Loveless by Alice Oseman

August 12, 2020August 12, 2020 ~ messalner ~ Leave a comment

Loveless by Alice Oseman

Published: July 9, 2020
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Page count: 435
Goodreads

Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day.

As she starts university with her best friends, Pip and Jason, in a whole new town far from home, Georgia’s ready to find romance, and with her outgoing roommate on her side and a place in the Shakespeare Society, her ‘teenage dream’ is in sight.

But when her romance plan wreaks havoc amongst her friends, Georgia ends up in her own comedy of errors, and she starts to question why love seems so easy for other people but not for her. With new terms thrown at her – asexual, aromantic – Georgia is more uncertain about her feelings than ever.

Is she destined to remain loveless? Or has she been looking for the wrong thing all along?

I just want to make it clear that this is not a real “professional” review, more just my extended thoughts on a book that I felt like deserved its own post. Take my words with a grain of salt. If you want to read the book – read it.

I originally gave this book a three-star rating but upon further reflection I’ve since lowered it to two stars. Expect a rant. I liked the book just fine, but still, be prepared for a rant.

*Cracks knuckles* I wasn’t particularly fond of the main characters. Most of them were really just unflavored yogurt. A lot of their personalities were purely based around their sexual identities and preferences. Georgia, the main protagonist, was just about as okay as the book itself. All of them seemed to be all over the place and have about twenty different personalities at once and never be able to settle for one (except for Jason, who was about as two-dimensional a character can get. The only trait he had was that he liked Scooby-Doo.) Don’t even get me started on Rooney. Jesus fucking Christ she needs to chill and stop being so dramatic.

I also have some words about the other characters. Sunil literally only existed as Georgia’s walking, talking Wikipedia. Lloyd only existed to spread hate and had literally no other purpose than to throw some mean, ignorant comments about asexuality and such for Georgia to overhear. I don’t even remember the other side characters’s names. That’s how irrelevant they were.

There was no clear plot or a common thread running throughout the story, except for the Shakespeare society, but it was really there just to force the characters to stay together. It was very repetitive; parties, bickering between the main character’s best friend and roommate, info-dump about a sexual orientation or a gender identity, another party, rehearsing a Shakespeare play, yet another party.

The writing was… I don’t even know. I can’t put a finger on it, but it actually annoyed me. It wasn’t very good, definitely worse than in Radio Silence. I did really enjoy the text message bits since they gave me a break from the otherwise annoying writing style.

Oh, did someone mention the constant need of the author to be relatable? “You know I’m a Shakespeare stan.” Why? Why does this line exist? Why did you feel the need to use the word “stan,” especially in this context? Needless to say, there were (again) a lot of pop culture references scattered throughout the story (and even a mention of Universe City towards the end.) Georgia was always talking about some fan fiction she was thirsting over, just like any other teen in the year 2020. Please, Ma’am, limit the amount of pop culture references in the next one. They got extremely tiring extremely fast.

And what about the entire selling point of the book? Georgia’s struggles with understanding and coming to terms with her sexuality hit me on a personal level (which is a big part of the reason I picked this book up), but at some point it really just started to feel extremely shallow and all of her feelings were just mostly forgotten and replaced with the terms she used to define her sexual orientation. I’m probably not making any sense here, but I mean that instead of going more into Georgia’s head space and how she felt about herself, she just started bluntly stating what she was. It got super annoying to read “I’m aro-ace. It’s a real thing, I looked it up” over and over every time she explained her sexuality to someone. Like said in my wrap-up, I would’ve really loved to read more of what she thought about it all before and after coming out. It probably would’ve made this entire book about ten times better, honestly. Oseman didn’t need to copy-paste the Wikipedia article about asexuality into this book.

I had a lot of the same issues with this one as I had with Radio Silence. Instead of everyone being either a straight A student or a dropout, everyone, including the main friendship group and everyone they ever interacted with just so happened to be LGBTQIA and/or non-white. All of these are important topics to bring up, especially in young adult literature, but these things were constantly being shoved in your face as if being anything but was a bad thing. There was way too much focus on race and sexuality, even in a book that is literally about figuring out your sexual preference. I don’t constantly need to be told how “white” an English city with a population of 50 000 is.

In conclusion, this was just okay. Maybe even a little worse than okay. Would I still recommend this? I’m not sure. It really wasn’t bad, but there was so much that could’ve been left out and the book wouldn’t have changed one bit.

The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

June 14, 2020June 17, 2020 ~ messalner ~ 1 Comment

The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Published: September 19, 2019
Genre: Fantasy
Page count: 304
Goodreads

“They say the thirst of blood is like a madness – they must sate it. Even with their own kin.

