Thursday, August 11, 2011

Review - Charlotte Sometimes

Charlotte Sometimes (Aviary Hall #3)
by Penelope Farmer
Date: 1969
Publisher: Red Fox
Reading level: MG
Pages: 208
Source: Kobo

Charlotte Makepeace is the new girl at her boarding school. After going to sleep in the curious iron bed with the little wheels, she awakens the next morning to find that she has switched places with a girl named Clare Moby who lives in 1918.

At first, the girls view this strange phenomenon as a curiosity. They even figure out a way to communicate with each other over the 40 years that separate them. But when Charlotte finds herself trapped in the past, the question is not only how will she return to her own time, but who is she, really?

I've been itching to read this book for ages. I'm so glad I finally got to it, because it was quite good!

The time-travel theme has been done many times, of course, but I quite liked how it was done here. As far as I can tell, Charlotte and Clare physically travelled through time (as opposed to just their consciousnesses travelling); they must have looked very much alike for so few people to have noticed the difference. But the story is not so much about the time travel itself as it is about identity. It's also an English boarding school story, which is bound to introduce a number of interesting characters and scenarios. There were a few things that I thought might be relevant that were never addressed again (what was the deal with Elsie, for example?), but on the whole it was a pretty cohesive story.

I did like most of the characters, but I especially liked Clare's younger sister, Emily. She had such a big personality for a little girl; she was only ten, but in some ways she came across as more of an adventurous, rebellious teenager. The stuffy Chisel Browns were also pretty entertaining.

The narrative is quite lovely -- even poetic -- in places, and I enjoyed reading every word. However, the EPUB edition that I had (supposedly based on the 40th anniversary edition of the novel) was abysmal.  There were numerous typos and odd, random punctuation (like errant periods or one half of a set of quotation marks just dangling in the middle of nowhere) and I find it difficult to believe that such mistakes were actually included in the original... and then continually overlooked for the next 40 years!  (The good thing about this edition, though, was that it included the original ending.  Apparently, someone in the 1980s decided that the last bit shouldn't be included.)

All in all, I really enjoyed this one and I can see why it's considered a classic.  Funnily enough, it's the third book about the Makepeace sisters.  However, you do not need to have read the first two books to enjoy the third (and it's a good thing, too, since the others appear to be out of print).

Plot: 4/5
Characters: 5/5
Pace: 4/5
Writing: 4/5
Editing: 3/5
Originality: 4/5
Enjoyment: 4/5

Overall: 4 out of 5

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Review - Go the F**k to Sleep

Go the F**k to Sleep
by Adam Mansbach
illustrated by Ricardo Cortés
Date: 2011
Publisher: Akashic Books
Reading level: A
Pages: 32
Source: Kobo

This picture book about nocturnal frustration features charming illustrations and clever rhyming verse about the trials and tribulations of a toddler's bedtime.

Warning: Do not actually read this book to your children.

I heard about this picture book a while back.  It was supposed to be hilariously funny, so I was curious.

Go the F**k to Sleep is funny... but not quite as funny as I'd expected.  Maybe if you've actually been through the situation of trying to put a restless toddler to bed you can better see the humour.

A few of the verses were a bit clumsy and hard to read aloud because the meter was just a bit off.  Perhaps that was intentional, since the book is told from the point of view of a frustrated, sleep-deprived parent.  Still, I think it could have been even funnier had the meter been uniform throughout.

All in all, it's an amusing little book, but I'm not really sure where it would fit in anyone's library.  It's not for kids, and yet the picture-book format and length are not what you usually see in adult fare.  I can see this book being given as a gag gift to a new parent... but other than that, it's probably not going to have mass appeal.

Premise: 3/5
Meter: 3/5
Writing: 3/5
Illustrations: 3/5
Originality: 4/5
Enjoyment: 3/5

Overall: 3.17 out of 5

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I can see by my Blogger Stats that the Kobo Coupons posts are still pretty popular.  The only problem is, they're old and expired!  Here are some new ones for you:

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Thursday, August 4, 2011

Review - Salt

Salt (The Salt Trilogy #1)
by Maurice Gee
Date: 2007
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Reading level: YA
Pages: 272
Source: Chapters

When Hari's father, Tarl, is sent off to Deep Salt -- a place from which nobody returns alive -- Hari vows to rescue him.

