Restraint by Sandra Madera Book Report

Restraint
By: Sandra Madera
Genre: Paranormal Thriller (possibly YA, but I didn't classify it that way because I didn't get the feeling that's what the author intended when she wrote it)
Rating: PG
Coffee Beans: 2/5 – the story has the potential to be interesting
Spoilers: No. Well, maybe a little
Favorite Line: "…she answered briskly, brushing off Laura's concern as if it were a fly that needed to be swatted." (ebook, pg 54)
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book free in exchange for this honest review

 
Sometimes it's hard to review a book.

Sometimes, there's just so much you want to comment on, but it all gets scrambled in your head and you can't figure out how to put it all down so that it makes sense. That's what I ran into with this book so I'm going to try and limit what I bring up and try to keep it as on point as I can.

Here we go.

Restraint is the illegitimate child that resulted from a one-night stand between Jane Austen and Bram Stoker. Set in 1884 America and England, Restraint is a story about two sisters whose father dies, leaving them to be shipped off to live with an estranged uncle in England. The only problem is, there are vampires in the mix. And they're after Laura (Even though that's the crux of the story, you don't find that out until well after the halfway point).

The idea of the book is interesting. I like that the vampires are cruel, cold beasts. It's about time vampire stories get back to their roots. But the author's execution in telling the story is poor. Also, I felt the first 125 pages could've been summed up (or given as snippets of back story later on in the book) and the book should have started on 126 with the discovery of her father's journal.

Now onto specifics:

First of all, head hopping. I'm pretty sure I was supposed to be in the protagonist's head throughout the entire book, but there were countless times the reader was told things there's no way the protag could've known.

Secondly, vocabulary. We're in 1884, stick with the language and sayings from that period. For the most part, Madera did a good job getting down the vernacular and vocabulary (from what I would expect it to be, anyway), but there were times she would throw in word or phrase that just didn't fit and would completely pull me out of the story.

While reading through the book, one thing kept standing out to me. The story was overworked while at the same time still extremely raw. There were a lot of little things (and some not so little things) that could've been fixed by tightening up the book.

There was a lot of telling (sometimes telling the reader the same thing 3 or 4 different times in the same paragraph). It's like Madera didn't trust the reader to figure out on their own what she was hinting at. I think this issue also affected the fact that there wasn't any real sense of urgency or risk in the story. If we'd gone through what Laura was going through, then maybe there could've been.

Incorrect use of many things. Exclamation points! ….ellipses…. and adjectives, to name a few. A lot of times, a adjective was used in the completely wrong context, giving the reader a wrong impression of what the character was feeling at the time. It threw me out of the story more than once. For example, there's a scene (well, several scenes, actually) where Laura is very tired/sick/drained/etc and "hops" out of bed. wrong. Maybe she crawls/slides/slinks out of bed, but with what she went through, she most certainly didn't hop out of bed.

I felt that Laura, the main character, was a very inconsistent and unreliable character. Her thoughts and emotions were all over the board and couldn't be relied upon. Also, she didn't have a strong enough arc.

And lastly, the cover.

I don't say this easily, in fact, I debated weather to even mention it at all. But in the end I felt it would be unfair if I didn't since I almost always make some sort of comment about a books cover in my reviews. 


The cover is an author's first impression on their reader. It's so, so, so important to have the right cover for your book, for traditionally published authors, but even more so for self-published authors. With traditionally published books, covers can go through dozens and dozens of designs, focus groups, restarts, votes, etc before the final product hits the shelf. You get lots of input and opinions. Unfortunately, that tediously long process usually isn't the case with self-published books. The same thing is true with editing.

Madera designed her covers herself, she tells you on her blog it's her own artwork. And while she's a talented artist, using drawings for the covers made the books appear a bit amateurish. Had I been browsing for a book to read and I came across this one, it wouldn't have been one I picked up. I strongly suggest for any self-publishing author to spend the extra money and get your cover professionally designed as well as your book professionally edited.

Okay, I know this review might sound a little harsh, I tried everything in my power for it not to seem that way, but at the end of the day, it's my job to be honest and give you guys my candid review about a book. It's up to you if you like it or not. And as I always say, pick it up and read it for yourself. Your opinion might be very different than mine.

