Review: Matched by Ally Condie

Title: Matched

Author: Ally Condie

Series: Matched #1

Genre: YA Future Dystopia, Romance

Publisher: Puffin

Summary (from Goodreads)

In the Society, Officials decide. Who you love. Where you work. When you die.

Cassia has always trusted their choices. It’s barely any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one . . . until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now Cassia is faced with impossible choices: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she’s known and a path no one else has ever dared follow—between perfection and passion.

What’s Good About It

Continuing with my dystopia kick (which I’m calling, as I used to in my Uni days, ‘research for my novel’) I picked up both Matched and Pretties (by Scott Westerfeld) for a bit of ‘time off’ reading. I opened Matched yesterday evening and had finished it by ten this morning. Finishing reading it came with a double wave of exhilaration – one, it was fantastic and two – I was finally ahead of the game!

After the Hunger Games, Uglies, Wolves of Mercy Falls etc catching up I’ve been doing on the blog of late, it is nice to at last talk about a book that perhaps a few of you out there haven’t actually read yet. And what a great book to start with. Condie has created a masterpiece with Matched that will have hundreds of readers hanging on to the edges of their chairs waiting for future installments.

First, let’s talk about the world building. A key ingredient in dystopian novels that Condie gets absolutely right.

At first her rather soft world seems fairly harmless. The Society controls everything you do – who you marry, how many children you have, even when you die. But Condie has a way of writing about it, drawing you in to the idea of Matching, the main premise of the story, that gets you feeling that it’s not such a bad thing. The sinister nature of the world creeps up on you, through subtle hints about a war and a mysterious red pill that the Society can order you to take, but no one knows what it does.

The idea that the Society picked the hundred best of every element of culture was a nice one – the Hundred Poems, Paintings etc. A world where creativity is stifled, where culture is limited, and any new words discovered in the ruins of the old civilisations are destroyed is far more creepy than any world where violence is predominant and obvious.

The characters are great too, the love story believable and slowly developed. Condie takes her time to build the relationships – something rare in YA fiction these days – and the love triangle worked well, with both relationships ringing completely true, even in their duality. So often I find love triangles annoying because there is one relationship in it that doesn’t make sense, but I was totally convinced by Cassia’s sense of loss in finding Xander wasn’t her only Match, and her confusion at her feelings for Ky.

What’s Not So Good

Xander was occasionally just a bit too nice, too willing to help Cassia in her troubles with Ky. A little more jealousy from him wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Rating: 5/5

Watch the book trailer here:

When Characters Appear At Random

So I’ve been making good progress on my current WIP. Time off work does wonders for your wordcount. Chapter five is done and I’ve got a clearer idea where the story is heading.

I’m not much of a planner. Well, it depends on the project – sometimes I plan in great detail, but for the most part I have a clear idea of where I’m starting, a vague idea of where I’m heading and a few key milestones mapped out between. The getting to and from those milestones is something I hope will be figured out along the way.

So far the current WIP is growing quite organically, evolving from the little idea that got me started into a multifaceted story with more than one interweaving (hopefully!) plot thread. Today though, I really knew it was starting to get a life of its own.

Writers talk about characters having a life of their own. This was something I first experienced back when I wrote fanfiction. Fanfiction is generally about the author fantasising about being with someone on a TV show/Film they love, and for the most part my 13/14 year-old dallies into Fanfiction were very much about that. Not that I was ever as dirty as some fanfiction I’ve stumbled upon in the past. Seriously, you could burn your eyes on the filth out there! But, back to the point, when I got a bit older and started thinking seriously about writing my own stuff, I thought more carefully about plot and less about how character X would end up together with character Y (although there was still a strong element of that). My characters became less like exaggerated versions of me, and more like their own person, until one day one of them turned round and told me that she most definitely wasn’t going to play out a particular scene how I’d imagined it.

