This book made me miss the dystopian boom. I liked the creativeness of the story. It kind of reminds me of both HOLES and the Alex Rider series, but way grungier and creepier. Escape from Furnace is a series about a dystopian society where boys are slapped into a maximum security prison for even the smallest of crimes. But it seems like maybe there aren't enough criminals to fill quota because boys like our main character, Alex, are being framed.
If you like modern-day steampunk horror, like the Bioshock franchise, you'll love this. It definitely feels like a book that's marketed to teen boys first and foremost but I think that there's a lot in here that would appeal to adult readers of horror, too. I know it's the first book in the series but I had SO MANY QUESTIONS that weren't answered, and that was frustrating. Like, I know, I know, first in a series. But give me something! And it ends on a wicked cliffhanger, too. I can't imagine being a teen reading this in 2009 and being like where's the rest
Update: Bumping up to a full five stars because I can't stop thinking about this book.
This book was absolutely insane, like FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC meets Midsommar. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, because this is some of the most depraved shit I've read in a while. Without going into spoilers, THE ECLIPSE RITUAL is the story of Obedience and Ronan, and a society that oppresses women and forces them to be brides against their will if they are chosen.
I liked Obedience's gradual questioning of her faith. I thought it was really well done and appropriately terrifying. Any book where one of the bad guys gets a piece of his dick nailed to a wall is going to be pretty fucked up. I also liked that all of the characters were 18+ and that as psychotic as the hero was, he had his own internal logic that he was following to try to prove his twisted love to the heroine.
I read this book for the first time when I was in middle school, I think. It used to be one of my favorite stories. Maybe this is the lens of nostalgia speaking, but one of the things I love about older YA is that I feel like it was allowed to be crazier. Social media wasn't dictating trends and tropes back then, so authors could come up with the craziest concepts without worrying about how well it would do in the Goodreads Choice Awards or on TikTok.
I don't want to say too much about RUNNING OUT OF TIME, but basically, the heroine, Jessie, lives in an 19th century frontier village. A very minimal kind where they live hand to mouth, learn in a one-room schoolhouse, and forage and farm for their food. It's a hardscrabble life with the usual ups and downs until kids start getting sick, and her mother reveals to her a devastating truth that explains some of the other weird shit going on: haunted trees, strange tablets, and forbidden words that nobody else is allowed to speak.
I read this in less than a day. It holds up pretty well. Jessie is a strong and relatable female protagonist and she isn't too perfect. Sometimes, she's allowed to be mean or cowardly. I liked that nuance. There's some pretty obvious plot holes but then I remind myself that this was published in the 90s, and social media has made us all purveyors of the information super highway. Also, it was published in the 90s, so there's a lot of really random fat shaming that doesn't seem to serve any purpose. The 90s, ammirite?
LUST FOR TOMORROW almost feels like a nostalgic read because it's so reminiscent of the military sci-fi classics of the 70s and 80s, like STARSHIP TROOPERS or ENDER'S GAME. I remember trying so hard to get into books like that in my early twenties and walking away feeling so disillusioned, because the worlds those books described were entirely men's worlds, and seemed to deliberately exclude women from being a part of the fantasy (at least, on their own terms).
This book feels like a direct response to the sexist male gazey sci-fi canon, both in homage and also as a critique. The heroine, Nina, is a foot soldier in a futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopian hellscape where zombies have ravaged the cities, forcing people to a life of scavenging or, if they're "lucky," military service. In the Stronghold, which used to be a fancy hotel and now serves as barracks, Nina lives on the outskirts of a sort of gated community, where she alternates between performing various duties in the Stronghold and going on raids led by Helmets.
Helmets are the commanders who lead the raids. Some of them take the helmets off after the battle is over, but some of them really have a hard-on for the helmets and wear them all the time like it's some kind of kink. (YAAAASS.) The people in the stronghold refer to these individuals as "helmet heads," pejoratively. But Nina, who is forced to hide so much of who she used to be to function in what remains of society, is fascinated by these people who seem to glory in hiding themselves so completely. Especially when a new Helmet joins the Stronghold and she finds herself utterly hypnotized by his voice. Most people don't like him and call him Alpha, but Nina wants to fuck him.
This is because Nina is smart.
