Book Reviews

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

 in Adult / Book Reviews / Books / Books-to-Movie / Older Readers / Young Adult by

Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd

a_monster_callsSummary

“An unflinching, darkly funny, and deeply moving story of a boy, his seriously ill mother, and an unexpected monstrous visitor.

At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting– he’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It’s ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd– whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself– Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.”

-From Amazon.com

Review

Holy…moses. This book was….wow. First off, you have to read this book in one sitting. It isn’t terribly long and isn’t a hard read at all, but you really can’t put it down because of what the book is about. It is not a book you can start and continue reading later because you always have questions and need to know what comes next and then the book just loses the power it has over you if you stop reading it half way. It HAS to be read at once and it will only take two hours of your life, so do it! Trust me.

The book honestly was nothing like I thought it was going to be. It was amazing, and powerful, and beautiful and holy shit did I need a box of tissues at the end. Just a warning. It’s not a happy book like many books are with a neat ending that makes you go ‘wow, that was such a good book’. This is the type of book that has you sitting there crying and questioning everything you know going ‘wow….that was…..SUCH a good book’. Just trust me when I say that you need a box of tissues handy and an empty room to cry in after.

The story was amazing! LIKE WHAT?! It is YA but I would classify this as older YA and honestly almost put it into the adult category because of the story and the kind of emotional levels it was operating on. Someone 16 may not understand everything going on emotionally but they would get the story while a 50 year old would completely be able to connect with the little boy in the book.

I thought The Monster was the coolest character as well. Think of like the BFG but instead of it being in a fantastical world, it was based in the real world and The Monster was…well it is just too hard to explain. Read it and it will all make sense to you.

I probably would have never read a book like this, or really noticed it because of the simple cover, but because the movie is coming out soon, I had to give it a read and I am so glad I did.

The cover of the book is beautiful and simple and that is one thing I really like about the book. There are illustrations within the book but instead of them being all colored and fancy, they are very simple and black and white. It just adds this kind of dream quality to the book!

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It was just something I had never experienced before and has me sitting there in awe of what was done with the book. The idea was created by Siobhan Dowd, who is a very impressive woman. She spent 20 years as a human rights campaigner for PEN as well as Amnesty International but she passed away at 47 years of age. Patrick Ness was then asked to write this book which was her idea and he did such an amazing job.

There is so much character development and you connect with Conor so well and are able to feel his pain.

Would I read this book again? Not for a few years probably as this is the kind of book you cannot read over and over again. Maybe you get a different message from it every time or find something new in it but it isn’t like a book you can pick up and just read. Besides the emotions which this book brings up, you just need time between readings.

I absolutely loved this book and cannot rave highly enough about it and you MUST check it out, especially before the movies comes out. The movie looks amazing and looks like it will stick extremely close to the book, which I am very happy of, but you have to read the book first.

The trailer is below, but keep in mind there are a few differences and you may think that the movie trailer looks a little Hollywood-ized, like they made it bigger and such. But in all honesty, it looks pretty damn close to the book and I’m very impressed.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Purchase the book here.

Happy Reading!!!!

Don’t forget the tissues.

 

Gideon’s War by Howard Gordon

 in Adult / Book Reviews / Books / Young Adult by

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Summary

“GIDEON DAVIS, whose behind-the-scenes negotiating skills have earned him the role of peacemaker in conflicts around the globe, knows more about hush-hush discussions in Capitol corridors than he does about hand-to-hand combat. But his more practical, tactical skills come into play when he’s called on by family friend and government bigwig Earl Parker to chaperone a rogue agent from Southeast Asia to D.C. The agent, Tillman Davis, has promised to turn himself in— but only to his brother, Gideon.

Although the two brothers have been estranged for years, Gideon cannot fathom how his brother could have turned into so ruthless a man. But when the plan for Tillman’s surrender goes awry and Earl Parker is taken hostage, Gideon is forced to embrace his dark side in order to evade hostile locals in war-torn Mohan to make his way to the Obelisk—the multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art oil rig that has been seized by terrorists led by Tillman himself. It is with the help of oil rig manager Kate Murphy that Gideon launches an unlikely one-man rescue.”

From Amazon.com

Review

I really did enjoy this book and read it surprisingly fast as well, considering I don’t have tons of time to just sit down and read at the moment.

A little bit about the author…

Howard Gordon—the longtime executive producer of the hit TV series 24—makes his fiction debut with a tale of political intrigue and international terrorism. Gideon Davis has just 48 hours to bring his rogue agent brother in—before a twisted global conspiracy turns deadly.

-From Amazon.com

So, with that in mind, this entire book felt like a perfect movie and I think that it would have made a perfect movie as well and hope that maybe one day a movie will be made out of this.

It had a lot of political kind of stuff going on, but not so much so that if you didn’t understand anything about how the U.S. government works you wouldn’t understand it. Most of the jargon used was to just help illustrate the situation but it didn’t make the reading any more difficult.

There wasn’t exactly tons of character development in this book but it didn’t really bother me because of the story. There was lots of action happening and it kept you interested. There were terrorists, there were Delta Teams, there were massive storms, there were epic underwater dives, there were oil rigs. I mean it had it all. It was almost like something out of a James Bond movie and I absolutely loved it. Since the author writes for TV, he knows what people like to read and he, honestly, nailed it.