I thought that was as difficult as fictional people would get. Arguing back over the hows and whys of scenes. The fact that they are always right and that I have to bow to the superior wisdom of a fictional person does present its psychiatric questions, but that’s what writer friends are for – they nod knowingly instead of looking at you like you’re mad and tell you all about their own battles.

Now though, it seems these fictional people appear at random, waltzing into my manuscript with no concern for my plot ideas.

This first happened to me on my previous novel that I completed, but will probably never attempt to publish. The fact of its completion was enough for me.

It was, in essence, a story about a teenage pregnancy. The main character ends up pregnant after a one night stand with a boy who isn’t particularly interested in her, and the novel details her pregnancy and how she comes to terms with being a mother and the redemption of her incredibly dysfunctional family along the way.

About a third of the way into the novel, the main character acquires herself a role model in the form of a sixth form student who knows what she’s been through. This was planned. Anna, the sixth former, was part of the original story notes I made when jotting down a rough outline. The boy who appeared behind her, entirely of his own accord, as I wrote Anna into the story was not.

From a character I hadn’t known existed until I wrote his name, Will became a very major part of the plot. The main character’s love interest, in fact. Looking back at the book now, I have no idea what it would have been like without him.

And now it’s happened again. My characters are happily guarding something for a friend when a gang of youths tries to intimidate them. Out from this gang appears a new character, merrily rattling a fence as he tries to scare Keira and company, who, though not yet named, I already know is going to play an integral role. From the vague idea of this gang, he’s sprung forwards and announced his intent to hang around, that I haven’t seen the last of him yet.

I’m sure this sort of thing presents a whole load more psychological questions about writers and how their brains work, but I’m not going to analyse it. I aim to go with the flow in my writing, and last time an unplanned, unannounced character work really well. This time, I’m quite happy to see where this new development takes me.

Review: Not Telling by Cindy Vine

Title: Not Telling

Author: Cindy Vine

Series: N/A

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Publisher: Self Published

Summary (from Goodreads)

Not Telling is the story of two sisters who give new meaning to the term ‘sibling rivalry.’  Jealousy, hate and betrayal are woven into their lives, after a series of traumatic events completely disrupts Jenny’s childhood.
You can never escape your past, it’ll always come back to haunt you in some way.  Jenny is quite unprepared when her past resurfaces and she is faced with an enormous dilemma.  But, does she tell?

My Thoughts

Euh... Writing a bad review is never easy, particularly when you’ve been sent the book by the author themselves. But, I have to be honest. Know that I have tried my best to be fair.

The good things, then.

There is a good story hiding in here somewhere. Vine has clearly done her research on rape victim psychology, and she was certainly brave in her subject matter, unflinching in her portrayal of it… I just felt it really didn’t work.

The story was told chronologically, which meant we heard of Jenny’s traumas in the first person as it is happening. Which is a little bit too much for me when dealing with such a harrowing subject as childhood rape. If the story had been told from an adult perspective, looking back at the past, it would have provided a sense of removal from the scene – a buffer for the reader. We read to experience lives outside of our own, and while a dark background adds depth and interest to the character, there are certain things we don’t particularly want to experience so up close and personal. It would have made me very uncomfortable… only it was written in such a way that it made me laugh. Which really isn’t a good thing.

Vine has clearly thought hard about children and their sexual innocence, but rather than having her character view the memories from an adult perspective, there are lines like this:

A purply pink standing up thing is sticking out of Uncle Eddie’s trousers, like a cobra sticking its head out of a hole, and it’s dripping snot onto my leg.

Um. Yes.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really get any better than that.

The characters then.

I’ve already mentioned Vine’s obvious research into rape victim psychology – it really shows in her portrayal of Jenny as an overeater, anorexic, cutter, incapable of physical affection. I didn’t ever really doubt that Jenny would have reacted psychologically the way she did.

The other characters, though, and some of Jenny’s actions, were totally off the mark.