I was really impressed by this book. For a debut, it is nearly perfect. I really liked the world building, which surprised me, because post-apoc is not a genre I gravitate to at all (I think the last one I read was, like, two years ago and I believe I gave it a two). The mask kink is hot and very on-trend. Why is nobody talking about the Reylo to mask kink dark romance pipeline? If you watched The Force Awakens and thought to yourself, "I want to fuck Kylo Ren," this book is for you. Especially if it was qualified by "But only when he's nice to me while domming the complete and utter shit out of me."
The sex in this book was great. It manages to convey a pretty compelling BDSM relationship with a Dom who does active care and fucks up sometimes but admits it. There were a couple scenes that weren't to my personal taste, but 90% of them were exactly my thing and all of them were well-written and contributed to the emotional development of the characters. I also liked that the heroine initiated the relationship between them and that the consent was mostly implied. I feel like too often, erotica writers are so conscious of making sure there's consent that they sometimes end up sounding like afterschool specials for How to Sex Without Being Rapey 101 and it ends up feeling artificial. This did not.
I personally cannot fully get on board with a romance unless there's an emotional connection and all the little moments between Tom/Alpha and Nina really made such a difference. There's people on TikTok who do videos about toxic couples where they make jokes about how they'd break up or divorce after the fact, but these two feel like a couple you could really root for. Which is why it kind of surprised me when, after Nina sees Tom's face for the first time, it feels almost anticlimactic. His face is never really described much at all. Maybe this was intentional, because his face was never what she was attracted to, but given the mutual simpage, I thought she'd wax a little more over (in Tom's own words) his "handsome face."
I only had a handful of qualms for this book. There's a jump where Nina and Alpha go from sleeping together to her waking up injured and I had to reread that scene several times because I didn't realize that there was a battle scene that happened off page. I think it's supposed to convey amnesia, like an actual blank space (kind of like those empty pages in Stephenie Meyer's New Moon), but it was really confusing to me. I was also a little confused about how the zombie outbreak happened in the first place (unless I was really dumb and I missed the explanation), and also about what Threshers were. There's also a really sinister undertone to the Stronghold which is only really hinted at here (and I'm sure will be explored in more detail in later books) but I really wanted to know more about what it is like post-apocalypse, and what these super sus military people are actually hiding (LOTS, probably).
Apparently the next book is going to be about the himbo of the Stronghold, Demetri. I really liked his character, and I'm excited to read more in this series. It's been a while since I picked up a sci-fi romance I really liked, and hats off to the author for writing a world that is sinister but not stomach-wrenchingly bleak. My poor little wuss soul wouldn't be able to take it. :)
Part of me wants to give this a higher rating just because it was so weird and I have a soft spot for vintage YA, but this was so strange and hard to follow and had such an abrupt ending that I really wasn't all that keen on it.
THE SHEPHERD MOON is a 1980s YA dystopian novel about a futuristic Earth. We learn that Earth built several satellite moons do to overpopulation and some of those moons got up to some weird shit, as we find out when a space pod from one of those moons-- Terra II-- crash-lands on Earth, releasing a mysterious teenage boy who doesn't necessarily have the best intentions.
Merry, the heroine, is the one to find the boy and is also the one to see him do some sus stuff that everyone around her immediately gaslights her about. "You didn't really see that," they say. "That's not possible," they say. Joke's on y'all, I guess, because the next thing you know, people are getting burned alive and suddenly the government's involved.
Read this for the vintage vibes and if you like YA dystopians. Apart from that, I didn't find it too interesting, although there were some pretty poignant lines about the heroine and how she wasn't appreciated by her showy rich parents that I thought were rather touching and sad.
At first I was kind of into this book. It reminded me of old school female sci-fi by authors like Sheri S. Teper or Octavia Butler. But then the book got weird. First of all, the premise is one of the most unusual post-apoc premises I've encountered in a while. Climate change has triggered a pollination event that has caused the air to have unhealthy levels of pollen, killing off the young and old and causing respiratory failure in basically everyone who doesn't have precautions in place.
Izabel and Kaito are an interracial couple with a young daughter named Cami. One day, they go to bed and wake up to find their daughter not breathing. Someone has slashed into their protections, leaving them vulnerable to the toxic air. It turns out to be a serial killer who is murdering other families in this way.
I liked the thriller element at first but then this book started getting really weird. The author chose to make people psychic for some reason, maybe in homage to how so many 70s sci-fi novels inexplicably had people being psychic, but there's no explanation for it. And yet, the police have an on-call psychic to make people give psychic confessions and people Medium in their sleep, so idk. It felt like a deus ex machina to me, and really left a big gaping plot bunny in the narrative.
