Lone Wolf

Written By Jodi Picoult
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 2 Stars

I have really got to stop expecting new and exciting things from Jodi Picoult.  My Sister's Keeper was a one hit wonder, and the rest of her novels are bubblegum or rehashes with very slightly different casts of the same novel.  At least they're easy reads.  Bubblegum isn't terrible, just not good.

Let me sum it up for you:  Life or Death Situation is followed by Awkward Family Moment, usually in a hospital, is followed by an Ethical Dilemma in which there is an Intense Disagreement and Alienation of Certain Family Members.  All this is followed by the Big Courtroom Drama Law and Order SVU style, then a Dramatic Decision is made, which is followed by a Big Reveal of a secret or Big Twist Ending that changes everything.

This book had some serious potential.  There's a family.  Luke, the father, works with wolves.  He has been known to take off and live with packs of wolves.  Cara is his high school daughter.  Edward is the estranged son.  Luke's ex-wife is married to an attorney and has young twins from her second marriage.  There is a car accident, when Luke is picking up Cara from a party that she had attended.  Cara drags him out of the car, but he is non-responsive.  Luke's character could have been so fucking cool.  Instead, the story just sort of petered out into a Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper rehash.

Gone Girl

Written By Gillian Flynn
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 2 and a Half Stars

Review:

I'm having a really hard time putting into words what I thought of this book.  On one hand it was incredibly easy to read, I've read reviews that said it was slow moving - I disagree - I thought it ebbed and flowed in such a way to make it compulsively readable.  On the other hand, however, all the characters were horrible and evil; I read characters more than I read plots and having such horrible characters just made me crazy.  Anyway, I'll just start writing and see where it leads.

Amy and Nick have been married for 5 years on the day that Amy goes missing.  Their house looks like there has been a struggle: furniture is flipped, their door is left open, etc.  One by one, as the clues come out, the investigation closes in on Nick.

Amy had a charmed life growing up, she was the inspiration for the wildly successful series of children's books, written by her parents, called Amazing Amy.  Nick and Amy met and lived in NYC, writing for various magazines, until they were both laid off.  When Nick's mother was diagnosed with cancer and his father's Alzheimers became much much worse, they move back to Missouri to take care of them.

The problem.  The people in the novel are horrible.  They're all evil.  Even though the books were called Amazing Amy, I was mentally combining Horrible Harry and Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Day to make up 

Horrible Harry Doing Awful Things on the Terrible Horrible No Good Day

Nick is terrible, Amy is terrible, the lawyer is terrible, the cops are terrible.  I hated them all.  I wanted them all to turn up murdered.

And just to make things even worse for me, I didn't have to "figure out" any of the twists of the novel. They were so obvious to me that I just knew them before they happened.  All right, there was one or two that I didn't see coming, but in a novel of that many twists and turns, they should have at least made me think, right? 

I did enjoy the readability factor, I wanted to see how it would wrap up (though the actual ending made me want to kill things), so I read it quickly.  It flowed well, even though it was just unwrapping one terrible thing after another.

Jenny Pox

Written By J.L. Bryan
Original Publication Date: 2010

Rating: 4.5 Stars

Book Notes:

As of this moment (01/06/2013 10:10pm), this book is available for free for the Kindle.

3%

Morton.  That's an appropriate name.

69%

You know, not a single popular girl in my high school was involved in her church, and certainly not in a manipulative sort of way.  I am not pleased by this church-going-manipulative-abstinent-bitch-popular-girl trope, not at all.  I hate it in Glee, I hate it here.  Though I think that's a rant for another day, because I liked this book too damned much to bitch about that ... much.

Review:

Jenny Morton is for all the world a normal girl.  Except she's not, not even a little bit.  Jenny can't ever touch another person or living creature without killing them of disease.  The book opens on a very young Jenny having the "don't touch anyone" rule being reiterated by her father.  She had picked up a snake that had erupted in disease and died on contact.  A fairly minor incident with kids on the playground leading in only a breakout of some sort of pox, but no death leads us to where the bulk of the book takes place.  Jenny is now 18 and wears long sleeves, long pants, and gloves at all times in public.  This reduces her risk of touching anyone at all, but has earned her the cruel nickname: Jenny Mittens.