For a start this is a book about sibling rivalry in some senses. There is rivalry, yes, but it makes no sense. Karen is just a totally evil character with no redeeming features. Written well, she could have been a brilliant character, and Vine did try to give her realistic reasons behind her flawed behaviour, but a sister, no matter how jealous and damaged, does not watch (and encourage) her sister’s rape and not feel guilt about it. The story should have been a journey towards redemption for the two of them, but a cop out ending saw Karen written out of Jenny’s story in a way that Jenny didn’t have to feel anything about.

Characters also blithely talk about murdering the main antagonist. Now, a little joke about it, or a few strong words said in anger or while drunk I could buy, but a blase conversation over coffee about killing off someone is not what people do. Not seriously.

Then there’s the whole middle section of the book, where Jenny gets married to Nick, a character who I thought made sense, but within a paragraph left me wondering who he was, what he wanted, and what on earth his motivations were.

Again, I feel this could have been a better story. Jenny’s marriage breaks down, and the final run of the book is her quest to find herself, through opening a coffee shop. That was the interesting part of the story, unfortunately glossed over. If the story had started with Jenny trying to open a coffee shop, detailing her struggles to find the money and believe in herself, revealing as the story progressed about her traumatic past and how she got to where she was at the start of the novel, it could have been a really moving tale.

Overall, I think the sum of this book’s problems is the fact that it is self-published. A good editor could have fixed this, though realistically, I doubt in the busy world of publishing there are many who would dedicate the time. As it is, grammatical errors (it actually says ‘would of’ at one point – ARRRGGGH), over cooked metaphors and two page long paragraphs that jump between topics and bewilder the reader make this a difficult book to read. For a story that’s not absolutely incredible, only the most dedicated of readers would sift through all that.

Rating: 1/5

Finding the Words (and Not Using Them Twice in Two Sentences)

My partner and I got into a playful argument last night about the merit of mnemonics to remember how to spell ‘because’.

I was taught in primary school that ‘Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants’ and because I was a terrible speller until about the age of thirteen, when everything somehow slotted into place, I relied on the mnemonic often.

My other half told me I was categorically wrong. It’s ‘Big Elephants Can’t Always Use Small Exits’.

Because we were in a playful mood, we spent about ten minutes discussing which was the better mnemonic. I won.

The reason I won is this: the Exits mnemonic doesn’t make sense. It’s illogical. Big elephants can’t use small exits. Ever. They are big. The exits are small. Unfortunately, ‘Big Elephants Can’t Use Small Exits’ spells ‘Becuse’.

But, pedantic argument aside, it reminded me of an important element of writing. The most important element of writing, I would say: words. Specifically, choosing the right ones.

I’ve nearly finished chapter four of my current project. A busy couple of weeks at work have seen the project somewhat neglected of late, but I now have a week off (yay) and aside from a bit of preparation for the next few weeks, I have very little I have to do. Finishing chapters four and five is top of my priority list.

But I can’t blame work entirely for my lack of progress. Chapter four is proving difficult. The story so far has been set up, introduction to the world, the characters. A little has happened to progress the plot, but mostly in small ways that won’t become evident until later events. Chapter four is pivotal.

In it, three characters meet together for the first time to discuss the crux of the plot – the problem. Two of the characters, main character Keira and her new friend, are by and large concerned about the problem. The other, Keira’s old friend, is more concerned about the others looking a bit too cosy together.

The two male characters are both strong, dominant personalities. In totally opposite ways. The old friend is brash, edging on cocky. The new friend is more reserved, seething with hidden power. As soon as I walked them into a clearing together on page I knew there would be clashes between them.

The problem was, neither were going to be overt enough in their battle for alpha-male dominance to actually throw punches. Where the old friend is definitely impetuous enough to exchange punches if he thought one was coming his way, the new friend is far more sophisticated than that. Most of their face off occurred with glances and a sharply spoken statement.

Trying to make the tension palpable, while also trying to throw in a bit of tension of a different kind between Keira and the new friend wasn’t easy. There are only a limited amount of ways you can say someone gives you a challenging look. Hence why I ended up using the word ‘challenge’ twice in two sentences.