The writing is very clean and I liked the diverse cast of characters. At one point, Izabel and Kaito end up taking in a Muslim girl who wears a hijab and there are numerous other PoC characters in this world. I think if you like trippy vintage sci-fi you'll enjoy this more than I did. At least the cover is super pretty. My copy made the dew drops on the blueberries a different kind of plastic so they glisten as if the cover is actually wet. I love the cover and the premise and wish this had worked for me more than it actually did.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
So every Wednesday, I do a challenge called What the Actual Fuck Wednesday, where I invite YOU to recommend me the weirdest romance and erotica books you can find. Not just to take the mickey out of them, but just because, well, it's fun. And I am very bored. I try to go into these books with an open mind and sometimes I am pleasantly surprised, but sometimes I really don't like the book in question. Either way, I am unapologetically honest.
IT'S THE FREAKING APOCALYPSE AND THIS IS MY NEW BOYFRIEND was recommended to me by my friend, Julia. And at first I thought it was like some sort of Bane-inspired fic, kind of like the Omegaverse books, but no. And then I thought it was one of those "haha I'm trolling y'all as I laugh to the bank" type books, but also no. It is its own class of "(c)literature" entirely.
ITFAATIMNB is set in the future. I guess there was a zombie invasion or whatever and the government was like, you know what we need to fix this? Drafted civilians slapped in riot gear with total martial control. Because putting guns and tactical gear in the hands of the people never leads to anything bad happening. This plan is so stupid I can only assume that this was the American government. Anyway, faster than you can say "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" these dudes are calling themselves the Ravagers and going around raping and pillaging because YOLO.*
*I bet you didn't see that coming
Our heroine, Marley, lives in some kind of compound with other survivors where they alternate between living in fear and, I guess, living in denial. They're having a wedding and someone has managed to dredge up two 2000s-era slutty club dresses. Look out, y'all. It's time to get down and PARTAY. We even shaved our gross apocalyptic leg and arm hairs. Nasty, nasty! But oh no, Ravagers LOVE weddings because they like to jus primae noctis the shit out of that (bet you didn't think there was going to be this much Latin in an erotica review). Marley and her friend Cassandra make quite the star attractions in their slutty dresses and they are hauled off, one conscious and one not, to the big bad leader of the Ravagers, Boris the Butcher, who is the kind of creep who says "I like 'em feisty."
But before they can be raped, the women are saved by this dude in a skull mask named Max. But don't huff out a sigh of relief yet. Max has already decided that Marley is his girl and her virginity will be his. But for some reason... Marley is okay with this? Because Max is young and hot and ripped? Also, they love each other now? WHAT. At first I thought they were childhood friends and he'd been searching for her this whole time, but no, it was just insta-love, which makes it extra gross when he starts referring to her virginity as a gift and talking about how much he wants to breed her. Barf.
This book kind of ended up being a nasty petri dish of all my least favorite tropes in erotica. Fetishization of virginity. Sloppy and gross sex scenes. References to the words "cream" and "juicy." (What is this? Sex, or a fucking rootbeer float?) Breeding as a fetish. Insta-love. Caveman-like hero. No emotional connections. People behaving in ways that defy reality. Sci-fi w/o world-building.
The problem with ITFAATIMNB is that it isn't funny enough to be funny-bad erotica but it isn't good enough to be funny-good erotica, so it kind of languishes in this limbo where I guess you read it ironically or you just like reading about breeding and gross caveman sex. I actually had flashbacks to my (bad) experience reading Alexa Riley erotica while reading this, so I think if you like AR books (especially the breeding ones), you will probably enjoy this author. I'm honestly shocked at how many people loved this book, tbh. No shade to them or anything-- have you seen the weird shit I enjoy?-- but it makes me feel like I'm living in some sort of bizarro alt-reality where everything sucks.
My sister and I have started trading books back and forth during quarantine and this is the one she wanted me to read first before giving it to her. This is one of the instances where I read the book after seeing the movie. It's a grim dystopia/post-apocalyptic book where a "blindness" plague infects an unnamed society in an unnamed city. Rather than plunging into darkness, the victims find themselves inhabiting a strange, misty whiteness-- and it's highly infectious.
The main characters are never named except for their characteristics. So we have "the first blind man," who stops traffic when he gets out of his car panicking because he is blind. We have the thief who takes him home and offers to wait for him-- and then steals his car. Then we have the blind man's wife, the ophthalmologist, a woman with dark glasses who moonlights as a prostitute, a boy with a squint, a man with an eye patch, and the doctor's wife who, miraculously, remains immune.
