Book review 7 - Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Pages: 422
Publisher: Broadway Books
Publication date: January 1, 2011
Summary: 
On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?

My thoughts:
Beware going forward, there may be spoilers.
My first thought upon completion is that people are HIGHLY overdramatic about how good this book is. There is no “twist”. Everything was so predictable, like literally so much that they actually tell you everything that’s going to happen before it happens. 
My second thought: I guess people say that it seems like she likely killed him at the end, but I really doubt that. She wouldn’t be so stupid and every single person would know she did it. Like Amy is smart enough to know even she would never ever get away with that. 
I mean I think my problem with the book is the hype. It was good yes, surprisingly good, but like the twist thing really bothers me since I was so excited and hyped about it. 
I just I really don’t know how I feel. I both loved the book and hated the book. But I hated the parts that I was over hyped up about. So I don’t really know how to rate this right now.
I did lose interest a few times in the book, I kept reading, but it slowed down too much sometimes. But I mean still it was good. 
I will say though, Amy needs so much therapy. She is so fucked up. Like top notch psychopath. Gillian Flynn scares me at how well she wrote Amy as a psychopath. I study psychopaths and let me tell you she did her research. 
Overall I mean I loved the book, there were obvious things I didn’t like about it and I wanted it to be more based on the reactions I saw, but I still loved it.

Just a P.S: I just want to recommend that if you saw the movie before you read the book, you probably shouldn’t bother reading the book. It’s not that there’s nothing left, I mean there is LITTLE stuff they cut out, but it’s because the book loses it’s appeal if you already know the story. 

Book review 6 - Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern

Pages: 512
Publisher: Hachette Books
Publication date: December 1, 2001
Summary: 
Rosie and Alex are destined for one another, and everyone seems to know it but them. Best friends since childhood, their relationship gets closer by the day, until Alex gets the news that his family is leaving Dublin and moving to Boston. At 17, Rosie and Alex have just started to see each other in a more romantic light. Devastated, the two make plans for Rosie to apply to colleges in the U.S. 

She gets into Boston University, Alex gets into Harvard, and everything is falling into place, when on the eve of her departure, Rosie gets news that will change their lives forever: She's pregnant by a boy she'd gone out with while on the rebound from Alex. 

Her dreams for college, Alex, and a glamorous career dashed, Rosie stays in Dublin to become a single mother, while Alex pursues a medical career and a new love in Boston. But destiny is a funny thing, and in this novel, structured as a series of clever e-mails, letters, notes, and a trail of missed opportunities, Alex and Rosie find out that fate isn't done with them yet.

My thoughts:

I have decided that I am actually going to leave this unrated. I feel like a 3 star rating does not do it justice, my reasons for disliking the book do not permit me to give it a 4/5 star and I didn't hate it enough for a 1/2 star.

I adored this book. Truly. From the first page I knew that I would love this story. I will admit, the letter format took me some time to get used to, but only about 30 pages and I was used to it and hooked.
Rosie and Alex are the most complex and irritatingly loveable characters I've ever read. Alex and his constant inability to tell anyone how he feels and to play everything off, as well as being unreliable.
Rosie and her inability to listen to everyone's advice, to be a negative whiny person and to never do anything for herself.
I admit, I never have wanted kids, infact I am violently against having children and this book just further reminded me why I don't want kids. Rosie is a great mother in that she sacrifices LITERALLY her entire life for her daughter, but I don't have it in me for that.
The side characters were so cute and I loved them all. I loved Ruby and her siblings and his siblings and Katie and Josh as well. 
The length of the book though had me skipping a lot of the side stuff near the end. I lost interest in the brothers and sisters and even the children because I was so anxious to finish this 550 page book. It was so good but it really didn't need to be that long. 
The length was also a little weird in terms of timing. The book spans 45 years of their lives. You have entire decades that pass in the span of 3 pages, and then you stay on one year of their life for 100 pages. It was a little hard to follow the time at points but it didn't seem to take away from the story.

Where I have a hard time rating the book is the love story. I didn't actually like it in the end. I loved them, I truly wanted them together. Until they were about 35. Then I stopped. I really DID want them to be together at first. They loved each other, that much was clear, but they just got sidetracked, babies happened, wives and husbands and then they couldn't be together. But then Sally and Alex got divorced and Alex was ready. Then Rosie and Greg got divorced and they were ready. I was extremely happy with that and I wanted it to stay like that. But then there was a new complication that prevented them from being together, once again, and that's where I lost interest. It went from being a really believable heartbreaking story of people who couldn't be together, to a story where a lot of stuff happened just to add drama. I think that 10 or so years of waiting was enough. I don't really think that the author needed to start adding more complications. I lost interest almost in the book entirely by that point. Not to mention that it's kind of bittersweet that they finally end up together on the last page, where we can't read any of it, and when they are 50. They have lived almost their entire lives by then. It's not a romantic storyline anymore, it's just sad. 

