Book Review: Vicious by V.E. Schwab

Vicious by V.E. Schwab

Standalone novel
Publisher: Tor
Release Date: 24th September 2013
Read Date: 1st February 2015
Tagged Under: 2015 read, 2015 favourites, paranormal, YA fiction, 5, fantasy, favourites, book review
Check It Out: @Amazon, @TheBookDepository, @Goodreads

Book Summary

A masterful, twisted tale of ambition, jealousy, betrayal, and superpowers, set in a near-future world. 

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates - brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other superpowered person that he can find - aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible powers on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge - but who will be left alive at the end?

Book Review: The Vanishing Game by Kate Kae Myers

The Vanishing Game by Kate Kae Myers

Standalone book
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Release Date: 16th January 2014
Read Date: 12th June 2014
Tagged under: 2014 read, 4, YA fiction, mystery or thriller, paranormal
Pages: 384
Buy at: Amazon, The Book Depository

If you're reading this, then it means you're close to finding me...

Seventeen-year-old Jocelyn follows clues apparently from her dead twin, Jack, in and around Seale House, the terrifying foster home where they once lived. With help from childhood friend Noah she begins to uncover the truth about Jack's death and the company that employed him and Noah. 

Jocelyn's twin brother Jack was the only family she had growing up in a world of foster homes - and now he's dead, and she has nothing. Then she gets a cryptic letter from "Jason December" - the code name her brother used to use when they were children at Seale House, a terrifying foster home that they believed had dark powers. Only one other person knows about Jason December: Noah, Jocelyn's childhood crush and their only real friend among the troubled children at Seale House.

But when Jocelyn returns to Seale House and the city where she last saw Noah, she gets more than she bargained for. Turns out the house's powers weren't just a figment of a childish imagination. And someone is following Jocelyn. Is Jack still alive? And if he is, what kind of trouble is he in? The answer is revealed in a shocking twist that turns this story on its head and will send readers straight back to page 1 to read the book in a whole new light.

Book Review: Don't Even Think About It by Sarah Mlynowski

Source: Don't Even Think About It
by Sarah Mlynowski

Don't Even Think About It by Sarah Mlynowski

Series: Don't Even Think About It (Book #1)

Publisher: Orchard Books

Release Date: May 1 2014 [Already released in US on March 11 2014]

Tagged under: 2014 read, review copy, YA-fiction, contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, 3

Pages: 338

Buy at: Amazon, The Book Depository

This is the story of how we became freaks...

When Class 10B got their flu shots, they expected some side effects. Maybe a sore arm. Maybe a headache. 

They definitely didn't expect to get telepathy. 

But suddenly they could hear what everyone was thinking. Their friends. Their teachers. Their parents. Now they all know that Tess has a crush on her best friend, Teddy. That Mackenzie cheated on Cooper. That Nurse Carmichael used to be a stripper. Some of them will thrive. Some of them will break. None of them will ever be the same.

Book Review [Relatively Spoiler-Free]

The premise of this book is what immediately grabbed my attention. A whole class of students who are suddenly privy to every thought that comes into your head - it gives a whole new meaning to thinking out loud. Secrets lose their definition. Skeletons in the closet come tumbling out. I was interested to find out how these kids would react to and utilise their telepathic powers. 

It is something we all do without much thought. Every year, with the flu season looming over the horizon, we all line up to get our vaccination. The students in Class 10B did so - some with less enthusiasm than others - but once the needle is in and a band-aid is slapped over the site, they all trickled away from the nurse's office thinking that's the end of it.

Except it wasn't.

Slowly, over the next couple of days, the kids started hearing thoughts from everyone around them. Whether they were benign comments like the tacos might look like cat barf, but they taste really good to serious bombshells such as spilling out the fact that you cheated on your boyfriend over the summer.

This book is a fairly easy read and is obviously targeting the younger end of the YA-market. The narration can be a bit odd but if you read with an open mind, you might find yourself actually enjoying it. For me, I found the we-narration of the book very interesting and potentially one of the highlights of this book. My favourite section is still the opening chapter where as a reader, you're trying to pin-point who's the narrator and then the author hits you with this -

Maybe you think Olivia is telling this story. Or Mackenzie, or Cooper, or someone else in our home-room you haven't met. It could be any of us. But it's not. It's all of us. We're telling you the story together. It is the only way we know how. This is the story of how we became freaks. 

It's how a group of Is became a we.

The book starts out strong and it's highly entertaining journeying with the characters as they all, one at a time, come into their powers. Their reactions are humorous (and juvenile at times, which is why I think the book is geared towards younger readers) and they realize straight away that they must come up with a plan of some sort in order to deal with this. The fact that they come together and discuss things and make decisions as a group makes it feel like a collective effort. 

Amongst all the collective thoughts, the reader never loses sight of the fact that these characters are all individuals that have their own problems to deal with. Mackenzie has to deal with the fact that now every mind-reader in her class knows that she cheated on her boyfriend. Tess is desperate to figure out if Teddy, her best friend who she has been crushing on for ages, likes her or not. 

