Cloned Blogger

Just so everybody knows, I was originally going to call this book incestuous necrophiliac, but decided I would probably get the wrong kind of audience :-)  What the heck am I talking about you ask?  This is the post where I ramble about Blackout, the third book in the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant.  It has taken me a while to finally finish this series, but here we go.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

We left our group being chased by zombie virus infested mosquito's.  Florida has essentially fallen to the zombies and the country is once again in chaos.  Shaun has been bitten by a zombie, and has recovered, make him immune to the Kellis-Amberly virus.  He and his team decide to go and find out just what the heck happened with the mosquito's, as they suspect that they were released on purpose as a distraction from the news story the crew was going to break about the intentional killing of the reservoir condition people, and the attempt to infect people with a stable strain of the Kellis-Amberly virus.  If this is all a bit technical and confusing...well that's how I felt too :-).  Meanwhile Georgia wakes up in a secure CDC facility and learns that she is the most recent in a line of clones that the CDC has produced to try and control Shaun and his crew.  The plan is to make a stable version of Georgia and then mess with her brain enough to control her.  Part of this plan involves surgeries to make the clone Georgia more like the original as they cannot make a clone with the retinal reservoir condition the original Georgia had.  Eventually Georgia II as she calls herself is rescued and finally gets to meet up with Shaun.  Understandably the team, Shaun and even Georgia herself have some reservations about just how much of Georgia is left in the clone.  According to the scientists who created her Georgia II is a 97% match for the original.  After some questions and such they all end up at the White House where President Ryman and his vice-president, the former Newsie Rick attempt to use Georgia against Shaun and his team to repress the news that there will never be a cure for the zombie disease, just a treatment.  The CDC, apart from wanting to keep all the power, believe that the general public will freak if they know there is no cure.  They want Shaun and his team to essentially be the mouth pieces of the government, to only put out what the CDC wants them to, and they are willing to threaten everybody including the president to do it.  Luckily for our team, vice-president Rick has other plans and helps take down the CDC guy and with the help of some friends restores the truth.  The story breaks and everybody who didn't die goes back home to try and live the rest of their lives.  Georgia and Shaun reveal that they are lovers as well as brother and sister (hence the incestuous necrophiliac joke...it makes sense in the book, I promise) and disappear, presumably to Canada.  Life continues and our trilogy ends.

Where to start, where to start.  In the first book we had Georgia as our narrator, in the second book Shaun took over, in this book they switch back and forth.  I have always liked Georgia's voice better, I'm not sure if it is because Shaun is a bit more emotional and broody, or I prefer Georgia's more factual take, but in this book I liked her chapters best.   I also liked Georgia's chapters because they seemed to go somewhere, where Shaun and his team seemed to be going around in circles alot.   You definitely need to read the first two books to understand this book, and for a couple of things relating to why the CDC was after Shaun and his team I had to go back and look up.  For Shaun, I liked that the Georgia in his head did not go away when Georgia II showed up, showing us just how far gone he had been.  I do wonder however why when he saw the Georgia in his head manifest, he saw her without the retinal Kellis-Amberly when he had never seen her without it.  I liked following Georgia II as she learned she was one of several clones, was experimented on, and eventually came to grips with what she was.  I was not a huge fan of the whole lover thing between Georgia and Shaun, even though I saw it coming in the first book.  I know they are not technically related, but...I don't know I still found it a bit icky.  I liked the questions raised with both the scientific and emotional