One of the chief complaints of this book is the punctuation style and it does make things book very hard to read. The author, for whatever reason, made the choice to not include quotation marks or normal sentences, so dialogue is marked by writing paragraphs that read like this, And then the next branch of dialogue is donated by a capital A, Even when someone else is talking, you ask? Yes, even when someone else is talking, But that sounds confusing you say, Yes, it is, and it results in paragraphs that last for multiple pages, Oh my God, you say, That sounds terrible, It is.
The story itself is equally unpalatable. The blind are shepherded into an empty mental asylum which quickly disintegrates into chaos. The conditions quickly become unsanitary. The military guards shoot up the inhabitants out of blind (if you pardon the unintended pun) fear, and then they stand by and do nothing when an opportunistic gang forms demanding first money and loot as payment and then women and sex in exchange for the food that they have immorally co-opted. Even when freed from the asylum, those who escape find themselves in a society at its very last dregs, where all humanity is lost.
I liked the book okay and thought it told a compelling albeit depressing story, but I probably wouldn't read it again. So many descriptions of vomiting and shit and human waste, and humans performing inhuman acts at the cost of their own survival. It didn't occur to me while reading this book that a dystopian epidemic might not be the best choice of reading material during COVID, but here it is and here I am. It's not a book I'd recommend, but it's a book you won't forget.
The first time I read this book was as an ARC when it first came out and I couldn't stop thinking about it. THE SUMMER PRINCE was one of the first diverse sci-fi-fantasy books I ever read and it totally blew me away. It's set in a dystopian matriarchal society in a futuristic Brazil, where all of the leaders are women and everyone old expects to live to two hundred. They elect their kings in an elaborate, Hunger Games-like ceremony every five years, and the king, in turn, chooses his new queen one year later: on the day of his sacrificial execution.
Our heroine, June, is an activist/artist, kind of like a female Banksy. She does all of these elaborate art pranks and one of these is at the very beginning, with her friend Gil, to help elect the underdog choice: a boy from the very worst parts of Palmares Tres named Enki. The prank works and the three of them end up first as glamorous poster children for the opulent party scene, and then as icons of rebellion. As the year goes on, the three of them become incredibly close: Gil and Enki become lovers and June starts to fall for him too, all the while, his fate hangs over the three of them like the sword of Damocles.
I think I loved this book just as much the second time. I loved the way Brazilian culture and the Portuguese language are woven into the story. I liked the heroine's passion for art, and how it ends up taking a more political bent as she sees more of the injustice that's inherent in the system that she's been blind to because of her privilege. I liked how there wasn't really a lot of slut-shaming, and how all of the characters in this book felt like real people making real decisions in this fantastic backdrop. It takes a while to get into, but I think the heroine sells the world-building, and her melancholy and wistfulness end up making this a pretty devastating read, especially as the story winds to the end.
I was a bit torn on whether to give this a four or a five. It's not a perfect book, but it's still a very, very good one, so I've decided to round up because I've never read anything like it before and I still love it.
One of my current reading projects is going through books I really enjoyed when I was young and revisiting them to see how well they hold up as an adult. Part of that is a low-key flex ("look what amazing taste I had!") and part of that is morbid curiosity. What we like as kids doesn't always hold up to adulthood. I think any of us who have sampled Dunkaroos or Capri Sun in a moment of weakness know that. What once tasted like the nectar of the gods now tastes like sugar water and tainted memories. Oh, woe.
MATCHED is one of those dystopian books that came out on the coattails of THE HUNGER GAMES. It reads like someone decided to write a crossover fanfic between THE GIVER and TWILIGHT, which I am weirdly okay with. Maybe it's because I really love romance novels, the trashier the better. And this book is pretty trashy. It takes place in a highly regimented futuristic society where people are Matched by the government, and most of history has been systematically destroyed. 100 History lessons, 100 Songs, 100 Poems, etc. were preserved because the thinking went that if there were fewer things around, what you had would be easier to appreciate. But we know that's not really why. Because they also don't write, either.
Also, everyone dies by age 80 in a ritualistic ceremony called The Final Banquet, which is ominous as fuck, so kudos to the author for coming up with that. It definitely has Logan's Run vibes.
On the day of Cassia's Match, though, the unthinkable happens-- she sees not one, but TWO boys. Faster than you can say "love triangle" Cassia begins wringing her hands over her true match, childhood friend and steadfast follower to the rules, Xander, and the dangerous bad boy who came from The Place Where Bad People Live who is classified as something called an Aberration, Ky. I'll give you three guesses who Cassia really likes.
