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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.

 

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.

Gol (The Legends of Ansu) by J.W. Webb

 in Adventure / Book Events / Book Reviews / Books / Fantasy / Older Readers / Otherworldly / Young Adult by

Gol Book CoverSummary

“An island beset by the Sea God’s wrath. Once a mighty kingdom, now six provinces torn apart by treacherous barons. In one province, two young lovers strive to stay together when all else prises them apart.

Lissane and Erun must survive to guide their people through the coming storm. The odds are stacked against them. Erun, dreamer and fool, is chosen for a dark path, whilst Lissane is given away by her father the baron to wed the brutal son of a rival ruler. Meanwhile, at the far side of the world, a sorcerer has freed the fire demon, Ashmali, setting off a chain of events that could ultimately bring about Gol’s long foretold ruin.

Caught between rising seas, civil war, and approaching fire, the continent’s time is fast running out. Gol is book one in the forthcoming Legends of Ansu series. Within lies an epic tale of love, hatred, vengeance and destruction. In Gol, the high courage of a few individuals is all that stands against the will of fickle gods and the treachery of men.”

–From Amazon.com

Review

This was a fantastic book! I probably never would have found this book had it not been for the Books & The Bear book tour. I never really got into the Lord of the Rings series and was never really into that kind of story line where there were tons of characters and epic quests. I don’t know, I always found them kind of cliche. However, this book was really really good and overall was highly enjoyable.

First thing I will mention is that it had a LOT of characters all from different provinces and kingdoms and such. I wasn’t aware of this, but at the end of the book (I read the ebook as that’s what’s emailed for book tours and such), was the list of characters which I wish I knew about before I started the book because it would have helped keep track of who was who a little bit more. I would sometimes read and think I was reading about one character and something drastic would happen and I’d be like ‘no, he would never do that’ and then I’d realize that it was a completely different character than who I thought it was. That wasn’t a massive problem but it meant I would sometimes need to go back to see what I had just read again or take a few minutes to straighten out who was who exactly.

With all of these characters, there was a lot of character development as well. Sometimes it was for the better and sometimes it wasn’t. Which was definitely nice because it wasn’t a  fairy-tale ending. That helped to make it more realistic and kept you on your toes a lot more.

The next thing I wanted to mention is the age group which this book is for. I would definitely recommend this book for older readers due to the fact that there was sex, language and a lot of violence.

The sex was not exactly graphic, but there was a fair amount of it and it was quite….I guess the word would be violent. In the world, as well as times, that the book was set, women weren’t necessarily, well usually, were not married to men whom they loved. So with Lissanes love life, her sex scenes were generally a little more along the lines of rape, as that is kind of what it was like (think Game of Thrones for those of you who watch it). Also a lot of the men were pig and so they would just have sex with women left, right and center without caring about what they did. So in that aspect it was kind of graphic but it was true to what it would be like though.

The language wasn’t excessive but with certain characters, to highlight the fact that they were rude and uncivilized, they may use more foul language than others. So there were moments when words were used that definitely were not appropriate for younger audiences.

For the violence, there was a lot of that. Whether it be from torture scenes to just general fighting. It generally wasn’t terribly graphic, but there was lots of threats of removing the male member from people, as well as various torture scenes that weren’t that vivid but if you’re like me who reads and really gets into the book, your mind makes up wonderful images, so in that sense it was kind of brutal.

I personally didn’t mind the sex, language and violence as it added character to the book. In my opinion it stayed quite true to what the medial sort of times would have been like with rivaling kingdoms and magical kinds of creatures.

And that’s another thing. There was magic and sorcery and demons but it wasn’t something that took up the entire book. It was a theme that kept appearing and it wasn’t really a massive thing until book two (the book was split into two books). Then Erun went on an epic quest to find his love. That kind of reminded me of The Princess Bride, in a few aspects now that I look back on it while I write this review.

But overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was about 550 pages so it took me a little while to read, but I finished it and thought it was pretty creative and a nice change from all of the other stuff out there.

I highly do recommend it. But a warning. Prepare yourself for a fantastical journey. You may just encounter fire demon along the way.

Happy reading!!!

Click here to purchase the book.

A Bargain in Silver (Solis Invicti Book I) by Josie Jaffrey

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

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Summary

“After an attack by the infected, Emmy is rescued by a stranger who introduces her to the world of the Silver. Desperate to escape subjugation and confused by her attraction to him, she gathers what remains of her surrogate family and plans to make a break for freedom.  But she can’t hide from him for long.

Despite her efforts to resist, she is drawn further into the intrigues of the mysterious Silver through the agency of their ruler, but an attempt on her life soon makes it clear that he is unable to protect her from the political machinations of his race. As the connection between them deepens she must choose between her desire and her will to rebel, but how can she trust his intentions when everyone is after her blood?”

–From her website

Review

So Josie reached out to me over this book, asking me to review book one, and I have to say I absolutely loved it. It’s a romance book with like this love triangle kind of thing going on.