ramifications of cloning.  I liked how they acknowledged that Georgia II was NOT Georgia, but for some purposes, especially for Shaun, she was good enough.  Overall I liked this book better then the second one, but not as much as the first.  Now that I have finished it, I would like to talk over the series as a whole.  I love the world the author has created, I like that it is not your typical survivalist, living in the woods, shooting zombies to survive type of world, but more of a continuing life with zombies, but I still want my Starbucks type of world.  It is still a unique take, and I really like it.  I also still appreciate the "science" (I put that in quotes, because it is fictional) that the author used to make the virus plausible to those of us who are super nit-picky.  I did find that the three books had a bit of lack of consistency as far as the story line went.  The first book was so focused on the campaign, that when it was barely acknowledged in the second book, and only really brought in at the end of the third book, it felt a bit disjointed.  I know the real story was about the virus conspiracy with the CDC, but that felt scattered to me as well. To me it felt as if each book was telling a different story without it being successfully tied together, but that may be just me.  I also felt that when dealing with Shaun and his crew, it took a really long time for them to get anywhere, it felt like they did a lot of hurry up and wait while the rest of the story caught up or progressed.  I did like the series as a whole, and think that the author is a superb writer.  I enjoyed all three books to varying degrees. I give this book a 7 out of 10 zombie clones and give the series as a whole 7 out of 10 virus tests.
What do you think about unrelated siblings getting it on?  What series have you read that is better when looked at as a whole?  Should I have tempted fate and used incestuous necrophiliac as a post title?

Cancer And Champagne

I have to be totally honest, I really had no intention of reading The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.  I am usually not a huge fan of the tug on the heart strings, tragic teenage stories and this was the pinnacle of that type of book.  However a trusted friend handed it to me and told me to read it and so I did.  In the end I was 100% right about the kind of book it is, but I am very glad I read it anyways.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!

Hazel Grace Lancaster has cancer.  She is 17 and will probably die from it.  That my friends is a story, but not the story this book tells.  This book tells us to the story of Hazel and Augustus "Gus" Waters, who becomes the love of her life.  The story if fairly simple.  Teenage cancer girl with lungs that force her to carry around and oxygen cart and is living on borrowed time meets loud, boisterous, confident, one legged cancer boy.  They hit it off and bond over books, especially the favorite book of Hazel called An Imperial Affliction.  Hazel struggles with her health, and her place in the world of her loved ones, calling herself a grenade that will explode when she dies, hurting the people she loves.  Gus decides to use his "cancer kid wish" to take Hazel to Amsterdam to meet the author of An Imperial Affliction to try and get some of their questions about the ambiguous ending of the book answered.  They correspond with the author and his

assistant and get the trip all planned out.  Meanwhile another one of their cancer friends ends up losing a second eye to cancer, blinding him completely, leaving Hazel and Gus to help him survive this new state of being.  Hazel, Gus and Hazel's mom all head to Amsterdam, regardless of some of Hazels health issues, determined to have a good time.  Gus and Hazel share a wonderfully romantic meal on the canal's, which includes the most wonderful champagne, which is described as a glass full of stars.  The two go to meet with Peter  Van Houten, who turns out to be as my Mamma would put it, a total turd.  He is mean, pretentious, drunk and pathetic.  The two don't let the experience ruin their trip...but the revelation that Gus's cancer has come back and spread to his entire body does put a bit of a damper on things.  When they return, Gus enters palliative care, which is essentially a way to make him as comfortable as they can while he dies.  Hazel stays with him as the vibrant boy she fell in love with turns into a hollow, pain filled shell.  He dies and Hazel has to learn to live without him.  As a final gesture before he died, Hazel discovered that he had written her the most beautiful eulogy and sent it to Peter Van Houten to look it over.  It is sent back to Hazel and the book ends with Gus's final words to her.

So after reading this book, what do I think...hmmmm...I'm trying to figure out how to put into words how I feel about the book, without sounding as pretentious or nit-picky, or petty, or gushy. What cannot be put in the synopsis is the personality that the author put into this book.  Their is a great sense of what us EMT's call gallows humor, which is when you are surrounded by death on such a regular basis that you have to make jokes about it.  This sometimes seriously disturbs other people, but sometimes it is the only way to get through the day.  The reactions that the kids have to having this horrible disease of varying degrees of severity, the reactions of their friends and family were all fairly realistic and appropriate.  I think the biggest pro and con of this book for me personally, is that it was perfectly written for the YA age group, which is

