Jumping The Pages

It is snowy, cold and blech outside...seems to be the perfect time to curl up with my computer, a cup of coffee and write a rambling.  Today I shall ramble on about a book that caught my eye called The Book Jumper by Mechthild Glaser.  I was at the bookstore looking for a completely different book, when the cover jumped out at me...and seriously with a cover like this I pretty much had to buy it.  It ended up being a bit hit or miss for me, though it did re inspire the return of my book journal...but before we get to that, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

Amy and her young mother Alexis are both in the throes of heartache.  Alexis has been dumped by her married boyfriend and Amy is experiencing the teenage angst of betrayal and embarrassment by a friend via social media.  They flee from their town in Germany to the tiny Scottish isle of Stormsay and their family home called the Lennox House.  They arrive fittingly in a storm and are greeted by the stern matriarch of the family Lady Mairead, Alexis's mother and Amy's grandmother.  They are welcomed on the condition that Amy learn how to become a book jumper.  What the heck is a book jumper?  I'm glad you asked.  You see on this little tiny isle there are two families, the Lennox family and the Macalister family.  These two clans have been responsible for hundreds of years for caring for the storylines of books.  They accomplish this by lying in a circle of standing stones, laying a book over their face then voila! they are in the book.  Amy chooses The Jungle Book as her practice book, but finds that she can easily move between stories, making friends with various characters.  Amy also discovers that she can jump into her e-reader and that she does not need to be in the standing circle to do so.  She is in a class with Betsy and William, the daughter and nephew of the current Laird of the Macalister clan.  Betsy is not a fan of Amy's, feeling she is too old to be properly trained...also she is a Lennox.  Will is cordial.  The three are taught by three guy's who are kind of monk like and are all scarred by burns.  While exploring the various literary worlds, Amy discovers that idea's are being stolen, altering the storylines in all the books in the world (yeah...we will discuss this later).  Nobody believes her, until she and Will discover the body of Sherlock Holmes in the real world.  Apparently Will would pull Sherlock out of the book to talk to him.  He vanished one day and it turns out he was murdered.  Apparently the Sherlocks in the other stories agreed to help out in the dead ones book so all was well.  The three students are taken to a place deep in the library and shown a story that explains a lot.  Apparently the Lennox family used to have a castle, but after a tussel, a fire broke out and destroyed it along with a one of a kind manuscript of a story not written down anywhere else.  The three teachers turn out to be the only characters rescued from the destroyed story and now live on the Stormstay teaching the new jumpers.  Amy discovers her mother making out with Desmond, one of the rescued book guys,  and after a bunch of angst and back and forthness learns that he is her father.  Yep, I guess when you spend most of your life on an island that only houses two families and a less then a dozen other people, you fall in love with the ageless book character...and then have a kid with him.  This helps explain why Amy is such an advanced jumper as in reality she is half fictional...yeah...anyways moving on.  We continue to go back and forth, Will and Amy fall in teenage love, accusations and suspicions fly 'cause nobody actually talks to each other and finally we figure out what is going on.  The old burned manuscript that had only fragments of pages and the three men saved had one more surprise.  Somehow the princess in the story also managed to escape the destruction and has been hibernating on the island.  She is a young, spoiled petulant thing who enchanted Will to be her Knight and jump into the stories to steal ideas.  She is trying to use these ideas to restore her story.  Once we know this we are able to piece together her story...which is not a very nice one. Most of the info finally comes from Desmond, who was the original Knight in the story.  Essentially the princess, when she get's bored, enchants a man to be her Knight, sending him out to slay a monster that is ravaging her kingdom.  The sick part is that the princess has actually turned the Knight into the monster, having him commit heinous acts, then sending him out unknowing to find the monster.  The only way to stop the monster is for the Knight to kill himself...starting the cycle all over again.  Will finds a way to stop the princess, getting himself killed in the process and Amy is able to return the idea's back to their original books.  She takes Will's body into his favorite book, Peter Pan and Tinker Bell is able to bring him back to life as a story character.  Amy spends most of her time in the books, exploring them with Will and that is how the book ends.

