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I kicked off my resolution to read more novels by finishing The Seduction of an Unknown Lady by Samantha James
and then reading The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
.
The Seduction of an Unknown Lady was so boring and generic that it took me almost the whole month of December and part of January to get through it. Ugh.
I only just read The Knife of Letting Go this morning, so I'm still working my way through how I feel about it, but my first reaction was to post this to the greader thread my friends have about it:
if it had been submitted to me, i'd've acquired it for sure, but i didn't enjoy it, and was mostly variations on bored and irritated.
I'm not really sure I have more to say than that. It hit a lot of my buttons for kneejerk disliking. While not all of it was awful, I didn't enjoy any of it. I made a list of stuff I didn't like for a friend of mine in gchat. Here is the list, slightly cleaned up (with proper-casing! and no visible spoilers):
1. Awful men. The spoiler of the book is predictable, given how awful the men all are.
2. Dialect. I often don't like dialect because it's poorly done and clumsy. This book is definitely clumsy; reading the dialect was not easy or interesting and it never fell into an engaging rhythm.
3. It takes almost four hundred pages to find out what's going on, because everyone who knows what's really happening keeps telling the protagonist, "We'll tell you later!" or "You shouldn't have to know!" Plus the protagonist is literally carrying around a book that says everything that happened from the POV of someone it happened to (it is a diary), but he can't read. His companion throughout can read, but he guards the book jealously for four hundred pages. (FOUR. HUNDRED. PAGES.)
4. The thread of "church" (no religion named) running through made me really uncomfortable -- both the parts where the churchiness is glorified and the parts where it's vilified. I need to think more about it/reread it to come to a conclusion about whether there's some kind of lesson about religion and the evil of mankind the author is trying to impart, but there's definitely something that really set my teeth on edge.
5. The spoiler with the spoiler. Highlight to read. (The dog! The antagonist killed the dog! That dog was my favorite character. And I think the killing of the dog was really unnecessary. It didn't raise the stakes or tell us anything we didn't already know. I really felt like the author was just trying to prove that he's a badass who isn't afraid to kill a helpless puppy.)
6. I normally enjoy media that has a darkness to it, but I did not find the darkness in this book engaging. It was very off-putting. I might not have felt this way if I hadn't read -- and been incredibly disappointed by -- the Hunger Games trilogy last summer, but I think those books filled my quota for depressingly dark books with no hope and no point for the next ten years.
7. I really felt like every single character, including the protagonist and his companion, were villains. If there is a thread of "lesson" going through the book (a la point #4), it is that everyone can be evil. I'm down with that most of the time, and I even believe it in real life, but I thought it was sort of clumsily handled here, and not subtle enough. Although . . . that is probably something that works for the ostensible target market of the book, which is, I guess, precocious ten year olds.
8. The book is not tight enough. It only took me 90 minutes to read the book, but it seriously felt like it stretched out forever. And part of that is because of things like how it took 400 pages for the hero to find out "the truth" about what happened.
9. Cliffhanger ending. Not a fan.
10. At least three or four different fonts were used throughout. Animals speak in a different font, and people speak to each other psychically, etc. It's really irritating, especially because the chosen fonts are difficult to read.
11. There are a lot of action sequences that are not very well written. Blah blah stream of consciousness, but come on. I need to be able to tell what's going on, and I found it difficult at times because the narrator couldn't give me a clear picture.
...This is just off the top of my head. I'm going to think about it some more. I haven't come to a conclusion about whether or not I want to read the rest of the trilogy. I'm definitely not the target market; I'd've loved this when I was ten years old, but find it too transparent now. If you liked it, I'm open to being convinced to read the second book! Spoilers are okay.
and then reading The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.The Seduction of an Unknown Lady was so boring and generic that it took me almost the whole month of December and part of January to get through it. Ugh.
I only just read The Knife of Letting Go this morning, so I'm still working my way through how I feel about it, but my first reaction was to post this to the greader thread my friends have about it:
if it had been submitted to me, i'd've acquired it for sure, but i didn't enjoy it, and was mostly variations on bored and irritated.
I'm not really sure I have more to say than that. It hit a lot of my buttons for kneejerk disliking. While not all of it was awful, I didn't enjoy any of it. I made a list of stuff I didn't like for a friend of mine in gchat. Here is the list, slightly cleaned up (with proper-casing! and no visible spoilers):
1. Awful men. The spoiler of the book is predictable, given how awful the men all are.
2. Dialect. I often don't like dialect because it's poorly done and clumsy. This book is definitely clumsy; reading the dialect was not easy or interesting and it never fell into an engaging rhythm.
3. It takes almost four hundred pages to find out what's going on, because everyone who knows what's really happening keeps telling the protagonist, "We'll tell you later!" or "You shouldn't have to know!" Plus the protagonist is literally carrying around a book that says everything that happened from the POV of someone it happened to (it is a diary), but he can't read. His companion throughout can read, but he guards the book jealously for four hundred pages. (FOUR. HUNDRED. PAGES.)
4. The thread of "church" (no religion named) running through made me really uncomfortable -- both the parts where the churchiness is glorified and the parts where it's vilified. I need to think more about it/reread it to come to a conclusion about whether there's some kind of lesson about religion and the evil of mankind the author is trying to impart, but there's definitely something that really set my teeth on edge.
5. The spoiler with the spoiler. Highlight to read. (The dog! The antagonist killed the dog! That dog was my favorite character. And I think the killing of the dog was really unnecessary. It didn't raise the stakes or tell us anything we didn't already know. I really felt like the author was just trying to prove that he's a badass who isn't afraid to kill a helpless puppy.)
6. I normally enjoy media that has a darkness to it, but I did not find the darkness in this book engaging. It was very off-putting. I might not have felt this way if I hadn't read -- and been incredibly disappointed by -- the Hunger Games trilogy last summer, but I think those books filled my quota for depressingly dark books with no hope and no point for the next ten years.
7. I really felt like every single character, including the protagonist and his companion, were villains. If there is a thread of "lesson" going through the book (a la point #4), it is that everyone can be evil. I'm down with that most of the time, and I even believe it in real life, but I thought it was sort of clumsily handled here, and not subtle enough. Although . . . that is probably something that works for the ostensible target market of the book, which is, I guess, precocious ten year olds.
8. The book is not tight enough. It only took me 90 minutes to read the book, but it seriously felt like it stretched out forever. And part of that is because of things like how it took 400 pages for the hero to find out "the truth" about what happened.
9. Cliffhanger ending. Not a fan.
10. At least three or four different fonts were used throughout. Animals speak in a different font, and people speak to each other psychically, etc. It's really irritating, especially because the chosen fonts are difficult to read.
11. There are a lot of action sequences that are not very well written. Blah blah stream of consciousness, but come on. I need to be able to tell what's going on, and I found it difficult at times because the narrator couldn't give me a clear picture.
...This is just off the top of my head. I'm going to think about it some more. I haven't come to a conclusion about whether or not I want to read the rest of the trilogy. I'm definitely not the target market; I'd've loved this when I was ten years old, but find it too transparent now. If you liked it, I'm open to being convinced to read the second book! Spoilers are okay.
