A Room with a View

After a view distractions from my scheduled TBR, I am back on track. There’s nothing wrong with going off pace, especially for books people are talking about or movies I’m going to see. But, I always feel better when I go back to my list.

EM Forster was up next with A Room with a View. This is a dramatic Edwardian romance with a love triangle–and a feminist heroine–something I wasn’t expecting for this style of book!

Lucy and her older cousin Charlotte visit Italy and meet George and his father. George becomes enamored with Lucy, but she finds him too immature. When they move onto Rome, she meets another man, Cecil, who is more sophisticated, and they get engaged.

However, the romance with George continues, and eventually she cannot ignore that she loves him more than Cecil. Cecil does not treasure her independence and sees her as more of a trophy to be won.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I wasn’t in love with it–I was easily distracted from the writing, and I didn’t get sucked in as much as I do some books from this period. However, I really like the plot and I did write down several quotes from the book. It’s a good concept, I’m just not not quite sure. May have to give it another go at some point.

 

Fulfills Boxall’s #93

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The Darkest Minds

Staying true to the norm, once again I am way behind on another very popular YA trilogy. Everyone started OOING and AAHing over In the Afterlight  by Alexandra Bracken when it came out this year, and when I looked it up–what? It’s the last book?!?!?!

Lucky for me, the release of the final book meant that Hey! The first ebook was free on Amazon. Woot! So, I’m catching up.

The Darkest Minds can be described, basically, as another one of those love triangle dystopian YA trilogies, but there’s quite a bit going on–and from what I can tell, at least, the love triangle only seems to last for this book. At least the third branch of it. *shudder*

But let’s back up. The story begins with a sickness that rages through the children of the United States, hitting around age 10. It seems to have no effect on adults, as it is linked to the onset of puberty. Most of the children die instantly, but those that aren’t killed take on 5 different styles of superpowers. And the adults are absolutely terrified, so they send them all off to internment camps. Great parenting, huh?

This book is basically Lord of the Flies in modern times, except the adults are still around, and absolutely pissed off. The setting is very zombie-movieish, without any zombies. Everything is complete and utter destruction, everyone lives in camps outside the city because the economy has completely tanked. It’s madness.

The concept is pretty brilliant, really, and terrifying. I will say that the book is a little confusing at first, but once you start to understand Ruby, everything falls into place and the action picks up. This is a trilogy I’ll be continuing, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a movie come out of this one either. It wouldn’t be a hard world to design since it is based on reality, and it’s quite a different concept from what is already out there.

 

Fulfills PopSugar #34:  A book with a love triangle

Throne of Glass

Throne of Glass.

 

This is one of those books that has everyone talking right now, so naturally, I couldn’t wait to read it. High fantasy with a female assassin? Yes please.

Unfortunately, for me, it didn’t completely live up to the hype.

It wasn’t terrible, I did like the basic storyline, and Celeana was a pretty badass character overall. But, I felt like the structure was just very elementary in development. I felt like I had read this book before at times, that I knew already what was going to happen.

There were also some character traits that just didn’t make any sense to me. The biggest of those–Chaol seems pretty naive for a Captain of the Guard. How in the world did he get to that rank without killing a man or seeing a man die? Not exactly the type of backbone I want protecting my castle…just saying.

Speaking of Chaol…and Dorian. TALK ABOUT A LOVE TRIANGLE HOLY CRAP. I probably won’t read the rest of the series (which is rare for me, and tells you just how disinterested I was in the first book), but have fun with trying to sort that one out. It’s about as delightful as Peeta vs Gale.

Anyway, I might be the only person on the bloggersphere who doesn’t like this book. And I’m really surprised that I didn’t. For me it was just iffy writing. This is Sarah Maas’ first book, so maybe she’ll get stronger as she goes. I don’t want to totally dismiss her, but this one wasn’t enough for me to keep going.

Has anyone  else read the other books in the series? Do they get any better as they progress?