World Building - There is a lot of different ways to look at the world building in this book.  The island of Stormsay is fairly well realized, I could probably find my way around it if I needed to, and the atmosphere of it is complete.  The rest of it however is patchy.  I never got a full sense of the family, the history or the mechanics of the book jumping.  I felt I wanted either more information, or better merging of the different pieces of this complicated world.  I unfortunately did not get the feeling of full immersion that is the hallmark of a well built world.

Story - We have the problem of too many stories to accurately judge this category.  Some of these stories are more successful then others.  The best story in my humble opinion was the one of the ruined manuscript.  Through out the book, there are fragments given to us that make it sound like a fairly typical fairy tale, to find out that it is a pretty dark and twisted story is pretty awesome.  I feel like I did with the world building that if we had more information it would have been easier for the reader to see where all the various disparate stories tied together.  For me it was a bunch of flipping back and forth and wondering if I missed something.  In general, each story line was pretty good, they just didn't completely gel to create a whole.

Character - This book had a ton of characters in it.  Some where created just for the book and some were pulled from the literary world.  I was pretty ambivalent about most of the characters, didn't really hate any of them...but didn't really fall in love with any of them either.  For the most part, most of the characters where just there to further the story without a whole lot of personality, history or motivation.  Will, Amy and Alexis where the most formed of the characters, and I liked Will the best of those three.  Amy and Alexis where your fairly typical young mom/teenager duo that seems to be popular lately, didn't hate them, didn't love them.

Editing - So this book was translated from it's native German, which is pretty cool 'cause I love getting view points that are not typically American.  That being said, the flow of the book was not my favorite.  I felt that the there were to many storylines and not enough information.  While this is mostly on the writer, I feel an editor can maybe point out to an author that maybe the reader isn't in the author's head and needs some background, or history, or consistency for the book to work.  It isn't horrible editing, but like the rest of the categories...meh

Book Jumping - Ok, here we have one of my biggest issues with this book, and a particular literary peeve in general.  For me the overall concept of the book jumping left me with a ton of questions and very few answers, in fact it inspired me to get out my book journal again so that I could write down all my questions about book jumping.  Here are just a few thoughts I had.  Who discovered it? Why only these two families?  How diluted can the blood get?  Seriously how do these two tiny families keep track of EVERY book?  What is their purpose again?  If they are the only ones who can jump...aren't they the only ones who can mess up the story? Why are the characters aware of the jumpers?  Umm...about the timelines?  How do you turn the page?  Seriously, other then the mechanism of lying down and putting the book on your face there is not much given to us about the jumping.  I hate it when an author has a concept, especially a potentially good concept and then the execution is poor.  I understand that I will never have all the info or answers I want for things like this, and I don't always need them...I just want a concept to make sense. Since the book jumping was such a huge part of the book, I don't feel like I am wrong in wanting to know how it actually works.

Books About Getting Into Books - I have not yet found a book that has successfully executed a concept where characters from the real world can get into book worlds.  I have read some great ones that deal with elements of books in the real world, or authors or things like that, but anytime I read about a character actually getting into Wonderland, or Neverland, or Pemberly...it just does not work for me.  I think it's cause for me a good book world is complete and personal to the reader.  If you asked me to draw, or describe Pemberly and then you asked my baby sis to do the same thing, I bet you would come up with two equally valid, yet very different pictures.  So when an author tries to put a character into that world it infringes on my view of the world.  As for my own personal self, I'm always torn.  If I had the opportunity would I want to jump into a literary world, or is the bigger appeal the fact that I am completely outside of it?  Ok this is getting very philosophical and may require it's own post.

Fictional Father - After all of my mehness about the book...I have to admit I kind of liked the idea that Amy had a father that was a fictional character. Aside from the zillions of questions it brings forth, it also had the added advantage of me paring up literary characters and wondering what their offspring would be like.  I may have also had some literary fantasy's on which literary crush I would allow to father my fictional kids...