Happy reading, my friends!

After the Snow Book Report

Title: After the Snow
By: S.D. Crockett
Genre: YA Post-Apocalyptic
Rating: PG-13 (language and violent/gore content)
Coffee Beans: 2/5. For reals
Spoilers: yes, some.
Favorite Line: The whole world and everything in it shining in the weak sun like it just been born. (pg 277, ebook) & "I'm sorry. I am." I put out my hand. But it's just a flame in that beating rain. (pg 281, ebook)
Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for this honest review

To date, there's only one book I've ever not finished, and it's Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement. You can read my BR to find out why. So, I was very discouraged when I started reading After the Snow, and by page 4 I was thinking to myself, DANG IT! This is going to be another book I won't be able to finish. But, I plowed through, and I'm just going to come out and say it:

I didn't like this book.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. The cover's pretty awesome. The summary sounded promising. But for me, it fell far short of being a good book. The first half was boring, slow, and uneventful. The second half was exponentially better, filled with action, substance, and characters, but it was too little, too late and couldn't make up for the first half.

I'm going to save you some valuable reading time.


Ready? Here we go.

Skip chapters 1 – 16. Trust me. You won't miss anything. Only a whole lot of backstory. In fact, to make you feel better, I'll sum up what happens so you feel like you know what's going on when you start reading at chapter 17:

Summary for the first half of the book (Ch. 1 – 16):

*Eh-hem*

15-year-old boy (Willo) is crazy. Like, certifiable. Talks to himself & wears a dead dog's head on top of his to get strength and power. The dog talks to him and he talks back. Willo goes home, finds his entire family and everyone else (it's vague as to who that is) missing and decides to go after them. On his way to the neighbors' (whom he suspects of being involved), he meets and takes with him a girl named Mary. They fight off some wolves, then run and hide. Then he takes her to a cave, then they walk some more (in the snow, of course) towards the neighbor's. 

I have just summed up the first 102 pages.

Now you can start reading the book from chapter 17 on, where it gets substantially better.

The book wasn't all bad, just mostly. And that's strictly my opinion. There are A LOT of 4 and 5 star reviews out there of this book. Go and read them. Some people really liked what was between pages 1 and 304. I, however, was not one of them. Let me explain why I chose the lowest rating I've ever given a book:

• Let's start with the setting. I know it's snowing. I know it's cold. I know Willo is in the mountains. But that's all I know. What year is it? What's the "world" this story takes place in like? Besides the few vague stereotypical description for a post-apocalyptic setting I had no idea what I was supposed to be picturing, which made it hard for me to be really invested into the story
  
• I found the main character, Willo, to be confusing at best. He's insane with moments of clarity, but he's constantly contradicting himself to the point of confusing the reader. And these contradictions happen only sentences apart. Which leads me to believe the author is giving credence to the protag's craziness, but it's not streamlined enough to be smooth.
  
• The first 102 pages were a waste of my time that I could have spent reading something else. Absolutely nothing pivotal to the story happened that couldn't have been summed up by the in a few sentences from the protag's POV
  
• Willo's 15/16 in this book, but the maturity of the character that comes through is far younger. In fact, Mary, who's 13/14, seems far more mature than her traveling partner. Plus, Willo's one crazy cat (and not in an artsy kind of way). Talks to himself. A lot. Talks to a dead dog that sits on his head. A lot. Hmmm…hard to get around and accept for me. And he seems very unemotional about the fact that his family is missing. In fact, I wasn't invested into any of the characters until page 151. 151, people. That ain't good
  
• The voice of the story—the style it's written in—is difficult to adjust to. It's written in a very primitive, uneducated style—which I can understand because Willo's lived in the mountains his entire life and isn't all that educated—but it's overdone to the point of being annoying and distracting. I thought that maybe it would be like Blood Red Road by Moira Young and I'd get used to it and fall in love with it, but here, I found myself skimming over a majority of the narrative, kinda like I did in Spanish class during tests. I got the main idea of the page, but didn't care to understand anymore. And the text is sectioned off weird at times; I still haven't figured out why
  
