This is yet another series that I have been coaxed into beginning based on one of Amazon's .99 cent Kindle book deals. I even read a few reviews on Good Reads first, but did not heed the warnings, thinking "But its only .99 cents! How bad could it be for a buck?" Little did I know I was sealing my own fate, and forcing my hand to embark on a 5 book journey of frustration and annoyance. My first mistake was thinking that if I read the first book, and found it shitty, I would have the power to say to myself "I did not like this, I will not buy the next books, I do not need to know what happens, because I know that I am not going to like it and I am just going to be 12 bucks poorer and even more pissed off." I have no such will power.
I read in someone's review of the first book of the series, Ethereal, that it was written like bad fan fiction. I find this to be an accurate description. The main character and narrator, Skyla, is possibly one of the most irredeemable characters in the series. She is shallow and entirely selfish, and lacks any sort of understanding for the consequences to her own actions. Yet somehow the 2 most gorgeous guys in school are in love with her. Go figure.
I found the initial love interest storyline irritatingly straight forward in the beginning. Moore offers no build up whatsoever with the love story, and suddenly they're just making out. Realistic in a teenage world? Yes. Builds an intriguing and well developed storyline? No. Anyway, that is the least of my worries as the story plummets into a gross (and I mean that both ways) amount of lovey dovey, insanely jealous, getting his name tattooed on your butt cheek, writing your name out with his last name and all kinds of heart doodles and shit, teenage musings. Which I wouldn't usually find so irritating if there wasn't a way more awesome and redeeming love interest. Gage, the one that seems to keep getting shit on, is probably the only character that seems to be an actual good person. Not to mention his undying and unconditional love for Skyla makes him even more endearing. I am currently half way through book 4 of the 5 books so far, and Skyla has continuously just been… kind of a ball of shit to him. Although things are starting to mildly look up, I am reading into some foreshadowing that I am not going to be pleased with if it rolls out that way. I cannot stand for this! I promise, I will throw my Kindle across the room if that is how it ends up. For real. Okay… I won't really throw my Kindle… but I will throw something less expensive and important. Perhaps a pillow… or a ball or something. I get to vent my frustration, and the dogs get to have fun… its a win, win. Like I said, it has been a brutal back and forth with the one character I actually like continually being dumped on, so the series has been really difficult to make it through, even though I can't stop myself from reading, because I must know what happens. Also time travel ends up coming into play… and almost anything that involves time travel becomes immediately convoluted. I feel as if this is sucking the life out of me. Usually I would wait to review until I finished all of the available books, but I had to vent some frustration here asap.
I will say though that it does seem like the writing and story line are getting better as the series progresses (either that or I have become accustomed to the awfulness and don't even notice anymore, hopefully not). That being said… I really don't know if I could recommend this series to anyone or not. It is a dilemma. Part of me feels like if I could stop being pissed about how the story is going for one particular aspect, that it may not be that bad. I mean… something has to have kept me reading them so quickly right? Or I'm just a glutton for punishment. I dunno… google it and make up your own mind :P
UPDATE : I probably should have waited to review this series until I finished the most recent book. Had I, I would have given it an even more scathing review. After books 3 and 4 began to get slightly better, my hopes for the series peaked a bit and I thought to myself, hey, this may not turn out at bad as I thought it would. Wrrrong. Book 5 was pretty terrible. There was nothing cohesive what-so-ever moving the plot forward. You know how usually in a book (even one within a series!) there is a primary conflict that propels the plot? Well in this book... there is none. Skyla just makes stupid fucking mistake, after stupid fucking mistake. Somehow, it manages to be the longest book of the series yet make absolutely no progress, with the exception of leaving you on yet another horrible cliff hanger. If this cliff hanger is not like all of the others in the series, i.e. it turns out that the horrible things that we think have happened are actually just some kind of misunderstanding, I am going to be hell of pissed. Just sayin.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
The Hollows Series --- Zombie Apocalypse goes to the Ladies (Like we knew it would)
I started reading this series for a couple of reasons, one, Amanda Hocking wrote the Trylle Series which I loved, and also wrote My Blood Approves which I also generally approve of, ha…get it? And two, Amazon was offering the Kindle edition for the low, low price of $2.99 so couldn't exactly pass that up!
