Zoe E. Whitten's blog

Divergent faced an uphill battle to capture my interest because I’m not usually big on dystopias. The setting of the book didn’t quite grab me, but I liked the main character Beatrice, and decided to see where the story led. In this decayed future, a city of people have divided up into the factions that they see as being most virtuous. This leads to people being factionless too, and already this perfect world is straining with political problems because only one faction governs. Obviously, not everyone is going to be happy with that setup.

When the children from each faction turn sixteen, they are given a “simulation serum” that is supposed to assess which faction they belong with. Beatrice’s results are inconclusive, and she is told she is divergent, and that this is something she must keep secret. She is also told she must decide which faction she will go to, because her test results are inconclusive.

Beatrice chooses to leave her family and join the Dauntless faction, who prize bravery, but Beatrice also remains selfless as she was raised to be in the Abnegation faction. The book mainly follows her initiation into her faction, and Tris has to deal with bullies, and at one point with the betrayal of a friend. As her training progresses, she also begins to learn more about the connections between the Dauntless and Erudite factions, and she finds out why being divergent is so dangerous to the scheming faction leaders.

Beatrice’s story was so intense that I swept through the last 300 pages in one day. I like that she’s gifted but not totally unique. There are others like her, and while she is gifted, she isn’t super special either. I liked the cast around Beatrice, including her romantic interest Tobias, AKA: Four. Dauntless initiation is shown as a grim and terrifying ordeal, with failures becoming factionless. With failure not being an option, every test and rite of passage is tense, and the book hums along at wild pace.

The ending is a bit of a shock, and for once a dystopia doesn’t have my eye twitching over unlikely rescues, because lots of people didn’t get rescued. It’s kind of an ugly ending, but one that fits in with the rest of the story. It does set up well for the next book, and I’ll be looking to pick up Insurgent soon.

I give Divergent 4 stars, and recommend it to fans of dystopia YA. It’s not often that I drop everything to spend a full day and night reading, and while this wasn’t “the best book ever” it certainly kept me guessing to the end. The pages flew by fast, and I kept going, “Okay, just one more chapter.” Definitely qualified as a page-turner, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

The Family: Liam is the second novel I’ve read from KV Taylor, though I’ve also read a few of her short stories and a lot of her paranormal and supernatural romances under the pen name Katey Hawthorne. In this new series, the central monsters are vampires, something like a cross between Anne Rice and John Lindqvist.

The main character Liam is a bi-curious college student who thinks he’s straight until he catches the attention of his dorm roommate Gianni. Gianni is everything Liam isn’t, sophisticated, spoiled, and self-assured, while Liam is an emotionally wounded farmer’s kid who sill isn’t sure what he wants to be. But once Gianni has taken an interest in him, his course is set to become a monster as ruthless as Gianni.

I like all the characters, even the bit characters like James, Madison and Aldo. I very much liked the kind of vampires covered in this story, and the romantic scenes were certainly attention grabbing. Liam’s swift change raises him to delirious happiness, but his positive outlook doesn’t last long before he begins to question what he’s becoming. He rejects Gianni rather harshly and returns to his family, and there he learns that he can’t really go home before Gianni arrives to take him back.

There’s some other stuff that happens after this point, but the story seems to walk away from a major plot point and never comes back to it. I can’t say what without spoiling it, but once this seeming threat is introduced, the story wanders off in a different direction, and there’s only a few fleeting references made to it again.

I know this is a first book in a series, but the ending left me feeling like there should have been another hundred pages or so. There’s a couple of introductions of conflicts, but only one of these gets resolved. The other much bigger conflict is left hanging, and I felt like sputtering, “But…but what about Aldo?” And for that matter, I wonder if book two will get back around to Madison. I rather liked her. But even if it doesn’t, I wanted to know more about this other mysterious faction of vampires that are running a cult in the middle of nowhere.

Overall I liked the characters, but I felt like story was all ramp and no jump. I liked the ride, and I’ll be looking for the next book in the series. It is a small kind of complaint, “I wish there was more to it.” But setting that aside, this is a bloody vampire tale with sometimes sympathetic monsters and lots of rough sex between  consenting guys. I give Liam 4 stars, and would recommend it to fans of Anne Rice’s work who wish Lestat could have had a hot romantic relationship with a hotter, prettier clone of himself. So, like 200% more hot sex and maybe two-thirds less existential blues and self-pity. And that’s not a bad combination for me.

In what may start a trend for me, I got this book because someone on Twitter commented, “People who read Cassandra Clare, you deserve everything that happens to you.” I’m actually finding lot of music and books based not on rave reviews, but on the snarling outrage of the haters. In this particular case, that hate isn’t just for the story or for the writer, but for EVERYONE who ever picked up this book and liked it. And I’m like “Dayum, that’s some serious hate going on up in there. What the hell did the writer do to earn this kind of rage?” So I bought City of Bones, and I put it fairly high on my TBR pile. I was totally ready to hate this too, seeing as how someone wished doom and gloom upon anyone who liked it.

Now that I’m done, I have to wonder what’s wrong with that poor woman who would wish bad karma on readers for liking this book, because I can’t really find anything offensive about it. I can’t say it blew my mind or that it was the greatest book ever, and there were some parts of the character development that bugged me. Often the later chapters made me roll my eyes for how contrived the plot became, and for the dialogue becoming strained. But there was never an eyelid twitching scene, nor a “throw the book down” moment.