I read this book for the first time in college. I thought it was really fun when I read it and I think I initially gave it five stars. When you're crushing out term papers and spending late-nights studying for final exams, you don't really want heavy reading, so books like this were really fun for me. It's easy to read, with clean, fluid prose, and there isn't really a lot of depth to the world-building so it isn't that hard to follow. So you know, the same things that would make it a good book for young readers also make it an easy read for stressed-out college students, which I was.
I think if you pick this up expecting Orwell or Huxley, you're going to be mad. But if you read this as a YA soap opera, it's kind of fun escapist reading. I didn't actually think it was that bad, but I also enjoyed other similarly maligned dystopians, like THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH and WITHER, and I think what happened to this book probably happened to those books, too: oversaturation of the market. They came out when people were already deciding that they were done with dystopians and moving on to The Next Big Thing, which I believe was toxic New Adult romances, if I recall correctly. What keeps this book from being too tedious, though, are the sinister moments, like the Final Banquet, and other little hints into the darker aspects of this world. I kind of wish there had been more of those.
In short: pick this book up if you love yourself some trashy teen drama, a la the CW.
Are you there God? It's me, Trash Can. Years and years ago, twenty-something-year-old Nenia stockpiled YA like it was going out of fashion. Little did she know, it basically was. All those HG dystopias and prom dress paranormals would soon go the way of Vanilla Ice and parachute pants, along with all other bizarre and slightly embarrassing trends that normal people would like to forget.
Too bad for everyone else, I'm not normal. And my Vanilla Ice-listening, parachute pants-wearing ass just loooooooves bad YA.*
*I don't actually own any parachute pants or Vanilla Ice CDs. But, you know, I totally would.**
**Probably.
Anyway, THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel set in a world inhabited by zombies, called Unconsecrated. It's part Night of the Living Dead (1968) and part The Village (2004). Mary lives in a village that is cordoned off by fences. When the sirens sound, they retreat to towers or lock themselves in. But one day, an outside girl comes... and everything changes. Mary learns that their world might not be as isolated as they thought, nor as safe.
I personally really enjoyed this book a lot. The dreamy story-telling, the emotional stakes, the fact that the heroine is allowed to be unlikable and selfish, the world-building. I am not usually one for zombie stories, honestly. I think they're gross. I'm a vampire girl-- I like my undead with fangs. But Ryan really sold it. When Mary and her friends, Cass, Travis, Harry, Beth, and Jed (well, he's her brother, but you know) are wandering through the network of fenced paths, heading towards the unknown, it feels so claustrophobic and tense. I found myself quickly sucked into the story and finished it in a day.
The thing I think a lot of people won't like about this book is that there is a love square (Mary likes Travis, who is engaged to Cass, who is in love with Harry, who is engaged to Mary) and the heroine really comes off as selfish in a lot of the book. Also, it's depressing as hell.
But apart from that, it honestly felt pretty fresh and enjoyable to me, and I think if you like The Village and zombie movies, you'll really like this book. It's like a teen soap opera version of The Walking Dead, and if that makes you want to read this book, you're probably well within the target audience. I own the whole "trilogy" but I must note that the two subsequent books are "companion" books. Mary's story ends with this one and the other two books each feature different narrators. That disappointed me a little bit because if I really like a story and am invested in a character enough to read further into the series, I generally like it to be about that character, but I'm still interested in seeing what Ryan does with this world.
Does anyone remember the Goth Girl Prom Dress Trend of the 2010s YA book covers that totally looked like Evanescence album art? Because I totally do. And even though I like to make fun of things, I secretly love covers like these and they make that inner voice inside my head scream, "BUY! BUY! BUY!" But luckily I didn't even have to buy this one because the entire trilogy showed up for FREE inside one of my local Little Free Libraries, so obvs I was like #NEED.
If there's anything that gets my little trash heart singing, it's a vampire book. And the fact that this was a dystopian vampire book where vampires are the oppressors and humanity is hiding inside a wall sounded dee-licious. Never mind that it kind of sounded a little like 30 Days of Night and a half-dozen other stories I could name. I don't expect all of my books to be 100% original as long as they can entertain me.
And at first, DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN did. At first.
