READING: The Beautiful (The Beautiful #1) by Renne Ahdieh

Publication date: October 8 2019
Published by: GP Putnam's Sons Books for YR
Genre: Historical, Paranormal, Vampires, Mystery, Romance
Rating:

In 1872, New Orleans is a city ruled by the dead. But to seventeen-year-old Celine Rousseau, New Orleans provides her a refuge after she's forced to flee her life as a dressmaker in Paris. Taken in by the sisters of the Ursuline convent along with six other girls, Celine quickly becomes enamored with the vibrant city from the music to the food to the soirées and—especially—to the danger. She soon becomes embroiled in the city's glitzy underworld, known as La Cour des Lions, after catching the eye of the group's leader, the enigmatic Sébastien Saint Germain. When the body of one of the girls from the convent is found in the lair of La Cour des Lions, Celine battles her attraction to him and suspicions about Sébastien's guilt along with the shame of her own horrible secret.

When more bodies are discovered, each crime more gruesome than the last, Celine and New Orleans become gripped by the terror of a serial killer on the loose—one Celine is sure has set her in his sights . . . and who may even be the young man who has stolen her heart. As the murders continue to go unsolved, Celine takes matters into her own hands and soon uncovers something even more shocking: an age-old feud from the darkest creatures of the underworld reveals a truth about Celine she always suspected simmered just beneath the surface.

I'm genuinely very disappointed. I know by now to always be wary of pretty covers, but after seeing all these raving reviews about The Beautiful, I though it would at least be decent.
It wasn't.

The Beautiful failed to capture my interest right from the start. The writing was almost uncanny, like it was trying very hard to be something it wasn't and was failing miserably. Each scene took forever to get through, vases and chandeliers' descriptions dragged on for ages, and there were densely worded sentences saying nothing at all. Also, phrases like "beyond your ken" (used more than twice) do not fit in a book about New Orleans me thinks, it threw me completely off.

This is supposed to be a book about vampires, but there are no vampire in sight until around 90% or so. Why take this long to reveal the plot? The whole point of buying and reading this book is to read about vampires. I absolutely can't stand it when a book promises you one thing and is marketed as, in this instance, a vampire book, when it's clearly a romance book, and not even a good one!

The characters were all one dimensional caricatures.
The big baddie's thoughts were written in monologed chapters, which to me read like "I'm evol and I vant to drink blood mwahaha". 

🤓 Not great.

The chief of New Orleans police is a 18 year old boy *eyeroll* How can you even justify that, it's impossible!
The girls were either clever or stupid, very shy or promiscuous, there was no in between. Celine was a reckless, numbnut who acted all high and mighty, but insta-loved a guy who looked dangerous, threating and unstable.
Oh but don't worry though. It's totally OK because he is soooooo dreamy!
My time machine worked everybody, I'm back in 2010 when this shit was still acceptable!
Stop putting so much importance on good looks, or rather out-of-this-world good looks, unless it fits your plot! It's not right to send these kinds of messages to young readers, or any readers for that matter.

This book was unbelievably exhausting to read. I felt like wading through mud in the last 100 pages, I just couldn't seem to finish it. When I finally did, I admittedly found the last 10 pages kinda interesting compared to the rest of the book, but definitely not interesting enough for me to read Book 2.
If you're brave enough to tackle this, you are my hero and I wish you all the best. I barely got through it.
Very unmemorable and tedious.

READING: Ninth House (Alex Stern #1) by Leigh Bardugo

Publication date: October 8 2019

Published by: Flatiron Books

Genre: Adult, College, Contemporary, Paranormal, Dark, Crime, Mystery, Suspense

Rating: 

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

I don’t know where to start with this book 🤔

As soon as I finished the Six of Crows duology, I immediately went to Goodreads to see what is coming up from Leigh Bardugo. When saw that The Ninth House was scheduled for late 2019, I almost wet my pants! I love books about college and at that point I was obsessed with Bardugo. So her writing an adult book about secret societies in Yale was just too much for me. Needless to say, that since then (April 2017), The Ninth House was the most anticipated book release for me. I was 100% sure it would be the most amazing, awesome book I had ever read (not having high expectations AT ALL!). 
After the initial lukewarm and straight up bad reviews, I was a bit disappointed but my interest and excitement never wavered. I just had to get my hands on this book! 

Long story short, the book was great but not what I was expecting at all 😕
I wanted intrigue, mystery, secrets and in part I got all that, but I didn’t expect the paranormal element to be so prominent, it threw me off a little bit. I would have much preferred a contemporary novel. But that’s on me, it has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself.

