Clancy of the Undertow Review

I read a lot of YA and I love it. I love YA fantasy, some sci-fi, and plenty of contemporary. Predictably in YA, however, there’s a whole lot of the ‘Sk8r Boi’ point of view going on. Y’know, ‘He was a boy, she was a girl, can I make it any more obvious?’ Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good romance, but this scenario can get a little ‘tired,’ so imagine my delight when I came across Clancy of the Undertow, which features a main character that… Isn’t straight? Amazing! I was immediately drawn to this book, given that I’d had such a good experience with Simon vs the Homosapien’s Agenda (if you don’t know SvsTHA, here’s my review!) and I guess I was hoping for something of the same calibre, and believe me when I say that I got it. This book was everything I could have hoped for, it was short, sweet, and I loved it from top to tail. I loved it for its similarities to other contemporary books I’ve read, but more importantly, for its differences.

The story follows Clancy Underhill, an outsider viewed by many as somewhat of a freak. She enjoys Nature Club, riding her ‘Lightning Lady’ bike, and arguing with her older brother Angus. She’s isolated, and is dealing with some serious issues she’s facing on her own, the biggest of which is coming to terms with her sexuality, and her isolation and loneliness. Life is complex, and just when things couldn’t get any worse, her dad is involved in a fatal car crash which kills the town’s two ‘golden kids’. The town’s sentiment quickly moves from simply seeing Clancy as a freak to hating her and her family. The family deals the crash in their own private ways, and they begin to drift apart, leaving Clancy feeling more isolated and depressed. It’s then that she meets Nancy, a new member of the nature club whom she quickly becomes friends with. But don’t get your hopes up, people. Nancy’s doesn’t turn out to be the love interest that Clancy can ride off into the sunset with, magically solving all of her teenage problems. Instead, Nancy becomes the friend who accepts Clancy as she is, and stands by Clancy as she works her way through her problems. It’s a feisty and realistic friendship, and I enjoyed watching it unfold.

Clancy of the Undertow is a sensitively written coming-of-age story set in a tiny country town. Aussie author Christopher Currie put the Australian outback to his advantage, contrasting the huge amounts of space in the outback, and yet trapping Clancy in a small town that hates her. As a reader, I felt her claustrophobia, and this is one of the things that I liked about the book; how well the characters and scenery were written. The characters were so carefully crafted that I was able to reflect on their individual experiences and take a walk in each of their shoes, or in Clancy’s case, her dusty old boots. Sometimes it was hard to be with Clancy, because her depression became a constant and ever-present feature in the book, but I never wanted to leave her side because of it, which I guess made me a bit like Nancy.

 This was such a different book to what I’m used to reading. I surprised myself with how much I liked Clancy of the Undertow, given that I tend to avoid books set in the Australian outback (I mean, I live in Australia, why would I want to read about it?). Lately, however, I’ve been developing a taste for Australian author’s, with Christopher Currie being my current favourite. The interesting thing about Christopher is that he writes Clancy as insightfully and perceptively as John Green writes Hazel from The Fault in Our Stars, which I find as impressive as I do somewhat frightening. How do they do that? Anyway, I give this book 4/5 stars, and I recommend you give it a read!

Oh Boy, ATPOY - A Thousand Pieces of You Review

I decided to read A Thousand Pieces of You because the blurb immediately piqued my interest and I enjoyed the quandary: what would I do? What would I do if I 1) had genius parents (ha, right), and 2) if my genius parents  created a device used for interdimensional travel, but then 3) my dad is killed by a trusted friend who 4) makes his getaway by stealing said interdimensional travel device and escaping into alternate universe? Well, I’d chase after him of course, just like our heroine did. And… Then what? I had to find out.

So there’s the plotline in a nutshell. A Thousand Pieces of you begins with our main character, Marguerite, outside in the rain, clearly in distress, and thinking things the reader has no way of understanding until a little further in the book. Odd things such as ‘the Firebird worked’ and reminding herself to ‘kill Paul Markov.’ The confusing yet intense beginning hooked me right into this book, and kept me turning the pages to find the answers to my questions. Marguerite travels through dimension after dimension in search for her father’s murder, bringing her best friend Theo on the chase with her. The two of them travel as far as Russia, and to places as strange and eerie as a futuristic London, with odd, advanced technology. One thing the book did really well was describing these dimensions, and making me feel as though I was right beside Marguerite for the whole journey.

