes and knights and princes and nobles. She was always guarded and cold in the continent, for fear that anyone who is dear to her will die, but in England, far away from the vicious court of Italy, she had let her guard down and allow herself to fall in love with a lowly runisch knight.

Both Sir Ruck and the Princess Melanthe are haunted by the demons of their past. Both of them are lonely, alone in the cold hard world. Both of them found love and companionship in each other, when they thought they couldn't. I love that Sir Ruck remains utterly loyal and devoted to Melanthe, even when he doesn't quite know what's in her sleeves. He had pledged himself to her for life, first as her knight, then as her husband, and by god he will upheld that pledge and vow, come rain or hellfire. The Princess Melanthe too, slowly but surely allowed herself to open up to this rough Northern knight, despite her fear for his safety if he got close to her.

The Middle English language employed in the dialogue can be quite disconcerting. I confess, sometimes I don't even know what Sir Ruck is saying, rough-speak as he is. But that's what I love about this novel, it doesn't feel like a pastiche, like some historical novel are. The narrative is very much grounded to the period. Sir Ruck and Princess Melanthe all act like Medieval people in a Medieval world, not modern people in a Medieval world. So there are some of their actions that to us might seem vile, for example Sir Ruck raping his wife for a week straight until he grew tired of her screaming, but they're perfectly reasonable for the characters. As in the Medieval times, religion plays an important role in the story, and the reason why Sir Ruck stayed chaste with Melanthe before they're wed is because he believed he would go to hell for committing the sin of adultery and fornication.

But I love this book and the characters, partly because they are so vivid and full of life. The side characters too are given their own plots and characterizations, not merely some two-dimensional paper-dolls. Sir Ruck and Lady Melanthe's relationship is like catnip to me, but the language can be disorienting, so that's why I gave it a 4.5 star, rounded down to a four star.

Review: Euphoria by Lily King

This book is one of the most refreshing that I had read in a while. Normally, I found 1st person narrative to be suffocating and unbearably shallow, but Ms. King twisted the narrative on its head, bringing about other narratives so that the story does not feel confined. And in a novel about anthropologists studying native cultures in remote lands, the setting can be quite isolating.

This isolation is felt deeply by our narrator, Bankson, who's fresh out of a suicide attempt when we first meet him. From previous accounts, we are led to believe that Bankson is an arrogant man, carving up a space in the Sepik River for himself, and him alone. But when we meet him, he's tortured, driven suicidal by his isolation and ghosts, and seizes the first chance he gets to have company nearby when a pair of anthropologists is looking for a new people for them to study.

At first, I was quite disturbed by how these anthropologists treat these tribes as scientific subjects to study. I'm afraid that I will encounter one of those "mighty-whitey" tropes that I loathe oh-so-much where white people lord their supposed cultural superiority to the savage, primitive tribes. But none of that happened here. It is clear that Nell and Bankson (no word on Fen, still fuming) cared about the tribes and community they studied, although Bankson is unsure how to approach them at first, because he was a proper British man of science whose training taught him that he must be aloof to his "subjects". Nell wasn't like that; she was a maverick American who freely interacted with the community, moving among the women and children, making personal relationship with them. Bankson at first was cautious of Nell's approach, because he was afraid that it would muddle up the power imbalance and samples, making it quite not "pure" but over the time he warmed to it - and her.

I like the characters. Nell, at first, seemed like the stereotypical extroverted American who shook up a British man's life, but her extroversion was the quiet of sorts. She was, indeed, the quiet sort, even though she was fierce and she would do anything to get what she wanted, she was always the quiet sorts, the proper wife, yielding to her husband but in a way move independently of him. Fen knew that she was better for him, and resented her for that. Bankson knew that too, and loved her for that. Bankson wasn't the typical socially clumsy, brooding British man, as he was eager and passionate about his work with the natives, but family discouragement and his own insecurities made him see failures in all aspects.

