Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I read this book two whole months ago. Since then, my daily life has been taken over by a demanding new job and my reading life has been taken over by War & Peace. However, due to the gloriousness that is Easter Weekend, I've had some time to myself and I feel able to finally talk about Station Eleven. You, my friends, are in for a mildly indignant treat.

Plot summary: What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.

One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again.

Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened.

If civilisation was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

This book was recommended to me by almost everybody - I've seen glowing reviews, the Waterstones cashier was raving about it at the cash desk and an acquantaincey work colleague sort-of grudgingly admitted that he quite liked it. I'm also perfectly aware how many awards this thing has won. I... this does not make a lot of sense to me.

It was sold to me as a unique story about the struggle to retain our culture and therefore (arguably) our humanity, after a disaster of epic proportions. This is a perfect idea for a book - so many books concentrate on actually surviving, which is understandable but not particularly ground-breaking anymore. Unfortunately, Station Eleven reads exactly like one of those novels - a fairly generic post-apocalyptic novel in which some of the characters just happen to be Shakespearean actors. The plays themself (and other references to culture) are an incredibly minor part of the story, which mostly revolves around the usual hunts for food, Doomsday Cults and the fight for survival.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. I like a good post-apoc as much as the next person. There's just nothing particularly interesting or unique about it either. By two thirds of the way through, I just wanted to finish it and move on to something, ANYTHING, else. To put this into context, I was looking forward to going back to War & Peace. I know, right?

There are multiple POVs here and some of them are really interesting. There's Kirsten who idolises the actor she saw die on stage as a child, Clark who's running a sort-of museum in an abandoned airport, and Jeevan who was one of the first survivors, to name just a few. The problem is that each character is given far too much 'screen-time' in one sitting and so by the time we've circled back to a previous character, you don't care about them anymore. Essentially, I suppose I'm saying that Station Eleven needed to be longer... or shorter. Either spend more time building up the characters, or let us cycle back to them quicker.

The ending was... well, there actually wasn't one. The book just kind of stopped. Honestly, it felt as though the author just went 'oh, and they all match up because of this...' and then wandered off to put the kettle on. It's very wishy-washy and I was expecting more after such a lengthy and thorough build-up. Don't get me wrong, I was pleased that I was able to put the damn thing away but I'd still been harbouring a sneaky hope that I was about to be blown away by an epic ending. I was not.

It actually reminds me a lot of Cloud Atlas, now I think about it. There are too many strands and it tries so damn hard to be clever and link them all up that it ends up failing to develop any of them properly.

You've probably gathered that I wasn't a huge fan of Station Eleven, although I'm willing to admit that my high expectations didn't help. I just found it to be rather pretentious, over-ambitious and to be honest, slightly boring.

Read a more positive review of Station Eleven at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm.

Review: Deadline (Newsflesh #2) by Mira Grant

Hmm. Alright, well, let's start with what we already know. Parasite, also by Mira Grant, was easily one of the best books of 2013, no question. Somehow, tapeworms taking over the world made perfect sense. Feed, which I read earlier this year was very good, although not quite on a par with Parasite. Yay for well-thought-out zombies. Deadline is the book after Feed, and therefore the next in the Newsflesh series. Everybody with me so far?

Contains spoilers for Feed.

Plot summary: Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the news organisation he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn't seem as fun when you've lost as much as he has.

But when a researcher from the Centre for Disease Control fakes her own death and appears on his doorstep with a ravenous pack of zombies in tow, Shaun's relieved to find a new purpose in life. Because this researcher comes bearing news: the monster who attacked them may be destroyed, but the conspiracy is far from dead.

Now, Shaun hits the road to find what truth can be found at the end of a shotgun.

  
These aren't your typical zombie horror books, not are they the standard YA post-apocalyptic tripe. They're not YA, for a start. The prose is very advanced and holds your attention, which isn't an easy feat whilst explaining advanced immuno-biology. Secondly, whilst zombies are involved, it's definitely more sci-fi than horror, as the novels go into great detail about the science of mutating viruses and the feasibility of a mass outbreak. It's complicated.

Too complicated, one might say (and I do). At the risk of being patted on the head and told to run off and play with my toys... I massively struggled to follow this book. Parts of it just don't make sense. We're constantly given facts without the necessary explanation, like the conclusion/consequences should be blindingly obvious, only they're not. I kept rereading paragraphs in case I'd missed something, but I rarely had.

Basically, it goes too fast. Not action-wise (we'll get to that), but text-wise. It moves on to another topic before we've fully got to grips with one idea, which makes a huge difference considering the entire premise is psuedo-science based. It needs to take the time to explain itself and it doesn't. I'm a normal person of average intelligence... yet I was confused with this. Either I've grossly over-estimated my own intellect or Deadline needs editing.