On the eve of her divining, the day she’ll discover her fate, seventeen-year-old Lil and her twin sister Kizzy are captured and enslaved by the cruel Boyar Valcar, taken far away from their beloved traveller community.

Forced to work in the harsh and unwelcoming castle kitchens, Lil is comforted when she meets Mira, a fellow slave who she feels drawn to in a way she doesn’t understand. But she also learns about the Dragon, a mysterious and terrifying figure of myth and legend who takes girls as gifts.

They may not have had their divining day, but the girls will still discover their fate…”

Boring, boring, boring. Absolutely nothing happened in this book. It’s 300 pages of words, sure. But where’s the content? There was a grand total of two things that really happened, and they were separated by about 280 pages.

A legend about a mysterious vampire prince who lives up north and takes girls as offerings, and a blurb that hints towards the two main characters being given to said vampire prince as gifts? The premise of the story sounded super interesting, which is the reason I even picked up this book; I’m a sucker for vampires, have always been. But it was not what I was promised. At all.

So many characters in the book speak about stories of a prince the people call the Dragon who’s apparently several centuries old, extremely cruel and drinks blood. And what do all these times the prince is talked about build up to? About a total of five or so pages of dialogue between him, Lil, and Kizzy. And most of his lines are just him saying how special and amazing Kizzy is, which seems to be a recurring topic in conversations between, well, any characters in the book.

On that note, let’s talk about how amazing Kizzy is! Wait, nevermind. I’m not Lil, or anyone else from this book. After the first few times, it got extremely boring and repetitive to hear how Lil just kept praising her twin sister over and over, both in her inner monologue and any conversation she had with Kizzy. “Oh, how you’re so beautiful!” “Oh, how every man in the land wants you because you’re so great and amazing!” “I’ll never be anything, but I know my sister will be the most amazing bear dancer ever!” Lil never complimented herself on anything, but, like a lot of other characters, just kept saying how her “sister was the better one.”

This read like something I could’ve written a few years ago when I was 14, and that’s not a good thing for a published book written by an adult. Really, this just felt like a way too long fan fiction of Twilight set in the middle ages. The writing wasn’t bad, but I’m not going to sit here and say it was good either. It was super repetitive, even confusing at times. Really, it was bland, sometimes (rarely) actually even good, but those good parts were limited to maybe one or two sentences at a time.

I found the world building to be lazy. The environments these characters are put in are barely described as anything but “forest” or “castle.” In my head, when I think about the kind of world this book is set in, all I can see is two castles separated by a forest, because that’s exactly what it read like. The main thing was that the people were separated into Travellers and the Settled, but there was no explanation as to why everyone seemed to despise the Travellers so much (or maybe I missed it, but still). The naming system also confused me, since a lot of them sounded like they could be eastern European names, and then some that they could originate from the other side of the world. Maybe I’m just reading too much into this, but there didn’t seem to be any pattern there.

On a completely different note, let’s switch topics for a second. The romance between Lillai and Mira, just… what? Why? It was all extremely sudden, going from Lil’s crush to saying “I love you” as goodbye about two weeks later. There was nothing to show for their relationship other than a few scenes of them laying next to each other and touching each other’s cheeks. Much like the author, I really have no words for this relationship. I’m no professional, but I just don’t think it was written all that well in any aspect. There was nothing – no chemistry, no real scenes between these two characters – that could’ve justified the relationship between Lil and Mira. It just felt like an unnecessary plot device that was only there so Lil would have someone to help her escape (which also made absolutely zero sense since why the fuck would someone like Mira, a damaged and abused slave, help Lil and Kizzy, who were literally just brought to the castle, in the first place when she and a lot of others have been there for ages and seen some awful shit?)

So. A vast majority of this book was just Lil and Kizzy working in the kitchens of some castle and being miserable. I picked this book up because I was promised an evil vampire prince and two “deathless girls.” Well, guess what! They did become exactly that, at the very end. We get maybe ten pages in total of the Dragon and his immortal brides. We learn absolutely nothing about his powers or why he is the way he is. The only thing there is to support the stories surrounding him is some gate littered with bodies that Lil, Mira, and Fen (Lil’s friend who was also taken captive) see when they’re riding to the prince’s castle to save Kizzy. Honestly, the Dragon was such a boring, basic bitch and showed no power or authority at all when he let Kizzy and Lil do whatever the hell they wanted. We are talking about the subject of legends in this fantasy world—God, what a waste of a character.

