Top Ten Tuesday - Top Ten Books I Liked More/Less Than I Thought I Would

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted at The Broke and the Bookish.

This week's topic is Top Ten Books I Liked More/Less Than I Thought I Would.

What an interesting topic!  I don't know if I'll be able to remember which books (out of all I've ever read) surprised me in a good or bad way... but here are some of the ones that stand out (click the titles for my reviews):

Top Five Books I Liked More Than I Thought I Would:

5. Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai - This was the first novel in verse that I read and, to be honest, I picked it up only because it was short.  I'm not that interested in historical fiction about fairly recent times, and I didn't know much about Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s at all.  But I found the voice of ten-year-old Hà engaging and by the end of the book I wanted the best for her and her family.  If I hadn't enjoyed this one as much as I did, I probably wouldn't have discovered the world of verse novels.

4. The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson - I actually kept putting off reading this one, because I'd heard that the beginning was gory and disgusting and I'd be traumatized for life (or something like that).  When I finally plucked up the courage to read it, I found that it wasn't that bad.  Intense and disturbing, yes.  But not intolerable.  And once the graphic depictions of the accident and injuries were over, there was a fascinating story about a flawed man and a mysterious woman who may be more than she seems.

3. The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson - When I put this book on my wish list, I'd seen mostly positive reviews of it.  By the time I got around to reading it, I'd seen some more mixed reviews, and they were enough to make me question whether I'd like this one or not.  The format was a bit different but, other than that, I didn't find much to complain about.  I actually really liked it.  While I guess it's technically a science fiction story (since it's set in the near future), I thought the questions of medical ethics were the real star and they made for an interesting, thought-provoking read.

2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - I had to read this book for a first-year university English course.  I'd heard of it, of course, but at that point I didn't know the story and I hadn't yet seen any film adaptations.  I was surprised at how accessible it was, being written in the first person, and I was genuinely interested in the story.  Stupid professor ruined the ending for me, as I wasn't reading quite as quickly as she would have liked.  So much for slowing down and savouring it.  Oh, well.  It's still one of my favourite classics.

1. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver - I'd heard such good things about this book, but at the time I got around to reading it, I was feeling a little bit jaded, having been misled a few times into reading "amazing" books that really... weren't.  I wasn't sure if I was going to like this one when I started; Sam was not a likeable girl.  But by the time I finished the book, I'd fallen in love with it.  Oliver's writing helped bring those mean girls alive, but in a way that made you care and wonder about the nature of teenage cruelty.

Top Five Books I Liked Less Than I Thought I Would:

5. Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan - I kept seeing this one making the rounds of the book blogs (and getting rave reviews), so I thought I'd give it a try.  It sounded unique and interesting and definitely like something I would enjoy.  While I have no beef with the premise (which is actually a pretty cool one), I couldn't stand the characters -- especially Lily.  She rubbed me the wrong way almost from the get-go.  I never even finished this one.

4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins - I was so disappointed with this book... especially with the ending.  While I appreciate the sentiment ("war is hell", etc.), much of the last book felt like a slap in the face.  If your main character is going to mope around, hide, and have her raison d'etre pretty much erased, it should be at the beginning of a series... not at the end.  This book was just depressing.  After all the sacrifices Katniss made in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, she deserved better than this.  Just because things don't always have a happy ending in real life doesn't mean they can't in fiction.  My reaction after reading this final book in the trilogy was to wonder what the point of it all was (if anything).

3. Evermore by Alyson Noël - A tortured heroine, a hot immortal guy, manifesting things out of thin air, and living the high life in Orange County.  What's not to like?  Apparently, a tortured heroine, a hot immortal guy, manifesting things out of thin air, and living the high life in Orange County.  I'd read good things about this book, and it seemed to have the paranormal elements I was looking for, but it was a mess.  Swap out a few character traits, and it was basically Twilight... with worse writing.

2. Basajaun by Rosemary Van Deuren - I went into this self-published book thinking I would enjoy it.  It was supposed to be a magical tale, set in Europe, about a little girl and her rabbit friend defending their town from a religious zealot.  It was supposedly written by a "masterful wordsmith".  I'm sorry, but I wouldn't call someone who doesn't even know how to write technically correct dialogue "a masterful wordsmith".  And simply saying your book is set in Europe doesn't evoke a sense of place... especially when your characters all have American-sounding names and the main antagonist sounds like a reject from the Westboro Baptist Church.  And why can the rabbits talk?  And why does nobody question this?  And how did a six-foot-tall rabbit manage to make his way from Australia without being noticed?  Magic, indeed.