For example, there's a whole thing about why it's a big deal that Georgia had retinal Kellis-Amberlee (the virus mutation that causes zombieness) when Shaun didn't, which I don't understand because they were adopted separately... so of course they have different genes. And then somehow that makes Shaun a target and everyone's nodding their heads sagely and going ''Ah yes, that makes sense..." but DOES IT!? *hyperventilates*

I'd have to say that Deadline is mostly just talking. I mean, I don't object to that in a book necessarily but it's a large contrast to Feed, which had a good mix of scientific theory and poking zombies with sticks. There's a lot of travelling from place to place (and then back to the original place (via a different place)) in a van, while they talk the entire time. I never thought I'd say this, but I really just wanted them to shoot something.

And now for the point that irritated me most about Deadline: Georgia talks inside Shaun's mind. Constantly. They have conversations throughout. I considered whether this might be mildly spoilery but it's revealed within four pages, and I wish I'd known this before I picked the book up. Partly because it took me a while to understand what and why that was happening (which is never explained), but then I suppose we're back to the lack of communication mentioned above.

Anyway. If you're going to kill off a main character, COMMIT TO IT. You don't get to have the reader's respect for being ballsy enough to do it and still get to use them as a character in the sequel. She comes up with plans, discusses other characters with Shaun, points out pratical flaws in new ideas... exactly as she did she was alive, really. It just seemed like a lazy way to have Georgia feature in the book without that pesky problem of her being dead. 

Just quickly... they are implying incest, right? Because they have a creepy-ass relationship if they're not. 

While, we're on the topic of characters, I actually really did like Maggie and her epileptic bulldogs. There we go, I said something nice. Shaun, however, I did not like (aaaaaaand we're back). He's awful -he's an arrogant thug and his entire team just kind of accepts it. It's a first person narrative too, so we're subjected to him calling people 'bitches' and talking about he constantly 'wants to punch him/her in the face.' I even hated his team for the way they just meekly took it. Get a backbone, people.

I struggled with seeing any of them as adults. I think I assume they're all 17/18 so it's odd when they have (reasonably graphic) sex and one of them is suddenly married. They act like teenagers and it's asking my imagination to out-do itself in order for me to believe otherwise.

Finally, the end of Book IV would have been a perfect place to end the novel, but it doesn't. It's unecessarily dragged-out and I really didn't appreciate the weak and obvious ending.

I know it sounds like I'm being overly harsh on Deadline, but I had high expectations so I feel frustrated and disappointed. I still barely understand what's going on, who's behind it or why. It's dry and repetitive with incredibly irritating characters. I really hope Symbiont, the sequel to Parasite, is better than this.


Go read my happy, positive reviews of Feed and Parasite. See? I do LIKE things occasionally!

Review: The 100: Day 21 by Kass Morgan

Although I really enjoyed the first book in this series, The 100, when I read it last year, I confess that I had forgotten pretty much all of it so I didn't have a whole lot of interest when The 100:Day 21 dropped onto the doormat. In fact, I only picked it up because I was exhausted and wanted to read the closest book to me. 

It doesn't matter though; I did read it and I'm so very glad that I did. 

Plot summary: It's been 21 days since the hundred landed on Earth. They're the only humans to set foot on the planet in centuries...or so they thought. Facing an unknown enemy, Wells attempts to keep the group together. Clarke strikes out for Mount Weather, in search of other Colonists, while Bellamy is determined to rescue his sister, no matter the cost. And back on the ship, Glass faces an unthinkable choice between the love of her life and life itself.

In this pulse-pounding sequel to Kass Morgan's The 100, secrets are revealed, beliefs are challenged, and relationships are tested. And the hundred will struggle to survive the only way they can -- together.

When I started this, I was very aware that I remembered very, very little about the first book. The first few pages were almost a trial by fire as I struggled to remember the four characters that the book followed without a dedicated 'recap' page. However, it only took three or four pages (literally) to find my bearings again. I think Kass Morgan went for the 'in at the deep end' approach, but it paid off - I knew where we were and it all made sense.

The 100: Day 21 is good; really good. Possibly even better than the first as there's less need for world-building and back story. That's not to say this is all action though - just when you think you know everything, there's another flashback and a startling new revelation that alters everything you thought you knew about the Colony.

That's possibly what I like best about this series, although I still don't appreciate the changing fonts to denote a flashback (I'm not a moron - I don't need a textual sock puppet to tell me that times are a-changing). It hasn't stopped trying, even though the middle book in a series is usually the worst. There are still little twists throughout that give the story a bit of 'oomph,' plot devices that I've not actually seen used anywhere else. 