awesome.  I find a lot of YA book either talk down to teenagers, assuming they are not as smart as adults, or they actually write to adults, but the content is considered YA so it is marketed as such.  This book however was written for the 13-17 age group, it speaks with the voice of a teenager, it is written with the immediacy of moment a teenager feels, it is written with the frustration of a person who is stuck between childhood and adulthood and then mixed in to all this is the constantness of cancer, which invades every "normal" teenage experience.  The down side to all of this however is that I am no longer a teenager (thank goodness) and so some of what makes this book perfect for the YA crowd came across as heavy handed and pretentious to me.  There was a fair amount of eye-rolling on my part, but then a weird nostalgia would come over me and I could totally remember feeling the intense emotion, and loving sounding like I was super smart by quoting random books of smartness.  Me and my crowd loved being "different" (are you liking all the quotes today?) and "esoteric" and all of that great stuff that made us feel "adult".  Overall it was a well written book, perfect for its target audience without talking down to them, or trying to also appease the adults. In fact I would be tempted to add this to my "if I was an English teacher required reading list.  It is a true YA book, which is perfect, I just it was around so I could have read it when I was 15 and gotten the full impact of it.  I give it 8 out of 10 nasal cannula's and recommend it anybody between the ages of 13-17, or anybody who needs reminded how tough, and yet wonderfully freeing it was to be a teenager.
What books do you wish you could have read as a child/teenager?  What do you think of books that intentionally tug at your heart strings?  Is gallows humor something you employ, or find distasteful?

This Makes Us All Cranks

Still cold, so so so cold, was at the station running calls in the cold and ice, so so so so so cold. I usually don't mind the cold, but this is excessive and it is making me cranky...you might even say I'm a Crank...which by the way happens to be what the crazy people are called in the Maze Runner series by James Dashner of which I just happened to finish the last book The Death Cure...which also made me a cranky Crank (do you like my babbling segues today?). Anyways  lets get to it, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

When we last left our tortured her Thomas he had just been "rescued" by WICKED a group that is supposedly working on a cure for a deadly disease by torturing teenagers.  Thomas is finally released from his padded cell and reunited with his fellow torturees.  The apparent head Doc whom the group calls Ratface informs them that they are almost to the last step of the cure and that they will now give them there memories back (remember part of the whole maze deal was that there memories got swiped).  Thomas along with his fellow Gladers Minho and Newt decide that they don't trust WICKED to put back their original memories and decide to stay clueless about there past.  This leads to a confrontation with Ratman who has decided that they don't get a choice in the matter. He tells them that one of the reasons that they were all chosen for this torture experiment is that most of them are immune to the Flare and that they are trying to map their brains to see why they are immune.  We also find out that Newt is one of the non immune, he gives Thomas a letter and tells him not to open it until the time is right.  Thomas is restrained and taken to get his memories back when he spots Brenda (a friend he made while slogging through the scorch) who with the help of Jorge (another Scorch friend) helps the boys escape.  They end up in Denver where a Flare outbreak is decimating the city.  They also learn that Immunes have been disappearing all over the place and that WICKED is going to start the Trials over again as they did not seem to get the information they were looking for. As they are running around the city they find out about a group called the Right Arm, a quasi-military group who is very anti WICKED and join them.  Meanwhile Newt has started to go crazy because of the Flare and sends Minho and Thomas away.  Later Thomas remembers the note and reads it, the contents essentially ask Thomas to kill Newt when he starts going crazy. Next time he encounters Newt, Thomas does as he wishes and kills him. The group eventually hooks up with the rest of their friends and plans an attack on WICKED.  Thomas goes in alone as Ratman has told him that he is the final candidate and that his brain holds the last piece of the puzzle for the cure for Flare.  The point is for Thomas to get in and plant a device that renders all weapons useless and then be rescued by the Right Arm.  Unfortunately Ratman has other plans, turns out that the final piece of the puzzle is literally Thomas's brain, that they in fact have to cut it out and dissect it, meaning Thomas would die. Thomas is put under and he wakes up in an empty room with nothing but an envelope with his name on it containing instructions on how to get the captive Immunes and escape with them to a preprepared place.  Explosions, fighting and death occur, but in the end Thomas, Minho, Brenda, Jorge, Teresa, and all the rest of the Immunes are transported to a peaceful meadow like area where they can start a new life and eventually repopulate the world with other little Immunes.  In a final epilogue memo we find out that the government purposely released the Flare virus as a means of population control after the devastating sun flare.  The memo also goes on to state that while the attempt to find a cure was noble, a second try was not worth it and that the author of the memo was sending the Immunes somewhere safe.  And so ends our long and torturous journey of pointlessness.