1. The Puzzle Ring by Kate Forsyth - This book has a Scottish setting, a kid who gets to live in a castle, and time travel.  Sounds like a pretty good read... but I was disappointed.  I thought it was too long and drawn out for the target age (the main characters were 13 or so, which probably puts the reading level at middle grade)... but I'm not sure actual middle graders would relate to these characters, either.  At times, they seemed much younger.  I think it could have been a decent book if either the characters' ages and/or reading level had been changed or if the story had been edited a little more tightly.  As it was, it didn't really work for me.  And after all the trouble I'd gone to to procure a digital copy (I had to buy it from Australia)!  I thought I would definitely like it... but I didn't.  Such a disappointment.

Review - Basajaun

Basajaun
by Rosemary Van Deuren

This is the first self-published novel I've read and reviewed (at least, for the purposes of this blog). I am kind of conflicted about how to proceed. On the one hand, I don't want to discourage people from writing and putting their work out there. On the other hand, I certainly don't want to encourage anyone to read this book.

(There will be spoilers in this review. I can't very well talk about the things I hated if I can't talk about the ending...)

On the plus side, the cover is great. Unlike a lot of self-published book covers, this one looks very professional. If I saw it sitting on the shelf in a bookstore, I wouldn't automatically assume it hadn't come from a traditional publisher. The author had to design and make the cover herself. She's apparently got a visual arts background, and it's evident here. Unfortunately, the lack of a background in writing really shows on the inside of the book.

According to the back cover, this is what Basajaun is about:

In the world of the rabbits, she is hailed as a savior.
In the world of men, a holy man wants her dead.
She is twelve years old.

In an isolated European farm town in 1906, a Pastor known as 'the rabbit killer' is preaching that the overrun of rabbits is a parallel for sin and corruption. But when Cora - a farmer's daughter - befriends a rogue rabbit named Basajaun, she becomes enmeshed in a hierarchy of sentient rabbit armies and ceremony. Soon the secret behind the rabbits' plight is unraveling, and Cora is fighting to save the lives of those she loves - as well as her own.

But that description is misleading. If that had really been the plot of the story, I might not have been as disappointed as I was. Here's my quick synopsis:

In an isolated farm town in 1906, a 12-year-old girl named Cora runs afoul of an unhinged misogynist who wants to kill rabbits. He became insane after being seduced by a 16-year-old girl named Nellie who wanted to have a baby that she could sacrifice to complete a spell, finally rendering the rabbit she'd fallen in love with into a man (who'd been stuck as a 6-foot-tall talking rabbit since the spell went awry back in Australia).

No, I am not kidding. Unfortunately.

I originally thought that the fantasy element of this book was just that there were talking rabbits. The first time the eponymous rabbit Basajaun spoke to Cora, she didn't seem at all surprised. (My reaction probably would have been, "Holy crap! A talking rabbit!") Fine... I'll suspend disbelief and imagine that rabbits who can talk (and smile, apparently) aren't something to call the newspaper about. But then in the last half of the book, all that magic and spell stuff started to creep in, and it just didn't feel right. It felt forced. Actually, everything felt forced. I didn't understand for a long time why the townspeople went along with the Pastor, since he was obviously crazy. His metaphor about the parallel between the rabbits and sin might have worked... if we'd been shown a town that was obviously sinful. But we're not shown much about the town at all, other than in one scene where all the farm hands are whooping it up with a bunch of whores in a farmhouse. That didn't seem that unusual to me. Cora also mentions something about the town not being a very good place for women; but again, we're not really shown that. (It's also a bit confusing as to why the author says this story takes place in Europe. The human characters have names like Wayne, Cora, Henry, and Sam. There seems to be no reason why this couldn't have been set in England or the U.S.A., so the names have me a bit confused.)

