Okay, so I have to admit this book left me confused. I mean, I understood it, but I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I guess I liked reading it, and it was interesting and had a lot of plot twists and had me hooked until the end, but like... It was just so sad, and pretty much had almost every single issue a teenager can face mixed up into it. When I finished, I was kind of like "Gee, thanks, I'm really looking forward to growing up now." I mean, listen: your mum dies from Huntington's, which is an incurable genetical disease that you have a fifty percent chance of inheriting, except then you find out that, actually, she isn't your mum at all, but you were actually swapped at birth with someone else's baby, so you have no chance of inheriting the disease. All that in the first, what, 30 pages maybe? Go figure. And then, on the opposite side of the globe, hey, guess what? This other eighteen-year-old girl finds out she's pregnant when barely out of childhood herself. WHAAAAT??? Don't you have enough with the first girl? Nope, apparently not, because even though she's alone in the world with already too many problems to handle, we're just going to add some more worries to her plate, for then the first girl gets drunk and gets back with her boyfriend and goes traveling, but she breaks up again cause she just "happened" to find her real family and ruin their lives. Intense.
I know I sound totally against this book, and I'm not, not really; it was interesting and I like the way the conflict was resolved, but then again there's not really much point in doing this if I'm not going to be honest, so I always make sure to write down stuff that I didn't like about it and focus on that. All I try to do is point out my personal opinion, and sometimes I will write too much about the bad parts and forget about the good bits, but if there is ever a book I absolutely detest, you will know right away, for the first words in my review will be "I DID NOT LIKE THIS BOOK AT ALL." And as you can see, this review has not started like that, so you've sort of got to imagine that it is not as negative as it sounds. The book is intense, and all the constant issue can get sort of tedious, but I did like it and it could be considered a good book by some. Just kind of not my style. My favourite character was, weirdly enough, little Ben (the second girl's little brother), because the simplicity of his character stood out so much against all the complicated problems in the story and all the life changing decisions some of the other characters took. Plus he was very cute ;). So, I hope you liked my review, and, more importantly, if you read this, I hope you like the book. Note that I ADORE receiving comments (emphasis on adore), especially if your opinion differs from mine, so just to let you know... comments are always welcome here! I know comments have to be approved before they're published, and that's only because I don't want to allow people to openly insult me or this site (positive feedback is always welcome though), although I have approved every single comment I have received since I started this blog two years ago, so thank you to all of you for being so nice :). Anyways, bye!
1 Comment
So, I know I haven't posted in a while, but it was Halloween and we had a small break so I met up with friends and wasn't home much, so there really wasn't much time to post anything. But anyway, today's review is about the Gemma Doyle trilogy and I'd honestly like to say that this trilogy kept me enthralled from beginning to end, although I must admit that one of my favourite things about it was the Q&A with the author, it was so funny it had me stuffing my pillow in my mouth to stifle the irrepressible giggles coming out at midnight when I was supposed to be sleeping... I personally think this book was really amusing and witty, and there was such a stark contrast when compared to the typical teenager books for girls where they all talk about boyfriends and makeup and all that... I'll admit that this book does talk about love, but its very differently written to the usual "OMG I have a crush on ____________ and he's so good-looking and hot, right?!" It's not like that at all. It could be considered desire more than love, really, but it's definitely not the shallow kind of love I demonstrated in the example, it's quite different... I'm pretty sure if you've read up to here you are not a boy, because this is quite a girlish trilogy and I'm quite sure not many boys would be interested in this. Really, you can probably tell I like this kind of book, because apart from the romance and all that there is also magic, and social division between the classes, and it is written in the perspective of a young 16 year old living in England during the Victorian period. Yes, that's right, the Victorian period. It really is quite interesting to read what modern day people presume Victorian girls thought like (because this is quite a recent trilogy; I think the first book was published in the early 2000's? Okay, I checked, it's 2003, so I was round about right...) and really, they were only girls, same as I am now, but their lives were quite different to ours. What if they were different too? What if the mind of a human teenager has changed and evolved over the centuries? What if the mentality of girls in the, say, 1600's, were completely the opposite to the way the average teen girl thinks and feels? Right, I'm getting a bit off topic now, so back to the book we go. As I was saying, it's interesting to read books set in different time periods because we get to experience the world differently, and we might even start seeing some thing in a totally different light. Like school, for example. I know most children don´t like school and say it's boring, and some might even say that girls in the olden days were lucky not to go to school, that it's not fair and they would have preferred life like that, but then when they grew up they would have liked having their independence and own jobs and not have to rely too much on anyone else. Well, it's just like that famous Spiderman quote: If you want to have rights and rewards and freedom and independence and power, you need to work for it. and start earning those luxuries. That's partly what school is for: to help you accept responsibility. So really, school could be looked upon as a good thing, for if we didn't go to school and had all the privileges, then that would make the world a horrible place to live in, so I'm just saying, thank the goods you have school :). Where did that come from? No idea. Well, one of the points I wanted to focus on (SPOILER ALERT: skip to the bold red words and continue reading from there if you really don't want a spoiler, but this is a very light introduction of some characters and really shouldn't spoil anything in the book, but if you really want to skip it...) was the friendship between four of the main characters: Gemma, Pippa, Ann and Felicity. These four girls have very different lives, and this is where the social divide comes in. Ann, you see, is a scholarship student that spends her life wishing to be rescued from her future as a nurse to her rich cousin's young children, as she is in their debt for paying the expenses of her boarding school so she would be trained to be an adequate companion for their children. Gemma's family, on the contrary, belong to the high-ish society of London, and so her station in life is to be, no doubt, a pleasant one. Pippa, although belonging to a family of merchants, is very rich, and Felicity's father is a famous naval hero at the time. These girls lives have been very different, and so it is surprising that they become friends, for they all are as different as chalk and cheese, and share neither hopes, nor dreams, nor sorrows. Each girl's past is unique and different, and all they share in common is the wish to be free. This makes their friendship interesting and unique, even though sometimes a chasm opens up and isolates one of them because of an experience the others cannot relate to, and it can seem like a rather shallow friendship at times. END OF SPOILER: continue reading from here One last thing before I finish. The ending. Endings always fascinate me, for sometimes the story gets so complicated that I wonder how the author will pull the end off. Will they give it the ending it deserves, or a simple one, or a much more complicated one that was necessary, or a very vague and shallow one, or what? Those are questions to ponder when you think the book is an intricate story that will need a lot of knot-tying to finish it off properly- unless it's a cliffhanger, but I generally find those when the author intends to write a sequel, and though it can give a nice effect if used correctly, sometimes they might do that because it's easier to leave the reader in suspense rather than go back and tie all the loose threads together so that the reader can fully comprehend the story. Not that I'm implying Libba Bray did that. Certainly not. Although there was still a sense of mystery surrounding the end of the trilogy, I think it was the perfect combination of suspense and compiling everything together. Really, if a little sad, it was fantastic, with just the right amount of vagueness so as to allow the reader the chance of fantasizing about what happens next, but also enough information to leave your mind at rest and to make the book feel finished, and I just really enjoyed reading this trilogy so much, so I hope you do too. |
AuthorCarolina (or Carol for short), a girl who adores to read. A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The person who never reads lives only one. Categories
All
Archives
April 2018
Feel free to comment your opinions about the books when you read them or any suggestions to read!!
For security reasons, please write only your first name when you post a comment and/or if you submit the questionnaire.
|