Overall Impression - Overall I feel pretty meh about the whole book.  It seemed to have a ton of stuff in it without really going anywhere.  There were moments of awesome and the concept was pretty cool, but the overall muddledness, lack of info and too many literary pet peeves made this book disappointing.  I feel that it had a lot of potential and if this author exports any other books over the pond, I will probably give her another chance 'cause I feel like she has good ideas.  I give this book 5 out of 10 inkpots and realize that other people enjoyed it more then I did which is also awesome.   Also the book cover is worth it just to have on my book shelf.   Happy Reading Everybody!

Editing Humanity

I have finally finished that last book in the Divergent series, Allegiant by Veronica Roth.  All of my fellow bookies have been dying for me to finish this series so that we could talk about it.  I love all the various reactions to this book and how other people thought I would react to the book.  Some people thought I would love the ending, others thought I would hate it...in the end, as with this whole series I have mixed feelings.  As always SPOILERS, SO MANY HUGE DON'T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU WANT ANY SENSE OF SURPRISE TO THE ENDING OF THIS SERIES, SERIOUSLY SPOILERS AHEAD!!

Ok, here we go with my new and improved shortened synopsis of this book.  As before we pick up right were we left off.  The factionless are now in charge and they are hellbent on revenge for all of their suffering through out the years.  Tris gets put on trial and using her super Divergent powers is able to resist the truth serum enough to get her and her friends set free.  Tobias pretends to break up with her so his mom (the factionless leader Evelyn) will continue to trust him, but really they just sneak out for almost sexy fun time.  They, along with their friends get recruited into Allegiant, a group dedicated to following the precepts of their ancestors, which includes reinstating the factions and sending the Divergents out into the world.  Of course our intrepid band gets chosen to set out into the big bad world including Tris, Tobias, Cara, Will, Christina, Uriah and Caleb who gets rescued from certain execution by Tobias.  Off our group goes and once they are outside the fence are almost immediately picked up by some former faction members who had either dissapered or supposedly died.  They pretty quickly learn that the video they found was mostly a lie to get the Divergent to come out of the city.  They are told that back a while ago people started messing with their genes to try and eradicate the bad stuff, selfishness, violence, cowardice, untrustworthiness, and

ignorance...sound familiar.  This led to people also losing the opposite of whatever they cut out...so selfless people had no sense of self preservation, truthfulness at the cost of tact and so on so forth.  Because all good dystopia's need a war the people with damaged genes fought the people with the pure genes, causing what is called the Purity war.  This lasted long enough and caused enough damage that the government could blame all the bad stuff on the people with the damaged genes.  This led to groups of what they call Genetically Damaged or GD's being put in sealed cities and treated with serums and experiments to try and fix the genes and then get them passed down to other generations...yeah it's supposed to make sense but never does.  Anyways when people are born with fixed genes they become Divergent, come out to the real world...and yeah.  So anyways in the real world it is found by our group that the GD's are very oppressed by the GP's (Genetically Pure).  The experiments are a big reason for the prejudice as all of the countries resources are being used to fund these experiments instead of rebuilding the country.  All kinds of chaos, and yet a whole lot of nothing occurs.  Near the end they find out that the leaders of the experiment are going to use a memory serum to wipe the memories of the people left in Chicago and start again.  Tris and her gang come up with a plan to stop this, while at the same time modifying the memories of the experiment leaders for a better world where both GD's and GP's can live in peace. Tobias goes and makes peace with his mother, and comes to terms with his father, stopping a potential massacre. In the end Tris takes the most risk and dies for it...yep Tris, the heroine dies...for real...I told you spoilers.  The risk pays off and everything goes as planned.  The country looks like it is one the right track, Tobias comes to terms with Tris's death and becomes a leader and they all attempt to live happily ever after.