When Pearl is betrothed to a man she does not love, she and her maid, Tealeaf, make a daring escape.

When Hari's and Pearl's paths cross, they must come together to stop a terrible event that could spell disaster for their land.

Where do I even start with this one?  To put it bluntly, it was awful.  I'm not even sure I want to waste any more energy by reviewing it, but perhaps it'll be cathartic.  (Warning: There WILL be spoilers.)

Things didn't start off too badly, at least as far as the plot went.  In the beginning, we see Tarl (Hari's father) taken away to work in Deep Salt as a slave.  This is the most dreaded of work assignments because nobody ever comes back alive.  The setting for the book is a dystopian fantasy world that (in some ways) reminded me of Panem in The Hunger Games.  There is a city populated by the rich (akin to HG's Capitol) surrounded by what are basically open-air prisons called the Burrows (similar to HG's Districts).  Unfortunately, the world of Salt didn't seem very plausible to me, since it tried to combine too much in the way of technology.  They still use horses and carts for transportation, yet their weapons are electrified.  I suppose this could be because of the meshing of the cultures, but I still found it inconsistent.  All the talk of horses and railway cars that have to be hauled up the mountain by hand... and then a jarring mention of a flatbed truck and batteries.  Have these people had their equivalent of an Industrial Revolution or haven't they?

The plot seemed to get worse as the book went on, but the characters were uniformly awful from the start.  I couldn't identify with either of the main characters, and I just couldn't care about them either.  Hari was particularly unlikeable (he kicks his dog until it yelps, for crying out loud!) and Pearl was just bland.  All the characters seemed to have flunked out of Social Skills 101; the dialogue was often stilted and juvenile.  And everybody wanted to kill each other!  Honestly...  It was like a broken record with the men.  Kill, kill, kill...  That seemed to be their only thought.  (Spoiler: What really made me realize how weak these characters were, though, was the ending.  Hari and Pearl, despite having shown zero attraction to each other throughout the entire novel, somehow fumble their way through sex and get Pearl pregnant.)

The very worst part of Salt, though, was the way it was written.  Both Hari and Pearl are telepathic, so much of their shared dialogue is silent.  Unfortunately, this made for some very confusing dialogue because it was not set off from the rest of the text in any way.  No quotation marks, no italics, no different font...  Nothing.  So there were paragraphs that contained both telepathic thought as well as regular text, and I sometimes had to read those passages multiple times to figure out what was dialogue and what was not and even who was speaking.

Aside from that, the writing just seemed very juvenile and condescending, and yet periodically overly verbose.  Too many details, many of which weren't even relevant, just acted as padding for the thin story.  And the way we find out the history of the country was so contrived it wasn't even funny: Hari tells the story back to the wizened old guru who taught it to him in the first place, with the latter gasping with his last breath that "It must be told."  Come on.  Pearl had lived such a sheltered life that she probably only knew the "official" version of events; it would have made more sense for Hari to tell the story to her.

This book came out in 2007 in New Zealand, so it's a bit older than the two books it reminded me of.  As I mentioned previously, some of the setting reminded me of The Hunger Games.  The character dynamic, on the other hand, reminded me a bit of Ship Breaker (so did the cover... the lettering for the title is almost identical!).  However, The Hunger Games' setting was more consistent and the plot was meatier, and the character dynamic of street brat/rich girl was done far, far better in Ship Breaker.

Salt is the first book of a trilogy.  The first chapter of the second book, Gool, was actually included in the back of Salt.  I didn't read it.  I've had more than enough of the world of Salt.  It felt like an insult to my intelligence as a reader.  And I don't think it would be appropriate to recommend it to younger readers because of the bad language and the sex.  Overall, I got the feeling that this book was churned out to make money, with the publishers hoping that readers would be swayed by the author's experience and overlook the lack of character development and plot.

Plot: 2/5
Characters: 0/5
Pace: 1/5
Writing: 1/5
Editing: 1/5
Originality: 2/5
Enjoyment: 0/5

Overall: 1 out of 5