Jenny's biggest enemy is a girl named Ashleigh.  Ashleigh is also 18, she is active in her church, running an abstinence program, is captain of the cheerleaders, is running for class president, and is generally loved by everyone who comes into contact with her.  When it comes to Jenny, however, Ashleigh has a dark and cruel side, which is helped not at all by the fact that Jenny isn't madly in love with her like the rest of the town.

Things get a little better for Jenny when she's going for a run, and meets up with Seth, Ashleigh's boyfriend, over the broken body of her dog - which had been hit by a car.  Jenny discovers that she can touch Seth and they strike up a friendship.  The obvious happens, and they fall in love, leading Ashleigh to hate Jenny even more.  This "school girl rivalry" is brought to an epic height in the ending of the novel, but you'll just have to read it to find out what that is.

One of the best parts of this novel?  People actually die.  We're not talking tame-ass young adult, "oh no they died, we're so sad," kind of death.  We're talking people melting and exploding and bleeding profusely.  They die horribly, and it is wonderful.  It's a story about a girl who brings death with her touch, it's nice that the author doesn't shy away from the kind of reality that it would bring.  It's actually one of the only times in the novel that the gender of the author shines.  It's strange to find a male author that does YA  fantasy like this well.  Fuck, it's strange to find a female author that does YA fantasy of this sort well.  There's something about the "Paranormal" genre (which I think was made up for marketing piss-poor fantasy romances, but that's a whole different rant) that usually drives me crazy.  It was really, really, nice to read one that was not only a good novel, but a good novel where the romance is secondary to the meat of the mythology created for the series.  I love a good Fantasy YA novel, and I think this was it.

The Fault in Our Stars

Written By John Green
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 5 Stars Out of 5

Book Notes:

No notes in this book as there usually are. It only took me four hours to read, and I truly stopped for nothing. Not even to mull over points.

Review:

Of the four hours it took me to read this novel, I sobbed for two.  Curse you, John Green, for writing something so fucking beautifully depressing.

Hazel is a 16 year old girl who loves to read and watch bad reality television. She has loving, devoted, parents.  She doesn't see her best friend, Kaitlyn, as often as she'd like to because she doesn't attend high school.  She has, however, gotten her GED and takes a couple of classes at the local community college.  She's falling in love with her wonderful boyfriend, Augustus Waters, and they're on a mission to find their favorite author and have him follow up on his novel, which ends abruptly.

They'd be average, normal, though overly articulate and self-aware (John Green tends to do that with all his characters), teenagers except they met in a cancer survivor support group.  Hazel has aggressive thyroid cancer that spread to her lungs, but the mets' growth is slowed by an experimental drug; she could live "a long time," like this as long as she keeps her oxygen tank and has her lungs drained every so often.  Augustus has lost a leg to someformofcancerI'veneverheardofbefore, but he's been in remission ever since.

This is a love story both in spite of cancer and because of cancer.  The love story is beautiful, and obviously doomed.  I started sniffling barely 30% into the novel, by the time I was at 60%, I was all out sobbing, highlighting favorite passages when the crying got so bad I could barely see the page.  I want you to understand something.   I. Do. Not. Cry. At. Books.  I just don't.  So, even warned as I was that it was a tragedy, I didn't realize how much this novel was going to tear my heart into itty bitty paper pieces.  

My only real problem with the novel was Augustus.  And at that, he was only a problem when he was first introduced.  He was this broody, muscly, pretentious, douchenozzle; and that puts it mildly.  I outright hated him for a while.  He obviously knew that he was smart and thoughtful and he tried so damned hard to sound smarter than other people.

This novel is going directly on my list of favorite books of all time.  I still have a head(heart)ache from all the crying I just did.  I'd like to both Thank and Curse John Green for this novel.