amandagstevens's reviews
1193 reviews

Unspeakable: Surviving My Childhood and Finding My Voice by Jessica Willis Fisher

5.0

Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews

4.0

It's true: this series just found its stride with this book. On to the next!

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
Did not finish book. Stopped at 11%.

At this point I was already skimming, which is why I'm estimating the page number and also why I'm DNF'ing. I'm simply not interested. I don't really have a sense of who this character is, and the writing is full of summarizing block paragraphs. This was going to be a long shot for me anyway, given the genre. On to the next.

Dream Children: Stories by Gail Godwin
Did not finish book.

I had to read "Dream Children" for a class in college, and I remember liking it. I've had this collection on my shelf for years and decided to re-read that story and, if I still enjoyed it, read the next as well. Oh, 20-year-old English Major Amanda, I don't know what you liked about this. Today I find the author's voice dated (in a negative way) and overwrought and the story in no way compelling. I skimmed the next one anyway and felt no pull toward it either. Life is short: this one goes to the used-book store.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Did not finish book. Stopped at 9%.

I have this thing about first person narratives. The voice has to be standout, or I can't get into the book (when I possibly could have, were the story told in third person). The voice of this narrator isn't convincingly male; plus it seems to want to "sound literary," but in the first ten percent of the book I didn't encounter a single original wordsmithing phrase. So I watched the movie, figuring if I found myself investing in the characters (despite Pattinson) I would give the book another try. Nope. Nothing about this story makes me want to keep reading.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Did not finish book.

Apparently the author believes that extreme intelligence makes a character sympathetic. This is not so. This is especially not so when said intelligent protagonists bemoan their isolation from all the stupid people of the world while simultaneously flaunting their intelligence to the reader and putting down all those stupid people who don't deserve to know their true selves (but isn't it sad that they're so misunderstood?). Two of the most self-absorbed and unlikable characters I've encountered in quite some time. I know they're going to bond and all before the end (over their shared misunderstood genius of course), but I couldn't care less what happens to either of them.

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
Did not finish book. Stopped at 3%.

Yes, I would normally give a book more time to hook me (I try to give 10% or 50 pages, depending on the length), but there's no reason to do so this time. I can't abide the profusion of italics and exclamation points and pointless run-on sentences. I can't abide the cutesy voice of Judd, the 30-year-old baby of the family, gushing descriptions of his family without giving me any clue as to his own personality (except that he's a gusher). And I can already tell Judd is going to mess with me, withhold things, bait me and then not tell me The Big Secret. For 450 pages? No. Can't do it.

Oh, and this:

Everything recorded here happened and it's my task to suggest how, and why; why what might seem to be implausible or inexplicable at a distance--a beloved child's banishment by a loving father, like something in a Grimm fairy tale--isn't implausible or inexplicable from within. I will include as many "facts" as I can assemble; and the rest is conjecture, imagined but not invented. Much is based upon memory and conversations with family members about things I had not experienced firsthand nor could possibly know except in the way of the heart.

So the author here is warning me that 1.) The story is implausible, but the narrator will try to make me believe I missed something if I conclude that the story is implausible; 2.) The narrator will be unreliable in other ways as well; 3.) The author fully intends to break point-of-view rules.

I'm okay with a well-done unreliable narrator, but one that's badly done (purely to manipulate the reader) is one of my literary pet peeves, so ... Overall, plenty of reasons for an enthusiastic pass on this one.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Did not finish book. Stopped at 11%.

There's no way I would enjoy another 470 pages of this. Past the ten percent mark, I still have no sense of who these characters are beyond their academic prowess, and the frequent art/poetry/music/etc references don't show up organically. Somehow both Clare's voice and Henry's (which are pretty much the same voice) feel pretentious even when I'm reading about their insecurities. And Henry's voice does not read even slightly male. And the dialogue is off somehow (maybe all those voices are the same, too?). And then there's the romance, which I did not expect to feel so ... warped.

The book blurb reveals these two meet when Henry is thirty-six and Clare is six. I guess I should have realized what I was getting into. Clare grows up encountering a naked adult man in the meadow behind her house, providing him clothes and guessing by the time she's twelve that he is going to marry her in her future (his past).

On her eighteenth birthday, forty-one-year-old Henry shows up, and as agreed, now that she's a legal adult, they have sex. Eventually they meet in his present for the first time (now aged twenty and twenty-eight) and he has no idea who she is. She's amazed at how young he is. He's amazed that she grew up knowing an older version of him. They have sex.

And the romance is born ... reborn ... whatever. I just can't get into this. I can't forget that this Henry is going to go back in time years later and meet her at six years old knowing what it's like to have sex with her when she's eighteen and twenty and ...

I went ahead and read spoilers and I'm glad I stopped now.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Did not finish book. Stopped at 7%.

Oh my word, this is insufferable. I don't care if it gets better later. Because I don't care. About anything or anyone, least of all Thursday Next. This book might have a clever plot, but it suffocates in the author's self-satisfaction over said cleverness. There's a problem when I'm thinking If one more person says, "We have a saying in SpecOps ..." less than ten percent in. Having Thursday describe herself by looking into a mirror is doubtlessly some kind of literary satire, but I didn't smile at it. I didn't feel I was in on some fun joke. I just rolled my eyes and wanted to tell the author, "Yes, I see your smug smile over Thursday's shoulder ... Yes, I get it already ..." I flipped forward to the middle and discovered there is actually a character named Jack Schitt. I guess that is also supposed to be clever.

This book is definitely not for me.

Zorro by Isabel Allende
Did not finish book.