Dawn, the heroine (TITLE PUN), is a delegate to the vampire Lord, Lord Valentine, who is pissed off that humans aren't meeting blood quotas. Her job is precarious. It probably got her parents killed. She's chafing under the constraints of her role and decides to go out and party. After her friends is roofied, she is rescued by a mysterious man whose name is, I kid you not, VICTOR VALENTINE.
VICTOR. VALENTINE.
I wonder if he has a cousin Vincent...
Anyway, obviously Victor is a vampire and the son of the vampire lord Dawn hates. And obviously Dawn is a specialy specialton not-like-other-girls heroine who has something that makes her different and special. And obviously... I did not care. Hence the DNF.
J.A. London is a mom and son writing team. The mom writes under the name Rachel Hawthorne (also YA) and I think this is the son's first work. I think it's really sweet that they're doing the project together but I also think that mom-and-kid writing teams don't always yield the best stuff, case in point: the P.C. Cast vampire series that shall not be named. (My mom bought me the series at Costco when I was a teen thinking I'd like it because I liked Vampire Diaries and Twilight. I read literally one chapter of book one before pronouncing it unfit to read and she returned them all to Costco.) I don't think I'll be reading further into this trilogy, which is a shame, because the colors are gorgeous.
Look, I never claimed to be a literati okay? I can be a smart, sophisticated woman and still wallow in book trash the way a Vegas bigshot wallows in a hot tub filled with hookers and champagne. That's why I'm on this trashy YA binge. I crave the mindless escape of soap opera drama and mediocre world building.
The Chemical Garden series really isn't very popular among my friends. A lot of them were kind of fatigued by the glut of Hunger Games copycats and some of them were (fairly) horrified by the child bride themes in this book. Which is totally understandable. This series revolves around a sort of Logan's Run premise where people don't live past twenty (female) or twenty-five (male). Which means that people get married and pregnant uncomfortably young.
If the first book was like a teen-friendly harem drama from the 1980s, this sequel is more like a classic adventure bodice ripper. The heroine, Rhine, is on the run from her evil mad scientist father-in-law, only to end up out of the frying pan and into fire when she lands in a carnival brothel run by a crazy lady who likes to burn people up in incinerators. Her captive gang of prostitutes have all been abducted and some of them are on drugs One of them has a mute child that the crazy lady nearly beats to death at one point. That child comes with Rhine and Gabriel when they try to escape-- again-- only to end up in YET MORE DANGER. Oh, boy.
FEVER took a long time to get moving. Unlike WITHER, which was pretty compelling from the start, this book definitely suffers from second book syndrome. Most of the book is running around. Lots of bad things happen. Rhine gets sick at some point and then it's pages of surreal fever dreams. There really isn't much meat to this book until the beginning of the middle and then, later, towards the end. We get some insight into why the House Governor did what he does (surprise, surprise, he's basically one step removed from a Nazi scientist-- and I mean that very literally, the man is basically a eugenicist). There's some medical gore that was hard to read. I found myself skimming towards the end. It's not a bad book but definitely not as good as the first and it gives the impression that the author was kind of figuring out the plot as she went, and completely ad-hocing it.
I'm still curious to see how this trilogy ends and unfortunately, I DON'T own book three, but I'm not in a huge hurry to buy it, either. I do think that Chemical Garden gets a lot of unfair hate, though, so if you're curious about the book and have a strong stomach, don't let the negative reviews prevent you from giving it a try. It really is a lot like a dystopian bodice-ripper and if that's something you think you'd be into, you'll probably really enjoy this book.
Oh man. I was REALLY disappointed by this book-- especially since I'd been looking forward to it ever since it came out. I liked the author's debut novel, DESCENDANT OF THE CRANE, and really looked forward to seeing what she would do next. Especially since THE ONES WE'RE MEANT TO FIND was *checks notes* being compared to Studio Ghibli movies in the blurb and had one of the most gorgeous covers I've seen recently.
Sadly... I did not like it at all.
This is just SO confusing. I checked some of the one star and two star reviews to see if it would get better and it didn't seem to. This appears to be the kind of book where if you're not into it from the beginning, you're not going to be into it at the end. One of the POVs is about this girl marooned on a beach (first person). The other is this girl in a city environment who is looking for her missing sister (third person). I guess I was hoping, based on the cover, that the sisterhood dynamic would be more prevalent and less... I don't know, absent.
I also think I have a pretty good idea what the twist is. Definitely curious if I'm right, though.
