The Book Bird

 

  

        The Night Circus tells the story of two rival magicians (and not the illusionist kind - this is the real deal) who decide to have a contest. The competition goes like this: they each choose a contestant. They are bound by a ring together. They must compete against each other to find the winner. The venue will be the place called The Night Circus. A beautiful circus that is only open at night, Le Cirque de Reves has a magical, mystical atmosphere. When the two contestants of fall in love though, the fragile balance of the circus is in danger.

       There is no doubt that The Night Circus is a beautiful book. Between the perfect atmosphere, the rich descriptions, and the amazing writing, this book is a work of art. The premise is very intriguing as well. I have never read a book that takes place in the circus, and I don’t know if I will be able to after having read this book - nothing will be able to compare. It was at times a little difficult to get through, but it was well worth the effort. The way the story skipped forward and backward in time was a little confusing, along with the sheer amount of characters. I didn’t find myself actually caring about any of the characters which was a little disappointing because they were all so fascinating. I would give this book 4/5 stars.

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Obsidian follows a teenage girl who moves to a small town in West Virginia with her mother, and is not particularly happy about this decision. Next door to her lives a very attractive, and very rude, boy along with his twin sister. When she sees them do something out of the ordinary, she finds out that they are hot aliens from far, far away. 

The Good:

• The plot was entertaining. The book was very fast paced and made you want to read on, and the drama kept me wanting more.
• Although it was not as funny as the hype says it is, Obsidian still has some humor here and there.
• The action scenes were entertaining.
• The writing was solid. Not award-winning prose, but there weren’t any problems. It did its’ job.
• The idea for the aliens was original, which I appreciated.
• I had a lot of empathy for the MC. There was plenty of second-hand embarrassment involved.

The Bad:

• The whole “I hate this guy but I am still in love with him how funny and unique” plot is getting really old, and I was rolling my eyes the entire book. MC wasn’t fooling anyone.
• We get it. Hot alien guy is hot. You tell us every time we see him, we don’t need to be reminded on every page. If I had a dollar for every time the words “his hard chest” were used I could buy the rights to this book and fix it.
• The author tells all the information at once. I wish there were more suspense on that front.
• The idea for the aliens was really cool, but I wish it was developed more and there was more information on how they actually work. Especially the Arum. How does that work?

Overall rating: 3/5 stars. I will be reading the next books. It was very entertaining, and if the kinks in this book were worked out the rest of the series will be great. I hear the books get better as they go on, so I will be holding out hope. The author accomplished what she was trying to do, but I won’t be nominating this book for any awards.

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Marcus, otherwise known as “w1n5t0n”, is just a seventeen-year-old boy living in San Francisco. But this normal boy leads another life on the internet as a mastermind of technology. An expert at finding ways to exploit flaws in security, Marcus knows how to work the system. Marcus is a celebrity online, until the Bay Bridge is bombed by terrorists. He and his friends are mistaken for terrorists by the Department of Homeland Security and are taken into custody. Interrogated for days, the teenagers are forced to prove that they are not terrorists to the very people who are supposed to protect his country. After the panic from the bombing throws San Francisco into a police state, he decides it is his duty to take down the DHS himself.