• What the heck is Willo's goal? It's all over the place, and when he does have one, it's unfocused. Meandering. When he discovers his family missing, he wants to find them. Then, when he thinks he knows who the traitor is ("married" to his sister) he wants revenge. Then he comes across Mary, one thing leads to another, and they find themselves in the city. He still has his distracted goal of getting to the culprit (and his sister). Then he gets separated from Mary. Then he bunks with a nice old man and his wife for the winter. His new goal is to find Mary. Wait, what about that goal of finding his family? He gets back to that. Then his goal is escape and heading back up to the hills. But wait, Mary! Once reunited, their goal is to get to the sea to get on the ships with the Resistance to get to some islands. Then they change their minds and want to go south. See what I mean?
  
• The ending made me mad. NOTHING was resolved. NOTHING
  

What I liked:

• Crockett, at times, has beautiful imagery and a very simple way of saying things that resonates truth (thanks to Willo's simple way of thinking and isolation from the "real" world)
  
• The second half of the book was packed with tension and action and all-around great writing and storytelling. If the book had held that impact from the beginning, this would've been a VERY different BR
  
• The cover
  

I almost didn't finish this book. Almost. But, I'm determined not to have one DNF book on my list in 2012, if I can help it.


Look, as always, read it for yourself. It wasn't for me, but it may be for you. It's never fun writing BR's for books I didn't like. The author worked hard on the book. They love it. I just hope there are more people out there that love it more than me.

Happy reading, my friends!

Just Read...

Torment by Lauren Kate

Okay, so I started this book when it first came out (2010?) and stopped reading it with about 10 chapters to go. Don't know why I stopped, to be honest, I probably lost interest. I have the third installment, Passion, and I read about two pages of that before I said, "Nah. I wanna read Ransom Rigg's book, instead." (Good choice, by the way).

BR to come.

--Me

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Sci-Fi (Now it's considered YA, but originally, it wasn't)
Spoiler: A little

Rating: PG
Coffee Beans: 2/5

I’m not quite sure how I feel about Ender’s Game right now. I just finished it on Sunday and I waited a little while for everything to sink in before I decided to tell you my thoughts. I know it’s supposed to be this awe-inspiring, best-book-of-all-time story, but I wasn’t left with that impression. It could be that I’m not that big of a sci-fi fan (except for Dune and Myst), but I think mostly it was because I don’t think the story was well told.

For starters, me, as the reader, was thrown into a world I know nothing about with terms that left me clueless, and was given a mysterious conversation between two unknown people about something I knew nothing about. This abuse was done to me before every chapter. This alone left me scratching my head, trying to figure out what was going on.

Then, when I was introduced to the MC – Ender (short for Andrew), I find out that he’s 6-years-old and a genius. It was strange reading a book with the MC being a toddler. But Card played a sly trick in making Ender and all the children in the book geniuses, that way it was easier to relate to him, and I found myself forgetting his age.

Eventually (by about chapter 4 or 5) I felt pretty comfortable with what was going on in the storyline (although the mysterious conversations at the beginning of each chapter still left me puzzled). The book takes place in the distant future, on a population-controlled Earth after the Second Invasion of the Buggers (an alien breed of giant ant-like creatures). The human race won each invasion, and now they’re preparing for the third, and hopefully final, battle.

Kid-geniuses are taken from their families at a young age and enrolled in Battle School in outer space. The government has been breeding and testing and hoping that their savior will be among one of the enrolled, and they think they’ve found him in Ender. Ender leaves behind his parents, sister Valentine, and older, evil brother, Peter (Card does an a-ma-zing job of making me hate Peter from the first time he’s introduced into the storyline.)

Ender’s amazing and special in every way possible. He’s strong, smart, fast, resilient and perfect. Whenever a problem is introduced, he figures out a way not only to fix it, but annihilate it. And I think that’s why I didn’t really care for Ender. The author tried to give me little things to like Ender, to feel sorry for him—his brother is evil, he’s all alone and isolated, people hate him because he’s perfect, and so on. But all that did for me was make him an unbelievable character.