I have since been over and over the scene, deliberating about the words. I’ve managed to correct the awkward, clumsy error and I’m happy with the result. I’m not normally one for the minutiae of word by word writing – preferring to deal in the overarching story, the bigger picture – but the challenge (haha) of finding the word that absolutely evoked what I wanted it to was an interesting and rewarding one.

I’m still waiting for my trusty proof reader to finish chapter three (it’s still sat exactly where I left it in her house over a week ago!) and I know she’ll be reading this so NOT VERY SUBTLE HINT!!! I’ll be finished with chapter four soon. When I am, I’ll be in need of someone to check my word choices and make sure I’m not trying to force big elephants through small exits.

Review: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Title: Mockingjay

Author: Suzanne Collins

Series: Hunger Games #3

Genre: YA Future Dystopia

Publisher: Scholastic

Summary (from Goodreads)

Katniss Everdeen, girl on fire, has survived, even though her home has been destroyed. Gale has escaped. Katniss’s family is safe. Peeta has been captured by the Capitol. District 13 really does exist. There are rebels. There are new leaders. A revolution is unfolding.

It is by design that Katniss was rescued from the arena in the cruel and haunting Quarter Quell, and it is by design that she has long been part of the revolution without knowing it. District 13 has come out of the shadows and is plotting to overthrow the Capitol. Everyone, it seems, has had a hand in the carefully laid plans — except Katniss.

The success of the rebellion hinges on Katniss’s willingness to be a pawn, to accept responsibility for countless lives, and to change the course of the future of Panem. To do this, she must put aside her feelings of anger and distrust. She must become the rebels’ Mockingjay — no matter what the personal cost.

What’s Good About It

I’ve seen a lot of reviews criticising the violence and the rather passing mentions of deaths of several major characters. Many reviewers, it seems, weren’t happy that their favourites didn’t get their shining moment of glory.

I, personally, loved this approach. The ultra violence of the final battle against the Capitol, fizzing with so much gore and action it was hard to keep up with – it was so realistic. I could feel the disorientation of the characters, feel their desire to stop and grieve, knowing they couldn’t. It was brutal, but it was war. I’ve never been to war, but I imagine that is very much what it was like.

Wiping out characters with a single sentence avoided schmaltzy writing, glorifying the actions of either side in the war. I didn’t need to see any more than what I was given. I thought it was perfect.

It’s difficult to resolve a trilogy, particularly one with a love triangle, and leave everyone happy. There will always be those who were rooting for the other team, left disappointed like their character of choice. Now I was neither particularly Team Peeta or Gale, so who Katniss ended up with was not a real concern for me. All I wanted was for an ending that made sense, and I felt it did. Even the Epilogue (my least favourite word since Harry Potter 7) wasn’t overdoing it. And what a sinister and fantastic last line!

All in all, an excellent conclusion to an excellent trilogy.

What’s Not So Good

Nothing to declare – this was pretty much perfect.

Rating: 5/5

Review: Flood Child by Emily Diamand

Title: Flood Child

Author: Emily Diamand

Series: Flood Child #1

Genre: Future Post-Apocalypse

Publisher: Chicken House

Summary (from Goodreads)

Flooded England, 2216 … England has changed for ever: most of it is under water. Worse, bloodthirsty pirates prowl the shores, and when they kidnap the Prime Minister’s daughter it looks like war. But out of this drowning world comes Lilly Melkun, a girl determined to put things right, with the help of a pirate boy – and an extraordinary treasure from the past, with the power to change the Future…

What’s Good About It

I’m on a bit of a Dystopia kick at the moment. What with Hunger Games and Uglies and writing my own Dystopian future novel, I’m demolishing any YA novel with a hint of Future Gone to Hell. Naturally, when I saw this on the shelf in the library, I couldn’t resist. Despite having an already substantial reading list of my own books…

And it didn’t disappoint.