This book was short and packed full of plot, which, while good in some ways, detracted in others. As much as it kept me reading, it also meant that there was little room for character development and character depth itself. I barely learnt anything about Marguerite herself, and she was the main character. She loves painting, her family, and is somewhat shy (until she immediately and surprisingly has the courage to chase after her father’s murderer into unknown dimensions), and that’s about all that I get from her. None of the characters really had their own personal voice or feel to them, which was quite a letdown as I really wanted to know Marguerite better and therefore care more about her. I feel as though this book had a great plot, and it had potential to be a brilliant book if the characters had been developed more thoughtfully. Overall, if you enjoy interdimensional travel with a smidge of murder and betrayal on the side, this book is for you, and I give it 3/5 stars.

The 5th Wave Is An Alien Concept - The 5th Wave Review

I’m going to start off this review with an honest confession: I watched the 5^th Wave movie before I read the book. I know, I know, don’t give me that look, it was a little further down on my TBR list than I’d hoped, and by the time it was in my hands, I already knew the whole story. Whoops. But, for the purpose of the review, I’m going to write it as though I never watched the film.

Since the huge hype for ‘The Hunger Games,’ there is currently nothing more popular in YA literature than a dystopian, end-of-the-world, kids against adults book. And that’s exactly what Rick Yancey’s ‘The 5^th Wave’ is. Being a fan of stories about how the world is in chaos, I was looking forward to reading the 5^th Wave and discovering yet another way that the world could end, and this time, it was because of an alien invasion. Now, before reading this book, I had this stock-standard alien picture of an alien in my head. You know the type: green, bug-eyed men we all know so well, hanging out in UFO’s, using laser beams to defeat humanity and take over the world. This book is nothing like I imagined it would be, and for that I’m glad.

16 year old Cassie Sullivan believes she may be the last human left on earth. She has survived the first 4 waves of destruction sent by the aliens, or, as she calls them, the Others. She now lives alone in the woods, fighting for survival and fighting to keep her promise to return to her little brother, who was taken away to a military base. However, on her journey to the military base, she is shot in the leg by an Other, and becomes sick. She is saved by a young farm boy, Evan, and is brought to his home for recovery. However, Evan may not be all he seems to be.

As much as I enjoyed the twisty, turny plot twists of this book, they were a little obvious at times, and perhaps not as shocking as they could have been. One thing I would change about this book was the mostly ambivalent romantic subplot between Evan and Cassie. The two characters had next to no chemistry, and all it did was slow the story down. From what I could see, all Evan cared about was Cassie’s looks and safety and all Cassie cared about was Evan’s big hands and good cuticles that she wouldn't let the reader forget about. For example: “… and his cuticles, as I’ve pointed out, are impeccable.” Or how about: “… those hands with the perfect cuticles.”? Or this one: “…you have incredible cuticles…” Also: “…cuticle care can tell you a lot about a person.” If I had to read one more line about Evan’s cuticles, I was going to tear his fingers off!  Don’t get me wrong here, the plot of this book was great, but I could’ve done with less staring into Evan’s ‘chocolaty brown’ eyes, and a little more of kicking alien butt. 

Having said that, the last 150 pages of the book really turned around my overall opinion of this story, as we finally had some constant, intense action scenes that were well written and were just what the story needed. The whole situation was dropped in a pressure cooker and turned up to max, with explosions, injuries, and lots of gun usage. Finally, the characters were truly fighting back, and the book had both redeemed itself and earnt its place amongst the other bestselling dystopian novels. For those of you who are interested, the book is much better than the film, and I’d recommend that if you are going to see the film, read the book first. I leave you with my rating of 3 cuticles out of 5.

Shining a Light on ILLUMINAE - Illuminae Review

Have you ever read a book that had such a big, shocking plot twist that you had to put the book down for a moment to process it? In Illuminae, this is practically every second page. The number of times that I stopped reading to think over what had just happened was pretty much uncountable. I bought Illuminae as a Christmas gift for myself, and believe me when I say it’s the gift that’s kept on giving; I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I finished it. And I know it’s really early, but I’m gonna make the call: this will be my favourite book of 2016.

There’s two things that I’m going to talk about in this review: the first is the story itself, and the second is how the story is presented, because it’s unlike any book I’ve picked up before, and both these aspects had an equal role in immersing me in this book.

But first, the story. Illuminae begins on a small planet called Kerenza, which is used for illegal mining. The planet is attacked and invaded by a mega-cooperation, BeiTech, leaving thousands dead. Kady and Ezra, our heroes, are among the residents of the planet who are forced to flee. They fight their way onto separate evacuating spaceships, with an enemy BeiTech ship close on their tails, but this is the least of their worries, as a deadly plague has broken out on their ships, and the AI, AIDAN, who is programmed to assist the crew, is not all it seems to be. Kady hacks into the ship’s database to find out what’s going on, and soon realises that the only person who can help her save the spaceships is her much derided ex-boyfriend Ezra. Oh dear, this can’t be good - or can it be? I can’t say much more about this without giving away important plot details, so instead, I’m going to move onto the way the story’s laid out.

