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Laura Elliot – Stolen Child
This book was a free kindle book downloaded on a impulse and intended as a break from carrying around heavy books like the last 3 Mistborn books I’ve just read. Although it wouldn’t have mattered too much since I’ve pretty much spent my Saturday chilling out and devouring this book.The subject matter is not too easy to deal with, but the book is so well written that it’s compulsive reading and I couldn’t put it down!
As you can probably tell from the title of the book, it’s about a woman who is unable to carry a child to full term and decides to steal a baby. We see the story from both sides, seeing Susanne becoming more and more mentally unhinged and seeing Carla become more and more desperate to find her baby.
I expected the book to cover a fairly short space of time, but it stretched over sixteen years. Again and again it looks like the truth is going to come out but it’s thwarted each time and Carla’s life is falling apart.
As the book progresses, we start to hear from Joy too, the stolen child. Elliot really got her emotions perfectly. You can never know what something like this would be like, but it was written in such a way that you could feel perfect empathy for all the people involved.
You can probably imagine how the book will end, but I think it ended a little too perfectly. I won’t give you any spoilers but if you read it you’ll see what I mean. It just didn’t feel like the right way to end it.
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Brandon Sanderson – Hero of Ages (Mistborn 3)
Well I would just like to say that this has become my favourite fantasy series. I thought I’d loved reading Game of Thrones, but this was soooooo much better! (Warning: spoiler alerts below)
I didn’t realise quite how attached I had become to the main characters until things started happening to them and I wanted to help so badly and couldn’t!
Poor Sazed has lost faith in his study of religions, along with just religions and study and life in general, following Tindwyl’s death. He just can’t bring himself to believe in any God who would let the love of his life die. Sanderson’s compelling portrayal of what it feels like to lose hope and faith and then find it again was one of my favourite parts of the book. In fact, I would say that faith is the strongest element running through the book.
TenSoon was willing to risk his life for his belief in Vin as the Hero of Ages and his sacrifice to try bring the truth to the Kandra First Generation showed true faith in her ability to save the final empire. And even though he doesn’t succeed at first, when he manages to escape and bring Sazed back to the homeland, the Kandra first generation’s unfailing faith in what Sazed is telling them leads to them destroying their entire kind for the sake of the empire. If that’s not faith, I don’t know what is.
And Spook. He seems to have developed an unfailing faith in the Survivor. He’s gone from a quiet and ignored young man to the saviour of a city. He believes that he’s been granted extra allomantic powers by Kelsier and has complete faith in the things that ‘Kelsier’ is telling him to do, but it turns out that he was being controlled by Ruin. I loved how Ruin twisted and turned everything throughout the book, You were so sure about how or why something was happening, and it turns out that everything you knew was wrong and was actually being manipulated by Ruin.
And of course, Vin and Elend. They keep getting themselves into sticky situations, particularly Vin. With her belief that she is the Hero of Ages, she’s taking more and more risks to save the empire. And even though Elend is now mistborn too, she won’t take him with her, which leads to him taking risks and getting himself into trouble too. He feels the weight of the empire resting on his shoulders, and only faith in his friends and companions can pull him through.
I don’t really know what else to say to this book, because the ending truly truly shocked me. I won’t give away what happens, but let me just say that I wasn’t very happy when I read it! I can understand fully why it happened and I think it was a brilliant end to the book, but I don’t think anyone reading it could possibly have expected what was coming. So bravo to Mr Sanderson for that!
In fact, I think that has been my favourite thing of the trilogy. I just can’t predict what is going to happen next. Sanderson’s plot is so brilliantly and intricately executed that even if you think you’ve guessed what’s going to happen, you flip the page and you’re wrong again!!
I’ve just bought the final Mistborn book, Alloy of Law, which I believe is set far far in the future of the empire. It’s way shorter than the trilogy were, which will give my shoulder a rest from carrying around 700+ page books in my bag!
If you’ve got to here and you haven’t read this series yet, go read it! I hesitated when my friend recommended it to me and I shouldn’t have because it truly was superb! I can see a lot of Brandon Sanderson on my Christmas wish list this year!
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Brandon Sanderson – The Well of Ascension (Mistborn 2)
They tend to say that the second book in a trilogy can usually be a bit slow – you’ve already got through the introduction to all the characters and the plotline, and you’re waiting for the dramatic ending to the final book in the series. But I’m very glad to say that it wasn’t true for Mistborn. I’ll warn you now, there will be spoilers below so look away now if you don’t want to ruin the surprises for yourself!
The book seemed like non-stop action throughout, it made the book very hard to put down. We left the last book with Kelsier dead and the Lord Ruler overthrown, so we’re coming into this book with Elend as King with his ideas about making a fairer government (of sorts) to rule over the Skaa. And obviously now Kelsier is dead, Vin has a lot to learn about the strength within herself and confidence that she can do this without her mentor, the one who taught her how to be herself and use her natural powers.