Generally I think there are two kinds of Dystopia – technology gone crazy like Uglies, or return to the past where a technological breakdown plunges everyone into the dark ages. Flood Child is the latter.

The world Lilly Melkun lives in is a barbaric, harsh world, where peasants struggle to get by as raiders smash their boats and destroy their livelihoods. The priests speak of the time of ‘puters’ as a period of great excess and evil, responsible for the flooded plight of the current people.

It’s a world easy to imagine, what with global warming and melting ice caps, which makes it a rather frightening one to read about.

I liked the characters, and the choice to have both a fisher village girl and a Reaver (sort of like a pirate) boy telling the story as a dual narrative made it a much richer story. Without Zeph’s point of view it would have been easy for the Reavers to become evil charicatures, but in creating him as a sympathetic character, Emily Diamand challenges the reader to overturn any preconceptions. Which I think is a really important thing in children’s literature – learning that there is always another side to the story.

What’s Not So Good

The phonetic dialect, while not overbearing, won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s not ridiculous, but things like ‘ent’ instead of ‘isn’t’ are common in both speech and the prose (as it’s a first person perspective, it is at least the character’s voice) and the initial transistion from Lilly’s perspective to Zeph’s confused me, until I realised the drawing at the head of the chapter changed with the different characters – a cat for Lilly a knife for Zeph. Once I’d twigged that I was with a new character, it was fine. The book doesn’t struggle to differentiate the voice of the characters, and they never sound the same.

Rating: 4/5

N.B. This was originally published as Reaver’s Ransom

Book Blog Hop 15

It’s that Friday feeling! Well, this week, after a hectic week at work, I’m wanting to use a strong phrase than ‘Thank God it’s Friday’. But let’s keep this strictly PG, shall we?

The question this week is: When you read a book that you just can’t get into, do you stick it out and keep reading or move to your next title?

Post blogging, I would have just given up, but since blogging I feel obliged to finish books in order to share a full and reasoned opinion. I don’t easily give up on books, but there have been a few in recent history. Divine by Blood by P.C. Cast is the most recent book I didn’t finish. And I barely scraped through the previous two in the series. Just thought they were dire… The book before that I didn’t finish was Atonement (Shocked Gasp from the blog world) I know… I just couldn’t get into it.

I have several books that I’ve started reading but haven’t finished yet – this is much more common than me giving up completely on a book. They get shoved aside when something more exciting comes in, either because they aren’t the most gripping, or they are very long, or simply because the new acquisition is shinier. But I do always get round to them in the end. Usually…

So, what do you do about those books you just don’t want to finish? Oh, and while you’re here you can…

Check out the Giveaway I’m hosting!

Teaser Tuesday: Flood Child

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

My Teaser:

‘I’m sure of it,’ I say, with a big false smile. Then, in a shaking voice, I ask the question I’ve been holding in ever since I found out who Zeph’s father is. ~ pg 186, Flood Child, Emily Diamand

 

 

 

Check out my International Giveaway while you’re here!

Competition + Giveaway

Hi everyone. Something a bit outside the norm today, but there are PRIZES involved!

 

Stan and Jill. Family Super Heroes.

 

Volkswagen Ultimate Family Hero Competition

Meet Stan and Jill Jones, head of the large Jones family. I mean large. These guys have 13 grandkids, aged from 23 down to 3 months. Stan and Jill are in their seventies, but still have time to visit their family once a week, support them and provide knitted hats and gloves to keep them warm! They are true family Superheroes.

They have been nominated for the Volkswagen Ultimate Family Superhero competition and have made it to the final three. Now they need your vote to claim the title!

If they win, they will be donating £1000 to Cancer Research UK, as well as some money for local schools their younger grandchildren attend.

Because I know Stan and Jill and would love to see them win, I’m trying to help spread the word. They need your votes, people!

Competition

Everyone who votes is entered into a prize draw and there are four family holidays up for grabs! So support ‘Superpops and Nana’ (that’s Stan and Jill’s superhero alteregos!) and have your own chance to win a holiday!

