{Review} Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi

Title: Under the Never Sky
Author: Veronica Rossi
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release date: January 3, 2012
Date Read: April 5, 2013
Rating: ✭✭✭✭✭

Exiled from her home, the enclosed city of Reverie, Aria knows her chances of surviving in the outer wasteland—known as The Death Shop—are slim. If the cannibals don't get her, the violent energy storms will. Then Aria meets an Outsider named Perry. He's wild—a savage—and her only hope of staying alive.

A hunter for his tribe in a merciless landscape, Perry views Aria as sheltered and fragile—everything he would expect from a Dweller. But he needs Aria's help too; she alone holds the key to his redemption. Opposites in nearly every way, Aria and Perry must come together to survive. Their unlikely alliance forges a bond that will determine the fate of all who live under the never sky.

I owe this book so much.

For several months, I’d been a horrendous reading slump - the kind where you have a pile of books to choose from and read, but you actively avoid them all and spend your free time stuffing your face with junk food and watching Netflix.

I’d received a lot of advise for the slump: read novellas, read comedy books, and watch more television (which was a really bad idea, because then I watched all eight seasons of SUPERNATURAL in a row).

But I decided to pick up UNDER THE NEVER SKY because it just seemed like something that would interest me.

And oh, gods, did it.

This book bitch-slapped me out of my slump and set me on a ridiculous path to read as many books as I’d missed out while on my little... vacation.

UNDER THE NEVER SKY takes place in a world where the city dwellers live in a community known as the Reverie, completely excluded from the dangerous outer wasteland, where cannibals feast and the land is swamped with Aether storms. Our protagonist, Aria, gets into a bit of a fight with some very important bastards and gets thrown out of the Reverie, left to fend for herself.

However, she’s not alone for long. ‘Savage’ Perry is on a quest to find someone, and Aria goes along with him to seek out answers and look for her missing mother.

I’m going to be perfectly honest: the beginning of UNDER THE NEVER SKY was no picnic. It was confusing and I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t understand what Aria meant by Pods and the Reverie and Smarteyes and Aether. Hell, I still didn’t even know what the words meant by page one hundred! I would’ve preferred info-dumping to the lack of information in the first half.

But slowly, you began to unravel the meaning behind the words, and that’s when the world building got awesome. It was like someone had wiped and cleaned my finger-print ridden classes soon as I figured it all out.



I KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON AND IT WAS EPIC

The world Rossi had created for her characters was richly imaginative. The science fiction was so engrossing, but the outskirts, outside the enclosed city, was even better. I couldn’t put the book down. 

I literally considered skipping math class to hide out in the bathroom and continue reading.

but the bathroom is full of weave and dirty toilet paper and weird moth bugs so I was just like FORGET IT I'LL RUIN THE BOOK'S COVER

The characters all had these realistic backstories and personalities. I didn't like Aria at all for the first half of the book, but as soon as she got her shit together, I really started to appreciate her. Perry I loved as soon as I met him - he was kind of a badass awkward penguin that I couldn't help but adore.

And Roar.

ROAR, YOU GUYS.


okay, so a gif of my baby Castiel exploding probably wasn't my best move ever, but still

There was no insta-love in Perry and Aria's romance, though there was a bit of romantic tension after they became friends. Their relationship was so adorable and realistic, and equal. Perry snapped at Aria when she was being a bitch, Aria called out Perry when he was being a unknowing jerk, and it was all well and good. There were also hysterical moments in their relationship, like when Aria thinks she's dying because she got her period, and Perry is the one who tells her that she's menstruating.

I was crying from laughing so hard. 

Roar's relationship with Aria was fantastic, too, because even though he was a flirt, they were just friends, and they both knew it. Roar was in love with someone else, and I'm thankful Rossi didn't pull the dreaded love-triangle card on us.

I loved Rossi's writing. It was pretty and easy to read, going along with the intense world-building perfectly. UNDER THE NEVER SKY is indeed written in third-person with both Aria and Perry's points of view - but their voices were so varying and unique I never had to worry about mixing them up.

Veronica Rossi got me out of a damn slump with this amazing read, and I have her to thank for many months to come.

Also, I blame her for tearing my throats to shreds.

I honest-to-goodness screamed and snorted and squealed my way through this lovely work, and while my throat didn't enjoy the ride, I sure did.


