Review - My Book of Life by Angel

My Book of Life by Angel
by Martine Leavitt
Date: 2012
Publisher: Groundwood Books
Reading level: YA
Book type: verse novel
Pages: 256
Format: e-book
Source: library

When sixteen-year-old Angel meets Call at the mall, he buys her meals and says he loves her, and he gives her some candy that makes her feel like she can fly. Pretty soon she's addicted to his candy, and she moves in with him. As a favor, he asks her to hook up with a couple of friends of his, and then a couple more. Now Angel is stuck working the streets at Hastings and Main, a notorious spot in Vancouver, Canada, where the girls turn tricks until they disappear without a trace, and the authorities don't care. But after her friend Serena disappears, and when Call brings home a girl who is even younger and more vulnerable than her to learn the trade, Angel knows that she and the new girl have got to find a way out.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

I love how verse novels can be short on words but long on impact.  I didn't think this would necessarily be my type of book.  Historical fiction about a teenaged prostitute?  That's a little bit out of my comfort zone.  But My Book of Life by Angel was a story that I just couldn't put down.  I read it all in one sitting, transfixed by the awfulness of the main character's situation and the lyrical beauty with which she told the story.

This book takes place during the time when sex-trade workers were disappearing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; this happened in the late 1990s.  It must have been an absolutely terrifying time if you were in that line of work; knowing what we know now about what was actually going on makes you feel fear for the characters in the story.  Robert Pickton was eventually convicted of the murders of six women and charged with the murders of twenty more.  In the book, there are references to a "Mr. P.", presumably Pickton; one of Angel's co-workers warns her about him and his van, hinting that he may be behind the disappearances of the women.  But the police wouldn't listen, and the terror continued for years.

Against this backdrop is the story of Angel, a sixteen-year-old runaway who falls into the lifestyle after being lured there by her "boyfriend", Call.  Call is a real piece of work, though he seems to think of himself as an upstanding citizen, an entrepreneur who's trying to clean up the trade by getting it legalized.  He spends much of the book threatening and blackmailing Angel, until she finds a reason to stand up to him: to keep Melli, an eleven-year-old girl that Call wants to groom into a prostitute, safe.

I don't know if it was due to the verse format, or if this is just a really skilled author, but the characters were all so well developed -- despite the lack of physical descriptions.  We get to know these people through what they say (and how they say it) and what they do (and how they do it).  Leavitt makes the outcasts of society into people that we truly come to care about.  They all have their own stories, their own reasons for being where they are.  Even the johns were unique and colourful characters; they were more than just one-dimensional, stereotypical villains.

I'm not quite sure who I would recommend this book to.  Fans of verse novels... contemporary fiction... historical fiction...  Or maybe just fans of beautiful words.  (Despite the subject matter, this book is not overtly graphic.  There isn't even any swearing.)

Even if you think this book is not your thing, it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.  It's a quick read, and you never know: you might find you really enjoy it.

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

Overall: 4.57 out of 5

Review - Vamplayers

Vamplayers
by Rusty Fischer
Date: 2011
Publisher: Medallion Press
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 384
Format: e-book
Source: library

At the Afterlife Academy of Exceptionally Dark Arts, Lily Fielding is a measly trainee who dreams of one day becoming a Savior—those who visit vampire-infested high schools and put down the undead with their deadly crossbows. When Lily and her classmates Alice and Cara begin their latest assignment, it seems like just another run-of-the-mill gig: they’re to simply spot the Vamplayer—part vampire, part player—identify the popular girl he’s set his sights on, and befriend her before the Vamplayer can turn her to do his bidding. Before long, however, the Vamplayer sets his sights on Lily's friends, and she is left to face the threat alone while protecting her friends from the dark forces she has sworn to resist.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This book just didn't work for me, and there are a number of reasons why.  While I did somewhat enjoy the first part, I spent much of the remainder of the book in a state of confusion.  Things that I expected to be explained never were.  The characterization kind of fell apart.  When you have a group with a name like the Sisterhood of Dangerous Girlfriends that trains at a place called the Afterlife Academy of Exceptionally Dark Arts, you'd expect this book to be a lot funnier and fluffier than it was.  But after a certain point, it started to take itself way too seriously... and that's the point where I couldn't take it seriously anymore.