Side note: not only is the cover gorgeous, the amount of design and thought that went into the layout is A+. I actually took a photo of the endpapers on my Instagram because they were so beautiful. If you're into some Nova Ren Suma levels of M. Night Shyamalan-like plot twists, this will probably appeal to you. But if you're looking for something that's more straightforward, give this a miss.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
So I'm doing this project where I reread books that I read in my youth. In my late teens/early twenties, I wanted to read all the dystopians. I don't know why, but I found it fascinating. Now, I find it too depressing. I guess as you get older, it becomes too easy to imagine the world crumbling inward like an overripe melon as humanity succumbs to either disaster or hubris or both.
In THE HANDMAID'S TALE, we learn about a grim future in which a pseudo-evangelical group of fundamentalists has wrested control of the country in a vicious coup, reducing women to wives, baby vessels, or prostitutes, and men hold all the power. Women are unable to own property or even read; they are essentially chattel, stricken even of their names. Offred belongs to a man named Fred (literally "of Fred"). Before the coup, she was an ordinary woman. A woman with a daughter, who had a bank account and a lover. Now her sole duty is to bear children for the Commander, since she is fertile and his wife, Serena Joy, is not.
The timeline in this book is very difficult to follow because it is non-linear. I have always loved non-linear timelines when they are done well but it forces you to pay attention. Here, we see Offred in the before times, as well as in her training/brainwashing facility when they were grooming her to be a handmaid, and then in the present where she is navigating her precarious position in the household where any misstep could mean death-- or worse.
Having watched the TV show (the first season, at least), I'm pretty impressed with how closely it follows the show. There was so much I forgot. The fact that they mutilated the girls in the facility who disobeyed because they only needed them for their wombs. The mob justice scene when the handmaids literally tear apart the man accused of rape. The scene when Offred goes to the contraband club and sees all the whores garbed in the risque clothing of old. It's SO intense. I read this in two days which is a long time for me considering how short this book was, but it was a lot to take in. Especially since it's easy to imagine a sort of future where something like this could happen, what with the rabid group of religious assholes in the U.S. who mask their bigotry in piousness. This feels like their utopia.
It's pretty fucking chilling when you think about it like that.
The back of the book says "destined to be the most talked about young adult book of the year," but I hadn't heard anyone talk about it-- which is weird, because this book has one of the most "HUH? WHAT?" summaries I have ever read. Set in an alternate universe, MUNMUN takes place in a fantasy world where people's physical size corresponds to how much money they actually have, with poor people being the size of doormice and rich people being the size of skyscrapers.
I appreciate what this book was trying to do and it has a genuinely unique premise, but it didn't work for me for several reasons. First, the author has made up his own words and unique grammar style, like CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which made it really hard to read. Second, I just felt like it was a little wooden. Maybe that was because of the dialogue, but once I got over the initial premise and the novelty of that, I quickly found myself losing interest.
I could see this being a good read for reluctant readers, especially boys, who might find the novel text style and gritty world-building to be incredibly fascinating. But for me, I just didn't care for it all that much.
I'm doing this project where I'm rereading books I enjoyed from my adolescence and seeing how they hold up. FEED was a book that really stuck out to me as a candidate because I still remembered it so strongly despite not picking it up for several years. It's kind of like a YA-ed up version of BRAVE NEW WORLD. In a future where the earth is suffering from multiple environmental crises, humans take solace in an electronic soma: the internet feeds wired into their brains.
Titus, the hero, is the main character. He's just an ordinary teen who likes to do dumb stuff with his friends. When we meet them, they're partying on the moon, wanting to hook up and get wasted. Then he sees a girl who isn't like other girls. Her name is Violet and she uses big words and actually cares about the world beyond what it can offer up to her for sale. But when a rioter hijacks their computers to make a political statement, something goes wrong with Violet's... and as she struggles with her health, she tries to make Titus see without the influence of his feed.
This is a very depressing book but I think the author did a really good job with it. All the slang is a bit tricky at first, but the words the author chose all make sense and I picked it up pretty quickly. Some readers complained about the swearing and graphic content, but again, I think it sets the stage for the vapid, superficial world the author created and it never crosses into explicit.
Some sci-fi books don't age well but this one actually got better with age. The author actually predicted so much-- doom scrolling, toxic positivity, physically harmful trends for the sake of virality, and so much more. What makes this even more impressive is that social media was still kind of a gleam in the internet's eye when this was published, and so were the shopping algorithms that are now economical powerhouses online. I can't say that this book filled me with joy but it was incredibly intelligent and insightful for a YA dystopian and I think I liked it more as an adult than I did as a teen.