Do I recommend this book? Yes. Was it very good? Not really. Little Brothers talks about some very important and relevant ideas, like the importance of privacy as the internet grows and what terrorism really is, but if I were to use one word to describe it, it would be… heavy handed. Excessive amounts of time is spent discussing the reasons the main character feels the way he does, but that isn’t really necessary and there isn’t a lot of subtlety to the message. Despite that, though, Little Brother was truly fascinating for someone who is interested in technology at all. The methods the main character uses to achieve his goals are based on fact, and I found myself doing further research into the topics that were discussed. Even though the writing was often kind of weak, my interest in the plot made it easy for me to get into the book and I was able to overlook some things. And the writing was rough at best. Apparently, Cory Doctorow is incapable of writing a strong female character. There were two girls in the story, discounting adult characters who don’t really get developed, and neither of them had any kind of depth to their characters. The main character’s girlfriend’s personality was described but I just didn’t see any of that in her actions. The main character goes on and on about how adventurous and awesome she is, but the only way I saw that was when she used strong hot sauce on her burrito. Admittedly, it was very strong hot sauce, but I wasn’t seeing what Marcus was seeing. The other female character had me smacking my head in all of her scenes. She was like the literary embodiment of your recently divorced, misogynistic, drunk uncle at Thanksgiving’s idea of women. Even though Marcus has supposedly been friends with her his entire life, she is played as a crazy emotional bitch who is a coward and is just jealous of the marvelous Marcus, her one true love. While reading her final scene I was laughing out loud at the absurdity. If only she had been written better, she might have been one of my favourite characters. And Little Brother often gets just that - absurd. It starts to sound like, “As I made out with this super-hot chick, I contemplated the importance of the constitution as the United States navigates the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and planned my next blog post that millions of kids will read.” If the author hadn’t been so caught up in trying to make his character cool, the quality of the writing would have caught up to the quality of the ideas presented in Little Brother.

 

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This book was just... meh. I have pretty mixed feelings about it.
Things I liked:
- It was pretty cute. A lot of the parts when Bryce and Julie were interacting made me smile.
- The length was short and sweet, making it a quick read.
- I enjoyed the story a lot. There were plenty of funny bits and even though Julie was basically telling the same thing as Bryce in her chapters, it didn't feel repetitive as she was telling the story from her perspective.
- I liked the writing for the most part. No flaws that I can tell.
- The character development was good for the most part - I felt like I understood the characters
Things I didn't like:
- Throughout the book, I didn't like Bryce or Julie. They both annoyed me and I didn't always find them realistic.
- Bryce was supposed to have flipped, but even though he did something nice at the end of the book and he liked Julie, he still seemed like a jerk.
- The way Bryce treated Julie at the end of the book really annoyed me. He just expected Julie to automatically forgive him and like him back. Maybe he wasn't a coward, but he certainly wasn't respectful.
- Bryce had a lot more backstory than Julie. I didn't even know that Julie had brothers until Bryce mentioned it.
-The events weren't always in chronological order and that really confused me at certain points. The characters would talk about what happened over a long period and then go back and talk about it in more detail. This may not bother other people who are better at paying attention, though.
- The author's message wasn't very clear to me. Was she trying to say not to take people at face value? This doesn't make any sense to me because of Bryce's change in character at the end.
These character flaws were kind of to big for me to really enjoy the book, especially since it's a pretty character driven book. I would recommend it for a quick and fun read, but not much past that.

I would give Alabama moon three stars overall. My favorite part was the descriptions of what Moon had to do in the wild. My only problem with that aspect was that it spent a little too much time talking about Moon making his shelter, getting food, making fires, etc. and I thought it took a little bit away from the plot. It might have been trimmed down a little bit more.

The plot was alright, but I didn't feel like it had a clear structure. There didn't seem to be a clear goal in mind that Moon was working towards which wasn't a huge problem, but did bother me all the same. I thought Moon sometimes acted a little bit older than he should have. For example, he doesn't act very scared about being alone when his dad dies. I understand that he is supposed to be brave, but he isn't a robot. Sometimes I felt like the emotion on all the characters' parts fell a little bit short.

***** SPOILERS ******

I felt like the uncle came out of the blue a little bit. Now, I'm very picky about my endings, but there wasn't even any hinting. A new character can't be introduced in the last 10 pages.

I loved The Shadow Thieves. I really liked the humorous style of writing used and it was never boring, with constant action and no floods of detail that make you want to skip the two page long paragraph. I stayed up until four in the morning finishing this book and I don't regret a second of it! The only issue is that it is very similar to Percy Jackson and the Olympians - maybe a little bit too similar for comfort. All the same, I highly recommend this book and I can't wait to read the next one!

Very exciting! Definately a page-turner!