It was a romance book but it is not classified as erotic due to the fact that the fact that the sex scenes were not graphic. So you didn’t really need to worry about the love scenes being detailed, which was nice. It was more of a tension kind of thing.

One thing I really liked is that the fact that Emmy, the female protagonist, is a strong female lead. As you all should know, I LOVE strong female leads. Women who fight and aren’t afraid to state their opinion and go against the crowd and stand up to others. Emmy was definitely that. I mean come on, she stood up to vampires…um, sorry, I mean Silvers. That is awesome and I give her props for that. So automatically this book got a positive view for me.

I really liked the idea as well that there were Weepers (bad vampires) and the Silvers (who were the good guys). It’s interesting to think that the vampires would be split into two groups. Aristocrats and then everyone else. And the humans just being stuck there, or the few humans who were left, not that there were many. I have never come across this kind of idea before. I’ve come across good and bad vampires in books, but this was more like zombies versus vampires as the Weepers were like a plague and infected vampires and the Silvers were the ones who needed to deal with them.

The book had a lot more going on than romance as there was some type of political stuff going on. It was post-apocalyptic so it was based in a New World Order, and that kind of idea was quite interesting. In other books that are set after a kind of apocalypse, it is a free for all and everyone needs to fend for themselves or that the humans are scrambling to get some form of government. In this, after the apocalypse, the Silvers were waiting for the world to be in turmoil so that they would be able to come forward and take control, and use the humans as cattle. But it was definitely an interesting perspective of how it occurred.

My only complaint was that the set up to the post-apocalypse was kind of fast. In only a handful of pages, the world that everyone knew had come to the end and the vampires were in charge. I would have liked if it took a little more and if there was a little bit more of a war or something, but that was really my only complaint about it. A little bit more of a set up.

But this is a series so maybe something is explained later in the other books.

Overall I really did enjoy it and recommend that it’s given a read. It is short. Only about 250 pages or so, so it is not that big of a read and won’t take too long at all. I read it in about 2 days.

Click here to purchase it.

And happy reading!

Finding Magdalena by Shannon Cordon

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

412bihgrw7hl-_sx331_bo1204203200_Summary

“Magdalena “Maggie” Curran is a freshman at a prestigious Virginia boarding school when she suffers an unbearable tragedy. Maggie has only one true friend to lean on—Graham Ashford. He is the only one who can help her through the depression and night terrors that follow.
In her junior year, the school deems her stable enough to have a roommate, and her new friend Sarah quickly draws Maggie out of her shyness and into the dating world. While at Sarah’s house for Thanksgiving, however, she meets Sarah’s older brother, Eric, and what starts as a shy crush soon turns into terror as Eric becomes obsessed and violent toward Maggie.
Maggie runs to the safety of Graham, now her boyfriend. But not even Graham can protect her from Eric when he assaults her in her dorm room. Eric is given a light sentence in a mental institution, and Maggie leaves everything behind and moves to her mother’s hometown of Malaga, Spain, to attend college on a music scholarship and try to find her mother’s estranged family.
Beginning with the death of her parents, Maggie has had to reach inside herself to find the strength and resilience to move on. This book will capture your heart in the first few pages and hold you until the shattering climax.”

-From Goodreads.com

Reivew

So this review has been coming for a while due to having this book sitting in my ‘to be read’ pile and never actually getting to it as I was too busy with University work. However, I finally finished sat down and got through it in about 24 hours and I have to say it definitely wasn’t what I expected.

In the beginning it was a traditional YA romance novel with teens in relationships and having issues and breakups, then there was a little sex (that was “graphic”, so I would classify this as a more mature YA novel), then there was this violent dude, and then there was more relationships, and then more violence and I was just like what? I couldn’t keep up with everything and it kept you guessing as to what was going to be happening next, which was good, and bad. My one complaint was that all of this happened in about 350 pages which was a little bit too much in just many pages. I could see this book put into two books to make it a series to prolong the story as I did feel that towards the end it was rushed a bit, bad people being caught and all of this other stuff going down. So either to make a longer book or just make it into two books. But it was YA and I am reading it from an adult perspective and adult books do have more description. For YA it was good though, but as it was more mature YA, some of the things could have been expanded a little bit.

It did go from 0-100 quite fast in moments where one of the characters attacked someone else and then there was a threat of rape and I was kind of there like…wait what?

For the sex, besides the first sex scene which wasn’t bad but went into a little bit of detail, all the other mentions of sex did the ‘drawn-curtain’ kind of scene where it would gloss over the event which was nice.

Honestly, overall it was quite good though. There was some character development, but not a ton. I didn’t love how Maggie was kind of a whiny girl, crying over everything. I did want to sometimes shake her and tell her to grow up. She’d cry over small things. Don’t get me wrong, I know she had been through a lot in the story but she would cry over the sillies of things and I just wanted to smack her. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because if a writer and bring about an emotion in me while I am readying their writing, then that is pretty darn good. Whether it be bad or good.

I do recommend it as it is a decent read and you can probably fly through it quite fast and it is new so show some love!

But overall, a perfect YA kind of book!

Happy Reading!