So...here we are...at the end of this series and I have to try and figure out how to explain my feelings on this book and the series as a whole.  Lets start with the good, shall we?  I have fallen hard for Tris, Christina and Cara.  Christina is just awesome, loud, adventurous, smart, funny and deals with life in a fairly realistic, yet healthy way. Cara is a super smart person who has had to come to terms with her own humanity and grows in leaps and bounds through out the books, especially this one.  She also proves herself to be a fantastic leader.  Tris is just awesome, I wasn't sure at the beginning, but by the end of this book, so much love.  I think this last book is where I finally picked up on what I love about her...she is not a push over.  At one point in the book Tobias pulls his stupid double standard paternal crap and Tris calls him on it so hard I just wanted to kiss her.  Another time Tobias does something really stupid, after Tris tried time and again to talk to him and in the end she pretty much broke up with him over it...in a totally mature, hey this is not cool and I am not kissing a guy who refuses to respect or listen to me.  Of course they get back together before the end, but still, I feel Tris can hold her own against him.  I also feel Tris is a good window into humanity in general, she has strong moments, weak moments, funny moments, serious moments, hard moments, and crazy moment I just really like her. Props to the author for writing a wide variety of positive females.  The other thing I liked in this book is the realistic way the author killed a couple of good characters.  I love it when an author realizes that when you have a violent book...people die.  Uriah's death was a sad, slow brain injury instead of the normal sudden violent death which is awesome because it gave the other characters time to reflect and respond in a totally different way then normal.  Tris's death was significant because, well, she was the main character and her death made sense and brought home the real cost of rebellions.  I loved it.

On to the bad.  I hate Tobias.  In this book the author had the narration go back and forth between Tris and Tobias and I hated hated hated it.  Tobias came across as a whiny petulant 14 year old girl with a bit of angry 15 year old wanna be gangster boy thrown in just to really annoy everybody. I liked nothing about him, at all, not even a little bit.  I was excited to finally find out about the whats and whys of the whole Divergent thingy, but the explanation just did not work for me...or anybody who has gotten past third grade science.  It probably seems super nit picky, and I know I drone on and and on about it every time I review a book in this series, but seriously, it goes against human nature, it goes against science and it goes against all reason and as before, it ruins the premise for me.  There was not a lot of world building outside of there was a war, stuff was destroyed now there are the haves and have nots...makes me miss the Dauntless areas.  I also hate when reveals make the first couple books irrelevant, which this book seems to do.  There seemed to be a disconnect through out this book, a kind of feeling like I should care more about certain things then I did.  There is so much more about the serums, and how they worked, and how does one tell a GD from a GP unless you are holding their genetic results in your hand, and how does the genetic damage and repair even work, and so much stuff that probably only bugs me so I will end this here.  Overall I felt about this book how I felt about the series, I enjoyed a lot of the characters, but the world building, the premise and the story just did not ring true for me.  I give this book a 5 out of 10 truth serum.

How did you feel about this book compared to the overall series?  Does the lack of any sensible science in this book bug you anywhere near as much as it does me?   Am I sick and twisted to be happy when an author actually kills off a character in a meaningful, adept, realistic way?

Slogging Through The Scorch

Sometimes I just have to force myself to finish a book and that's all there is to it.  I had expected to get through The Scorch Trials (the second book in the Maze Runner Trilogy) fairly quickly, considering I read the first one in about a day.  I had mixed feelings about the first book, but wanted to finish up the trilogy, if nothing else to see what the heck it was all for.  I really tried to go into the second book with an open mind, but ugh, I had a really hard time with it.  To me it had all the problems of the first book with very little of it's good points.  Anyways here is a quick and probably jaded synopsis (I apologize to those of you who love these books, it is just my own personal take see this post for a fuller explanation).  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