For me, personally, this was a waste of time. I’d wanted to read this for a while and had to wait about half a year to finally be able to get it from a library, but even with my really low expectations, it was still a huge letdown. This sounded so, so interesting, but in reality, it was just pages upon pages of nothing.

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

June 12, 2020June 12, 2020 ~ messalner ~ Leave a comment

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

Published: February 25, 2016
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Page count: 396
Goodreads

“Frances Janvier spends most of her time studying. When she’s not studying, she’s up in her room making fan art for her favorite podcast, Universe City.

Everyone knows Aled Last as that quiet boy who gets straight As. But no one knows he’s the creator of Universe City, who goes by the name Radio Silence.

When Frances gets a message from Radio Silence asking if she’ll collaborate with him, everything changes. Frances and Aled spend an entire summer working together and becoming best friends. They get each other when no one else does.

But when Aled’s identity as Radio Silence is revealed, Frances fears that the future of Universe City—and their friendship—is at risk. Aled helped her find her voice. Without him, will she have the courage to show the world who she really is? Or will she be met with radio silence?”

While I really enjoyed this book and flew through it within 24 hours, I can’t say that the book was flawless and there weren’t things that didn’t bother me.

The writing was good. While the writing was mostly simple and therefore extremely easy and fast to read, I found it to be powerful and effective when it needed to be. The chapters were short, which I loved. I also really liked the messages between Frances and Aled that were included, it made their friendship feel more real. On the other hand, I wasn’t a big fan of the constant pop culture references and name-dropping celebrities to make it more than clear that the narrator was bisexual, but I guess most of it tied in with the story since it was centered around a kind of pop culture phenomenon itself.

One of the biggest revelations, or mysteries, in the book didn’t really even come off as a surprise or anything, as I’d already figured it out by the time it was mentioned for the first time. So in that way, I guess the writing wasn’t the best. Most things that happened were predictable.

I liked the entire idea of the podcast. The few little glimpses of the transcripts from the episodes we got were really interesting and I wish there’d been more. Especially the entire Letters to February thing and how it was so highly talked about – I wish there’d been more of that. Instead, we got one single paragraph from the podcast that even talked about the character.

Let’s talk about the characters. For the most part, I strongly disliked Frances, our first person narrator. It was kind of infuriating being in her head all of the time, especially at the very beginning when most of her inner monologue just consisted of “I’m so smart and good at everything and I know it.” Her attitude – and her as a character overall – did improve towards the end. I actually really liked Aled, the other main character. Though I didn’t really fully understand his character: his actions and the decisions he made. It just felt like he was supposed to be about 10 things at once and only a few of those were well written and communicated through the text. Am I making any sense?

Secondary characters. Yikes. Let’s start with the good. I liked Daniel. Even though he was made to be whiny and annoying from Frances’s point of view, I actually really liked him. Then there were Raine and Carys. Raine was just plain annoying. That’s all I have to say about her. There was a lot of talk about Carys throughout the book and when she finally appeared, she was just kind of there. She had no real impact and no real character, and towards the end, she was just completely forgotten despite the entire February Friday mystery being about Aled wanting to find her. It just felt like her entire character and everything building up to Frances finally finding her were wasted. Aled and Carys’s mom and her abusive relationship to both of her children was also just a lot of wasted potential and completely forgotten in the end.

There didn’t seem to be any “middle-ground” when it came to the characters. Either they were super smart and scoring all A’s in school, or failing every class and running away from home. It felt super unrealistic. Even how fast Frances and Aled became pretty much best friends forever would probably not happen in real life (well, how would I know?) And talking about unrealistic, holy fuck would Frances’s mom not exist in real life.

I’m probably going to get stoned for my next point, but I just didn’t like how the book kept pushing and shoving race and sexuality into the reader’s face. In a way they are important topics, especially sexuality (and especially in a YA book about high schoolers), but it felt a little too much at times. It was specifically stated at the beginning that this wasn’t going to be a love story, so why did the book feel the need to delve so deeply into every character’s sexual attractions and almost make it feel like certain characters were only defined by their success in school and their sexual orientation?

With all the memes of the Disney movie Radio Rebel going around, I do have to admit that a lot of this book reminded me of the movie and just the sheer thought of that makes me laugh. I mean, overall, the book was good. While not the most realistic, it was a quick, light read that I can see myself reading again. Like said, it’s not (supposed to be) a story where the two main characters end up falling in love. It’s a story about two people becoming friends over a shared passion. Despite my issues with the book, would I recommend it? Absolutely.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

May 5, 2020May 5, 2020 ~ messalner ~ Leave a comment

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Published: March 10, 2020
Genre: Contemporary fiction, thriller
Page count: 384
Goodreads

“2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English Teacher.