We’re not far into the book before the drama starts, and two armies arrive on the doorstep of Luthadel. Immediately, it doesn’t look good for Elend, especially considering one of the armies is led by his brutish father. And things start to go downhill from there. Elend’s kind and honest nature sets him up for trouble when the Assembly decides to overthrow him and he’s written the new constitution in such a way that there is no way he can stop it. And when he has the chance to lie and keep his crown, he just can’t do it. Forced to take a backseat to a new king who seems determined to hand over the city to Elend’s father Straff, how can the crew stop this from happening?
The book was full of tension, I felt scared throughout that Elend, Vin and the crew were going to fail in their mission and Luthadel was going to go back to it’s Skaa-oppressing ways.
I gained a lot of love for Sazed throughout this book. He’s put himself in a difficult situation by helping with the take-down of the Lord Ruler, and he decides to do it again when he uncovers what he believes may be an interesting piece of information about the Well of Ascension and the supposed Hero of Ages. His relationship with Tindwyl is unwrapped bit-by bit, until you can see the true love and genuine deep-seated affection that they have for each other, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when she is killed in the battle to save the city from the huge Koloss army.
At that point in the book, I was worried that Sanderson was about to go all George R. R. Martin on us and start killing off every character that we hold dear, but thankfully he stopped before it got to that point. However, I did want to scream a couple of times, like when the aforementioned Tindwyl was found to be dead by Sazed. He’s such a lovely man that has done everything he can to save the empire, and this is how he is rewarded?!
And when it looks like Elend is dead, I could have cried for poor Vin. I think I would have been tempted to just give up on the series if that had happened, what would be the point of reading any further when such a sweet, honest and giving man could die.
I found the changes in Elend and Vin’s relationship interesting throughout the book. At the start it looks like they are closer than ever, and then thanks to some horrid tricks by Elend’s half brother Zane (another Mistborn), it looks like Vin could be considering leaving Elend for someone who understands her true nature. And when Zane engineers a situation which forces Vin to kill someone rather brutally in front of Elend, it looks like it could all be over for their relationship. Vin believes that Elend hates her for what she has done, and that he can’t stand to look at her after seeing the horrific things that she is capable of. But the truth is that Elend believes that Vin is truly amazing, he describes her as ‘a force, like thunder or wind‘. He believes that she couldn’t possibly love him anymore since he can’t even keep hold of his throne, especially since he wrote the very laws used to depose him. So they’re both tiptoeing round and avoiding each other, when they both really love each other more now than ever before. I just wanted to knock their heads together at this point!
The book ends in such a way that leaves it open to a lot of intrigue as to what will happen in book three. Vin has just unwittingly released something terrible on the empire, the very thing that she thought she was preventing. So what is this ‘deepness’, which seems to be able to change your thoughts and the written word? And can Elend keep the kingdom safe from this terror, and the Koloss armies that are still terrorising the outer dominances? Looks set to be a thrilling finale!
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Brandon Sanderson – The Final Empire (Mistborn 1)
After having this book heavily recommended to me by my best friend, and then also recommended to me by the waiter at Nando’s who spotted my ‘Read Harder’ t-shirt and sparked an awesome conversation about all the books I should read, I had high hopes for this book.
At 650ish pages, it’s not exactly a short book, and I found it kind of slow to get going, which led to me spending the first 100 or so pages thinking that the book would go on forever. But once I got used to the strange concept of Allomancy and the plot started picking up, I was completely and utterly hooked.
When I first read about Allomancy I thought it sounded a bit too weird for my tastes, burning metals to get extra powers. But now I think that the concept is brilliant. I loved the way that it was introduced, us learning about it at the same time as Vin. (Spoiler alerts from here onwards). It kind of made me feel a weird sense of pride in Vin when she turned out to be one of the best Allomancers around, pulling off tricks that even her mentor Kelsier wasn’t capable of.
The book toyed with my emotions more than possibly any book I’ve ever read. The quote on the front seemed like a massive spoiler:
“What if the Dark Lord won?”
Every time something started going awry for Vin or her crew members, my heart was in my mouth hoping that the front of the book wasn’t about to come true. And let me tell you, my heart was up and down like a yo-yo. I’d like to meet Brandon Sanderson and shake my fist at him for playing with me like that.
Especially since way too many things happened that shattered my heart into tiny pieces, for myself and for Vin. After the terrible start she’s had to her life, it all looks like it might be working out for her; she’s found a good crew that treat her right, and shock horror, they even respect her opinions. And then Sanderson cruelly rips holes into her newfound safety blanket and she’s plummeting right back towards the life of a Skaa street urchin again.
