Review: Splintered

 

Title/Author: Splintered by A.G. Howard

Publication Date/Publisher: January 1, 2013/Amulet Books

Series: Splintered #1

Source and Format: Audiobook, borrowed this book from the library

Rating: 1.5 stars

 

From Goodreads:

Alyssa Gardner hears the whispers of bugs and flowers—precisely the affliction that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before. This family curse stretches back to her ancestor Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alyssa might be crazy, but she manages to keep it together. For now.

When her mother’s mental health takes a turn for the worse, Alyssa learns that what she thought was fiction is based in terrifying reality. The real Wonderland is a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on. There, Alyssa must pass a series of tests, including draining an ocean of Alice’s tears, waking the slumbering tea party, and subduing a vicious bandersnatch, to fix Alice’s mistakes and save her family. She must also decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland, who may have dark motives of his own.

I had to bring back half stars for this one – it wasn’t the hate read I give 1 stars, but neither did it deserve 2 stars. It was just…not good.

I mean…I guess the story is okay in parts. The magic and Wonderland stuff is fine, but anything regarding the characters, dialogue, and/or love triangle did not work for me AT ALL.

The writing leaves so much to be desired. I would have guessed Splintered was self published, honestly, based on the quality of writing. Sometimes it’s the fault of the audiobook narrator, but I really don’t think that was the case here. Sure, Rebecca Gibel’s cockney accent for Morpheus is not great, but he’s also saying ridiculous things so is it really her fault?

The characters are ridiculous. Alyssa is a “skater girl” who can’t do an ollie AND a white girl with dreadlocks. Jeb is basically a walking labret piercing – with bangs AND a ponytail. He’s also super controlling of Alyssa and if for some reason I was friends with a white girl with dreads, the first thing I would tell her (after “change your hair”) is to run away from Jeb as fast as possible. Morpheus has a fedora collection. This is basically a collection of the worst “people” ever and they all deserve each other.

I obviously will not be continuing the series.

Audio Review: The Lightning Thief

 

Title/Author: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (read by Jesse Bernstein)

Publication Date/Publisher: January 28, 2005/Miramax Books

Series: Percy Jackson and the Olympians #1

Source and Format: Borrowed from library – eaudiobook.

Rating: 2 stars

From Goodreads:

Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson is about to be kicked out of boarding school . . . again. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to stay out of trouble. But can he really be expected to stand by and watch while a bully picks on his scrawny best friend? Or not defend himself against his pre-algebra teacher when she turns into a monster and tries to kill him? Of course, no one believes Percy about the monster incident; he’s not even sure he believes himself.
Until the Minotaur chases him to summer camp.

Suddenly, mythical creatures seem to be walking straight out of the pages of Percy’s Greek mythology textbook and into his life. The gods of Mount Olympus, he’s coming to realize, are very much alive in the twenty-first century. And worse, he’s angered a few of them: Zeus’s master lightning bolt has been stolen, and Percy is the prime suspect.

Now Percy has just ten days to find and return Zeus’s stolen property, and bring peace to a warring Mount Olympus. On a daring road trip from their summer camp in New York to the gates of the Underworld in Los Angeles, Percy and his friends-one a satyr and the other the demigod daughter of Athena-will face a host of enemies determined to stop them.

To succeed on his quest, Percy will have to do more than catch the true thief: he must come to terms with the father who abandoned him; solve the riddle of the Oracle, which warns him of failure and betrayal by a friend; and unravel a treachery more powerful than the gods themselves.

It’s hard to review older books, especially older books that are well-loved and ESPECIALLY older books that are well-loved that I didn’t also love. I can’t exactly tell what I didn’t like about The Lightning Thief. I think it read a lot younger than I expected for some reason – even though the characters are 12.

Actually, if they’re only 12 – why are they being sent on these hero missions? Shouldn’t they do some training first and do that kind of stuff later?

The story was pretty entertaining, if extremely Harry Potter-y, so I’ll keep listening – though the narrator could be better. Hopefully he picks it up in the volumes to come. I have enough interest in Greek mythology to keep going, and luckily that was the most well-done part of The Lightning Thief – even when I was thinking “this one’s the Snape” and “what a weird Dumbledore”.

Audio Review: How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky

Title/Author: How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer

Publication Date/Publisher: July 1, 2014/Macmillan Audio

Series: No

Source and Format: Borrowed from Library

Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads:

Like a jewel shimmering in a Midwest skyline, the Toledo Institute of Astronomy is the nation’s premier center of astronomical discovery and a beacon of scientific learning for astronomers far and wide. Here, dreamy cosmologist George Dermont mines the stars to prove the existence of God. Here, Irene Sparks, an unsentimental scientist, creates black holes in captivity.

