Book Review | Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

Series: Lunar Chronicles #2
Published: February 2013
Publisher: Feiwel and Friends
Format: Kindle eBook
Pages: 464
Rating: ★★★★

Halfway around the world, Scarlet Benoit’s grandmother is missing. It turns out there are many things Scarlet doesn’t know about her grandmother and the grave danger she has lived in her whole life. When Scarlet encounters Wolf, a street fighter who may have information as to her grandmother’s whereabouts, she has no choice but to trust him, though he clearly has a few dark secrets of his own. As Scarlet and Wolf work to unravel one mystery, they find another when they cross paths with Cinder. Together, they must stay one step ahead of the vicious Lunar Queen who will do anything to make Prince Kai her husband, her king, her prisoner.

Ever since I read Cinder, I have been so excited for the next instalment of the Lunar Chronicles series – Cinder was the first fairytale retelling that I had ever read, and it would definitely encourage me to read more in the future. I had extremely high expectations for Scarlet due to this, and although I still loved it, I don’t think my expectations were really met or exceeded.

This is a fairytale retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, now although it is a fairytale, it isn’t one of the most predominant ones, or one with a lot of story behind it. There are certain aspects of Little Red Riding Hood which are noticeable in Scarlet, but there was nothing remarkable and there wasn’t a lot of progression on the retelling front like there was in Cinder. The book in itself was brilliant, but I can’t see as much of a retelling of the fairytale as I would like to, as this is a retelling.

Each chapter represented a different character, and throughout the story you were mainly following two stories, with the exception of other characters slipped in every now and then. You saw our newest heroine, Scarlet Benoit, on her search for her Grandma, and Cinder where she left off, with her newest companion “Captain” Thorne. I know I’m enjoying each story on its own when I don’t want to go onto the other story, and then get hooked on the next one, and this definitely happened to me upon reading. Both points of view were very fast paced, action packed and full of surprises, and that’s exactly what I love about these books and what makes me not want to put them down. I enjoyed reading about Scarlet and getting to know her and the characters revolving around her as much as I enjoyed following on from where we left off with Cinder – there wasn’t any particular story that I favoured.

The characters were as brilliant as ever. Cinder is like a new person, she’s so much stronger than she was at the beginning of the first book, and this development hasn’t just come on suddenly, it’s come over a series of unfortunate events and I love this. She acts with purpose and knowing but at the same time with an underlying doubt, which is what makes her so realistic and relatable – she’s also got a lot more sarcastic which I absolutely love. Her and Thorne’s friendship in the book was hilarious to read, their personalities were so different but when they conversed they just bounced off of each other ever so nicely. They were like the unintentional comedy duo that lifted the dark air that sometimes shrouded the book. Scarlet on the other hand, although I loved her story, I found to be quite frustrating. She was so naive and trusting of certain things and then wouldn’t believe someone when they told her the stone hard facts about other things, she is the typical character that in my head I would be screaming at to stop being so ridiculously stupid.  She would always have these doubts in her head but would then brush them away and say something along the lines of ‘but I can see it in his eyes’ – like that makes a difference.

On the topic of Scarlet, her and Wolf’s relationship just wasn’t believable in my eyes. Although it was necessary for once to have this relationship, I can’t whole heartedly believe it happened the way it did and in such a ridiculous space of time. Scarlet was always going on about trusting people and then just jumps on the first train with a stranger to save her Grandma, that’s just not how things work in the real world. It seemed too forced from both sides and her naivety played a massive role in this.

Overall, this was a fantastic sequel that could have done with a little bit more ‘fairytale’ and a little less naivety on the character front. It’s not a better book than Cinder as such, but it’s definitely a great read.

Book Review | The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

Series: The Darkest Minds #1
Published: December 2012
Publisher: Hyperion
Format: Hard Cover
Pages: 488
Rating: ★★★

When Ruby woke up on her tenth birthday, something about her had changed. Something alarming enough to make her parents lock her in the garage and call the police. Something that gets her sent to Thurmond, a brutal government “rehabilitation camp.” She might have survived the mysterious disease that’s killed most of America’s children, but she and the others have emerged with something far worse: frightening abilities they cannot control.

The Darkest Minds is the first in a trilogy of books that are due to be released sometime in the future and I was dying to read this book as soon as I heard about it. It only got released last year in America and was gutted when I couldn’t get it in any bookstores here in the UK so decided to nab it off of Amazon – the effort I made into getting the book was not worth the book. This book grabbed me from the get go and I found it difficult to put down, this is only, however, on a storyline basis. The premise of the book was fantastic and well thought out, it was such a dark dystopian novel plot wise in the shockfactor – the fact that children as young as 10 were being taken to concentration camps was ridiculous and the effect that that would have upon them in later life is unimaginable. Some of the writing and characters however, I found left a lot to be desired.

The story was shown in a first perspective from our main protagonist Ruby Daly and this was probably something that in this book in particular I wasn’t keen on. This one sided commentary on the action wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to know what other people felt and how other people were dealing with the situations at hand. This was especially relevant when it comes to the secondary characters of Liam, Chubs and Zu – I felt as though I didn’t know them at all, that they were quite one dimensional and I certainly (especially at the end) didn’t feel anything for them in the emotions department. You saw how they treated one another, how they felt to a certain extent but I never found that I could empathise or sympathise with them in any shape or form. 