While I wouldn’t consider this good writing, because the sentences were smaller and it didn’t really take much concentration to understand the story, the story itself was very entertaining and made me wanting to find out what happened. He had many suspenseful moments, where he would end the chapter, and then it may change back to Washington so you had to read that chapter before you could find out what happened back on the oil rig or something like that.

There wasn’t exactly tons of violence, except towards the end and it was only a little graphic, but decently realistic to how maybe a jihadist would treat a prisoner.

I also really liked how it wasn’t a perfect ending. Not everyone survived and not all of the larger characters survived either which was quite a change. It wasn’t a perfect and neat package in the end.

The cover was beautiful, as you hopefully saw either on my snapchat around when I started it (4th of July) or on my instagram, and if not, here it is again.

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I purchased this book for like 1 cent in a thrift store, with tons of other small books and it was a great bargain. I probably would have bought this book if I saw it in Barnes and Nobel or borrowed it from my library as this is exactly the kind of book that I love to read.

So I really do suggest checking it out. It’s more of an adult book but I could also qualify this as young adult. It’s more adult just because of the story idea with the political kind of stuff, but as a reading level, probably older YA.

Purchase it here!

And let me know what you think about it!

Happy Reading!

Patriarch Run by Benjamin Dancer

 in Adult / Adventure / Book Reviews / Books by

Patriarch Run by Benjamin DancerSummary

Nine years ago, Jack Erikson was deployed to China to protect the United States from a cyberattack. Now, suffering from a drug-induced amnesia, he is unable to recognize his own son. What Jack knows for sure is that an elite group of operators is determined to kill him.

What he does not yet remember is that he controls a cyber weapon powerful enough to return human civilization to the Stone Age. If Jack lives long enough to piece together his mission and his identity, he will be forced to choose between the fate of humankind and that of his own family.

From benjamindancer.com

Review

Unfortunately I really didn’t enjoy this book and due to time commitments I wasn’t able to finish the book. While this book does have a decent about of good reviews on Amazon, it really didn’t hook me and make me want to continue to read the book. Now let me make a disclaimer before I continue to review.

This is more of an adult novel and I understand that adult novels are not as fast paced as Young Adult novels, so in that aspect it was okay, but due to my personal time span that I can dedicate to a book to make a review based on authors requests, I need a book to catch my attention in a short-ish time span and help me get a good picture of what this book is.

I had a hard time figuring out just what was going on as it jumps around a lot between different characters and I struggled to figure out who was who and where they were and what was even going on.

The idea behind the entire book is definitely an interesting one, and based on the summary it really had me interested, but after starting the book, I had a hard time really getting into the book and find the motivation to finish reading it. I couldn’t find time to just sit down and read a large chunk so I struggled to get back into it every time I wanted to read it, and even when I did once find a period of time that I could read a chunk, I didn’t really GET into the reading like in other books where I could fly through it. I spent so much time understanding who’s point of view it was being written from that I stopped paying attention to the story and would have to go back. I did have a PDF version on my iPhone sent from the publisher so it was quite hard at times to figure out where a chapter ended to know that the voice would be changing to a different character, so it may be different if you purchase an actual copy.

But, it does have a lot of good reviews, as I said, on amazon so please don’t base your purchasing of this book just based off me. I’m sure many of the reviews were written by adults who find this as their kind of book. But as a young adult, this didn’t fit into my personal kind of reading category and I didn’t really enjoy it.

To purchase this book, click here.

Happy Reading!

Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol

 in Book Reviews / Books / Older Readers / Young Adult by

Summary

“Diary of a Madman is a farcical short story by Nikolai Gogol. Along with The Overcoat and The Nose, Diary of a Madman is considered to be one of Gogol’s greatest short stories. The tale centers on the life of a minor civil servant during the repressive era of Nicholas I. Following the format of a diary, the story shows the descent of the protagonist, Poprishchin, into insanity. Diary of a Madman, the only one of Gogol’s works written in first person, follows diary-entry format.”

-From Amazon.com

Review

So, I don’t think I would have ever read this short story but I had to read it for school and I have to say, that I really did enjoy it. While it definitely was a little confusing in a few places here and there, overall, it was quite enjoyable and a nice read.

During the beginning of the short story, it seemed pretty normal with everything which was happening. Poprishchin seemed like an average guy working in a really horrible job (even though he thought it was kinda decent) but as soon as he was heading to work, a few pages in, that was when reality started to get distorted and you realized that something was up. Dogs talked and he was able to understand them with ease and it seemed that not only did they talk, but they wrote as well, and wrote letters.

From that moment on it slowly started to show that the main protagonist was slightly off his rocker as he thought that he had a change at getting together with his bosses daughter though she was much younger than him and in a much higher societal class and he was much older than her and in a low societal class. As the story wore on, it became clear that the main character developed some mental disorder of some sort because things he believed and said clearly weren’t that of a normal person who knew where they stood either in society or knew about themselves and how they worked.

Almost towards the end, Poprishchin believed that he was the King of Spain due to some events and that was the turning point in the short story. I won’t say what happened in the end, as you have to read it, but it definitely ended quite interestingly.

It is a fairly quick read so sitting down and just diving into it shouldn’t take too much of your time, an hour, maybe two tops. I do recommend it as it was quite good and overall thought that it was one of the better reads that I’ve had to do for English class. It did have moments of being a little confusing with his thoughts as it was written in journal style, but not so much so that you couldn’t follow it.

Click here to read it online and enjoy! (Yes the link says Memoirs of a Madman but the official title is Diary of a Madman)

Let me know what you think.

One of the many covers offered.