I actually found this book to be a tad less problematic then the previous two. Some of the decisions and reactions were actually plausible and the action tended to have some kind of point to it.  That being said, it was still way to...I don't know how to put it, I just wanted it to be done.  I found myself wanting to skip all the angsty pages and move on to the next sparse tidbit of storyline which does not make for an enjoyable read.  Ok things I did not hate.  I liked that they made one of the core friends sick and that he did not survive, but was reduced to the "enemy" that they all feared so much.  I liked that Thomas and at least some of his friends decided to quit being the puppets of WICKED (no matter how much Teresa insisted that they were good) and finally fought back.  I also appreciated how so many people finally came to the realization that the resources, time, and angst that were being poured into the Trials to find a cure would have been better spent containing and treating the symptoms of the Flare, instead the whole world went to hell while they were waiting for this nebulous possible cure.  Thomas having to question what a cure was worth in terms of both personal, and the groups well-being.  Was it ok to torture a couple hundred people if it could potentially save millions?  At what point is torturing and killing people for a cure going to inflict a damage that out weighs the benefits of a cure?  All good ethical questions.  Things I did not love.  The whole, non explained (not really) reason that torturing Immune teenagers would result in a cure was not sound in any way shape or form.  I work in the medical field and I have never ever remotely heard of a virus infecting somebody because of the way they think...or at least not in the way the book tried to present it.  While positive or negative thinking can have an effect on your health...it won't "cure" anything.  I hated that their was absolutely no mention of them even trying to find a cure or vaccine from more traditional virus killing methods that actually work in real life.  Nope it was all about the killzone (which is the stupid name they gave the brain 'cause the virus makes you go crazy).  So obviously since it is a brain infection...only a thought pattern can cure it, hm I'll have to tell that to my next viral encephalitis patient.  I also thought that the fact that the Flare was released on purpose was pretty non-plausible, I mean what government purposely releases a horrible, non-lethal (it's not the virus, but the going crazy and not being able to take care of yourself part that kills you), uncontrollable, uncurable, unvaccinable virus into the world, seriously who does that...oh right only crazy people.  This was annoying  cause it made an already implausible story pretty much as unpossible as possible (and that is totally a word, Lewis Carrol says so).  I hated that the government did not think to isolate at least some of the immunes, heck or even healthy people once they saw the scale of destruction that was happening.  They obviously had a place prepped, they new the Trials may fail...so why not save as much as humanity as possible?  You could even still run the pointless trials while preserving the human race?!? This book made more sense then any of them, but it was still a very frustrating read.  Questions were still not answered (what the hell were the Trials for?  How were they gonna use the patterns?  What was Teresa, Thomas and Aries role in the beginning?) which may be answered in the prequel...which I will read 'cause why not.  Also a lot of stuff that got set up in earlier books was completely pointless by the end of this book, again a case of the second book of a trilogy being beyond completely pointless, in fact all three books could have probably been combined into one semi-decent book.  In case you haven't figured it out, this is not my favorite series.  I keep hearing people comparing it to the Hunger Games trilogy which while not perfect, at least had a point.  Just because a book is about a bunch of tortured teenagers does not put it on the same level as a set of well written books that also happen to be (among other things) tortured teenagers. I will read the prequal The Kill Order because one I already have it and two just in case it gives me any more information.  I give this book 3 out of 10 Death Cures.

What did you think of this trilogy?  Was it comparable to the Hunger Games?  Will you watch the movie when it comes out and tell me what you think so I don't have to?