October’s cumulative word count is 29,953. I like to think a lot of that was written on The Last Assassin, but I’m honestly not sure. Approximately 7,300 was written on short stories.
I’ve prepped for NaNoWriMo, deciding on what I want my bullet journal word count tracker to look like for the month, doing a little bit more Continue reading “Farewell to October”
This book… Oh my gosh… I’m half convinced that Rachel Coker wrote Chasing Jupiter on psychic paper. I relate to this book so much in so many areas. My feelings about this book can be summed up as follows: Continue reading “Book of the Month Review: Chasing Jupiter by Rachel Coker”
People say it’s bad to put people in boxes, and the same applies to characters. I say that if you know they won’t fit neatly in the box it can help you get to know your character to put them in it. It can help you understand their values and flaws and strengths better. Here are the boxes I’m mostly talking about:
Harry Potter Houses: Yep. I’m a nerd. Although, not a Harry Potter nerd. I have yet to read it. (Long story short: It’s on my tablet and my tablet broke.) However, Continue reading “The “Boxes” I Put My Characters In”
I started this book sometime before August (or maybe during August) and finally finished it on September sixteenth. It was very, very good, and I gave it five stars on Goodreads.
My favorite thing about this book was the characters. They were all well-written, well fleshed out, deep, enjoyable characters, with the possible exceptions of Giddon and the Leinid crew. Giddon seemed rather shallow to me, but even at that he was still well-written for who he is, I think. Po was certainly my favorite character; he’s fun to read because he’s clever and witty and flirtatious and he’s a good guy. That’s basically my checklist for if you want to write a character I’ll love reading. Jest from Heartless, Po from Graceling, Celaena from Throne of Glass, Cimorene from The Enchanted Forest Chronicles… Yeah, it’s a long list. So of course I like Po. Bitterblue was my second favorite character. I couldn’t tell you quite why. I think because she’s so intelligent and understands so much about the characters around her. Katsa, the main character, comes in third. Though she was deep and complex, her personality wasn’t a favorite of mine, personally. She’s rather distant under most circumstances and takes a while to open up to other characters, and I tend to prefer reading characters who connect easily with other people, for some reason. She did connect very well with some of the characters around her, but her general character is aloof and distant.
I judge the worldbuilding as about a four out of five. I could tell that the world was well thought-out and deep, but I thought in the book we really only get to see the tip of that iceberg and I really wanted to see more. Leinid was the most fleshed-out of the kingdoms, and also my favorite. I’m sure that the former contributed to the latter, but it doesn’t help any that the other two countries that were really mentioned weren’t really very likable for… reasons. The two of them fed into each other, I think. I tend to like reading a deep world, so maybe I’m just looking for more from the book than is normal because of that. I do see that it has a lot of depth, just not a lot that we get to see in this book. Maybe in the other books there’s more detail given.
The plot also gets a four out of five. I really love the idea of Graces. I found that fascinating. I love Po’s Grace in particular, but all of the three showcased were fascinating to read and fit their characters well and just blended to create a really interesting story. The main plot was really interesting, as well. I felt that the antagonist was well-developed, just like all of the others, and even though he isn’t really seen much, he was really interesting to read when he was “on screen,” and even when he wasn’t. I love villains who personally affect the good guys. The antagonist did that with Katsa and Bitterblue, and to some extent with Po as well, more through Katsa and Bitterblue than as directly. He played with Katsa’s mind, both intentionally and not so intentionally, and we get to see her confidence falter as she’s faced with something she’s never faced before.
Unfortunately I must include a warning that there are about two scenes and a sentence that are rather inappropriate. It really disappoints me that so many of the really good books I’ve read have scenes in them that have to be skimmed. Why can’t people write clean fantasy with the same depth of worldbuilding and characters?
Other than those couple of spots, though, this book was great. I don’t feel comfortable recommending it because of those few scenes, but I really enjoyed it.
Well, I was planning on having this showcase the best thing I’d read this month, but The Collective was so bad I had to feature it instead. I started marking it up about halfway through and it’s now covered in red ink.
The Collective is a historical fiction/sci-fi following two main characters who go back in time to the 1700s to stop time from being altered. In theory this would make an interesting book, but in reality it was severely underwhelming.
The first issue with The Collective is that the relationships don’t make sense. Everyone falls in love instantly (something I’ll cover in the next point), and even the friendships make very little sense. The main characters, Tilly and Jenny, supposedly become great friends over the course of the book, but it comes across forced and artificial because for one thing they’re not even together for half the book, and then they just suddenly are great friends. I get that people sometimes bond together because of dangerous circumstances in which they need to get along to survive or get something done, but this took it too far. And both of them set my teeth on edge with romantic relationships. Each one supposedly falls in love with one of these two guys, one of which is the villain and the other of which doesn’t have the greatest moral compass (no pun intended). It just irked me that they have such poor judgement.
Next comes “instalove.” Jenny and Tilly both fell in love with their respective gentlemen almost instantly, and then those relationships weren’t even well fleshed-out later in the book, so they were both shallow, surface-level relationships. Everything was focused on the guys being physically attractive, not their personalities or character traits (which makes sense because one was entirely immoral and the other had questionable morals). I personally cannot stand romances in books that never go more than surface-deep. It irks me to no end. I like deep, meaningful relationships built on trust and actual love for the other person, not shallow, vain relationships built on how hot the other person is.
This next point was one of the biggest turn-offs. If this hadn’t been an issue I might not have judged the overall poor writing quite as harshly. The grammar was atrocious. There was an overabundance of commas, most dialogue was formatted incorrectly, and there were so many lines that just didn’t make sense the way they were written. I actually laughed at one point because I came to this line: “Jenny could hear his boots walk down the hall.” So his boots were walking all by themselves? I literally laughed out loud when I read that. And then again on that same page, “She heard his voice speaking to his crew.” There were so many more spots I could mention, but then this post would be far too long.
The characters also weren’t interesting. They felt flat and annoying. I wanted to slap them numerous times throughout the book for making stupid decisions (like falling in love with jerks), and there wasn’t much character to them. Tilly was constantly melodramatic about everything and Jenny was made out to be critical but then wasn’t in some areas. Like guys. She wasn’t critical at all of any of the cute guys in her life, pretty much. And then when she found out who was masquerading as another character she was entirely too emotional for the circumstances. Now, I don’t mean to say that critical characters can’t be emotional. I don’t mean that at all. Jenny just wasn’t executed well. She came across as a character who was supposed to be critical and just wasn’t. Both main characters were weakly written, and the majority of the other characters were, as well. Roger and Joseph were better-written, and they’re the only characters in the book I remotely liked, and I still wanted to slap them numerous times.
Overall I thought this was a very poorly-written book and it took me four months to struggle through it to the end. I barely give it one star.