But Vin is a vital part in the plan to overthrow the Lord Ruler and free the Skaa from a life of drudging slavery. As I mentioned before, she’s got the makings of one of the greatest Allomancers around, if she can just learn enough to survive.
I don’t really want to give away too many more spoiler alerts because if you haven’t guessed, I’m a little in love with this book and I really think that if you haven’t read it, you should back away from your computer and start reading it immediately.
Also selfishly, the quicker I type this review, the more time I have to start the second book before bed, so I guess that’s it. Read it or miss out on something awesome. I can see this being picked up as another blockbuster film very soon!
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Nathan Filer – The Shock of the Fall
I had extremely high hopes for this book after looking on Goodreads and seeing that my cousin Hannah had rated it 5/5. As she’s a very infrequent five-starrer, it must be something special, right?
In a way, yes. But in a way, no. I understand that the chronology of the book was reflective of Matt’s mental state and once I got used to it, I found it completely absorbing. But I found it took me a while to get my head around it, and for the first half of the book, I found myself flipping backwards a lot as Matt dipped in and out of present and past; back and forth and what seemed like all over the place.
I found the book heart breaking in a lot of ways, and that was before you even knew the full story of what happened to Matt’s brother Simon. Being first person from Matt’s perspective means you get a glimpse into the madness, the things that he finds perfectly ordinary, and even though you can see that they’re mad, you can also see it from his point of view too. I think it definitely helps that Nathan Filer is a registered mental health nurse and he obviously knows a lot about these kind of conditions. He wrote the book sensitively and compassionately without making Matt into a comical character, which I loved.
I have to say that after finishing the book, I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed it. On one hand, I read it extremely quickly and found it hard to put down, but on the other hand, it just didn’t seem like my kind of book, and I did find it hard to become completely involved in the book. I know that those two opinions sound completely counter to each other, but I don’t know how else to explain it.
I may come back to this book again in the future and maybe I’ll get something else out of it, but for now, I think I can only give it 3/5.
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R. J. Palacio – Wonder
At the risk of sounding puntastic, this book was simply wonderful. Bought on a whim, attracted to it in Asda by the unusual cover, it has been sat on my shelf for quite a while!
A rarity for books which switch between character perspectives, I loved each character that we heard from. At first I thought the book was going to be primarily Auggie, and when I realised that we were going to see many different characters, I was a little apprehensive, but it worked beautifully.
The book is about a 10 year old boy named Auggie. Born with a genetic problem that has caused a severe facial deformity, he has never attended school; the number of operations he’s had to have meant it was easier for him to be home-schooled. But his parents have decided that it’s time for him to join the mainstream, and have got him a place at a prestigious local school. Auggie is unsure at first, he doesn’t like people to stare at him, and even when they’re not staring, he can tell that they’re sneaking a peek or talking about him behind his back. But he reluctantly agrees to try it out, with the promise that he can leave whenever he wants to.
Once there, Auggie has to put up with way more than any 10 year old child should ever need to. Among other things, the children in his school play a game called ‘plague’, where if they touch him or any of his things, they have a short space of time before they have to wash their hands or they’ll be ‘infected’. But Auggie doesn’t let this get him down, he’s got a cool new friend called Summer, and a guy called Jack who seems to be his friend too.
Auggie’s almost constant positivity was heart-warming, but there were many heart-rending parts of the book where his shell cracks just a little and you can see that the brave face that he’s putting on is just that, a brave face. He’s a normal little boy with normal interests, including a slightly unhealthy obsession with Star Wars, but no-one can seem to see past what he looks like.
Seeing the honesty from the other characters was heart breaking too. Seeing Olivia struggling with trying to forge her own way in a new school without just being known as ‘the girl with that brother’, and seeing Jack’s struggles with his desire to be Auggie’s friend, but his internal wish not to be ostracized, and the guilt he feels when he realises he’s made a huge mistake was not easy to read, it made me want to reach out and give them all a big hug and tell them that it was all going to be okay.
The book is a beautiful story of kindness and acceptance and learning that it’s not what’s on the outside that counts. And you can be as mean as you want, but people will eventually see through you and it’s not so nice when you’re on the receiving end. The book was written sensitively, but with a kind of honesty which was refreshing. Everything isn’t always okay, but with good people around you, it will all be okay in the end.
I had a few favourite quotes from this book:
“Shall we make a new rule of life…always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.” (Originally from The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie)
“Such a simple thing, kindness. Such a simple thing. A nice word of encouragement given when needed. An act of friendship. A passing smile.”
“Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness.”
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Veronica Roth – Four (A Divergent Collection)
I first spied this book just after it came out, but when I saw the price, I thought I’d leave it for my Christmas list, I didn’t really want to pay £9 for a book of short stories. But then I was having a pretty bad day and my lovely boyfriend brought it home for me, so I was very happy!
