A Bookish Girl
Wow. I went into this a bit worried that it would be a preachy “issues” book, but damn. No preachiness, just raw emotions and an amazing heroine (main character, but also literally a hero). I got involved with these people, I cried with them, and I almost missed my stop on the train because their lives seemed more real to me than my journey home.
I like stories about classic Hollywood, but this just felt somehow cold and distant. I never really cared enough.
On the up side, it didn't go into the “seedy underbelly” type stuff that these books often do, so that was a giant plus. I hate reading about sexual abuse in Hollywood, but luckily this book didn't go there.
3.5/5
It started out brilliantly, but the last few chapters changed in tone and were something of a downer to end on. For the most part, though, it's insightful and irreverent, and Trevor Noah knows exactly how to make light of a bad situation while still getting you to take it seriously (no easy task!). It was especially fascinating for me, as we're almost the same age, grew up in the same city, but had such different experiences. He even went to the high school where my Aunt taught, and where I knew a few other pupils, but our lives could not have been more different. It's especially fascinating because his experience as a mixed-race child was so different from pretty much anybody else's, black, white or coloured.
I'd have liked to find out a bit about how he got into doing comedy. That's literally not covered at all except in a passing sentence.
I'd have given this 4/5 if it hadn't been for the change in tone at the end, but I'd still absolutely recommend it. Get the audiobook as narrated by him, because he does all the accents and voices, and it's great.
What an odd book. I can't really explain how I felt about it - it was definitely readable and interesting at the time, but after I'd finished it just felt a bit, “Well, what was the point of that?”
I was hoping this book would be mostly about the book “virus”, where books alter themselves and infect each other. Unfortunately, it ended up being about other things entirely - to the point where the book virus played no part and needn't have existed at all.
Probably more of a 4.5 than a full five, but it felt better to round it up rather than down, since I did really love it. Most of it was read during a couple of busy weeks when I had to take the train into London nearly every day, and I don't even remember those journeys; I was so engrossed in the world of Jess and the Library.
I read this because I really like the film adaptation, and since said adaptation has some flaws which have always niggled at me, I thought the book might get those bits right, and be - as books nearly always are - a much deeper and richer version than the film.
However. Much like another book-to-film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries), the book and film of Ella Enchanted have very little in common aside from the main character names and the basic premise that Ella has been “gifted” with obedience. Nothing else bears any resemblance to the film I saw. And yet it's still hard for me to judge them as separate entities, because I found the film so much more interesting and fun. The book really fell flat for me, because I never really got a sense of what the characters were like. Even though it's told in first person, I didn't really get to know Ella, somehow. Things happened to her, or she caused things to happen, but the book never got under her skin. Same problem with Char. If I had to write fanfic about them, for example, I'd have no idea how, because neither of them really had a voice.
I'm being quite harsh here on what is really a sweet story with an interesting premise and take on the Cinderella story, but unfortunately it just left me cold. Two stars = “it was okay”, but I think if you haven't seen (or enjoyed) the film, you might enjoy the book more. Unfortunately I just kept comparing it to the fun, self-aware humour of the film, and its strongly-drawn characters, and the book fell short.
I have mixed feelings about Purity, because the book is told from different characters' points of view. And my problem was that I loved some and disliked some (and one character I hated so much I wanted to murder her with a blunt instrument). Some of the sections I disliked were necessary for the plot, but I wish they'd been trimmed down to the bare essentials.
I've read most of Meg Cabot's adult and teen fiction, and I always enjoy her sense of humour and fun-but-predictable romances. However, “She Went All the Way” didn't work for me at all. It just felt clunky and clumsily-written, almost like an average fanfic written in Cabot's style. The characters' internal thoughts got very repetitive, and the way Jack constantly refers to Lou by her full name when he's thinking about her was pretty irritating. It almost felt like Meg Cabot was trying to get the word count up by writing “Lou Calabrese” every time, instead of just “Lou”.
However, it's a cute enough story, though unlikely as hell, but then we're not reading these stories because they're likely. :-) But it's definitely the weakest of Cabot's adult novels by a long shot.
So...it's a sweet story, and goodness knows we need more stories about accepting people and embracing their differences. And I quite enjoyed Walliams' writing style (lots of directly addressing the reader and sharing in-jokes with them). But what drove me absolutely bonkers was the incorrect use of (or, generally, the lack of correct) punctuation throughout the book. Many battles are fought over the Oxford comma, but it's not correct to have a sentence like, “I'm going to be late, Dad!” without the comma before “Dad”. It's the difference between “Let's eat Grandma” and “Let's eat, Grandma”, to quote an internet meme I've seen a hundred times. And this book was full of mistakes like that. I read a lot of children's books (I used to be the buyer for the children's department in a big chain of bookshops), and I've never seen an author omit that sort of comma. I don't know why Walliams did it, or why nobody corrected it, but it irritated me no end. Children learn how to write by reading, and if they read it and it's wrong, they're going to learn it wrong. For that reason alone I wouldn't give this book to my children (or pupils, if I were a teacher).
I had no idea this was a YA novel when I picked it up, but hey, I love a good YA book, so my slightly negative review isn't based on that at all. It just that, for a story about social anxiety and depression, this book seemed far too simple. Kinsella's usual fun chicklit books have more layers than this one, and that doesn't feel right. I didn't want it to be morbidly miserable and depressing, but you hardly get any sense of how debilitating mental illness can be, since it all seems to be so easily solved in this story. It's not quite so simple as “Audrey gets a boyfriend and hey presto, she's cured!”, but it veers close to that.
Having said that, the family and Linus (the boyfriend) were really well-drawn and interesting. Kinsella's a good writer. But I had to go for two stars (It was OK) on this one because I just had too many problems with it to say “I liked it”, though I enjoyed it while I was reading it.