I found the relationship between Ruby and X (I shall say x because it isn’t instantly obvious) to be quite forced as well – it went from the occasional pet name, which he would actually say to every girl, to suddenly being smitten. It wasn’t needed in the story and I don’t think every YA novel needs to have a romance in it to make it work, I’m getting quite fed up the predictability of this element in the genre. The story would have worked just as well, if not better without this element as the characters could have focussed more on the bigger problems at hand (and there were enough of them) and grown as people and as a unit as a whole. The occasional description of his hair and the way his muscles looked was just unneccesary when there were bigger things to be worrying about like not being thrown into a concentration camp again. I can understand that they need to have some time to live normal lives but at that moment in time it most definitely wasn’t the right time and place.

The best character was one of the ‘bad guys’ in the book – their lack of characterisation and quick build up didn’t matter as this person was, I found, seen as the mysterious type. The way they spoke, the things they did, just really made me love but hate them as a character which is something that I adore in a book. I really want to talk about this particular character a lot more but it would be giving away a lot of spoilers, but I’ll just leave you with the fact that this character was my favourite.

I really couldn’t put into words how I felt about this book, and it took me a little while to even write this – I just feel as though Bracken let an amazing story slip between her fingers for something quite mediocre instead.

Book Review | Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood

Series: MaddAddam Trilogy #1
Published: May 2003
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Format: Hard Cover
Pages: 378
Rating: ★★★

Snowman may be the last man on earth, the only survivor of an unnamed apocalypse. Once he was Jimmy, a member of a scientific elite; now he lives in bitter isolation and loneliness, his only pleasure the watching of old films on DVD. His mind moves backwards and forwards through time, from an agonising trawl through memory to relive the events that led up to sudden catastrophe (most significantly the disappearance of his mother and the arrival of his mysterious childhood companions Oryx and Crake, symbols of the fractured society in which Snowman now finds himself, to the horrifying present of genetic engineering run amok. His only witnesses, eager to lap up his testimony, are “Crakers”, laboratory creatures of varying strengths and abilities, who can offer little comfort. Gradually the reasons behind the disaster begin to unfold as Snowman undertakes a perilous journey to the remains of the bubble-dome complex where the sinister Paradice Project collapsed and near-global devastation began.

This book is a dystopian like no other that I have read, if I thought ‘Shades of Grey’ was different, this is on a whole new level of intensity. It takes place on this Earth many years into the future – we are never given a specific time, but in the way that’s it written, you can feel that it’s not too far off to sound unrealistic; the world is filled with genetically modified animals, new medicines, and science is running the show. The types of things described in the book are things that we are currently trying to work on in the present day, and due to the fact that they have made advancements on all of this, it gets a little bit too realistically creepy. It’s one of those novels where you think to yourself that this technically could be happening to our world in the very near future, and because of this it is quite scary to read at times.

The story follows the perspective of Snowman, or as he used to be known in the old world, Jimmy. It follows him in the present day when the world has become a desolate chaos, and show’s you a recollection from the past from his school years up until now as he deliriously recollects the memories from before, and how the world fell apart. If there was a casting call for the role of the ‘(technically the) only man to be alive at the worlds end’, you wouldn’t imagine anyone like Jimmy; he was a screw up that was always living in somebody else’s shadow, who didn’t really get anywhere in life. Even though this may sound quite odd, I think that Jimmy gave an interesting perspective to read from because of his personality – he wasn’t always confident about what he did, he had his regrets and was plain right stupid a lot of the time – this made it quite relatable as not everyone would act cool and collected and figure things out like in the movies.

The other main characters, Oryx and Crake, as a whole were ridiculously interesting, they had a variety of different upbringings and life stories that shaped them into what they became, and I was intrigued as to the mystery behind them – which there was a lot of, I found myself wanting to read more about their lives than I did about the present day chaos. Sometimes I found them to be a little too vague in the present day, a lot of the things they said got me frustrated as they were so open ended and profound that they just didn’t make any sense. Again, that was probably the allure of mystery that was a key factor in this book, and maybe that was Atwood’s aim, but I can’t help but think that there was something I missed.

For the first 200 pages I found myself flying through this book – it’s a relatively easy read, and the structure of the whole thing was brilliant. For me, it was fresh and unlike anything that I have ever read so I was intrigued as to where this was going to go. After about 200 pages however, I did find myself getting bored, I wasn’t reading as much, and my interest levels were dipping immensely. The book became quite boring, samey, and things were just delved into more than they needed too; a food production chain was described with amazing detail as to the history of their products, and although it’s interesting from a ‘near future’ perspective, it’s quite irrelevant to the story at hand and made me impatient for Atwood to just get on with it. Due to this, and just the general lack of story, the book just fizzled out then for me, and I started page counting, (I don’t do this unless I’m getting bored and want to read another book.) Nothing new or interesting was happening, which was very disappointing as it started so well.

I finished this book not knowing what had happened, I felt as though nothing had actually been resolved – I had more questions than answers which made me frustrated. I just felt as though an amazing novel just slipped through Atwood’s fingers at the last minute, and although I still loved the premise there were definitely pitfalls which let her down.