And, since this is young adult fiction, we've got to have a bit of pedophilia in there. Never mind that Cora is twelve. She's obviously old enough to make the decision to turn into a rabbit and become Basajaun's mate (and I got the feeling she only did so because she'd already lost everything in the human world; her decision seemed a bit defeatist to me). Let's set aside the furry fandom aspect for a moment and just mention again that Cora is twelve. Not twenty-two. Twelve. Why, oh, why do young adult books always have to have old men (or rabbits) lusting after young girls? Yes, Cora takes the place of the baby so that Nellie can complete the spell and turn her rabbit boyfriend into a human. There had to be a balance, you see. (As far as I know, rabbits only live for about 10 years. So if Cora turned into a rabbit, shouldn't she have instantly died of old age? And if Nellie's boyfriend was a fully mature rabbit, why did he end up being a handsome young man? Shouldn't he have been at least middle-aged?)

Let's also not forget the marmot ex machina (don't ask). With all these talking animals (and the age of the main character), I wasn't sure if I was reading a young adult novel or a middle grade one. The speech was all very juvenile, and at times I really felt like I was reading fan fiction written by a pre-teen. People (even adults) kept saying "yup" instead of "yes". (Coincidentally -- or perhaps not -- "yup" entered our language in 1906.) But then I hit the part about the human girls developing romantic feelings for rabbits and I wondered if I'd stumbled onto some sort of kinky adult book...

But my biggest complaint with this book was the writing itself. It was absolutely dismal. I felt embarrassed at first, as though I was reading someone's first draft that they didn't want the public to see. It was that bad. I could never quite get a handle on the point of view. It started out as limited omniscient, but then you'd suddenly get a glimpse into another character's thoughts for a couple of sentences. It was quite odd and completely disrupted the flow.

Then there were all the outright mistakes. Despite what Fantasy Book Review claims, this book is not "well-written and for a self-published book, very precise." The assertion that "the sentence structure is firm and there are amazingly few typos" is just ridiculous. I can think of a number of typos and mistakes off the top of my head: the author wrote chose instead of choose; loose instead of lose; they instead of the; got instead of go; rabbits instead of rabbits'; and Nellie eye's instead of Nellie's eyes. There were plenty more small mistakes, too, as well as a number of silly "said bookisms". There were also some problems with the visual breaks. A couple of them were placed at the bottoms of pages, and I tended to miss them... which led to confusion when the scene subsequently changed. There were also a number of breaks that seemed to be missing altogether.

However, the biggest single mistake was that the author didn't seem to know how to properly punctuate dialogue. I encountered this to a lesser degree in Helen Stringer's Spellbinder. The author would write a bit of dialogue and then, instead of a speech attribution, would tack on the next sentence with a comma. I encountered this in the first few pages of Basajaun and my heart sank. Little did I know how bad it would be. This is done on nearly every page of the book (or at least every page where there is dialogue).

The thing is, this probably would have been caught if Van Deuren had published through a traditional publisher. The problem with self-publishing is that you have to do everything yourself... and that includes editing. The author claims that she wrote the first draft in nine months and then revised on and off for eight months. I find that a little difficult to believe, considering all the mistakes in the book (if you went through it with a red pen, you'd have more red text than the New Testament!). But if it is true then she really needed to hire a copy-editor. If you don't have the skills to do something, then you should hire someone who does.

So, all in all, I'm left with more questions than answers (Why did European characters all have Anglo names? Why are these girls sexually attracted to rabbits? How did a six-foot-tall rabbit make his way from Australia to Europe without being noticed?) and a bit of a sour taste in my mouth with regards to self-published books. Do not listen to the glowing blurbs and reviews; you'll regret having done so. Rosemary Van Deuren is a good visual artist... but she should probably stick to cover design and leave the actual writing to someone else.

(When I read Spellbinder, I honestly didn't think I would come across another book that had worse writing. I don't really like having to give negative values, but since I gave the writing in Spellbinder a -2, it's only fair that I continue with that system here and give the writing in Basajaun what it deserves. Hence the -4.)

Plot: 1/5
Characters: 1/5
Pace: 2/5
Writing: -4/5
Originality: 2/5

Overall: 0.4 out of 5
(so bad it killed the ladybug!)

In My Mailbox (16)

This week, I got a book I've been looking at for a while. It's a self-published work, but I'm already impressed by the professional look of the cover. The story sounds intriguing, too.

I'm in a rabbity mood, I guess. We've got our own "rogue" bunny living in our backyard; it looks much like the rabbit on the cover. It's fun to just watch it eat the weeds that are growing in the lawn (and the weedy lawn is probably the reason why he took up residence in our yard rather than in the neighbours').