The romance of this book is my favorite kind of romance: one based on a meeting of the minds. Bankson and Nell doesn't get many interactions alone without Fen, but from the interactions we get, you can see that they are perfect for each other. They are not necessarily identical copies, but they complement the other well, sharing the same interests while remaining different enough for them to work. They found support in each other: Nell, someone that honestly appreciates her work; Bankson, someone that soothes his fear and gives him encouragement when all he could see was failure.

The prose was exquisite too, beautiful, poetic, but not too purple. I read this after I finished On the Road and the difference between them was astounding. Whereas I had to spend 2 hours slogging through the last 80 pages of Dean and Sal's incoherent, drug-fueled, misogynist ramblings, I scarfed through 241 pages of Euphoria in five hours, savoring it.

I gave this four-stars instead of five purely because I think the ending is very much upsetting for personal reasons. I wouldn't say anything further, but rest assured, it was enough to warrant a full-star downgrade. Otherwise, this novel is perfect as a palate-cleanser, as it is short enough but nevertheless still engages the mind.
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Book information:

Author: King, Lily
Edition: New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 2014 (Hardcover).
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2255-1

Review: On the Road by Jack Kerouac

[Cross-posted to my blog: paquetdevie.blogspot.com]

My feelings for Jack Kerouac's On the Road can be summed up in a saying by the ever-truthful Ms. Paris Geller



I don't understand the obsession with Mr. Kerouac's "masterpiece". While I found some of the passages here hauntingly marvelous, scarfing down two-hundred pages of Sal and Dean's endless trips across America and back in less than a day, over time I see Sal and Dean for the men they truly are: hypocrites, trying to get down with the common American man, but at the same time deriding them in their own incoherent, racist, misogynist, pretentious drug-filled haze of a "novel". The book becomes a behemoth to me, even though it's only three hundred pages long, because I don't feel any sympathies for the characters after I realized that these two are bums, worse than bums really, because at least bums are willing to work for money and they generally are a-okay with calling themselves bums. All these two do is mooch off from their aunt, wives, relatives, and friends and still have the gall to present themselves as independent American men and make fun of, in their own patronizing way, poor people who don't know any better.

I vent my frustration about this book to a friend who likes it. She admitted that the book is hard to read, probably because Mr. Kerouac wrote it while he was high on cocaine, and yes, Sal and Dean are misogynist pricks, but she encouraged me to finish it because in the end it's a good story. I'll admit that on the surface On the Road tell a good story. I can see why some people like it because I do sympathize with Sal and Dean's plight, I do, really: losing yourself on the road, having an adventure of self-discovery, generally giving society a big middle finger, I'm all for that. But the way it's written in this book is so caked with middle-class white male entitlement that I basically rolled my eyes every time I turn over a new page. Their plight and experience has become childish to me. How can I muster any sympathy for a middle-class white heterosexual male who wants to be as free as a Black man in the antebellum South? To me, they are nothing but man-children instead of the heroes they think themselves as.

Not to mention, the way women is written in this book is vile. We exist, apparently, only as the motherly aunt who supports her good-for-nothing nephew through everything, or the gullible hot girlfriend who swooned and giggled at Sal and Dean's "charming" ministrations and declarations of love only to be abandoned when they decided to hit the road again very impulsively. The way Sal and Dean goes about "gurls, gurls, gurls", how they commented about the breasts of every women they encountered, and how "fresh" sixteen-year-old girls are (even though they are grown men probably in their early thirties) is honestly sickening and it's one of the reasons that it took me nearly six months to finish the book. Sal and Dean doesn't treat women like human beings; they treat them as trophies and treasures that's an extension of themselves. And don't even get me started with how they treat POC (see: the entirety of their Mexican trip).

I can see this book's appeal, why it resonates to so many people, but in the end, its pretentiousness, misogyny, racism, and general entitlement, sours me. That, and the fact that I have to incur a massive library fine for returning the book nearly six months after the due date.