In the Hollows series, Amanda Hocking has gone in a different direction than I've become accustomed to in my usual crappy reading, opting out of vampires, werewolves, faeries, or seraphim, and instead opting in for zombies. She also went really wild, and decided to not make the supernatural beings in the story the object of lust…thankfully. Although, I guess it would be nice for a guy to be interesting in a girl for her brains instead of her body for once. HEY-OO!!! Anyway, I'll say that I knew this series was about the zombie apocalypse prior to reading it and, for some reason I was hesitant to get started, even though I generally love all things zombie. However, I was very quickly turned around. The story follows Remy, an all around bad ass zombie slayer chick, on cross country trek to find her kid brother. Enter bitchin' ass zombie eating lioness stage right. Actual lioness… that isn't a term for something else, at least not that I am aware of. Enter 2 dudes stage left. Don't worry, you don't have to stress out about a love triangle yet. However, I advise not to get your hopes set on the wrong candidate right off the bat like I did, there will never be so much as a glimmer of hope in that direction. Let's just say, that the actual love interest wouldn't exactly be Darwin's choice to carry on the human race. But at any rate, I eventually decided he was endearing enough to entertain. We continue on with tons of zombie slaying, cult people, more zombie slaying, rebel mercenaries, and even more zombie slaying. On the whole, I really did enjoy both of the books that have come out in this series so far, I breezed through both of them pretty quickly. I will say though that, as in many other Urban Fantasy novels, the main character has an irritating habit of being unnecessarily self sacrificing. I mean, its not like that is a bad quality for a character to have, but its frustrating to read sometimes. Not to mention the fact that this is the zombie apocalypse we're talking about here… not exactly the best time to have an unnecessary sense of responsibility. Mild spoiler alert: I recommend not getting your hopes up in regards to the original romance carrying over into the second book. Nothing major, it just doesn't go in the route that you exactly expect for it to go as far as that is concerned. This didn't really bother me however, and I found that I actually enjoyed the second book more, which as far as other reader reviews I've read, tends to be the opposite with a lot of people. I think knowing that it isn't going to be what you expect, helps as far as appreciating the story itself. The same thing kind of happened for me in the Trylle series, but I had a friend warn me not to get attached to the original interest, and it made it much more enjoyable!! So yeah, don't be a douche and stop reading, it all comes back around :) Anyway, I'll definitely be looking forward to book 3!
In the Hollows series, Amanda Hocking has gone in a different direction than I've become accustomed to in my usual crappy reading, opting out of vampires, werewolves, faeries, or seraphim, and instead opting in for zombies. She also went really wild, and decided to not make the supernatural beings in the story the object of lust…thankfully. Although, I guess it would be nice for a guy to be interesting in a girl for her brains instead of her body for once. HEY-OO!!! Anyway, I'll say that I knew this series was about the zombie apocalypse prior to reading it and, for some reason I was hesitant to get started, even though I generally love all things zombie. However, I was very quickly turned around. The story follows Remy, an all around bad ass zombie slayer chick, on cross country trek to find her kid brother. Enter bitchin' ass zombie eating lioness stage right. Actual lioness… that isn't a term for something else, at least not that I am aware of. Enter 2 dudes stage left. Don't worry, you don't have to stress out about a love triangle yet. However, I advise not to get your hopes set on the wrong candidate right off the bat like I did, there will never be so much as a glimmer of hope in that direction. Let's just say, that the actual love interest wouldn't exactly be Darwin's choice to carry on the human race. But at any rate, I eventually decided he was endearing enough to entertain. We continue on with tons of zombie slaying, cult people, more zombie slaying, rebel mercenaries, and even more zombie slaying. On the whole, I really did enjoy both of the books that have come out in this series so far, I breezed through both of them pretty quickly. I will say though that, as in many other Urban Fantasy novels, the main character has an irritating habit of being unnecessarily self sacrificing. I mean, its not like that is a bad quality for a character to have, but its frustrating to read sometimes. Not to mention the fact that this is the zombie apocalypse we're talking about here… not exactly the best time to have an unnecessary sense of responsibility. Mild spoiler alert: I recommend not getting your hopes up in regards to the original romance carrying over into the second book. Nothing major, it just doesn't go in the route that you exactly expect for it to go as far as that is concerned. This didn't really bother me however, and I found that I actually enjoyed the second book more, which as far as other reader reviews I've read, tends to be the opposite with a lot of people. I think knowing that it isn't going to be what you expect, helps as far as appreciating the story itself. The same thing kind of happened for me in the Trylle series, but I had a friend warn me not to get attached to the original interest, and it made it much more enjoyable!! So yeah, don't be a douche and stop reading, it all comes back around :) Anyway, I'll definitely be looking forward to book 3!
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
In Good Book News....