A lot of the time, the action was mixed up and I couldn't tell what was going on.  I felt like the author thought we -- as readers -- were in her head and could see the scenes unfold the way she did.  Unfortunately, there often wasn't enough information given (or, if there was, it was contradictory).  Some things were just plain stupid.  The girls in the Afterlife Academy train on a Simulator, which is basically a 1970s-style house full of booby traps (mostly wooden stakes that get triggered when you step in the wrong place).  At one point in the story, Lily says that maybe they needed a simulator for dealing with a Vamplayer's seduction rather than his fighting skills.  Um, yeah!  That would have been a lot more useful.  I mean, how often are you going to be skulking through a booby-trapped house?  Then there was the whole deal with vampires being "turned".  I thought they already were "turned"!  Isn't that why they're vampires?  It was never explained how, exactly, this could happen.  With the vampire mythology especially, I felt like I had missed a huge chunk of information.  Why can these vampires tolerate sunlight?  Why was Lily so clueless about the effects of communion wine on a vampire?  What's with the flying?  How do these vampires manipulate such long fangs, and why are they necessary?  What's the deal with the claws?  Why did Lily have such little knowledge about the hierarchy of vampires that she thought the Royals were just a myth?

Lily, as a main character, was pretty bland.  She's got a dark ponytail and she's a vampire.  Okay, fine.  She's also not very interesting.  She doesn't have a heck of a lot of emotions, either, and when she does have them, you end up scratching your head.  She thinks Tristan is a horrible, evil sleaze, but she's not ruling out a relationship with him.  (What?)  She watches vampires dissolve into puddles of goo in front of her, and she barely reacts.  She falls for a guy, but all she seems to like about him is his hair (at least, that's what she keeps going on about).  She's clueless about what's going on with the Vamplayer, and even when the evidence is staring her in the face, she stubbornly insists that it can't be so!  The rest of the characters were pretty unremarkable as well.  Lily's friends, Alice and Cara, seem like they were just there to create conflict and move the plot along.  The human boys, Grover and Zander, were okay, but even then they weren't written well enough for me to get really attached to them.  Another problem was that all the action seemed to happen in a vacuum.  This story supposedly took place at a boarding school... but we rarely see any of the other students, giving the impression that the main characters are rambling around in this Gothic building all by themselves.  It just seemed odd.

While reading this, I often felt like I was reading a sequel, and the first book must've been where everything was explained.  I've read that this is, in fact, a companion novel to Zombies Don't Cry.  Companion novel... not sequel.  As such, I expected a lot more explanation for the world these characters were inhabiting.  As it was, I felt like I'd been dropped in the middle of their world without any sort of explanation or guidance.  That's not a bad thing... if the world-building helps flesh things out as the story goes along.  Unfortunately, in this case, it didn't.

Plot: 3/5
Characters: 1/5
Pace: 3/5
Writing: 3/5
Editing: 2/5
Originality: 3/5
Enjoyment: 2/5

Overall: 2.43 out of 5

Review - Blink Once

Blink Once
by Cylin Busby
Date: 2012
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 288
Format: e-book
Source: library

West is a high school senior who has everything going for him until an accident leaves him paralyzed. Strapped down in his hospital bed, slipping in and out of consciousness, West is terrified and alone. Until he meets Olivia.

She's the girl next door-sort of. A patient in the room next to his, only Olivia can tell what West is thinking, and only Olivia seems to know that the terrible dreams he's been having are not just a result of his medication. Yet as West comes to rely on Olivia-to love her, even-certain questions pull at him: Why has Olivia been in the hospital for so long? And what does it mean that she is at the center of his nightmares? But the biggest question of all comes when West begins to recover and learns that the mysterious girl he's fallen in love with has a secret he could never have seen coming.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This was a book that should have been interesting and engaging.  But it failed to draw me in emotionally, and so I can't get that worked up about anything that happened during the course of the story.  It didn't help that the writing and editing were not that great, and these two things kept drawing me out of the flow.  I kept getting tripped up by sentences that didn't seem to make any sense; I'm not sure if the author was going for a stream-of-consciousness thing, but these rambling musings just seemed like comma splices to me, and they messed up the syntax of a lot of the sentences.  There were also some weird tense shifts throughout the book.  Some were intentional.  Some seemed more like outright mistakes that should have been caught by an editor.  And, finally, West is a junior, not a senior, a fact that's mentioned numerous times throughout the book.  I don't know why the synopsis says he's a senior.

Then there was the whole deal with West and his accident.  There was a lot of medical-type information in the book, and you could tell that the author had done some research on the subject.  However, in places there were not enough details.  For example, we're not given quite enough information about West's condition in the beginning.  We know he's paralyzed, strapped to a bed, and has a tube to help him breathe.  He resorts to communicating by blinking, because of the breathing tube.  I assumed that that meant it was in his mouth.  But it wasn't.  He'd had a tracheotomy, which led me to wonder why he had to blink to communicate with Olivia.  I know that not everyone can read lips that well, but surely most people can tell the difference between "yes" and "no".  Maybe this was all so the book could be called Blink Once.