Another thing I didn't expect was how gritty and, for lack of a better word, miserable this book is. There is no respite from the constant reminder that people are horrible, bad guys always win and life is pointless.
In other words: it was such a downer. And I like downer books, but that was overkill. The hardest thing for me and the reason I didn’t quite get into it as much as I would have liked, was the fact that I didn’t really care for anyone. Alex was the ultimate anti-heroine and a very difficult person to like. The rest of the characters were all pretty terrible except for:

1.Alex’s friends, whose bubbliness was completely out of place and made them stand out like unicorns in a tar pit
2. and Darlington, who was the best part of the book for me, regretfully cut very short. Hopefully, he gets a much bigger presence in book 2 but I have to be honest: it took a lot out of me to read book 1 (three weeks to be exact) a lot of perseverance and patience, so forgive me if I can’t even think about book 2 right now.

All that aside, there were times where Bardugo’s brilliant writing and vision shone very brightly. Like for instance when

Alex goes to the Underworld to strike a deal with North, I thought it was such an awesome scene. I really liked North and Alex together.

 
Or when 

the night at Ground Zero was described -like watching Kill Bill-that good. Or gross and disgusting, depending on your view.

Speaking of disgusting, that whole thing with Blake: Nah, it didn’t bother me at all. He deserved way worse.

To conclude this pretty lengthy and all over the place review, I get why people didn’t like the Ninth House. Most of Bardugo’s readers are YA readers and even though it was mentioned sooooo many times that this is an adult book, Bardugo’s fans would still read it and of course get disappointed because this is DEFINITELY NOT a YA book. 
Personally, I would have liked it to have been more fast-paced and a lot less bleak. If I don’t have someone to root for or care for what happens to them, I kinda lose interest. Hero/villain it doesn't matter, as long as they are gripping enough to get me invested. So, please bring Darlington back OK? 

READING: The Rook by Daniel O'Malley

Publication date: January 11 2012
Published by: Little, Brown 
Genre: Adult, Dystopian, Mystery, Suspense, Horror, Sci Fi, Paranormal
Rating: 

"The body you are wearing used to be mine." So begins the letter Myfanwy Thomas is holding when she awakes in a London park surrounded by bodies all wearing latex gloves. With no recollection of who she is, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and track down the agents who want to destroy her.

She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Chequy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain. She also discovers that she possesses a rare, potentially deadly supernatural ability of her own. 

In her quest to uncover which member of the Chequy betrayed her and why, Myfanwy encounters a person with four bodies, an aristocratic woman who can enter her dreams, a secret training facility where children are transformed into deadly fighters, and a conspiracy more vast than she ever could have imagined.

I haven't given birth, but I'm sure it can't be more agonizing than reading this book 😫

Don't get me wrong-this book was not all bad. Overrated maybe? Sure, but not bad.
First of all, I guarantee it is unlike anything you've read before, especially if you're a noob in sci fi like myself. The story in the Rook is very intricate, definitely not a breezy beach read, and I truly appreciate the amount of thought and detail that went into it.
So much detail.
Oh my God, so much detail.

I don't think I've ever complained about a book having too much plot, usually it's the other way around. I'm all for making interesting and unique stories, but this one went overboard. Like, it's surpassed the "over the top" limit by a lot. It is so densely written that its 496 pages felt like 1,000 to me. I kept reading and reading and I was not even half way through! Every sentence is packed with so much information, 90% of which was not even necessary for the progression of the story, I forgot it 10 minutes later and it didn't make any difference.
O'Malley's writing was very clever and sarcastic yes, but it also felt arrogant to me, like he wanted to prove how smart he was and how well he has planned this whole thing out, when we was mostly spewing unnecessary, boring prose.
Also, I hate to say it, but there was a lot of body shaming in this book. Didn't really see that coming, right? Body shaming in a sci fi mystery, what? I know! It's true though:

[this is just a sample, there was actually way more in the book]

"massively fat"

"The fattest man she’d ever seen"

"an extremely fat woman"

"His kilt could have been used as a tartan slipcover for a settee" wtf?

Myfanwe was a pretty bland heroine; not bad, but not necessarily great either. It was a bit strange to me how a person with no memories whatsoever suddenly finds herself in a weird, secret paranormal world and she just slides right into it like no one's business. I mean, couldn't you have spent a bigger part of the book explaining that, and cut from literally anywhere else?

By the time of the final reveal, I was so exhausted and so ready for it to be over that I just didn't care anymore. There is not a huge list of characters anyway, so I pretty much suspected everyone.
Also, it turned out that it didn't really much mattered in the end because the whole situation was wrapped up in a pretty little bow in the last 15 pages or so...
I know! So frustrating. After 10 days of weaving though massive amounts of information thinking that it is all going to come together in the end and I will be rewarded for my patience, the ending was not at all satisfying. It was so rushed and it totally negated the importance of what happened before it, leaving me feeling like: "All that ⬅️ for this ➡️ ??"

For all the brave souls out there that want to spend an insane amount of time on a book which is only half good, I applaud you and respect you.
The rest of you, just watch the TV show. Way easier.