The book covers a time span of about 20 or so years, with the majority of it hovering over the 6 or 7 years of Ender’s life in Battle School. While there, he’s trained to be the best commander in existence, Earth’s last and only hope of defeating the Buggers for good. Ender knows this and goes with it, even though he’s afraid it’s turning him into something he doesn’t want to be: Peter. But he trudges on. There’s a lot of manipulating that goes on. A lot of lying. And a lot of Ender being the perfect military machine, never fighting back or saying no to the things he knows are wrong, even though it’s destroying his 10-year-old self on the inside.

Card spends the next 4 or so, pretty detailed, chapters on Valentine and Peter back on Earth. They’re trying to take over the world. Literally. They create online persona’s who take opposite sides of politics and discuss current events--mainly Russia’s plan to dissolve the Warsaw Pact.

And guess what? Yup, you got it. It works. Peter takes over rule and miraculously becomes the leader of the known world, leaving his evil, manipulating, squirrel mutilating self behind. Bull pucky. A sociopath like Peter wouldn’t be able to, physically or mentally, change that much.

But, Valentine and Peter’s online persona’s and what they fight for takes no significant part in the book (other than Card needed a reason for the nations to be on the verge of war—which, hey, would happen anyway—which, looking back on the story, I don’t even see as being relevant. It’s almost like he needed this one small thing to happen, and he concocted this unneeded, elaborate scheme to get it done. Sorry, I rambled a bit there.). Even when all their “hard work” pays off, it is only mentioned once towards the end, and I think what Card used it as could’ve been accomplished without that part being in the book.

Another thing that bothered me was the POV that Card told the story from—everyone’s head at once. I know that it’s accepted in writing, but I don’t recommend it. I was head-hopping so much (the majority of the time in Ender’s, though), I didn’t connect with anyone. Also, there was A LOT of narrative. Which--to me—is boring. Give me dialogue, I say!

Whew! Glad I got that off my chest. I won’t tell you the end, in case you want to read it for yourself. Overall, it was okay. I don’t think I’d read it again, though. Nor would I recommend it to a friend. But, now I can say, “I’ve read Ender’s Game, and it was ‘eh’ *shrug of shoulders*.”

--Me

The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff

The Replacement
Brenna Yovanoff
YA Urban Fantasy (YAUF)

Spoiler Alert: None
Coffee Bean Rating: 2/5

Okay, I’m sad because I’m not super thrilled with this book, and I have many reasons why. In no way am I saying I’m better than the author, only that this was not my cup of tea, and for several reasons. First you should know that I ADORE books. All kinds, but YA is my ultimate favorite. There are many, many, many YA books I love and very few that I don’t. This is one of them. And it’s a shame. I follow the author’s blog and find her very funny (especially when she goes into blurbs about her high school experiences), but actually sitting down to read her book was very different.

First I will go over what I did like:

1. The cover. I mean, who can look at this book and NOT pick it up to see what it’s about? I am a visual person, and will buy a book on its cover alone, because, if the cover’s cool, how can the contents of the book not be, right? WRONG. I have learned my lesson (but will happily continue on my merry way of selecting books).

2. The imagery. The detail she gives to everyday things is remarkable and amazing. After reading her descriptions, I thought to myself, Wow! She is totally right, how could I have not seen that before now? For the most part I had a vivid idea of where we were at when I was reading the book.

3. The metaphors. Wow, does the author have a gift with metaphors. Simply amazing.

4. The Story. In my writer’s group we talk about a story being, “The king died and then the queen died.” We talk about plot being “The king died, and then the queen died of a broken heart.” The story idea is great. After seeing the cover, I read the summary, and the story on the back is what convinced me to buy the book—mysterious creepy-crawly things from underground come and steal babies, replacing them with creatures of their own. When I started reading, I was disheartened because there was no plot to the story. If there was one, I didn’t must have missed it. And that’s never a good thing.

Now onto what I didn’t like:

1. The imagery. I know I said I liked it. And I did. But I also hated it. There was SO much of it, it jarred me out of the story. I got bored. It felt like an old Victorian novel where they spent eighty-billion pages describing the sunset. There was too much. It also seemed sort of out of place in a YA novel—more like it should be in a lit fiction novel or something.