2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?”

I want to start by saying that I really wanted, and tried, to love this book. I wanted it to be one of my favorites and tried to love it as much as I could, but I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t my expectations that were too high; the book actually met them to an extent, but it was more about how most of the book wasn’t even about what I was initially promised. I was promised a story about Vanessa Wye and her struggles as an adult with sexual abuse she experienced as a child; her relationship with her much older English teacher, Mr. Strane, at a boarding school. Instead, all of that was overshadowed by pages and pages and pages of events and dialogue and characters that did not matter or add anything new to the story.

Like a lot of others, I also felt that this book was way too long. I loved nearly everything about the book for the first 200 pages. At around 200 pages I started to get bored and began wondering how on earth this is still going to go on for another 200. The first half of the book really gripped me, it was interesting; it was amazing. The latter half just bored me to death and I found myself closing the book mid-sentence sometimes. The last 100 pages were a drag. Nothing happened after the 200 page mark. I would’ve been 100% fine if the book had ended at that point. The last 184 pages could’ve been cut down to 20, maybe 50 at max, and absolutely nothing would have changed. Why was there so much useless filler content in the end? (Not even in the end, literally half of the book is just there to increase the page count.) The college part was absolutely unnecessary and didn’t matter at all, I didn’t give two shits for her messy apartment and going to get coffee with Taylor. It didn’t even feel like the book I was promised after those 200 or so pages. It didn’t feel like it was all part of the same story. It felt like a completely different book with completely different characters that just had the same names. It felt like two different stories combined to one.

While on the topic, I think the ending also felt a little off. Sure, it made me feel nice, or maybe it was just relief that the book was finally over. It just felt off. It didn’t feel right for a book dealing with themes such as sexual abuse and trauma. I personally think it left so many things still unsolved and even felt a bit unrealistic in a way.

What I think would’ve been the perfect ending

If you ask me, the book could’ve ended when Strane killed himself and Vanessa stood in her apartment, thinking what would happen if she was to just light everything on fire after hearing the news and receiving the box. With some of the scenes from later in the book put before that, I think that would’ve been the perfect ending.

What comes to the writing, it was very matter-of-fact and I liked it for the most part. The chapters set in 2017 kind of irked me, though, because mostly they were just endless repeats of “I woke up, checked Facebook, smoked a bowl, went to work, checked Facebook again, ignored Strane’s texts and calls, went home, smoked another bowl, checked Facebook, went to bed.” I found the chapters set in the past better in terms of writing since they weren’t only description of Vanessa’s feelings and surroundings like in the future, but something was also happening all the time and there was a certain tension. What I’m trying to say is that the chapters on Vanessa’s childhood weren’t just her inner monologue, unlike most of those set in 2017. Everything she endured as a kid felt real. It made me feel uncomfortable, as it should’ve, and realistically captured what some people actually go through.

Now for a few words about the characters. I didn’t like Vanessa as a protagonist at all. While she was extremely judgmental, she was actually really interesting for the first half, then just became really condescending and arrogant, and even started contradicting herself at times. I hated how she was always defending Strane and what he did to her, even though she knew it was wrong. She would say he abused her and then five minutes later say nothing of the sort happened and it was all consensual. With the story just going on and on and on, it made Vanessa so much more unlikable and erased the entire point of the book and even her character for me. She showed no growth throughout the story; she always went back to Strane no matter what. At first her actions and way of thinking were completely justifiable since she was just a kid and really thought Strane loved her, but 15 years later at 32 she should’ve already known better.

I’m not able to form my thoughts about Strane into words that would make sense or sentences that you would be able to read, and honestly have nothing to say about him other than I want to hit him, and hard. Preferably with a baseball bat or something of the sort. He was interesting as a character, but such a huge piece of shit and deserved to suffer so much more than he ever actually did. He was the embodiment of literally any other guy like him that exists in the real world and it made my skin crawl.

This book should’ve been one of my favorites. And, honestly, it would’ve been had it been 200 pages shorter and focused on the entire premise that was promised. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded all the “bad stuff” or all the filler content if they had been scattered throughout the book, and not shoved into your face for the entire latter half. The blurbs on the back of the cover call this book a masterpiece, and I can’t help but wonder if the people who wrote them were only sent the first 200 pages to read. I think I would also consider this a masterpiece if I had only read half of the book. The first half was the only part that lived up and was worth all the praise and hype My Dark Vanessa has been getting.