Updates and YA mini-reviews

You may have noticed that I have been absent from the internet recently. You may have not. If so, I’m not offended. So where have I been? University! Wooo!

I have been having a fantastic time. Such a fantastic time, that I now have no time. Between the 22 hours of contact time, the lab reports and coursework (this is what you get for choosing science), friends and extra-curriculars, I’m finding it to keep up, and I’ve just been lazy when it’s come to updating this blog and my Youtube channel. But with New Year’s around the corner, I am now determined to a better job of keeping up this blog and (hopefully) my Youtube channel. I say hopefully for Youtube because the walls in my halls of residence are so thin! So if anyone has some advice for me please let me know below.

I have also been a lazy reader. In the 3 months I was at university, I read three books one of which was on the train to and from London. To say I’ve been in a reading slump is to put it mildly. Luckily, the Christmas holidays have snapped me out of it, and I am on a roll.

So here’s the first part of my mini-reviews of what I’ve read.

Geek Girl and Geek Girl (Model Misfit) by Holly Smale

Geek Girl has been floating around the blogging circuit for a while and I now know why, it’s amazing! It’s funny and quirky (and not in a look-at-me-I’m-so-hipster kind of way). Harriet Manners is a geek (as you may guess from the title) and somehow ends up as a model, which of course is followed by several mishaps. I loved Harriet, especially once you peel off all the layers of facts and knowledge she was a normal, teenage girl. Geek Girl doesn’t take itself too seriously, but has a lot of heart.

I received Model Misfit from NetGalley 

Rating: 9/10

Heist Society by Ally Carter 

Heist Society had an interesting concept, as we follow Kat, a retired teenage thief whose father has been framed for a crime he didn’t commit. As much as I found the plot interesting, I felt like there wasn’t much to the characters. Kat was emotionless and lacked much of a personality, and I found it hard to connect to her. Even the plot, though fast paced and clever in places, required too much suspension of belief for me to take it seriously. It was fun to read, but ultimately left me feeling let down.

 Rating: 6/10

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare 

You may have noticed that I may be a tiney-winey (ok, massive) fan of The Mortal Instruments. So shockingly, I had not read the spin-offs. The reason for wanting to avoid them is that I’m not the biggest fan of historical fiction. Eventually I gave in and picked them up. I wanted to love it. Really, I did. And I did. Sort of. I really enjoyed the steampunk Victorian setting and the fast paced plot complete with a slippery villain. I loved all the characters, from book-loving Tess, to calm Jem, to strong Charlotte. The only problem I have is that I’m getting sick of love triangles. But I have high hopes for the rest of the series!

 Rating: 9/10

I have a lot of things coming up for this blog and I will get back into the swing of things, so stick around!

One Step Too Far by Tina Seskis

Age Group: Adult
Genre: Contemporary/ Mystery
Pub Date: April 2013
Publisher: Kirk Parolles
                                                                                          
If you asked me what the theme of this book was, I would have no idea. All I could say is “drama”. And that is because One Step Too Far has every type of drama possible, with a whole array of different characters.

We begin our story with Emily, a woman who is running away from her life in Chester to London, not for fame or fortune, but as a means of escape, using her handy birth name Catherine. Why? Well we have no idea. Then we meet Emily’s parents, Francis and Andrew, and we hear their problems, and then Emily’s “evil twin”, Caroline (no seriously, they’re identical twins). On top of that we have Ben, Emily’s abandoned husband, and Angel, Cat’s (Catherine wasn’t snazzy enough for her), troubled new best friend. And I haven’t yet begun on the different problems: anorexia, depression, psychosis, and that’s just Caroline. You add in everyone else’s issues and you have enough problems to fill several episodes of Jerry Springer.

All in all, One Step Too Far reads like a soap opera. Jam packed with lots of different issues, addictive to read, but at the heart of it, completely hollow. There was so much down in this book that I started to resent nearly all the characters and their miserable lives. As much as I was interested in their lives, I lacked any sort of empathy or connection to any of them. In fact, the only emotion I felt towards most of them was pity. It seems that Seskis was so focused on getting shade and depth into her characters that she forgot about the light.

Emily was our first person viewpoint, and when it jumped to another time or character the novel was in third person. This made it fairly easy to tell apart the different time periods with her, but made it quite confusing with telling apart the different points in time with the other characters. I also disliked the ridiculously long paragraphs and endless detail that Emily often provided, it was verging on stream of consciousness, and went past “setting the scene” to “irrelevant”.

I found the writing of the third person characters to be the best parts. Seskis seamlessly made very detailed, interesting (despite depressing) characters, and you could quickly spot the differences in their thoughts and voices. I found Caroline to be the most interesting, if not unlikable, and I was impressed with how Seskis really went back with Caroline’s history and how all her problems started.

It was only near the end of the book that I started to really enjoy myself. That was the point when the plot really kicked in and all the reveal came out, including one amazing omg-I-did-not-see-that-coming twist. And it was that which made it all worth it.

Overall: If you like soap operas you’ll love this book. Packed to the brim with enough drama to give EastEnders a run for its money, One Step Too Far may be a step too far, but its clever characters and interesting reveals make up for it.

Rating: 7/10

*I received this copy from Kirk Parolles via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*