What prevented me from enjoying the book more is the fact that as the story progresses, the majority of the characters stayed where they are. Apart from a couple of individuals who matured and grew from the experience, the rest were too busy caught up in their own issues. Pi, the ring leader, is sick of being number two in the school and used her abilities to her advantage on a test, yet she gets disgruntled when other telepaths used the same ability on her. There is a lot of how can this help me, revealing an ugly and petty side to having telepathy. In addition, the ending is a bit abrupt, leaving the story open for a sequel. 

Overall 3/5

Overall, it's still a fun easy story. It is not what I expected it to be when I initially started but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I definitely think it's more for an younger audience. 

Disclaimer: A complimentary advanced copy of the ebook was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The views expressed above are entirely my own and are, in no way, affected by the source of this book.

Book Review: Carrie by Stephen King

Source: Carrie by Stephen King

Carrie by Stephen King

Standalone book

Publisher: Anchor

Release date: 5th April 1974

Tagged under: adult fiction, horror, paranormal, 2014 read

Pages: 304

Buy at: Amazon

Stephen King's Legendary Debut...

Carrie White may have been unfashionable and unpopular, but she had a gift. Carrie could make things move by concentrating on them. A candle would fall. A door would lock. This was her power and her sin. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offered Carrie a chance to be normal and go to her senior prom. But another act - of ferocious cruelty - turned her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that her classmates would never forget.

Review [May contain spoilers]

When I think of Stephen King, I think horror and then, as a sort of automatic self-defense mechanism, my brain immediately turns to a lighter subject like rainbows or unicorns. For those who don't know me, I don't do horror. Period. A mildly scary TV show episode that won't even bother any normal person would leave me with nightmares for weeks. Once, on a roadtrip, my friends decided it would be fun to watch a Japanese horror film. According to them, it wasn't even a scary one. All my friends were making fun of how bad it was the whole way through. I think I watched half, cowered behind a couch pillow for the second half and then, for the next few hours, was as high-strung as a horse that refused to settle down. I simply couldn't sleep that night and because I couldn't sleep, no one ended up sleeping. Suffice to say, that was the last time my friends ever suggested a horror film to me. Even after the road trip, I had difficulty sleeping for the next two months or so.

So it was really for my own self-preservation that I steered clear from Stephen King for such a long time. I have read his On Writing memoir so I knew and was charmed by the story surrounding the creation of Carrie. I also knew vaguely that Carrie was about a girl having her first menstrual period in the girls' bathroom at school. But beyond that, I didn't know much. And frankly, given how Stephen King is often dubbed the king of horror, I didn't want to know much.

But last week, when I was in the local library, I stumbled across the book and I thought if I were really to broad my reading horizons, I should try a little bit of everything, shouldn't I? It's okay. I'll just read the book in broad daylight while in the presence of other people and hopefully, that'll dampen my level of fear.

And now, 304 pages later, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. Not sure if it's my lack of experience in the horror genre speaking or what, but my impression of the horror genre, be it books, TV shows or movies, is that the whole thing is just scary. The whole point of the experience is to scare the audience as much as you can for as long as you can. Everything else is secondary to the scare factor. So to my surprise, Carrie is more than just a scary book, it has a lot of character and plot development and I was really drawn into the lives of the residents of Chamberlain.

Stephen King gets the ball rolling right from the beginning. The entire novel is a combination of prose and excerpts from various articles and books on the Carrie Incident. So even if you come into the book completely blind with no idea what Stephen King writes or what this book is about, you knew something terrible was going to happen soon. There is a heavy sense of foreshadowing. Even simple phrases such as "one of her surviving classmates..." makes you wonder exactly how many people are going to end up dead by the end of the book and then, the nature of their death.

But beyond the escalating sense of impending horror, I can't help but be drawn into the characters' lives. Right from the start, I sympathized with Carrie the protagonist who will end up wielding powers of mass destruction. Carrie is really a victim of circumstances. She is raised up by a religiously fanatical mother who forces her to wear frumpy clothes, pray frequently every day and kept her in the dark about most things in life. The fact that when Carrie had her first menstrual period in the school gym, she thought she was bleeding to death is a prime example of how restricted her knowledge is. To make matters worse, when she goes home and confronts her mother about not telling her, her mother browbeats Carrie into praying because menstruation is a sign she sinned and drags Carrie into the closet for more praying. One of Carrie's poems in class summarises the situation perfectly:

Jesus watches from the wall.
But his face is cold as stone.
And if he loves me - As she tells me
Why do I feel so all alone?

But beyond Carrie, I am also drawn into the lives of all the other players in this book. Susan Snell with her guilt about what she did in the bathroom and her need to atone for her actions. Miss Desjardin with her initial exasperation at Carrie's behavior and then later, her stout defense of Carrie and fitting punishment of the students who started it all. When the principal snaps back at Christine Hargensen's father regarding lawsuits, I felt a moment of triumph. I even got involved in the scholarly articles and the White Commission as they speculate what exactly happened and who was to blame. Their miscast of blame and attempt to find a scapegoat really did get on my nerves but I guess that's what happens after a tragic accident. The dead can't talk.

Overall: 4/5

I really did enjoy this book, more than I had expected to. Stephen King frequently mentions this book as sort of "raw" but I can see how this book catapulted him onto the bookshelves of millions and how even today, it's being read and heralded as a classic. But does this mean I'll read more of his works? Probably not. Like I said before, I have my own self-preservation to consider first.