This book starts off where the last one left off.  The boys awaken in there nice cozy beds ready for some well deserved R&R.  Of course this does not make for a good story so instead they are set upon by crazy, sick, oozy people called Cranks.  Apparently the disease called Flare takes up residence in your brain and eventually makes you cuckoo.  Luckily for our boys they are safe behind barred windows.  Shaken up, but determined to figure out what the heck is going on they go to find there rescuers from before.  As they wander into the kitchen, trying to find some answers, they come upon the horrifying sight of all there rescuers dead and hung from the ceiling...WTF!  They all gather and talk and discover that instead of Teresa in her
room it is a boy named Aris who informs the Gladers that he was the "Teresa" in another Maze situation that was completely identical except that it was full of girls instead of boys. The only other differences are that more girls made it out then boys (well duh! :-) ) and that his partner Rachel got killed in front of them, since they didn't have a Chuck to jump in front of her.  A man appears behind a force field and informs the Gladers that they have all been infected by the Flare and that they had exactly two weeks to make it 100 miles across the Scorch (an area that has been devastated by a mega sun flare ((this has a serious SyFy channel feel to it)) and is pretty brutal on its own) and make it to a safe haven where they will all be cured. So off they set and as you can probably guess all kinds of horrific, non-sensicle things happen to them (seriously a head eating ball is just one of the horrors they  deal with). Teresa also shows up randomly to add additional torture to poor Thomas (who is still our main character).  After many deaths and injuries they make it to this city type place that is over run by Cranks in various states of the disease.  They make a tentative alliance with a pair named Jorge and Brenda who have just been diagnosed and exiled.   The group gets separated, Jorge and the Gladers wander around and Brenda and Thomas get into a couple of scrapes.  Cranks are crazy and do crazy things.  Eventually they all meet up again to continue across the Scorch.  Teresa shows up again with Group B (the girls) and captures Thomas.  They are supposed to kill him, but he talks the girls out of it.  Teresa and Aris get together and kidnap Thomas and take him to this box thingy that is supposed to kill him.  It releases some gas that heals him and Teresa and Aris said it was all part of the plan that he felt betrayed...yeah.  Thomas is understandably unable to forgive Teresa, or even believe anything that anybody is saying at this point.  They all meet back up with the other groups at the supposed safe haven site.  About 30 minutes before the deadline, weird monstery humany things appear and start trying to kill the kids.  Most of them hang on long enough to get to the deadline.  A ship appears in the sky and collects the kids.  They tell them that they are safe now (we've heard that before) and that everything will be explained.  Thomas falls asleep to Teresa talking in his head, telling him that WICKED (the group behind all this crap) is good.  The book ends with a memo talking about removing the mind wipe and telling the kids which of them are immune to the Flare.
Whew done with that!  I have not been so happy to finish a book in a while...and I still have two more to go!  This book had all of my most hated pet peeves in a second book.  It felt fairly pointless and unnecessary.  The whole point of the book seemed to be to torture teenage kids...and that is about it.  We do not get a whole lot of information about the world, or WICKED that we did not get in the first book.  In fact the only thing that was really new was the fact we find out that it was Thomas, Teresa, and Aries choice to go into the
Maze.  We keep seeing the WICKED people talk about patterns, and creating patterns, and that all this pointless stuff will result in patterns...but not a single mention of what the heck it is.  I will give the author props for inventiveness when it comes to the myriad of tortures he puts his characters through.  Walks down pitch dark tunnels resulting in peoples heads being eaten by balls of metal, random boxes of fear, giant monsters men who can be taken down by popping orange bubbles.  All very terrifying.  The character development was not as complete as the last book, while the friendships between Newt, Minho, and Thomas stayed refreshingly intact and very bromance, the new characters were just kind of tossed in there to further the "plot" which is pretty sparse to begin with.  Overall not one of my favorite books, it was very frustrating to watch these kids get jerked around, tortured, hurt, killed, lied to and then tell them "it's for a reason, but we won't tell you the reason".  As a reader, I personally can only take so watching characters get relentlessly punished with out any payoff, it starts to feel icky and squirmy, like I only am reading it so I can watch them suffer.  Like I said earlier, I will finish off the series to see if there is any pay off, but I think the open mind part is starting to suffer.  Those of you who enjoyed these books, please let me know in the comments why, because I really want to know!

How does this book compare to other second books in YA dystopia series?    Have you ever made your self finish a series?  How does one come up with head eating metal sphere of doom?