I actually cared what happened to all the characters, which is always a mark of good storytelling. I needed everything to work out for them, despite simultaenously wanting to throttle every last one of them. I know I said this in my review of the last book, but they haven't gotten any better. Bellamy is an obnoxious thug who acts too impulsively and just wants to hit everything and Wells (who I liked in the last book) thinks he can just make decisions without every actually consulting anybody else.

The romance isn't brilliant either. There's an awful lot of InstaLove - characters suddenly declaring their love for each other based on nothing and I can't escape the feeling that they all ended up with the wrong person. I know that's just my person preferences but they hadn't developed enough for it to conclude that way.

So basically, I really do recommend reading this as it's even better than The 100 which I liked a lot anyway. The plot is fast-paced and interesting, and the few quibbles I had about the characters aren't drastic enough to refrain from reading it. I haven't seen the TV show yet, so I can't comment... but who cares? Read this!

The 100: Day 21 will be released on September 25th 2014.

Review: The 100 by Kass Morgan

When this dropped onto my doorstep (thanks to Hodder Books), I wasn't really sure what to expect. The cover images imply a fairly futuristic plot, perhaps set in some kind of space station, and that's not really My Thing. I picked it up anyway, expecting to trudge through it... and found a story that is a thrilling YA dystopian mixed with the retelling of a classic adventure novel.

Plot summary: Ever since a devastating nuclear war, humanity has lived on spaceships far above Earth's radioactive surface. Now, one hundred juvenile delinquents - considered expendable by society - are being sent on a dangerous mission: to re-colonize the planet. It could be their second chance at life... or it could be a suicide mission.

CLARKE was arrested for treason, though she's haunted by the memory of what she really did. WELLS, the chancellor's son, came to Earth for the girl he loves - but will she ever forgive him? Reckless BELLAMY fought his way onto the transport pod to protect his sister, the other half of the only siblings in the universe. And GLASS managed to escape back onto the ship, only to find that life there is just as dangerous as she feared it would be on Earth.

Confronted with a savage land and haunted by secrets from their pasts, the hundred must fight to survive. They were never meant to be heroes, but they may be mankind's last hope.

The story is told in four alternating perspectives from different characters - Clarke, Wells, Bellamy and Glass. These chapters are very short, changing over very frequently, and usually feature some kind of flashback to the past. It actually works quite well as the story never gets stale and it can be interesting to read different perspectives of the same event. However, and I accept this may be a small point to most of you, I hate different fonts in one book. I understand that here it's used to differentiate between past and present, but there are other ways! I don't need a flashing sign to tell me that we're going to talk about the past now. It seems overly juvenile and unnecessary. It's a small point that hardly affects the quality of the book, but there you go. It irks me.

The story itself is very much dedicated to slowly unravelling the past. When the story opens, you know that these one hundred 'criminals' are there to recolonize the Earth, but not why the spaceships are desperate to do or so why the teenagers are criminals in the first place. All of the main four characters have secrets and a little more is revealed in every chapter. As a result, not a whole lot actually happens in the book, but that's alright. The discoveries seem to be the point of the novel more than any actual progression, but it works very well.

The 100 is immediately engrossing - it didn't take many pages at all for me to feel like I was 100% part of that story. The prose is actually pretty damn good - it flows very nicely and dialogue is natural and unstilted. Debut authors sometimes write in a very 'clunky' style, but here I wouldn't even be able to tell that Kass Morgan was new to the game. She writes like an experienced author and that can take a lot of skill.

My favourite chapters were those told by Clarke, although as a character she can be a little annoying and preachy. Her previous life is the most fascinating, involving a moral question that many of us would find different to answer. Wells is my favourite character, although his past is perhaps the most mundane. Of the lot, he's the most sensible and the obvious leader for the new colony. Bellamy needs to be strangled and Glass' situation is a little too... domestic.  All in all though, there's a great mix of different personalities, emotions and circumstances and I never felt like I had to persevere through the 'boring' ones, simply because there weren't any.

The one thing that I can't get away from is the obvious resemblance to Lord of the Flies. This isn't a bad thing - hey, I loved that book - but I do think that some form of acknowledgement would have been nice. I accept that any book where young people end up stranded on an uninhabited beach could be said to have parallels, but this goes deeper. Opposing male leaders, something lurking in the night, a theoretical certainty of rescue... it's all there, minus the damn conch shell.

Like I said though, I don't really object to this. It works really well and fits in with the story perfectly. The ending is different, although the futuristic twist almost demanded it. I did see it coming, although it was a logical path for the story to take so I can't really complain.

I actually thought this was a stand-alone book, so now I'm quite frustrated that I have to wait for the next installment. I really enjoyed The 100 - isn't it great when a book you weren't sure about ends up being one of the best young adult books of the year?  

Find Kass Morgan on Twitter.