Basajaun
by Rosemary Van Deuren

In the world of the rabbits, she is hailed as a savior. In the world of men, a holy man wants her dead. She is twelve years old. In an isolated European farm town in 1906, a Pastor known as 'the rabbit killer' is preaching that the overrun of rabbits is a parallel for sin and corruption. But when Cora - a farmer's daughter - befriends a rogue rabbit named Basajaun, she becomes enmeshed in a hierarchy of sentient rabbit armies and ceremony. Soon the secret behind the rabbits' plight is unraveling, and Cora is fighting to save the lives of those she loves - as well as her own.



What was in your "mailbox" this week?



In My Mailbox was started by Kristi of The Story Siren.

On My Wishlist (1)

On My Wishlist is a meme hosted at Book Chick City.

As you can see from the widget in my sidebar (if you're patient enough to watch all the covers cycle through), I have quite a few books on my wishlist. Here are a few that I can't wait to get my hands on:

The Puzzle Ring
by Kate Forsyth

Hannah Rose Brown is twelve years old when she finds out that her family is cursed. Desperate to find the truth about her father's disappearance, she travels to her ancestral home in Scotland, and discovers a chain of dark secrets that plunge her into different worlds, timeframes and dangers...

This one looks so good! And I've heard good things about it, too. At the moment, it appears to be most readily available in the UK. I did find it for sale on Amazon.ca, but it's got one heck of a wait time. So I think I'll wait until it's released in the U.S.A. Does anyone have any idea when that'll be?




Basajaun
by Rosemary Van Deuren

In the world of the rabbits, she is hailed as a savior.
In the world of men, a holy man wants her dead.
She is twelve years old.

In an isolated European farm town in 1906, a Pastor known as 'the rabbit killer' is preaching that the overrun of rabbits is a parallel for sin and corruption. But when Cora - a farmer's daughter - befriends a rogue rabbit named Basajaun, she becomes enmeshed in a hierarchy of sentient rabbit armies and ceremony. Soon the secret behind the rabbits plight is unraveling, and Cora is fighting to save the lives of those she loves - as well as her own.

I'm not usually drawn to self-published books, but this one looks pretty interesting (and the cover's not bad, either). The reviews I've heard are pretty positive, too.




Charlotte Sometimes
by Penelope Farmer

It's natural to feel a little out of place when you're the new girl, but when Charlotte Makepeace wakes up after her first night at boarding school, she's baffled: everyone thinks she's a girl called Clare Mobley, and even more shockingly, it seems she has traveled forty years back in time to 1918. In the months to follow, Charlotte wakes alternately in her own time and in Clare's. And instead of having only one new set of rules to learn, she also has to contend with the unprecedented strangeness of being an entirely new person in an era she knows nothing about. Her teachers think she's slow, the other girls find her odd, and, as she spends more and more time in 1918, Charlotte starts to wonder if she remembers how to be Charlotte at all. If she doesn't figure out some way to get back to the world she knows before the end of the term, she might never have another chance.

This is a bit of an old one (first published in 1969), but I've never read it and it looks really good. I love a good time-travel story.




Brightly Woven
by Alexandra Bracken

When Wayland North brings rain to a region that's been dry for over ten years, he's promised anything he'd like as a reward. He chooses the village elder's daughter, sixteen-year-old Sydelle Mirabel, who is a skilled weaver and has an unusual knack for repairing his magical cloaks. Though Sydelle has dreamt of escaping her home, she's hurt that her parents relinquish her so freely and finds herself awed and afraid of the slightly ragtag wizard who is unlike any of the men of magic in the tales she's heard. Still, she is drawn to this mysterious man who is fiercely protective of her and so reluctant to share his own past.

The pair rushes toward the capital, intent to stop an imminent war, pursued by Reuel Dorwan (a dark wizard who has taken a keen interest in Sydelle) and plagued by unusually wild weather. But the sudden earthquakes and freak snowstorms may not be a coincidence. As Sydelle discovers North's dark secret and the reason for his interest in her and learns to master her own mysterious power, it becomes increasingly clear that the fate of the kingdom rests in her fingertips. She will either be a savior, weaving together the frayed bonds between Saldorra and Auster, or the disastrous force that destroys both kingdoms forever.

This one hasn't been released yet, but it's close. Only a few more weeks to go! It sounds like the type of fantasy story I'd like.

Of course there's more on my wishlist. But I need to save some books for future weeks!