Holy movie trailers, Batman! Just watched the new trailer for The Hunger Games last night. For lack of a more intelligent way to get my point across, I will just say that it looks BAD ASS! If you haven't read The Hunger Games trilogy yet, I'm going to go ahead and recommend that you watch the trailer, because, honestly it sums up the premise more clearly and bad ass-ly, without spoiling anything, than I would be able to. If you have read The Hunger Games trilogy, you should also watch the trailer. If you've already watched the trailer… you should watch it again. Here's the link
Its been a long time since I have been this excited about a movie, which I completely expected because when I read The Hunger Games, it had been a long time since I had been that excited about a book series. This series literally kept me awake nights. It haunted my dreams. Not in the way that a scary movie would haunt my dreams, but in the way that I was so sucked into the story and the characters that it encompassed not only my waking thoughts, but apparently my sleeping thoughts as well. Suzanne Collins, managed to create a detailed, and distrubing world without detracting from the plot. Meaning mostly that she managed to bring to life this world and these multi-dimensional characters that I cared about and understood, could visualize... without the prose driven, detail oriented fodor that I tend to get bogged down with when reading a lot of other…ahem..."well written" books for lack of a better term. Alright… seriously… what I'm trying to say, rather clumsily, is that it felt like I was reading the plot driven crap I usually read, while still managing all of the details, and character development that I sometimes miss out on, without making me want to skip a few pages to get past the description of the mideval castle and get to the good stuff. Still doesn't make any sense? Fuck it. It was really, really good. I liked it a whole lot. Please, please read it. And please, please, for the love of god, don't just see the movie like a big ole' dummy that never learned to read. How's that for well written?
Its been a long time since I have been this excited about a movie, which I completely expected because when I read The Hunger Games, it had been a long time since I had been that excited about a book series. This series literally kept me awake nights. It haunted my dreams. Not in the way that a scary movie would haunt my dreams, but in the way that I was so sucked into the story and the characters that it encompassed not only my waking thoughts, but apparently my sleeping thoughts as well. Suzanne Collins, managed to create a detailed, and distrubing world without detracting from the plot. Meaning mostly that she managed to bring to life this world and these multi-dimensional characters that I cared about and understood, could visualize... without the prose driven, detail oriented fodor that I tend to get bogged down with when reading a lot of other…ahem..."well written" books for lack of a better term. Alright… seriously… what I'm trying to say, rather clumsily, is that it felt like I was reading the plot driven crap I usually read, while still managing all of the details, and character development that I sometimes miss out on, without making me want to skip a few pages to get past the description of the mideval castle and get to the good stuff. Still doesn't make any sense? Fuck it. It was really, really good. I liked it a whole lot. Please, please read it. And please, please, for the love of god, don't just see the movie like a big ole' dummy that never learned to read. How's that for well written?
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Bloodlines --- Better than telling people you are reading Vampire Academy
I say that... but so far that is probably the only thing about this series that I actually think is better or even as good as Vampire Academy. Perhaps with the exception of the fact that Adrian is back, and it looks to be shaping up in a positive way for him...eventually. We all know the proclivity to have a love triangle in Young Adult novels is something that is rarely overlooked and I can already see that this series is going to be no exception. Sadly this is one of the things that bothered be most about book one. It looks like there is a male "mortal" that is being pulled into the plot line that seems to have no other purpose, but to totally fuck with the romance story in later books. Perhaps he will serve some other purpose... you know... have some power that we didn't know about, or turn out to be a vampire slayer, or something else that would make him remotely significant otherwise. But I'm going to go with the former for the time being. I will say that I have a history of being on the wrong side when young adult love triangles are concerned, Vampire Academy I was "Team Adrian" all the way, The Mortal Instruments...we'll just say I was anti-Jace. So all I have to say is Adrian better be on the right side of the triangle this time.
This book also made me think that maybe its time for me to start reading more grown up books, as I saw the plot twists coming miles away. Perhaps just a little less foreshadowing would have served me better... either that or the characters should just be smarter, or at least not supposed to be smart, and than not figuring this shit out until the end.
All of those things said, I must have liked the book as a whole, as I zipped right through it in a day or so. I think mostly I was just glad to have the characters back that I had gotten attached to, and to have the universe continue. It took a little getting used to having this book narrated by an Alchemist, that inherently finds vampires disgusting, but I think it will work out in the end. I will definitely be continuing the series as it progresses.
This book also made me think that maybe its time for me to start reading more grown up books, as I saw the plot twists coming miles away. Perhaps just a little less foreshadowing would have served me better... either that or the characters should just be smarter, or at least not supposed to be smart, and than not figuring this shit out until the end.
All of those things said, I must have liked the book as a whole, as I zipped right through it in a day or so. I think mostly I was just glad to have the characters back that I had gotten attached to, and to have the universe continue. It took a little getting used to having this book narrated by an Alchemist, that inherently finds vampires disgusting, but I think it will work out in the end. I will definitely be continuing the series as it progresses.
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