As far as YA goes, I found it to be a nice change of pace. It had third person perspective, and it had a heroine who wasn’t perfectly pretty. The story centers around Clary Fray, a girl who goes to a nightclub with her best friend and witnesses a murder that no one else can see. When she gets home, her mother is acting very strangely, and after having a fight, Clary leaves and goes to hang out with her friend. She meets one of the killers again, Jace, and he tells her that he has to take her to “The Institute” because she can see him, and “Mundanes” aren’t supposed to be able to see Shadowhunters. Clary gets a call from home just before her mother is kidnapped, and when she looks around, Jace has vanished again. So Clary runs home to a trashed apartment and an ugly monster.

When Clary first encounters a demon in her home, she manages through blind luck to kill it herself, and she doesn’t need Jace to act like the hero to jump in and save the day. Also unique is how there was no instant attraction between the hero and heroine. Jace certainly does all the insulting and self-centered bragging that you’d expect from YA male characters, but Clary doesn’t melt over him, nor does she feel like there’s “just something about him.” At one point, she even slaps him for being a jerk, and I was thinking, “Hey, for once, a YA story might break the mold. How novel!” Continue reading →

When I started Witch Way to Turn, I wanted to like it, and to like the main character, Breena Cross. The story is third-person perspective, something I don’t see often enough in YA, and the main character isn’t a virgin, a truly rare trait in a genre that spends a lot of time equating non-virgin status as solely a route for sluts and/or teen villains.

But very early on, the story began falling into a pattern that turned me off from Breena, and then from all of the characters. Once I’d lost my like of them, nothing else clicked for me.

I should mention that there’s nothing wrong with the writing itself. There’s no mechanical errors, nor did I come across any typos. Were I to judge a book solely on the mechanical writing quality, this is a top notch perfect effort.

BUT the first problem remains the biggest for two thirds of the story. Early on, Bree comes home to find her drunk foster father about to rape her younger sister Jenny. Bree suddenly manifests witch powers that stun Stan, and after a short stay with a vampire, Myles, Bree is kicked out of the house by her foster mother, Norma.

So far no problem…except from this moment forward the story runs on an infuriating pattern. Bree thinks, I have to worry about Jenny, who is living with an abusive foster mother and foster sister, and a potential rapist foster father. AND YET, whenever Myles or Orin appear in the story, all she can think is Ooh, hot guy. Maybe I can get some. I only wish I was exaggerating about how often this happens, but seriously, it’s the MAIN CONFLICT for two thirds of the book. The first few times this happened, I had to put the book down for several weeks because I wasn’t sure I could handle this. And having finished the book, I sometimes wish I’d just stopped back around chapter 12 and given up. Continue reading →

Itsy Bitsy is a pretty compact short story, but the file I got looked longer because it has preview chapters for Handling the Undead and Harbour, both of which I’ve already read.

The premise is that a paparazzi is waiting for a couple to appear at a private swimming pool so he can take a photo of their romantic rendezvous and make big bucks. Only, the pictures he takes aren’t what he expected.

In some ways, it left me wanting more of everything. Lindqvist’s work is normally full of great visual details, but this is more sparse. There’s not as much creepiness here as in his full novels either, just a hint of something supernatural before the ride is over. It’s like a roller coaster that goes up and down one hill, and then pulls back into the station. It begs the question, “Where’s the rest of the ride?”

I can’t say I disliked it, but I really did wish for more. More detail, more information on the ending, and more of chance to be scared. So I give this 3 stars. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely not Lindqvist’s best writing.

I have conflicted feelings about this book, some of them still coming from out of the first book, Shiver, which I enjoyed the first half of, but hated the second half because it felt so sloppy. Linger in some ways addresses my problems with the first book, but it also creates more questions about whether my problems with the first book were genuine flaws, or intentional misinformation due to an unreliable narrator.

To fully address the story here, I need to back up to explain Shiver. In the Wolves of Mercy Falls, the idea is given that the wolves change seasonally, that cold is the trigger for change, and that at a certain age, werewolves stop shifting and just turn into wolves. From there, they live about fifteen years, and then they die from the wolf reaching their natural old age life span. BUT, suddenly for dramatic effect, all the wolves are changing and this will be their final winter as humans. Even Sam, who is a young man, is going to have this happen to him, and to me it felt extremely lazy. It felt like a fake grab at the heartstrings for added tension, and I had a hard time believing it.

My next problem was how the resolution to Grace not changing after being bitten was that she got locked in a hot car by her father, with a fever, on the hottest day of the year. This is child abuse, and when it happens in the real world, parents get arrested and lose custody of their kids. There’s no punishment of Grace’s father, and even Grace just treats this revelation as a eureka moment for helping Sam. It doesn’t really bug her that her absentee parents are vile shits. Everyone else knows this, but Grace comes across as oblivious that she’s a victim of abuse.

There were other little gripes I had, but these were the two BIG problems that left me so very dissatisfied with the first book. Yet, I’d already bought Linger, so I knew at some point I’d have to sit down and read it. And almost a year after I read the first book, I finally did read the second volume. Continue reading →