The Novelle

 

 

This book has been on my wishlist ever since it was announced. I am absolutely in love with the Lunar Chronicles, and funnily enough, it's the only series I've kept up with as it's been released. As I have mentioned before, I am currently travelling around Australia so don't want to be carrying books, so when Fairest was first released I was super excited to get it on my Kindle, only to find it wasn't available. Six months later, after searching on Amazon whenever I thought about it, I finally purchased and read this wonderful book. Definitely worth the wait!

 

Let's get straight into the nitty gritty. This book didn't have a very deep or developed plot line, it was more focussed in on the inner workings of Levana and why she is the way she is in the previous books as this is a prequel novella to the series as such, I'd say. However, I'm extremely surprised that I was so enthralled by a book with no plot as I was with this one.

 

Fairest gives you a raw outlook of what life was like for Levana growing up. She was treated extremely poorly by her older sister Channery and never received any kind of affection from her parents either from what I gather. All Levana ever wanted was to be loved and wanted and to not be lonely. At one point I felt as though the point of this book was for us, as the reader, to sympathise with Levana - I did feel that way for a good five minutes before I realised what a dark twisted bitch she is. I loved reading her unspoken thoughts about everything. The way she would try to justify every single dark thought she had in her own mind. It just proved how crazy she was.

 

Despite hating her, I still loved reading about her and actually wished this book was a little longer as I'm extremely intrigued and always love reading from antagonists point of view as everything isn't always what it seems. Sometimes it's refreshing to get the other side of the story rather than the "manufactured" one from the good guys perspective.

 

Marissa Meyer, I bow down to your genius in creating the most amazing and underlyingly complex characters that can provoke so many different emotions in one sitting. I don't know how you do it, and sometimes I worry that you actually created Levana and her twisted ways in the first place.

 

Holden Caulfield is a seventeen year old drop out who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Navigating his way through the challenges of growing up, Holden dissects the "phony" aspects of society, and the "phonies" themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scored with girls using sickly sweet affection.

Now let me get this straight, I am not a person who rereads books but I have had the recent urge to reread this book for quite a while now. I personally don't see the point in rereading books when there are just so many books out there that you haven't read or that haven't come out yet. However, this book has recently just been willing me to reread it and so I succumbed. This is by far one of my favourite books of all time and this reread has definitely cemented that for me.

 

Holden Caulfield is a character you will either love or hate, or even quite simply love to hate - I for one absolutely love him. He is a cynic and he is precocious, but he has this endearing naivety that you just can't help but feel for. It seems that experiences and influences in his childhood have shaped him to be the way he is, but you can tell through the writing that however cool, calm and collected Holden may seem, underneath he's just a scared little boy that doesn't know what to do with his life.

 

The narrative is written from Holden's perspective and the development of the story and of his character is predominantly displayed through this feature. His thoughts and speech throughout the book become more out of control as the book progresses; he starts to repeat himself a lot and the terms he uses in every day life, like "boy", "prince" and "swell" don't tend to pop up as often as they did in the beginning. The writing is very loud at the same time as being very subtle in it's background meaning which added to the greatness of this book.

 

This book has the simplest of stories but the deepest and richest of ways that it is portrayed and developed. It's a coming of age story that doesn't span across a long period of time (or pages in the book) but makes you feel as though you've learnt so much about yourself and Holden Caulfield at the same time. The focus isn't necessarily on what happens in the book, but the consequences and the reasoning behind what has happened - why is he acting this way? Why is he so cynical? Why is nearly everyone on the planet a phony in his eyes? It certainly has a lot of deeper meanings than the literal story itself.

 

The Catcher In The Rye is one of those books that I will treasure forever. I've currently only got it on my Kindle but when I return home I will most certainly buy my own copy to reread again and again as it's definitely a keeper in my books. I don't think I can express how much I love this book.

 

 

According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact, just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon - both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle - are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist...

 

Let's get this straight from the off, I was extremely disappointed with this book. I absolutely love the individual works of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, but this just didn't hit the mark for me.

 

Just because a book is written by two people it doesn't mean that it needs to feel like it was written by two people. It wasn't in the way that the two styles were dissimilar, but in the way that the story just too choppy; it changed around perspectives an awful lot that it just became extremely confusing for me. You didn't get to spend five minutes with one individual character before it would change to a completely new one, and you didn't get to fully understand what was going on with another character before it would change to yet another one. There were some times where new characters were "introduced" and you couldn't tell whether they were just a background character or an important role because it was happening so much. It wasn't that there were too many characters, but it was that they weren't fully explored like they could have been.

 

Due to the confusion, I didn't feel anything for the characters whatsoever - I didn't get the chance to. There was a development to a certain extent, but with the choppiness of the book it didn't seem gradual, but sudden. The characters were kind of one dimensional as well but to give them some credit they each had their own individual quirks which came with the dialogue that was absolutely on point.

 

The humour in this book was very "British", and for me that was just my cup of tea (no pun intended). I found myself laughing out loud on so many occasions as the dialogue was so witty, and each set of characters had their own personal humour about them - the Them (child gang) were so naively precocious and the angel and demon had so much banter and observational humour to name a couple. The footnotes as well - which are a favourite of mine in Pratchett's novels - were an absolutely delight to read and added the extra bit of humour which is definitely needed on top of the story. Now, this is what I know of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and it's a shame they couldn't have bought some other qualities of their other books to this book.

I really did want to like Good Omens but I just couldn't. Even though I love Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman individually I don't want to be fake and force myself to like something that I just didn't.