There's this movie called Disturbing Behavior(1998) that I really liked when I was younger. It's like Stepford Wives meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and it has a baby James Marsden and Katie Holmes in it. It's dated AF and riddled with plot holes, but I really liked the story and it had some genuinely creepy moments. Reading AFTER reminded me a lot of a less-gritty version of Disturbing Behavior. Set in the aftermath of a mass shooting, it chronicles a high school's gradual stripping away of its students' liberties in the name of safety. But who will protect them from the protectors?
I remember thinking this book was so good in high school. I stayed up all night reading it, my tiny aspiring writer brain filled with raw envy. It's narrated in first person from a male jock named Tom and I thought the author did a pretty good job making him sound like a real teenage boy; he's selfish but not a bad person, and hyper-focused on what other people around him think of him and his constructed persona, which is why when things start going south, he immediately begins self-doubting his own reality. He doesn't want to look like a coward or, worse, paranoid.
I saw a couple other reviewers comparing this to ANIMAL FARM and I could sort of see that. They have similar themes. ANIMAL FARM worked where this one didn't, though, because it was fantasy and didn't attempt to root itself in reality. There is something almost dystopian about this world, with almost supernatural elements, but they aren't well-explained enough to really work, which makes it feel like several pivotal plot points are either totally lacking in explanation or suffering from deus-ex-machinitis. I feel like the author had this really cool idea but she wasn't really sure how to hash it out, and instead of going full dystopian, full realism, or full Twilight Zone, she compromised with all three.
It kind of reads like a longer, edgier version of one of those old Point Horror books, so if you are in the mood for some creepy-lite that also talks about sex and drugs, you'll probably like this book. I didn't really question it all that much when I read it at age seventeen. I was like, "Yeah! The man sucks! Down with the man!" Now, adult me is like, "Yeah, the man sucks-- but what the fuck was up with that ending and why does the man have god-like powers?" Like... I'm down to hate the man, but I want answers.
This wasn't a bust, but as with my reread of ALL-AMERICAN GIRL, I find that as an adult reading YA, I'm much less satisfied with unsatisfactory explanations and am far less willing to suspend my disbelief.
POISON STUDY is one of my f a v o r i t e fantasy books of all time, so obviously I would jump at the chance to read anything else this author ever wrote because I am all about supporting my faves. As of my writing this, this YA science-fiction duology is on sale for $1.99 each (8/16), which is why I ended up getting both books on the cheap.
INSIDE OUT came out in the middle of the big YA dystopian trend following in the wake of THE HUNGER GAMES'S popularity. It kind of falls into a subgenre of books that I like to call "sewerpunk," in that it takes place in the below-ground, kind of like METRO 2033, ESCAPE FROM FURNACE, and QUEENE OF LIGHT. In the world of INSIDE OUT, scrubs clean and scavenge the pipes and uppers do, I don't know, administrative/bureaucratic-type work. Trella, a scrub, is known as Queen of the Pipes for her in-depth knowledge of the sewer system, as well as her high and mighty attitude. She also inadvertently becomes a figurehead of rebellion for the people when she accidentally gets involved in a revolution and uses her know-how to further their agenda and disrupt the regime.
INSIDE OUT was simultaneously better and worse than I expected. I felt like the dystopian world was more well-imagined than I anticipated. This isn't really a HUNGER GAMES clone: it stands on its own two feet as fairly innovative, so props for that. I also liked that Trella was so reluctant to step up to the plate. She liked being alone and antisocial and didn't want the whole nightmare mess that came along with being a revolutionary, which I found totes relatable. I like difficult, stubborn heroines who have realistic flaws and occasionally act selfish. Spare me the sacrificial Christ figures, okay?
On the other hand, I was pretty confused on how everyone ended up belowground. And it wasn't really clear what the difference between uppers and lowers was. What about agriculture? They had food and talked about sheep-- but sheep eat grass and need sunlight. Where was that food coming from? Are there farmers? You can't tell me that there's just military, bureaucrats, and scrubbers. Also, I didn't really buy the sort of romance between Riley and the jokes about the hero's stuffed animal sheep ("Sheepy") were painful and needed to go away. It was an odd split-- here you have a book were people are fed to execution machines ("Chomper") and yet there's cutesy jokes about stuffed animals.
Also, don't expect me to take your military police seriously if you call them Pop Cops. The whole time I was reading this book, I kept thinking about PopCap Games, themanufacturer of Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies.
This wasn't a terrible book but it could have been a lot better.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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