George and Irene are on a collision course with love, destiny and fate. They have everything in common: both are ambitious, both passionate about science, both lonely and yearning for connection. The air seems to hum when they’re together. But George and Irene’s attraction was not written in the stars. In fact their mothers, friends since childhood, raised them separately to become each other’s soulmates.
When that long-secret plan triggers unintended consequences, the two astronomers must discover the truth about their destinies, and unravel the mystery of what Toledo holds for them—together or, perhaps, apart.

Lydia Netzer combines a gift for character and big-hearted storytelling, with a sure hand for science and a vision of a city transformed by its unique celestial position, exploring the conflicts of fate and determinism, and asking how much of life is under our control and what is pre-ordained in the heavens.

I don’t even know where to start in this review. How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky started out almost tooooo quirky, even for me. Opening with all the physics talk, especially in an audio book where I can’t just glance over it, was a little hard. Eventually it all smooths out and comes together and is wonderful.

Joshilyn Jackson narrates, and it took me a while to warm up to her. I have read Jackson’s work as well, but I wanted to DNF based on her reading alone, at the beginning. She reads some of the characters, Belion (I had to read some other reviews to find out how to spell that) especially, kind of cartoon-y, and it starts working FOR the story, rather than against it, so I’m glad I stayed with it. I’m picking up the audiobook of Netzer’s first book Shine, Shine, Shine and I’m excited that Joshilyn Jackson reads that one as well.

The main issue I had with this as an audiobook (once I got past the narrator) is that there was no way for me to collect the quotes I loved.

I loved how fully fleshed out every character was – even the most minor supporting cast. Sure, they are each just a bundle of quirks, but it works. I enjoyed seeing the mothers meet as children and follow their plans to birth these children that would be soulmates and eventually their horrible falling out. It’s a fully realized life, even if it is extremely far-fetched (and that’s without the Gods, lucid dreaming, black holes, and Archmage of the Underdark).

I felt like it was well done, the love-planning. Make these people so compatible and similar-yet-just-different-enough to be perfect for each other. It’s perfect for the story, even if it would not be perfect in real life. They don’t really have to grow together as a couple, because they’re already done. There is no “here’s a thing I love, let me introduce you to it and share it with you because I want you to understand me” because they already did all the same things growing up. The same trips, the same books, the same music. They miss out on one of the most fun parts of starting a new relationship.

If I was still doing half star ratings, this would be 4.5 for sure. It’s just squeaking by under a 5 star rating because the end was a little off to me. I looooved the thing with the flowers and the confusion and was giddy about it, but the rest of it seemed kind of weird to me.

I definitely recommend How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky to everyone – and the audiobook, if you don’t mind missing out on being able to capture your favorite quotes, because it was fantastic, otherwise.

Audio Review: World War Z

Title/Author: World War Z by Max Brooks

Publication Date/Publisher: September 12, 2006/Random House Audio

Series: No

Source and Format: Purchased, Audio CD

Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads:

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. “World War Z” is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

They…made a movie out of this?

Okay. I did some internet researching. The only thing the movie has in common with the book is the name. I feel a little bit better about it now.

I should have waited a little longer to start World War Z after finishing the Newsflesh Trilogy. Some of the zombie lore got brought over and jumbled up and it wasn’t really a HUGE deal since a zombie is a zombie but…was it ever explained how the outbreak started? As I noted in my Lord of the Rings audio review, I space out while driving and miss some things – so was it African rabies mutated to undead cannibalism or something else?

I liked the full cast reading – Mark Hamill, Alan Alda, Rob Reiner, and Henry Rollins all appear. I was excited about Henry Rollins until I remembered that I hate him now. Anyway, I’m sure there are some other exciting names on there, but these are the ones that stood out to me.

Some of the stories are more interesting than others, sure, but I really enjoyed the way the whole story was presented and the overall presentation was very well done.

Audio Review: Gone Girl

Title/Author: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Publication Date/Publisher: May 24, 2014/Orion Publishing Group Limited

Series: No

Source and Format: Borrowed from Library, Audio CD

Rating: re-read

From Goodreads:

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 from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. 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?
As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

I originally read Gone Girl in September 2012 and gave it four stars. I think that rating stands, or is possibly a tiiiiiny bit lower on this audio re-read.

With the movie coming out this year, I wanted the book to be a little fresher in my mind. The trailer made it look promising, but then I remembered the journals. HOW ARE THEY GOING TO DO IT?! I would watch the movie just to find that out.

Once I started listening, the little twists and everything started coming back to me. The narrator for Nick did not really work for me at first, especially knowing that Ben Affleck “is” Nick Dunne – the voice did not have the supreme manly quality that Nick should have, in my mind. The narrator for Amy was practically perfect, because of course she would have to be.

Now I just have to hope I can keep it all in my head until at least October 3.