The book itself is presented as a file of documents (also known as a dirt file), which when read in chronological order, retells the story of the destruction of Kerenza and the unfolding relationship between Kady and Ezra. The fascinating thing about this book is that it’s told entirely through email correspondence between characters, online messaging, recordings, and interviews of the two main characters. The pages themselves all look like they’re separate documents and files, some of which give the appearance of being edited, with some words struck through, and some redacted. Even the AI documents are formatted in that they’re completely black, and that the typed words were white, and generally were not written in an ordinary book format, as they occasionally spiralled across the pages or formed pictures. This kept me drawn from page to page as I went from the facts of the story to the characters’ emotions to the AI’s ramblings. This formatted storytelling is unlike any other book I’ve read, and I found this really appealing, in fact, I found everything about the book appealing. This book played my emotions like a fiddle, somehow incorporating humour even into the most heartbreaking moments.

 The two authors, Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, who both live in Melbourne, have done a brilliant job of putting together a clever, humorous book that managed to keep me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. For me, this is a five star book and I can’t wait to get my hands on the second one in the trilogy. 

With great power, comes Zero(es) responsibility - Zeroes Review

What do you get when you mix an ‘invisible’ boy, a liar, two crowd-controllers, a destroyer of all things electronic, a boy with a mouth that can talk by itself and a blind-but-not-really-blind girl? The answer is, the Zeroes; a misfit ex-band of superheroes who are forced to reunite to save their one of their own, from his own mess of trouble.

I picked up this book for a number of reasons, the first of which was, that it was hard to miss. It’s been lauded everywhere. Zeroes is a New York Times Bestseller, and as such has been all over bookseller websites and social media. I personally took interest in it when I stumbled upon it on the #LoveOzYA tag on Twitter. Of course, the other reason why I took interest in Zeroes, is that I’m a big fan of all things superhero-related such as Captain America, I’m always on the lookout for new superheroes to discover, and who doesn’t want to read about teenage heroes? Sorry, Zeroes?

The interesting thing about Zeroes was that there were three authors: Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti, who are all authors in their own right. Together, they have created a book with a central story about a bank robbery gone wrong, with six sub-stories that weave in and out with the main plot. It’s not the story so much that was interesting for me, but the characters. The thing I liked most about the characters was the fact that they were the kind of people that could actually exist, with each one being relatable, specifically to teenagers, in their own way. Each character has a different, original power, though none can use their power without significant consequence to themselves. This begs the question, are their powers a blessing or a curse? Reading about their powers, I was reminded of Rogue from X-Men, who has powers she can’t use without hurting the people around her. One of the characters ‘Crash,’ for example, has the power to destroy any form of electricity, though is simultaneously harmed by electricity whenever she is around it. ‘Anonymous’ has the ability to make anyone forget him even if they’ve just had a full conversation with him, though he has little choice as to when he’s forgotten or who forgets him. His whole family forgot he existed, and the Zeroes are constantly forgetting there’s a sixth member in their team, and… Wait, who was I talking about again? (Ha-ha, see what I did there?)  A third character, ‘Scam,’ has a separate voice within himself that knows everything about everyone around him, and everything they want to hear, whether he knows the person or not. This means that he can open his mouth and words simply tumble out, which is rarely a useful thing and generally creates more problems than it solves. In fact, this is the central crux of the story, whereby over a year ago, ‘Scam’ lost control of this voice and tore the Zeroes to shreds by mocking their biggest, most secret insecurities. Later on, when ‘Scam’ tries to use his ability to get out of a sticky situation, he ends up in much more trouble than he was in before, and this is where the Zeroes have to reunite for the first time in over a year to reluctantly save their former friend, Scam.

The story was fresh, fun, and completely original, though a bit on the long side. I’m guessing this was the result of having three authors who all had lots of ideas and wanted to have all of them down in one book. While I enjoyed the originality of the characters and the context, I personally would have liked to have known more about the characters and how they got their powers in the first place. Unlike Spiderman, who everybody knows was bitten by a radioactive spider, neither we nor the characters know how their powers came to be. But I guess this mystery and others will be revealed in a future sequel, which I believe is already underway. For me, this was a 3/5 book, and if you’re not one who likes to be left off the bandwagon, you’d best jump on now.