Insurgent

Insurgent by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was fine as a YA book. It is the middle of a trilogy and so therefore has the problem of being quite dark. In the first book, we went from a naive girl battling others and herself to prove she is corageous only to confront evil in a final showdown. In this book, Tris is depressed about the loss of her family and friends in the conclusion of the first book, and carries the weight of secrets and guilt through most of this book. As she works through her own demons, she discovers new baffling secrets and betrayals. So I guess you have to wait for the third book to finally get some relief. It will really depend on the third book as to whether all this angst, secrecy, and hinted conspiracies will make the whole trilogy worth the ride.

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Super Sad True Love Story

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up in the bargain bin at the supermarket. Which I think is apt for the crazy farce of our very near future it ended up being. Lenny returns from Italy after a less than successful business stay trying to sell the uber-rich eternal life. He returns to an America deep in debt to the Chinese (hmmm...), his friends self-absorbed in their apparati (suspiciously sounding like apple...), and political protestors camped out in Central Park. A much younger girl he met in Italy, Eunice, comes and joins him and they slowly become a couple. Or do they? Can Eunice really love anyone outside of herself? Is Lenny just using Eunice as a younger version of his best friend's wife, whom he has always been in love with?
I thought the satire was dead-on. The scary part was that it is not too far from the truth. It is true that it could be crude, but in a world where we think bridesmaids crapping in the street is the ultimate in high comedy these days, aren't we just sinking further in the pit ourselves?
I was hoping more from the love story. I suppose they learned that true love comes from familial love and service to others. It would have been nice to have the main characters have reached a state of well-being or peace but then again, it was supposed to be a super-sad love story.

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State of Wonder

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I cried at the end of this book. Not because it was sad (though it was) and not because it was happy (though it was) but because I felt fully and completely satisfied with the world Patchett created and was sad it had to end. Talking this over with my sister later we would comment, "didn't you think it was wierd that..." and the other would say "yeah, but..." and that was the whole book--full of wonderful, wierd surprises that you completely believed and moved the story along. Like Bel Canto, State of Wonder makes the fantastic seem plausible and makes you care about the characters and their world.

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The Maze Runner

The Maze Runner by James Dashner
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

First of all, my kids loved this whole series and are vying for the prequel. So sometimes I feel bad ragging on a book that is not written for my age group, because the age group it WAS written for clearly likes it.
I have read a couple of Dashner's novels in the 13th Reality series and clearly his strength is in original storytelling. He is probably the most novel YA novelist I've read. Too bad his writing style gets in the way. He has no sense of pacing, and his descriptions can be as confusing as they are revealing. I was more patient with him in the 13th Reality series, but in this one I went past the suspense of what the maze is and how it is solved, to almost not caring, to be completely dissappointed in the grand reveal. I felt little to nothing about the characters--I was not scared for their survival, nor saddened when any of them died, nor even shocked when they turned out to be something different from what they seemed.
However, I am curious about what Dashner can dream up next. I'll just have my kids read it and tell me about it...it might be less painful that way.

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Smiley's People

Smiley's People by John le Carré
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was so nice to get back to Smiley again...le Carre finished his Karla trilogy with an ode to Smiley. Here Smiley is at his best with his small, quiet thoughts and long walks, but gets thrown in the action, too as he tries to uncover the motive behind the murder of a former agent. Everyone gets their cameos, too, from Toby Esterhouse to dear old Connie. I could have used more Guilliam, though, who played a prominent part in The Honourable Schoolboy and who I kind of crushed on a bit (couldn't you see an English Peter Krause playing him?). The ending is strangely anti-climatic, but seemed entirely fitting: sometimes the ending is not nearly as much fun as the chase.

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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Read this for book club. I loved the beginning, rather enjoyed the way the novel puttered along, put up with the country club scene that seemed to be lifted somewhat from The Help, actually teared up at the thought Major Pettigrew could be a knight in shining armor and then it was ruined with a knitting needle of all things. A knitting needle?? Really?!?? I almost couldn't bear to read it from that point forth.
At the end, I felt like Simonson said to herself, I am going to explore how rules shape our customs, mores, courtesies of our community. When should those rules be kept? When should they be set aside for a greater good? Then she brainstormed all these ideas and fit them together in a novel. Perhaps if she hadn't used every idea she came up with it might have turned out to be a cute, droll and touching novel of finding love when and where you least expect it. As it is, you can almost hear her "you shouldn't follow the rules of class and race because those shouldn't exist"; "you should follow the rules of courtesy because otherwise that's rude"; "you shouldn't follow the rules of business if requires duplicity and underhandedness"; "you shouldn't follow the rules if someone's life is at stake", etc. etc.(We get it, we get it) And then to set these premises up her plot turns to the absurd--KNITTING NEEDLES???? Can you tell how much I hate the plot line of the KNITTING NEEDLES!!!
Otherwise, it was an okay book.

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Divergent

Divergent by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading my kids' YA novels again. Another dystopian love story. This one has more action than love story, which is good. It is also an interesting premise--there are 5 factions that emphasize certain personality traits: Erudite, smart; Candor, truth; Abengnation, selflessness; Amity, friendship; and Dauntless, bravery. All good traits, it is true, but there is a hazard in taking each exclusively and to its extremes. Tris chooses Dauntless as her faction, and it was a little unsettling as a mother to see toughness, tattoos, and lack of feminity so celebrated, until Tris discovers that being Dauntless may not be all it's cracked up to be. It does have good character development and the plot is pretty tight.

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