2. Too much music. I love music. I was raised on it. I always have to have it on. It kind of drives Hubby insane. J But this was too much. I really don’t care who the author of the song is when you’re trying to describe it to me in the book. I don’t care what the song is they’re playing. I don’t care about the rifts they’re using or the notes they’re hitting (My Takamine is still in its case. I crack it open every now and then to get a whiff of the cedar and rosewood. That’s how often I play my guitar). I. Don’t. Care. And if you spend five pages telling me all those things, I will zone out. I will try, in a half-conscious state, skim through the section until I think it’s over (taking the risk of possibly missing an important part—although I doubt it). Then I will start to drool all over poor Hubby, who had no idea he was going to be violated in that manner. And that’s not fair to him. Which leads me to my next ‘why I didn’t like this book’ point.

3. I had a real problem with what I thought was a cop-out. The “good” dead people live off of—not blood like the little tattooed princess’ evil sister does—but the adoration of their fans when they play music at a local under-age night club? On weekdays? Huh? Seriously? Does anyone else feel cheated by that? I would even if I hadn’t read the book.

4. I was clueless as to what was going on in the story. The entire story. From start to finish, folks. Had I missed a chapter? An prequel? An entire book??? It’s good to have some mystery, but then you need to satisfy your reader by answering questions pretty quickly. I never felt that was done.

5. Things weren’t explained very well. I found myself scratching my head and not understanding (and then the REALLY bad part—not having enough interest to care that I wasn’t understanding or knowing what was going on). I still don’t know what the things are that live under the slag heap.

6. The language. My cheeks flushed at all the four-letter words. For some reason, I thought YA books had rules about that, but apparently the ‘F’ word can be substituted with the act of breathing.

7. Excessive drug/alcohol use. I mean, the main characters are sixteen. Come on! (Channeling Gob from Arrested Development. If you don’t know about that yet, good golly, people! Get with it! It’s the funniest stinkin’ show ever!)

8. Believability of the characters. The main character, Mackie, was out until about 2:30, if not later, every night (yes, school nights, too) and never once did he have to deal with parents. They never called him to let him know what was going on, where he was, etc. Let alone asking him where the heck he thought he was going at 10:30 on a school night. I find that completely unbelievable. I understand parents are essentially non-existent in many YA novel—except for maybe a blurb here or there so we know parents are present, but this was too much in my opinion.

9. Polishing. There were a lot of filler words (that, just, etc). There was more ‘telling’ and less ‘showing’ than I would have liked. I'm sad to say that I really felt like nothing really HAPPENED in the 343 pages it took to tell the story.

10. Who Knows. The town knows…or doesn’t know. Roswell knows…or doesn’t know. Mackie’s family knows….or doesn’t know. You never really find out who knows what and why. I really had no desire to finish this book, but then again, I had never NOT finished a book, and by golly, I wasn’t going to let this one ruin my record!

11. Nothing seemed believable. (As much as you could in a YAUF, anyway). The characters seemed flat. I wasn’t emotionally invested. At all.

12. It was really slow. I mean REALLY SLOW. Sometimes, I find a book that takes me about five or so chapters to get emotionally invested, and then I reap the rewards of an AMAZING book. But over half-way through The Replacement, at chapter nineteen, I was still trying to convince myself that the book would pick up and I would get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! But it never came. Sure, there were teasers of excitement and scenes of “oh, wow!” but they quickly passed and I was left, once again, with, “I think it’s my bedtime” and would glance over at the clock only to see that it read 8 PM. Then I would groan and trudge through a few more chapters.

I didn’t mean to come across as mean spirited. I am just being honest about how I felt about a book. There are so many AWESOME books out there, and this one just paled in comparison, is all. Read it for yourself to find out if you like it or not, but I can tell you this much, I won’t be reading it again, and I hope above all hopes, that there isn’t a sequel planned. It’s kind of like a horrible car wreck on the freeway…I’d probably have to check it out just to see what happens.

Update: I never did finish the book. Don't think lesser of me.

--Me