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grav_ityCanadiana, realism, non-linear, about a boy, absent mother, coming of age.
Ugh, so you know how I've been all about female characters and stuff lately? Well, it took me three days to read a thousand pages about a girl. And about a week to read 180 pages about a boy. It got to the point where I said to myself "Okay, before you can turn on your computer again, you have to read this book." and then I decided to watch Star Trek for the second time this week. Yeah, not my best plan.
There were a few things I enjoyed about this book. Sunny, the younger sister, spoke in Random Capital Letters (except it turned out that she did so because she had a hearing problem, and once she got an aide, she stopped, which I found sad, except that the main character made a note of how it also made him sad, because she no longer sounded so excited about everything all the time). Also, it has a great title. As Amy said, it's unfair that a book I don't love have this great a title. And...it took place in Canada, which always makes things more tolerable.
However, it jumped around in time with no rhyme or reason, making it difficult to tell if the main character was hallucinating, remembering or...something else. And all the grown ups were jerks (absent mother, inattentive father who is living with said mother's best friend, who makes them move because she doesn't like their old house), and NOBODY TALKED TO ANYONE until the very end, when suddenly it all made sense. It was annoying.
I make no secret of the fact that I am not a fan of CanLit. And this book was proto-CanLit. It has Grade Nine English written ALL OVER IT, and I am so sick of books about boys. (I was told by my last high school English teacher that books about boys would ALWAYS be the mainstay of high school English, because boys won't read books about girls. Which angers me now even more than it did then.) And there were a lot of teens in this book that just seemed very...fake. Like the author googled "what kids are into these days" and then added a bunch of quirks. (I do appreciate the effort of trying, however. Even the random bit characters had personalities. They were just...strangely undimensional.
So...five out of ten. At least it was better than Twilight.
Ugh, so you know how I've been all about female characters and stuff lately? Well, it took me three days to read a thousand pages about a girl. And about a week to read 180 pages about a boy. It got to the point where I said to myself "Okay, before you can turn on your computer again, you have to read this book." and then I decided to watch Star Trek for the second time this week. Yeah, not my best plan.
There were a few things I enjoyed about this book. Sunny, the younger sister, spoke in Random Capital Letters (except it turned out that she did so because she had a hearing problem, and once she got an aide, she stopped, which I found sad, except that the main character made a note of how it also made him sad, because she no longer sounded so excited about everything all the time). Also, it has a great title. As Amy said, it's unfair that a book I don't love have this great a title. And...it took place in Canada, which always makes things more tolerable.
However, it jumped around in time with no rhyme or reason, making it difficult to tell if the main character was hallucinating, remembering or...something else. And all the grown ups were jerks (absent mother, inattentive father who is living with said mother's best friend, who makes them move because she doesn't like their old house), and NOBODY TALKED TO ANYONE until the very end, when suddenly it all made sense. It was annoying.
I make no secret of the fact that I am not a fan of CanLit. And this book was proto-CanLit. It has Grade Nine English written ALL OVER IT, and I am so sick of books about boys. (I was told by my last high school English teacher that books about boys would ALWAYS be the mainstay of high school English, because boys won't read books about girls. Which angers me now even more than it did then.) And there were a lot of teens in this book that just seemed very...fake. Like the author googled "what kids are into these days" and then added a bunch of quirks. (I do appreciate the effort of trying, however. Even the random bit characters had personalities. They were just...strangely undimensional.
So...five out of ten. At least it was better than Twilight.
