MissEdithSpeaksOutOfTurn

I read this a while back, but I'm reading the sequel now so thought I'd pop back and review it. Such a mixed bag. The premise of the book doesn't work for me at all. I have bought into many dystopian worlds, but this idea of how society would reform itself after some sort of big disaster is so contrived, and would never happen. Even the whole "divergent thing". So, everyone is tested and gets to choose a faction based on having an aptitude for one thing, and the divergent are so dangerous because they are good at like, TWO things! And Tris is good at an entire THREE things! It is a lot to swallow.This was the pea under the many feather beds and mattresses of Divergent. If you can accept the premise and the initial world building (which I can't for long) then within that context, the characters are realistically written. If this sort of world existed (though, again, it just would not) this is how people would act, how they would talk. I loved Tris, and felt that I was getting to know her well from the beginning. The author articulates the characters well. The story is fairly well-paced, though in this first installment, that involved a lot of the world-building exposition, which kept irking me and taking me out of the story. Despite my reservations, I was hooked, and after a while, could not put it down. I'm reading the second one right now, and finding it all a little more believable. I still don't think this sort of society is plausible in really, any way. Roth is making it more complex than it first appeared, which helps me invest in it more. Still though. There's a lot of action, a good love story, and her writing is evocative. I can always see the environment, picture the people, understand how Tris thinks and feels. A lot of fun to read.

I pre-ordered this book when I first heard it was coming out. My expectations were high, and this book shot right over the top of them. I think Flynn is evolving and improving as a writer. I loved Dark Places, though not as much as I loved Sharp Objects. Sharp Objects was pretty much perfect. Dark Places was amazing, but the structure felt the tiniest bit unbalanced, as though she expanded the scope of her narrative a little too fast. Note the diminutive adjectives I use, because I do mean "the tiniest bit" and " a little". It isn't much of a criticism to say Dark Places was slightly less perfect than Sharp Objects. Gone Girl, however, is more ambitious than either book and never misplaces a word. Perfection.

I'd say 3 stars most of the way, and then the fourth star snuck up on me, nestled in and laid its head on my shoulder. I'd heard so many people rave about John Green, and I did love Will Grayson, Will Grayson. So when this book seemed no more than a fun, easy ya read, I was a bit disappointed. But eventually, I loved it. I think if I had read it as an actual young adult, it could have even been life-changing. As a 35 year old though, it was more of a revisiting of ideas than a discovery of new ones. Recommend this to the teens in your life, for sure.

More like 3.5. The writing is beautiful. It's the world building that is a bit lacking. I'm not sure this sort of economy would be possible.

This book is full of perfect sentences. The prose is simple, each word perfectly, naturally placed. Loved it.

Rounded up from 2.5. The story was pretty interesting, but the prose style was amateurish. I know that it's aimed at younger audiences, but just because you need to simplify doesn't mean you can't write well, and with style. I did enjoy the plot, and the pacing was good. The characters were mostly 2 dimensional, but maybe that is to be expected given that all of them have lost the memory of their old lives, starting fresh when they arrive at the Glade, remembering no detail but their name. There were also a couple of contrived plot points where the brainy protagonist completely fails to figure out a glaringly obvious fact. He is smart enough to decipher some complicated things, but fails to make very simple connections, and that took me out of my disbelief suspension. It was a page-turner, and I do plan to read the rest of the series. I hope that the writing improves, and maybe it will. People can get better.

I liked it. Didn't fully LOVE it, but the series has potential and I'd like to see where it goes. I was interested in the main character, but I want to know more about a couple of her convent sisters and hope the next book will feature them a bit more. There was a point where I was losing interest, then I realized that the narrator on the audiobook had a painfully slow speaking voice, so I just sped it up to 1.25 speed and found I was interested again. It's a fun read.