DAMMIT MORIARTY WHAT ARE YOU DOING BACK IN MY REVIEWS

Oceana is a French-blooded teenager who enjoys stalking British boys and asking them to marry her. She was diagnosed with severe fangirl disorder in 2011. Able to curse like a sailor with an angelic voice.

{Review} Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Title: Warm Bodies

Author: Isaac Marion

Format: Library; paperback

Publisher: Vintage

Release date: October 28th, 2010

Date Read: March 30th through 31st

Rating: ✭✭

'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead.

Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.

This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won't be changed without a fight...

Actual Rating: 2.75 stars!

QUICK SYNOPSIS

WARM BODIES is a pretty nice read. It's definitely not a perfect book, nor worth the hype surrounding it. I expected way more from the book and I think that's the main reason that I didn't love it as much as I thought would. The hype made my expectations skyrocket and as usual, I was disappointed. 

UPS

- R

- Writing

DOWNS

- R

- Julie

- Preaching

REVIEW

This book is full of itself. I swear that this book thinks that it’s the shit. The book is utterly insufferable in that regards. It had a very elitist attitude, if we're going to assign anthropomorphic qualities to this darling book (that sounds like something that would be said in this book TBH). It's the douche that thinks it's better than everyone because it reads Shakespeare and Tolstoy for fun.

WARM BODIES is a metaphor for the 21st century and how utterly horrible it is. WHY I HATE THE 21st CENTURY would also have worked as the title for the book. To be honest, I'm entirely okay with books that are metaphors but I'd like the metaphor to be subtle. When you pretty much shout it at the reader, it looses its impact. The whole book was filled with passages like these:

We were fearful in the best of times; how could we cope with the worst? So we found the tallest walls and poured ourselves behind them. We kept pouring until we were the biggest and strongest, elected the greatest generals and found the most weapons, thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness. But nothing so obvious could ever work. (page 148)

We're corralled in the stadium with nothing to think about but surviving to the end of the day. No one writes, no one reads, no one really talks. We don't have flowers anymore. Just crops. (page 71)

Perhaps part of Marion hates about the 21st century is the fact that you cannot write a book like this anymore. You just can't. WARM BODIES was lucky to make it big time but for the most part, it is impossible to make a widely successful YA book that is a METAPHOR. 

That aside, WARM BODIES is still a good book. It's not amazing like I thought it would be. I don't think it could've gotten more than a weak 3 star rating if the preaching had been taken out. It could have gotten a much higher rating if I got what I was promised: a gruesome and poetic book.

I can see where this "poetic" part is coming from but gruesome? Nuh-uh. This is light stuff. There's no ick factor or weird zombie gruesomeness. There's definitely some zombie violence but it's neither graphic nor scary. 

But, you can't judge a book by its lack of gore. You can however judge a book by its characters. R the zombie is our main character. His thoughts were surprisingly really interesting. I didn’t expect that at all.

For the most part, his thoughts were interesting and thought provoking. I admit he some times too philosophical. I don't think any 20-year-old contemplated life on a daily base. Not to mention this:

I wobble into the bathroom and lean my forehead against the wall in front of the urinal. I unzip, and I look down, and there it is. That mythical instrument of life and death and first-date backseat fucking.


Don't know about you guys, but I highly doubt that a penis could kill anyone. Or can it?

R's sort of a loner. He's also a possessive arse - yeah, let's not forget about that. He also saves kidnaps the love interest, Julie. He also lets Julie go back, "freeing" her, and then he follows her all the way to her home. But he likes Sinatra and Lennon so we're all good. 

I'm not saying that R is the worst protagonist ever. He's cute and funny at times. He's got some really amazing moments but I definitely do not see why he's in people's Top Ten Book Boy Friends. 

What keeps people fairly interesting in the real world? It's really obvious. In real life, people don't have one personality feature. There's always more to them. People are multidimensional. They have feelings. That's one thing that some authors can't do. Characters are either entirely missing a personality or they have one feature that OVERWHELMS EVERYTHING. THIS ONE PERSONALITY FEATURE YELLS AT THE READER, "DON'T FORGET ABOUT ME. I AM [insert word]!!!1!!!". 

This.

Is.

Not.

Natural.

Julie was one of those characters. She's brave and that's it. She's got girl balls because she can live in zombitopia without being eaten. She's obviously intelligent but this isn't really a personality his is the end of her intended personality.

Julie has no real personality. She was just the girl that R loved (for some strange reason). I think she was meant to signify something but honestly, I have nothing. For someone to signify something, the person needs something more than a name.