Unfortunately for Americans and other readers outside of the UK, it is UK only for the VW prizes, however, if anyone makes a truly superheroic effort to help me get Jill and Stan some votes, they will be entered into a Giveaway Contest to win £10 (thats about US$15) of books of your choice from Book Depository!

Sidebar Button!

GIVEAWAY FORM – CLICK HERE TO ENTER

There are additional entries up for daily retweeting, daily posting to facebook, and any votes you gain after submitting the form. Just leave me links to your extra votes in the comments, and keep forwarding me those emails with your name and I’ll add them to the spreadsheet!

Giveaway closes November 7th!

Stepping Outside My Writing Comfort Zone

So I’m knee-deep in my latest project, trying to balance my passion and enthusiasm for it with a demanding new job. I want to keep the writing going, particularly as I’m sending this one out to my critique group chapter by chapter, and they are keen to keep reading.

Writing Sci Fi is so far from my usual fare it’s presenting a number of challenges – exposition or total world immersion (I went for the latter) How much is too much? Is it overwhelming? Impossible to understand? Am I the only one who knows what is going on or cares?

Having loyal readers, even if most are family and (I would hope) naturally a little biased in my favour (and it’s not that I don’t trust them to be critical when necessary – I just always worry that our shared experiences come through in my writing, things they understand that most others wouldn’t), has done a lot to assuage these worries, allowing me to get down into the actual story. Which has taken me even further from my writing comfort zone. Starting at and not ending with a near-miss sex scene in the second chapter.

Seriously, how do romance writers write sex scenes and not die laughing? I nearly died laughing and all my characters do is take a few clothes off.

The premise for the scene is this: two characters meet for the first time, both a little intoxicated. They spend the night dancing at a club and eventually head back to one of their houses. They fool around for a bit, but before anything serious happens they get distracted.

This is told in flashback. At the start of the novel, the two characters in question are fast friends, but not an item. This is the one and only time they’ve ever come close to anything like that. Whether or not they will in the future is up to them and the course of the book. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.

Now, I find it hard to write anything explicitly sexual. As I’ve already mentioned – it just makes me laugh. I write things, read it and think ‘that sounds so ridiculously funny’ and delete it. A friend and I, during one of the more drunken/hyper/stupid moments of our uni career decided we would try writing a sex scene – not with the intention of ever showing a tutor, just to see if we could. We couldn’t. It was after reading No Humans Involved by Kelley Armstrong which, despite my love of all things Kelley Armstrong, has one of the most mind bendingly ridiculous sex scenes I’ve ever read, second only to a scene in Hunter’s Prayer by Lilith Saintcrow, which actually mentions kissing of the ‘carotid artery’. Yes. Is it just me or is ‘he kissed my neck’ much sexier than ‘he kissed my carotid artery’?

I couldn’t be one of these writers who details the exact hows of sex in that ‘romantic’, flowery way of Romance novelists and Urban Fantasy writers. I prefer allusion. Or total bluntness. Tabitha Suzuma is the master of completely warts and all bluntness in her novel Forbidden about an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister. Gross, yes, but wonderfully written. Wonderfully written enough to keep reading despite the sick factor.

My characters aren’t related, but at the time of their near miss one is underage. (Yes, underage and in a club, with no parents in sight – all part of the world set up: a dystopian future where the majority of the population is under twenty five or incapacitated.) I decided bluntness would be the best approach.

I think it worked out well in the end. Still waiting on feedback from a couple of parties, but generally the consensus seems to be that it wasn’t gratuitous and was necessary to the story. If my uni friend can read it without laughing, I’ll take it as a win!

Next time on ‘Liberty Chronicles Her Writing Struggles For Anyone Who Cares To Listen’…

The challenge of the word challenge and alpha-male face-offs. Or, ‘How Liberty tried to write about two characters rubbing each other up the wrong way and ended up writing ‘challenge’ twice in five words…’