3.5 really.The plot was interesting, and despite what you might have heard, quite a bit different from that of the Hunger Games. It loses a star due to poor characterization/pop psychology. I don't know if the awkwardness of some of the dialogue or the inner monologues of some of the characters had to do with translation issues, the higher formality of Japanese speech, or just a weakness on the part of the author, so I'm not dinging it for that, but perhaps due to the large number of characters, the treatment of the people involved was somewhat shallow. I tend to believe Suzanne Collins when she says she was not aware of Battle Royale, as I like to think she'd tell the truth about it. It's certainly not a straight-up rip-off, so I don't think there would be anything to lose by claiming it as an influence, much as the author of BR claims King's The Long Walk and The Running Man as his influences. In any case, comparing and contrasting the two similar works was an interesting exercise for me.I'm going to digest it all for a bit before coming back to write an analysis of the similarities and differences between them, but it should be mentioned that Battle Royale is a long book, 95% of which takes place during the Program whereas the Hunger Games is a trilogy of shorter books, and the time actually spent in the games is comparatively short, comprising maybe 2/3 of the first book. The types of dystopia are different, though they both deal with the control of the populace by a totalitarian regime. Hunger Games focuses more on the decadence and excess of the capitol, where Battle Royale is more about the control of a large population through what they term "successful fascism", a more homogenized society, the granting of small freedoms to maintain a total lack of real freedom. The fact that the Program is not televised made for a lot of practical differences in the action, and that the Program selects an entire class of 15 year olds is a huge difference as well. All these kids know each other, many of them quite well and for years. From a character standpoint, that was the most interesting thing about the book for me. I can't help but feel that the author could have dug deeper into that, but he did enough to intrigue and let me fill some of that in on my own. I will state again here that I wanted more from the characterization. Just a little more and this could have been even a five star book, I think.There are definite similarities; the plots are clearly similar. At the end of it though, I felt that the differences outweighed the common elements. They made me think about different things with surprisingly little overlap. If the Hunger Games had ended after the first book, I might think differently, but the fact is that the series continued and the territory it covered was larger than just teens-fight-to-the-death. I don't know if I would have liked Battle Royale as much as I did if I had not read HG first. Thinking about them together was more interesting than thinking about just one of them, so I suggest you all read them both.

I do love stories about con artists. I love a good con, and that alone would make me like this series. I have rather come to love it though. The third one should be on my reserve shelf at the library by next week, and I look forward to seeing how this ends. These books have an original take on magic, different from your standard fantasy fare, and the characters would be equally at home in a mafia story. It's a different kind of magical realism, one that skews more towards the real than the magic, where magic is infused with reality rather than the other way around. Well-paced, enjoyable, with twists that feel organic to the story, not contrived. Great series.

Here's the main problem with this book: The main character, someone who specializes in the time period the book is supposed to be from, doesn't know that "receipts" means "recipes". WTF? I mean, I am no historian, and I KNEW THAT. It takes her almost the entire book to figure this out, despite it being fairly common knowledge. Unbelievably stupid. This is not the only example of things the protagonist would have figured out if she had been the person the backstory claims her to be. Just ridiculous.

If this book sticks in my head like The Dolphin People did, I may come back and upgrade it to 5 stars. As usual, Krol has delivered something unique and challenging, startling and thought provoking. While all three of his books have some similarity in pacing and structure, each story and each world is new and different from the book before it. Highly recommend it.

I read this book years ago, and still think of it often. I've been reading the reviews on this site, and it seems that those that gave it only 2 or 3 stars really didn't get it. It's OK guys, you just need to go back and read a whole bunch of fairy tales and different versions of fairy tales, and it will all start to make a lot more sense. This book is brilliant.

I couldn't bring myself to give a book in this series fewer than four stars, but I would like to knock off a quarter star or even half a star if I could. I love this series, and I love the characters, but this one suffered from not enough Henry Stone, not enough Rae, and no Morty. No Len and Christopher either. Having read the others, I knew not to expect the last three people to be around, but I missed them anyway and don't feel like I was given enough to replace them. I still enjoyed this book, and tore through it, but I wasn't as flat-out in love with it as I was with the first four.

This is perhaps the geekiest book of all time. I am not enough of a geek to catch all the references, but I am married to someone who probably would, and I've absorbed some knowledge on the way. You don't have to be a geek to enjoy this book, but I imagine if you were a full on D&D type nerd in the 80s, you would get even more out of it than I did. Well-paced, good characters, satisfying resolution. The audio version is narrated by Wil Wheaton, to give it just a little more geek cred, and he did an admirable job. There's one part where he, as the narrator, has to refer to Wil Wheaton, because what would a nerdy book steeped in pop culture be without a Wil Wheaton reference. Very fun book.

Reluctantly rounded up to 3 from 2.5 stars. From the hype about this book, I expected something more akin to Gillian Flynn than to John Grisham, but it was closer to the latter. Poor pacing, irritating main character. It held my attention enough that I wanted to get to the end and find out what happened, but I was never as engaged as I felt I should be given the material the author had to work with. Much of the suspense was created through tactics I found contrived at best, gimicky at worst.

I think it's time to admit that I just hated this book. It's like the more time goes by, the more I look back on reading it and feel resentful about it. Was it "good"? That may be a separate question. I loved The Virgin Suicides and I loved Middlesex too, if not quite as much. Eugenides has great technical skill as a writer. He writes well, yes. I still hated the book. It didn't make me angry, or anything so interesting or thought-provoking as that. There were definitely moments when I admired something about it, and the writing was almost good enough to trick me into liking it, but I can't deny it anymore. I hated this book. Sorry, guys.