Books I Didn’t Finish: January 2013

 

It causes me physical pain that this book has to go in this post. The cover!! I love it so much! Her eye looks so awesome, and I love the way the font looks. Not to mention that the synopsis sounds amazeballs! This book was one of my most anticipated 2013 releases. That is, until I started seeing the nasty ratings. I heard from many people that the writing quality was middle grade at best. In a way, I’m glad my hopes were squashed down before I picked this up, because I went in with rather low expectations.
I’m afraid I couldn’t get past page 90. I wanted so badly to be the black sheep this time, but I’m afraid I share the same opinion as everyone else.

My main issue was the horribly sophomoric writing. This should really have been labeled as MG, not YA. My second issue was all the terms. Freeposts, Kidbons (which I eventually figured out was a bonfire for kids…so original), chaff beacons, and the term ‘fletch’ (which was used to describe a girl. Hot? Cool? Who knows). Then there was mention of a revolution 19 renegade. What is it? Why the number? What exactly does it entail? It’s the title of the book, so I’d think it would warrant an explanation straight off. I hate it when an author uses terms and doesn’t explain what they are. It drives me CRAZY. If you give me the gist of it, fine. Or even if I can glean the meaning from context. But when you use it in a sentence and I STILL have no clue what it is…yeah, that’s a problem for me.
Re-educated? Is that some sort of brainwashing? Even the main characters didn’t know what it was. Wouldn’t they think to ask? That would have been the common sense thing to do, when a stranger mentions a term that you’ve never heard before.

The main reason I wanted to read this book was because of the robots. I thought maybe I could read something else that would be as cool as Partials. But the robots in this book were cheesy. First of all, they were supposed to be super bad guys, but they didn’t kill just anyone. No, they had to ‘maintain the approved release control group quota’ – whatever the hell that means – so they only killed a couple people out of a group. What is the point of that? They were box-like with wheels…I think (I say think because from the shoddy description I don’t actually know) they were still supposed to be vaguely human-like, though. It’s just that when I think of rolling robots, I think of the dorky police robots in Treasure Planet. Real scary…
Plus every time a robot talked, it was in caps. For some reason, this bothered me. I can’t exactly explain why, it just didn’t work in the dialogue.

The conversations didn’t flow and were too cumbersome to be realistic. When the characters would talk, I kinda zoned out. The characters were all cardboard cutouts, without their own personalities. Plus I found them annoying. Especially Lexi, who kept calling Nick ‘rock star.’ Seriously, like every page. And there wasn’t even a reason for the nickname (that I could see, anyway). Every time she said it, my eye twitched.

Overall, I was bored. Things were happening, but they weren’t exciting like they should have been. I just felt ‘meh’ about the story, the plot, and the characters. Great idea. Not-so-great delivery.

Elliot North has always known her place in this world. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. Since then the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress, and Elliot’s estate is foundering, forcing her to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain Malakai Wentforth–an almost unrecognizable Kai. And while Elliot wonders if this could be their second chance, Kai seems determined to show Elliot exactly what she gave up when she let him go.

But Elliot soon discovers her old friend carries a secret–one that could change their society . . . or bring it to its knees. And again, she’s faced with a choice: cling to what she’s been raised to believe, or cast her lot with the only boy she’s ever loved, even if she’s lost him forever.

Inspired by Jane Austen’s persuasion, For Darkness Shows the Stars is a breathtaking romance about opening your mind to the future and your heart to the one person you know can break it.

 

I gave this one a valiant 104 pages. No, it’s not really that much, but I wanted to put it down much sooner. I was bored OUT OF MY EVER LOVING MIND, to the point where I was literally falling asleep. I actually nodded off twice while reading this. Plus I didn’t know what the eff was even going on. 100 pages through the book, and I didn’t even know what it was supposed to be about. The only reason I kept going after the first 80 pages of nothing was because I promised several of my good blogging friends (that may or may not come after me with pitchforks haha) that I’d give it 100 pages. But I just couldn’t go any farther.

I was confused as hell. I had NO idea what anything meant, or what was going on with the world building. Terms were being viciously chucked at my head: Luddite, Reduced, CORs, Posts, Cloud Fleet, ERV procedure…and it took FAR too long to finally get an explanation for any of them. And even when I did, I still didn’t quite know what the crap was going on. It was a thin explanation for why the world had come to be the way it was. It made my brain hurt.
There were too many characters, too. I couldn’t keep up, didn’t know who was who. Not to mention they were all terribly flat.

The pacing was painfully slow. Like, stab myself in the eyeballs with a rusty fork slow. Which is why I couldn’t stay awake. And when I wasn’t being attacked by violent fits of narcolepsy, I found myself zoning out. I’d read a whole page, then get to the end and realize that I had no clue what I had just read (because I was pretty much just staring at the page), and have to start all over again. I’d have to re-read the same paragraph 5 times before I could manage to make myself focus on the meaning of the words.

I know this book has received some fantastic ratings, and maybe it would have picked up eventually…but I just couldn’t take it anymore.