So the reason I am refraining from rating the book is NOT because I didn't like it, it's because I don't think it's fair to rate a book 1 star because of a romance plot (even though that's the whole book), but I'm not rating the book 5 stars when I didn't like the main storyline. So if you're looking for a decision whether to read this or not, I leave you with all of that information and you can decide what to do with it.

Book review 4 - Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

Pages: 383
Publisher: Orion
Publication date:  February 10, 2015
Summary: 
The poverty stricken Reds are commoners, living under the rule of the Silvers, elite warriors with god-like powers.
To Mare Barrow, a 17-year-old Red girl from The Stilts, it looks like nothing will ever change.
Mare finds herself working in the Silver Palace, at the centre of
those she hates the most. She quickly discovers that, despite her red blood, she possesses a deadly power of her own. One that threatens to destroy Silver control.
But power is a dangerous game. And in this world divided by blood, who will win?

My thoughts:

I tried to love this book. I really expected to, the plot was great, it had everything I love in dystopian YA books.. but that’s the problem.
I think maybe the positive attitudes for this book got me so excited and pumped that by the time I set out to read it that I just had expectations that couldn’t be met..
To start, and this is my MAIN problem with Red Queen, is that this book used every single YA trope that I am sick and tired of, and used them all at once. It ended up being a combination of so many other books that there was nothing unique about it. 
Some books that came to mind when reading this: The Selection because there was a competition to marry the prince.  The Hunger Games with the mandatory shows they have to watch. Red Rising because of the Silvers vs. Reds. And not to forget The Girl of Fire and Thorns because she’s married/getting married to the King/future King to protect herself. I just, in the end, couldn’t find a single thing about this book that was unique.  
My second problem was the love triangle star? She’s engaged to the future King prince dude. She’s obviously having a thing with his brother. There’s her best friend that will probably be a problem in the future, and then that really rude girl who is jealous of her. It is 2015 and there is no one in the world who likes love triangles anymore. I have officially decided that love triangles are dead to me. I am over it and I can’t bring myself to care for them anymore. Plus brothers? Really? That’s just a no no. I didn’t really get far enough in the book to figure out if this had a purpose to the plot (doubt it) but I just don’t care for it. 
I also found her a really flat character with no personality and I just couldn’t bring myself to care for any of the characters.

At the end of the day, it just wasn’t for me. It’s just too overused. The plot, the storyline of the characters, the characters themselves, I’ve just seen it all before and unfortunately I couldn’t connect to a thing.

Book review 3 - Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Pages: 432
Publisher: Harper Teen
Publication date: August 8, 2006
Summary: 
Taylor is leader of the boarders at the Jellicoe School. She has to keep the upper hand in the territory wars and deal with Jonah Griggs - the enigmatic leader of the cadets, and someone she thought she would never see again.

And now Hannah, the person Taylor had come to rely on, has disappeared. Taylor's only clue is a manuscript about five kids who lived in Jellicoe eighteen years ago. She needs to find out more, but this means confronting her own story, making sense of her strange, recurring dream, and finding her mother - who abandoned her on the Jellicoe Road.

My thoughts:

Have you ever read a book and after you finish the book you kind of close the book and hold it in your hands and stare at it, and you feel like no matter where you go in life that the book changed you? That's what Jellicoe Road was for me.
My friend recommended it to me because we were talking about books that changed our lives. I told her mine was Stolen by Lucy Christopher and she told me this was hers, so I decided to read it. When something means a lot to my friends I like to try it out.
This book was a puzzle from page one. There are two stories and the entire time you're reading you need to know how they go together, and if they even do. That's what kept me reading. While the beginning of the book was quite uninteresting and almost slow, once I passed 50 pages and the story started, the beginning made complete sense. As slow as the beginning is, the book wouldn't be the same without it. It's also not the kind of slow that makes the book hard to get into.
The writing in the book is beyond beautiful, there is no way to really describe it. The book is so vividly etched into my mind, even though there isn't actually much imagery or anything. She focuses on story and character and it pays off. The characters are perfect. Written to be flawed and mysterious and heartbreaking and they all have so much character development that at the end you feel like you've grown with them. Really well done world building.
I have so much to say about this book, none of it coherent or useful, so I'm going to end this here by saying that I recommend this book to everyone and anyone. It is beautiful and it is heartbreaking and I feel different than I did when I started this book and these are the most important books to cherish because they make you feel something.