It's sort of a must.

The writing is definitely the main selling point to WARM BODIES. To an extent, it lives up to what I thought it would be. WARM BODIES is beautifully written. It truly is. WARM BODIES is a type of book that you want to read every single line thoroughly.

However, this comes at a price. Too much of a good thing is never good. The amount of symbolism and philosophical thoughts was nauseating because there was just too much of it. I like symbolism and philosophical musing but I do have a cut off point. When interesting thoughts turn into preaching about how horrible the 21st century is, I loose interest in the book.

Overall, WARM BODIES is a fairly interesting book that I do think you should read. It's not a must read for the decade or even the year. WARM BODIES is simply an interesting book that will entertain you through a lazy afternoon.

Lisbeth is an American teenager who enjoys blowing shit up in videogames and discussing decapitation in great detail. She's also obsessed with Oceana, but you're not supposed to know that.

Please note that my next few reviews will most likely each have a different format. I'm currently experimenting to find a new format for my reviews as my old one was very annoying for many reasons. I couldn't let the review flow normally because I could only put character/plot/writing info in the designated spot, making the reviews feel very unnatural.

{Review} Partials by Dan Wells

Title: Partials
Author: Dan Wells
Format: Library Hardcover
Publisher: Balzar + Bray
Release date: February 28, 2012
Date Read: March 29, 2013
Rating: ✭✭✭

The human race is all but extinct after a war with Partials--engineered organic beings identical to humans--has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by RM, a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island while the Partials have mysteriously retreated. The threat of the Partials is still imminent, but, worse, no baby has been born immune to RM in more than a decade. Our time is running out.

Kira, a sixteen-year-old medic-in-training, is on the front lines of this battle, seeing RM ravage the community while mandatory pregnancy laws have pushed what's left of humanity to the brink of civil war, and she's not content to stand by and watch. But as she makes a desperate decision to save the last of her race, she will find that the survival of humans and Partials alike rests in her attempts to uncover the connections between them--connections that humanity has forgotten, or perhaps never even knew were there.

Dan Wells, acclaimed author of I Am Not a Serial Killer, takes readers on a pulsepounding journey into a world where the very concept of what it means to be human is in question--one where our humanity is both our greatest liability and our only hope for survival.

Oh, man. This book made me feel like humanity was my nasty ex, and I had just dumped his ass before snapping my fingers in Z-formation.

By that, I mean most of the humans in this book pissed me off - though they were supposed to. 

PARTIALS takes place in a futuristic world where humanity is quickly going extinct after a virus released during the Partial-Human war kills off babies less than a week after birth. Kira Walker, sixteen, is a medic-in-training. When someone important to her becomes pregnant, she resolves to find a Partial, experiment on it, and try to save the human race. But there’s more background to the war and the Partials than she initially thought, and what she discovers will turn her world upside down. 

That was about the shittiest blurb I’ve ever written but GIVE ME A BREAK OKAY AND THIS WILL BE A MINI REVIEW BECAUSE I’M TIRED.

The world-building and plot was amazing, hands-down. It was extremely immersive, and even though I didn’t understand a lot of the medical talk being the idiot that I am, I still appreciated the effort Wells put into it. It was very, well, scientific.

The politics and government in PARTIALS was brilliant, and this book made me feel like humanity was my nasty ex, and I had just dumped his ass before snapping my fingers in Z-formation. I mean, TEAM NATURE, Y'ALL.

By that, I mean I was cheering when I read about the flora and fauna taking over the cities.

I didn’t like most of the characters, Samm the Partial being an exception. I loved how sweet and mysterious he was without being a huge jerk. While Kira was a determined badass, she was also boneheaded and whiny. Her friends annoyed the crap out of me, particularly Madison and Marcus, her boyfriend.

There wasn’t a lot of romance in PARTIALS, though when there was, it was with Marcus, Kira’s boyfriend. Not Samm. Unfortunately.

YOU CAN HEAR ME GROANING FROM HERE

The writing was average for me, honestly. Some people didn’t care for it and others couldn’t get enough, but I found it to be alright.

PARTIALS didn’t consume me as much as I thought it would, being a predictable read and all, but it was good anyway.

Oceana is a French-blooded teenager who enjoys stalking British boys and asking them to marry her. She was diagnosed with severe fangirl disorder in 2011. Able to curse like a sailor with an angelic voice.