Book Review - Tricks

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brilliantly written with remarkable prose and a-little-too-good poetry (to believe it was written by the teens in the book, anyway!), Tricks is a dark book about the descent into prostitution as told by a varied group of young men and women who wind up on the streets of Las Vegas, with little to trade for their livlihoods other than their bodies.

Tricks exposes the dirty little secret that it isn't just bad kids from bad families who wind up on the streets. Sometimes it's good kids from good families, sometimes it's borderline kids who have a tragedy. Sometimes their parents push them out there, even if they don't want to be. Every kid's story is different, and heartbreaking, and very real.

I cried a couple of times during this book, and teared up at least a dozen times more. I got angry, and felt my heart break, and felt elation in some cases. You can't help but feel for these very poignant characters; they are so true to life, and so young that it just grabs you right around the heart.

This is a great read, but isn't for the faint of heart.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Heart and Soul

Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While this book was a slow starter, it had a nice payoff in the end.

Heart and Soul centers around a Irish clinic that treats patients with heart disease, helping them to learn to live with their condition, rather than dying from it - dietician Lavender holds cooking workshops, trainer Jimmy puts them through their paces in the gym, Dr. Decklan monitoring their health, nurses Fiona and Hillary minding the patients, clerical Anya working her behind off in every way, and administrator Clara overseeing them all.

The chapters are divided into the stories of different characters, so that you are changing perspectives off and on. The book starts with Clara, and while I can't remember the exact order, I do know that I was pretty bored until Anya's story was picked up in Chapter 4. I was considering giving up on the book, to be honest, but once I got into the tale of this lovely Polish immigrant and her troubled background, I was hooked!

The story is very character driven, and there seems to be someone to relate to for everyone who might read this book. There are some hints that several characters are reappearing after being highlighted in other books Binchy has written, but I haven't read enough of her recent work to have known who they were or what the connections might have been. It didn't detract too much from the story, but did pique my curiosity. If there had been more information about the other books, I probably would have picked them up to see the background, but I can't seem to find much info on that. If you have any - let me know!

By the end, I was very wrapped up in this story and stayed up late to finish it. Though parts of the book dragged, overall I really enjoyed it.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury

The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury by Robert Kirkman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After recently finishing the first book in this prequel series of The Walking Dead, I was really excited to move onto the next; more learning about the history and motivation of characters, more in-depth analysis of the community at Woodbury and how exactly the people there became complacent to the horrors The Governor perpetrated.

Imagine my disappointment when this book turned out to be extra gory and extra violent with no real payoff in the character development department, leaving me with more questions than answers.

This book was okay. I liked some of the new characters that were introduced, but in the end I felt like it went in circles a little bit too much. Instead of introducing new conflicts with the new characters, there was much repetition and lots and lots of gory, zombie slaughtering scenes. I'm not sure if I'll go on to check out others in this series as now I just feel like I wasted a good lot of the time spent reading this.

Why then, does it get three stars instead of a lower rating? I still appreciate an intelligently written horror story. I liked the few surprises that I got, and really enjoyed the first 100 pages or so. At that point I was ready to go 4 star or higher. But the rest of the book left me so unsatisfied that I had to drop the overall rating to a 3.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Dark Life

Dark Life by Kat Falls
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, this was another one of those stay-up-til-2 to finish books, where I'm so wired after the ending that I figure I might as well stay up a little longer to pen a review!

In the aftermath of global warming, the earth is almost - but not quite - the vision of WaterWorld we've all worried about since we saw the Kevin Kostner movie. No? That was just me that had those nightmares? Okay, well then. At any rate, almost the full surface of the world is water, with some land peppered here and there (Colorado Islands anyone?) overstuffed with millions of people living in one-room apartments in tiny towers. Except for the pioneers. Homesteaders get 100 acres if they work it for five years. The only catch is, the land is underwater - at the very bottom of the sea.

There is some very fun world building going on in this book, which probably is terribly inaccurate all over the place when it comes to science, but since I know nothing about scuba diving, let alone what it would take to engineer an undersea house (or casino, as the case may be), I just went with it and enjoyed the ride. And a very interesting ride it was, too, full of novel ideas and gorgeously described landscapes that tickled my imagination.

I loved that this book had a male narrator. So many main characters in YA fiction - even the post-apocalyptic sort that I favor - tend to be females. And I know it's because that is who tends to read the stuff, like it or not, but Ty was charming and had a very real and exciting story to tell. I hope there are more in store in this underwater colony, as I'm eager to re-visit the depths, and the fascinating characters there.

The only point I found vaguely unsettling was the way Ty called his parents "Ma and Pa..." sure, they're pioneers, and it hearkens back to Little House on the Prairie and all that, but this is the future, right? I don't think kids are time traveling backwards in terms of their verbiage. It struck me as a little weird; one "off" note in an otherwise lovely piece.

View all my reviews