I was very disappointed by the characters and their relationships.  For the predicament that West finds himself in, he seems awfully stoic about the whole situation.  Would a 17-year-old boy really be that calm about the prospect of spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair?  And then there was the relationship between West and Olivia.  I kind of suspected Olivia's secret for a while, so it wasn't that much of a surprise.  It also didn't have that much of an emotional impact for me (possibly because I'd seen it coming from so far away).  And the ending was just... blah.  There are things that West could have done (or even seriously considered doing) that would have brought up some interesting ethical and moral questions.  As it was, the ending was convenient, trite, and a little bit sappy.  What came out of West's narration in the last few sentences just didn't ring true.

While some parts of the premise reminded me a little bit of Rear Window, it wasn't anywhere near that interesting or exciting.  The mystery part of the plot felt a bit like an afterthought; had that part been expanded a little more, it might have made for a better story.  Though, ultimately, when you can't connect with the characters, there may not be much that can be done to make you like a particular book.

Plot: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Pace: 3/5
Writing: 2/5
Editing: 2/5
Originality: 2/5
Enjoyment: 2/5

Overall: 2.14 out of 5

Review - Skellig

Skellig (Skellig #1)
by David Almond
Date: 1998
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Reading level: MG
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 208
Format: e-book
Source: library

Michael was looking forward to moving into a new house. But now his baby sister is ill, his parents are frantic, and Doctor Death has come to call. Michael feels helpless. Then he steps into the crumbling garage and encounters a strange being who changes his world forever.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

On the surface, this is a short middle-grade contemporary fantasy about a boy who discovers something extraordinary in a dilapidated garage.  But I suspect that this book is deeper than outward appearances would suggest.  It's about evolution, about being aware of the little things that we don't always notice, and about how love and connection have the power to heal.  And all of that in a thin volume that you can probably read in an afternoon...

Since the book is so short and the plot is so straightforward, I don't really want to say too much about it for fear of giving anything away.  But I did really enjoy it.  The writing was spare and made an interesting use of repetition.  I liked Michael, the main character, and his friend Mina brought some interesting tidbits into the story.  She's homeschooled and her current obsession is things that fly, so we learn plenty about birds.  There are also numerous references to the works of William Blake.  Skellig was an interesting character, too, though I wish that he hadn't remained so much of a mystery.  We never do find out how he ended up in Michael's father's garage in the first place.

I'm not sure if all the kids who've had to read this book in school would agree with me, but as an adult who read the book simply for enjoyment, I have to say that it was pretty good.  Fans of paranormal or contemporary fantasy will probably enjoy this one.

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

Overall: 4.29 out of 5

Review - The Raven Boys

The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle #1)
by Maggie Stiefvater
Date: 2012
Publisher: Scholastic
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 416
Format: e-book
Source: Amazon

"There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love... or you killed him."

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

I am completely exhausted after reading this book.  When you go into a novel and find out fairly quickly that one of the main characters is doomed by a prophecy, it's difficult not to read every scene after that with a certain sense of trepidation.  I anticipated that I would, at some point, be on my knees with the book held aloft, shouting, "Why, Stiefvater?  Why?!"  Okay, not really.  But I felt like that might be a distinct possibility... until the point where I glanced at my Kindle app's progress bar and saw that it was at 99%.  This was a great 416-page lead-in for a sequel, I'll give the author that.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy myself before the story abruptly, unsatisfyingly ended.  The plot and the promise of the plot were interesting and unique.  But what I really enjoyed were the characters, particularly the boys.  The novel switches points of view from chapter to chapter.  We get to see through the eyes of Blue, Gansey, Adam, and Whelk (the boys' Latin teacher), and through them, we also get to know Ronan and Noah and the psychic women in Blue's life.  Unfortunately, I found just about every character more interesting and well developed than Blue.  I'm not sure if that was intentional or not; in the story, she acts as an amplifier for the psychic women's gifts.  For me, she seemed that way in the narrative as well, only serving as a sounding board or a piece of scenery that doesn't do much except support everything around it.  If Blue's point of view had been the only one we'd seen, it would have been very disappointing.  Luckily, we got to experience parts of the story through other eyes as well.  My favourite character was probably Gansey, who was nothing like I expected.  While it could be argued that Ronan and Adam were a bit stereotypical in their roles (alcohol-loving Irish scrapper and downtrodden abused kid, respectively), Gansey was something else altogether.  I appreciated the fact that he was different, and that he tried so hard to find something to believe in.

The only other book I've read by this author was Shiver, so I knew I could count on some fairly solid writing here.  I wasn't disappointed until near the end, when a bunch of what I assume were typos started to creep in (though one never knows if it's just something unique to the Kindle edition).  I was, however, quite confounded by the very last sentence of the book.  It made no sense to me, and I'm not sure if it was supposed to be some really obscure reference to something that's going to happen in the second book, or if my copy is plagued by a syntax-impaired typographical error.