I didn’t really know what to expect from the collection, I knew it was four short stories written from the perspective of Tobias, but that was about it. I saw quite a few reviews on Goodreads that said it was a bit boring as there was a lot of repetition between the shorts and the main series, but I loved seeing how it all happened from a different perspective. It definitely changed my opinion of Tobias a little bit, especially the last story which was set around Tris’ initiation. In the main series, we see him as being a little on the mean side, but from his perspective we can see why he needed to do this and how much it killed him to have to do it.
After the main set of four short stories, there were also three even shorter stories, which were extremely short and sweet, but lovely all the same. I’m not going to hide the fact that I’m a huge fan of this series, and I thought these extra stories were brilliant, a perfect way of fleshing out some of the details which were missing from the main series.
I’d kinda like it if there were more stories from the perspective of some of the other characters, like Eric and Al. We’re not supposed to like these characters so it would be nice to see what was going through their heads too.
If you loved Roth’s style of writing in the main series and you loved the characters and you’re just hungry for more Tris and Tobias, you’ll love this book!
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Kristin Cashore – Fire
I had very high hopes for this book after loving Graceling so much, I can’t believe it’s been so long since I read it!
Unfortunately, I felt a little let down by the entire thing. The book in general was very slow to get going, with a prologue that didn’t seem relevant until almost the end of the book. I think I was probably about three quarters through the book before I really felt like the action started, and it then seemed like a rush to fit everything in before the end. I would have liked the book to be another 100 pages longer to get some more details in the part of the book which really needed it!
My other main bug bear with this book was the unusual moral stance that the author took. Most young adult books take a very conservative stance on sex and relationships and tend to preach the ‘no sex before marriage’ ethos, or something similar where all the characters are in love before they even kiss. But Cashore took a more casual stance towards this, with her main character having much looser morals. I don’t think this was necessarily a bad thing, just not what I expected. I understand that Cashore is probably going for a feminine empowerment message with a strong female lead character like in Graceling, but I don’t think this made Fire seem stronger, I think in a way it made her seem weak.
Once I got through the initial long introduction section of the book, I did very much enjoy the storyline, I just wish it had been fleshed out more at the end. I know that there’s a third book in this series, so hopefully Fire may make an appearance there. Who knows? I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy the book, but I’ll definitely add it to my Christmas list.
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John Green – An Abundance of Katherines
I’m not going to lie, I decided I wanted to read this book because I’d read TFIOS and it was such an amazing book that I wanted to see if John Green was just a superb writer.
On the basis of this book, I’d have to disagree. I’d read some comments on goodreads which said that the constant use of the words fug, fugger and fugging to replace a similar sounding swear word were annoying, but I didn’t think that would bother me too much, I don’t usually mind that sort of thing. But I was wrong. By the end of the book, I found it highly infuriating, I’d rather the characters just actually swore.
But this was just one of the many things that got on my nerves with this book. The main character Colin was supposed to be a child prodigy turned not-quite genius, but I just found him whiny, self absorbed and slightly irritating. I think his uniqueness is supposed to endear us to him, but I just found myself completely unable to relate to him and wishing he’d just shut up.
As for the story, it was quite a nice idea, an intriguing concept of a guy who has dated 19 girls named Katherine. But as I realised I was coming to the end of the book, I got the feeling that not much had happened. I understand that the book was about a journey of self discovery and blah blah blah, but I was underwhelmed after such an emotional rollercoaster reading TFIOS.
I don’t think I’ll fully discount John Green just yet as I’ve heard some of his other books are great, but I wouldn’t really recommend this one.
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Milly Johnson – White Wedding
Well it’s been a long time since I started reading this book, over six weeks in fact. But I’ll blame that on Game of Thrones since this book was abandoned in my bedside drawer while I went on a fantasy epic.But after finishing Game of Thrones, and realising that I was going to a wedding last weekend, what a perfect time to pick this up again. Except not really, since I was hoping for a beautiful wedding to get me in the mood and nothing seemed to go right for these poor three girls.
Pretty much straight away you get a good idea of the personalities of the three ladies and where you think their story is heading. And although I may have been right in all three instances, there were some twists and turns along the way to keep it interesting.
I did find it hard to feel any empathy for either Max or Violet. I felt a connection to Bel, I really liked that character. But Violet was a bit wet for my liking (although understandably so) and Max was just way too stuck up and out there to be someone that I would like. But even though I couldn’t feel for the characters, I still couldn’t wait to read more about them to find out if I was right about their happy endings.
I did find this a very easy read, nothing too taxing for my poor brain, which was just what I needed after GoT. I wouldn’t say it was my favourite of Milly’s books, although I think I did it a disservice by reading it in two parts such a long time from each other, so maybe a re-read would make me feel better about the experience. Although with the length of my to-read pile, that isn’t coming any time soon!
Louise Douglas
(I've got no) Shelf Control…
Louise Douglas 