Tag Archives: YA

Review | Game, Barry Lyga

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0316125873I absolutely loved the concept behind Barry Lyga’s I Hunt Killers. A teenage son of the world’s most notorious serial killer decides to use his father’s training to hunt serial killers himself, and therefore prove he isn’t like his father. Jasper Dent has the daddy of daddy issues, and it makes for a gripping, emotional read, and a hero/potential anti-hero you can really get behind. There are shades of Dexter Morgan’s in Jazz’s own quest, and kudos to Lyga for fearlessly exploring the darkness within his teenage protagonist.

Game ups the ante by pitting father against son in even more overt ways. Jazz is somewhat more confident in his role as serial killer hunter, but his subconscious keeps torturing him with disturbing memories, and he is still unable to shake off the fear that he is predisposed to ultimately become like his father.

On one hand, Game is a bit of a letdown after the absolutely compelling first volume in the series. It reads more like a traditional thriller, except with a teenage protagonist rather than a hardened professional. Jazz’s character development had always fascinated me more than the mysteries themselves, so oddly enough, I found myself somewhat disappointed by the heightened focus on the mystery in this book.

Connie plays a much larger role in this book, and while I like how important she is in keeping Jazz deeply grounded in his own humanity, while I like that Lyga has a female character who can hold her own as well as the male protagonist can, I thought her part in the story mostly unnecessary and would personally have preferred to instead have had Jazz’s solitude offer us a deeper exploration of his psyche.

That being said, there’s still plenty of dark and twisty Jasper Dent psychology to grip readers. Jazz’s hesitation to have sex with Connie, because he’s afraid it’ll awaken some latent psychosis is reminiscent of Angel’s inability to have sex with Buffy at the risk of losing his soul, and it’s particularly striking within the context of the deeply disturbing, highly sexualized, memories surfacing in Jazz’s subconscious.

As well, as an action packed thriller, it’s a hell of a ride. Particularly in the second half of the book, where my Goodreads profile shows comments such as “Holy crap!” at around the 75% mark, and “OMG what a cliff hanger!” at the very end.

The Jasper Dent books is an audacious, utterly fascinating series, and I can’t wait to see where Lyga takes it next.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Truth or Dare, Jacqueline Green

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fe62b5cc5a2b57a344b8c67f776d5ed5Jacqueline Green’s Truth or Dare takes the concept of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Pretty Little Liars to the small seaside town of Echo Bay. Artsy outcast Sydney Morgan and pretty, popular childhood BFF’s Caitlin Thomas and Tenley Reed receive mysterious dares containing hints to long-kept secrets. As with any self-respecting horror thriller, the attempt to keep these secrets hidden only leads to the need to keep even more secrets, and the girls’ lives quickly spiral into a seemingly never ending loop of jealousy and betrayal.

With a book like this, you don’t necessarily expect amazing character development, but rather a tense, gripping read. Unfortunately, the book falls short on both counts. It was an okay book – the writing style was solid, and the suspense was enough to keep me turning the pages. It just didn’t make me care enough to want to read more of the series (and a cliffhanger ending straight out of Pretty Little Liars indicates the story is far from done).

The characters were pretty flat, stock figures. I did sympathize with Tenley’s desperate desire to reclaim her popularity, as well as with Caitlin’s desire to be known for something beyond “perfect,” but not enough nuance was given these characters to make it really stick. Worse, Sydney, the loner who is traditionally the reader’s entry point into stories like this, is such a stereotype that it’s hard to feel invested in her at all.

The dares in themselves begin fairly innocuous then get more and more twisted. I like how for the most part, none of the girls knew the others were also receiving threats, and I also like how the threats were very personal, each dare revealing something new about one of the characters. Yet for some reason, there was little ratcheting of suspense – for the most part it felt like one dare after another with hardly a sense of movement in the overall story.

It’s all right. It just pales in comparison with both I Know What You Did Last Summer and Pretty Little Liars. I remember after reading Pretty Little Liars wanting to read the next book immediately, and the one after that, until I find out who A is and what their problem is. I felt no such urgency in this book, and even when the source behind the dares was revealed, I was surprised, but mostly apathetic. Read Pretty Little Liars instead.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

 

Review | The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B, Teresa Toten

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16280081The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B is an important book, yet I think it’s for the very same factors that make it important that also made it difficult for me to connect with the book. I had the pleasure of meeting Teresa at a Random House blogger event a few months ago, and she basically stole my heart by talking about Puff, the Magic Dragon and reading from Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” So I read Unlikely Hero wanting, really wanting, to love it just as much as I loved meeting its author.

Yet I didn’t, and to be fair, I find it difficult to put my finger on just why I didn’t. Because Toten does a lot of things right. Unlikely Hero is about Adam, a teenage boy with OCD, who falls in love with Robyn, a girl in his support group. The members of the group are all given superhero nicknames, and Adam, naturally, chooses to become Batman to his Robyn.

Toten has clearly done her research on OCD, and it’s heartbreaking to see how difficult Adam sometimes finds such mundane tasks as entering a door. In one particularly moving scene, he invites his support group friends to his church and realizes at the threshold that he needs to perform an elaborate, ten minute or so ritual before he can enter. The other members of the group, and Robyn herself, are sensitive enough not to make a big deal out of it, and simply walk in to wait for him. Even more striking is another scene where he worries about his mother needing urgent help, but upon reaching his own front door, realizes he is unable to pass through, again without performing an elaborate, time-consuming ritual. Toten does a great job making Adam’s struggles real for the reader – his rituals form a barrier than almost feels physical, and thanks to Toten’s gift with language, certainly feels as impenetrable to us as to Adam himself.

There’s a touching sweetness to Adam. He desperately wants to be a hero, desperately wants to help Robyn overcome her own fears, and to rescue his mother from a hateful anonymous letter writer who tells her to kill herself. Yet, try as he might, he is unable to escape his own weakness – how can Batman save the world if he can’t even enter a doorway?

I think it’s this sweetness that, ironically, eventually sours me to Adam. He seems too earnest, his sweetness almost cloying, and he seems too close to perfect to be real. It’s not that he has no weaknesses – the source of his personal struggle is all too real – but the depiction of his heroic nature seems almost heavy handed, and I found myself searching for a character flaw.

Even the constant reference to other group members by their chosen superhero names – regardless of how realistic this may be – felt cutesy after a while, and I found it difficult to see them as real people. They serve mostly as a foil to Adam – we see their own OCD quirks, and see how they respond to Adam as an inspiration – but never really come into their own as characters.

Robyn, in particular, since we’re seeing her mostly through Adam’s eyes, appears a dream girl – yes vulnerable, yes struggling with OCD tendencies – but ultimately unreal.

As I said, this is an important book, mostly because of how much it plunges the reader into the experience of having OCD. I just wish the characters had a bit more of an edge to their personalities.

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Thank you to Random House of Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.