As much as I enjoyed the journey, breathless as I was for most of it, I'm kind of hesitant to read the next book in the series for fear that I'll run into more of the same problems that plagued this story.  I didn't find that much got resolved in the way of the plot.  So many loose ends were left hanging and the foreshadowing went kaput, so that it almost doesn't feel like I finished a book at all; it feels like I merely finished a chapter.

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

Overall: 3.71 out of 5

Top Ten Tuesday - Top Ten Books on My Fall 2013 TBR List

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

This week's topic is Top Ten Books on My Fall 2013 TBR List.  Subject to change, of course, because I'll probably find something at the library or in the bargain bin at the bookstore... and the TBR list will be even longer!  Here are the books I'd like to get to this fall:

10. The Assassin's Curse by Cassandra Clarke

9. Feed by M. T. Anderson

8. Jessica Rules the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey

7. Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

6. A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz

5. 11 Birthdays by Wendy Mass

4. Evernight by Claudia Gray

3. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

2. Plain Kate by Erin Bow

1. Skellig by David Almond

In My Mailbox (58)

Borrowed from the library:

Alligator Pie
by Dennis Lee

Dennis Lee won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1972 for his poetic meditation on Canadian identity in Civil Elegies, but he made perhaps his most enduring contribution to Canadian nationalism two years later with a short collection of near-nonsense rhymes written for a much younger set. Alligator Pie, which remains the classic Canadian bedtime book, is written as if Mother Goose had the Latin name Branta canadensis, from William Lyon Mackenzie King, who "loved his mother like anything," to Trois-Rivières, which, of course, rhymes with "eat your hair."

Escape from Eden
by Elisa Nader

Since the age of ten, Mia has lived under the iron fist of the fundamentalist preacher who lured her mother away to join his fanatical family of followers. In Edenton, a supposed “Garden of Eden” deep in the South American jungle, everyone follows the Reverend’s strict but arbitrary rules—even the mandate of whom they can marry. Now sixteen, Mia dreams of slipping away from the armed guards who keep the faithful in, and the curious out. When the rebellious and sexy Gabriel, a new boy, arrives with his family, Mia sees a chance to escape.

But the scandalous secrets the two discover beyond the compound’s façade are more shocking than anything they ever imagined. While Gabriel has his own terrible secrets, he and Mia bond together, more than friends and freedom fighters. But is there time to think of each other as they race to stop the Reverend’s paranoid plan to free his flock from the corrupt world? Can two teenagers crush a criminal mastermind? And who will die in the fight to save the ones they love from a madman who’s only concerned about his own secrets?

The Lake and the Library
by S. M. Beiko

Wishing for something more than her adventureless life, 16-year-old Ash eagerly awaits the move she and her mother are taking from their dull, drab life in the prairie town of Treade. But as Ash counts the days, she finds her way into a mysterious, condemned building on the outskirts of town—one that has haunted her entire childhood with secrets and questions. What she finds inside is an untouched library, inhabited by an enchanting mute named Li. Brightened by Li’s charm and his indulgence in her dreams, Ash becomes locked in a world of dusty books and dying memories, with Li becoming the attachment to Treade she never wanted. This haunting and romantic debut novel explores the blurry boundary between the real and imagined with a narrative that illustrates the power and potency of literacy.

Odette's Secrets
by Maryann Macdonald

For Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris, nowhere is safe. So when Odette Meyer’s father is sent to a Nazi work camp, Odette’s mother takes desperate measures to protect her, sending Odette deep into the French countryside. There, Odette pretends to be a peasant girl, even posing as a Christian–and attending Catholic masses–with other children. But inside, she is burning with secrets, and when the war ends Odette must figure out whether she can resume life in Paris as a Jew, or if she’s lost the connection to her former life forever. Inspired by the life of the real Odette Meyer, this moving free-verse novel is a story of triumph over adversity.

Stupid Perfect World
by Scott Westerfeld

In this future-set novella by bestselling author Scott Westerfeld, Kieran Black lives in a "perfect" world. Disease and starvation have been eradicated, sleep is unnecessary, and it takes no time at all to go from the Bahamas to the moon. But now Kieran has to take Scarcity, a class about how people lived in the bad old days. And as if sitting through an hour of Scarcity every day wasn't depressing enough, it's final projects time. Each student must choose some form of ancient hardship to experience for two whole weeks. Kieran chooses having to sleep eight hours a night, which doesn't seem too annoying.

Maria Borsotti has never thought much of Kieran, but she decides to take pity on him and help him out with his project. Soon, Kieran is sleeping and having vivid dreams, while Maria, whose Scarcity project is to give up all teenage hormone regulation, is experiencing emotions she never knew she had. As their assignments draw them closer together, they begin to wonder if the olden days weren't so bad. Maybe something has been missing from their perfect lives after all?

What was in your "mailbox" this week?


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