Review: Dear Life by Alice Munro

I didn't expect to find Alice Munro in my local imported bookshop. It's a small shop and the fiction shelves are mostly stocked with the latest bestsellers and YA novels (on my last trip there there was a copy of the novelization of After, that horrid One Direction fanfiction). However good Mrs. Munro is, she isn't a best-selling author, per se. So I was a bit surprised to find a book of hers, her latest, in one of the shelf in mass market paperback format. I've always wanted to read Mrs. Munro after her Nobel Prize announcement but really hadn't had the chance, so I took it as a sign and bought it.

It turns out to be a good investment, indeed. There's a reason Mrs. Munro has a Nobel Prize now. Her stories are captivating, in a quiet, unassuming way. They don't dazzle or shock; the twists and turns are revealed slowly like a blooming flower. You are left questioning the characters' motives, the story keeps us in the dark of them, yet you don't finish the story unsatisfied. The stories are realistic, in a way that it mimics real life and its quiet absurdity. You don't know the characters' motives and reasons, because there's no need. Sometimes, life has no need for reason or motive. Sometimes, you do things just because you can.

Mrs. Munro is also a shining example of how you don't need purple prose and long run-on sentences to make good literature. Her sentences are short, cut marvelously and to great effect. Her words are simple and staid and elegant and flowed so beautifully. Her characters might seem passionless, but also not. There's passion and vivacity in them, clearly, but muted, not at all noticeable.

I wish I can write a longer review, but it's nearing 12 a.m. and I'm going to New York City for the first time in four days. My mind can't think of anything except my laundry, what to buy, oh my god is there going to be a blizzard when I'm there, how do you wade through 3 feet of snow, etc. So my apologies, this is all I can do for now.

Until next time.

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Book information:
Title: Dear Life
Author: Munro, Alice.
Edition: New York: Vintage Books. First Vintage International Open-Market Edition. 2013. (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-8041-6891-5

Review: 1984 by George Orwell

I know 1984 will rank as one of my favorite book since the first time I had heard it. I know this. But I keep postponing my intent to read it, since I feel like due to my age I will not be able to understand properly, and because I want to work on my English so that I can read it without much difficulty. But one day I was at my local bookstore, window-shopping, and I happened upon a translated copy of 1984 in one of the shelves. I didn't expect it at all and I was so shocked and happy at the same time that I paced around the shelves for some time to calm myself. I was seized by the sudden impulse to grab it and stuff it into my shopping bag, before I saw the publisher. I've read several books by this publisher, and most of them have shoddy translations; I even have to buy a copy of one of them in its original language to even remotely understand anything because the translation is that bad.

But the book haunts me even as I got home. I agonized about it for days. Should I or should I not buy the book? Am I ready yet? Well, I decided finally, if I'm old enough to go to college I'm old enough to read the book. So I placed an order in one of those online bookshops and wait. When it arrived a week ago, I promptly read it.

You must be wondering why it took me almost a week if I liked it so much? Well, because a book like this is like fine wine; you can't read it all at one but rather savor it slowly. And because this book is depressing as fuck, that's why. There were many times when I have to put the book down, draw a long sigh, then took a rest browsing for cute puppies and kittens pictures. The book gets to you. Its worldbuilding is so good that you can't help but get sucked into its world and feel the helplessness of the character. I was there, with Winston in London, trying to survive under constant censorship and squalor, despite the fact that we are separated by the pages of the book.

Orwell has a vivid writing style. He can make his character and his world come to life with mundane words. Every author who thinks that the only way they can write well is by using the most superfluous words needs to read Orwell. Sure, sometimes his paragraph is long and confusing, but like I said, you need to savor it slowly like fine wine. You can't speed-read an Orwell. I usually felt bored upon encountering a wall of text in a novel, but with Orwell, the wall of text makes me feel excited. It doesn't bore me, not at all.

Wow. I really don't have anything to add anymore. What can I say? Everything that needs to be said has been said in this book. You need to read it. That's all I'm going to say.

Final rating:

Book information:

Title: 1984

Author: George Orwell

Edition: New York: Signet Classics.1950

ISBN: 978-0-451-52493-5