Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The H.Y.P.E. Project: The Conclusion!

If you have been sticking around for a while, you may or may not have noticed I've been working on the H.Y.P.E. Project, a self-assigned reading project dedicated to hyped up YA novels of the past two years, since June 2011. Ten books, nine months, and a short lists of statistics of my results that I would like to show the world.

Total number of books read: 10
  • Number of books that lived up to their hype: 4.5 (Unearthly by Cynthia Hand, Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick (bad kind of hype), Halo by Alexandra Adornetto (again, the bad kind of hype), Die for Me by Amy Plum (this is the one-half because it did kind of live up it), Across the Universe by Beth Revis)
  • Number of books that did not live up to their hype: 5.5 (Nightshade by Andrea Cremer, Matched by Ally Condie, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Die for Me by Amy Plum (didn't live up to it in certain ways), Delirium by Lauren Oliver, Starcrossed by Josephine Angelini)
If you want to see my reviews for the books, you can check the "h.y.p.e. project" tag attached to this post or check the link above, where I included more links to the reviews. Now for a few unorthodox stats I'm including just because I can:

Number of series the project had me read the first book of: 10
  • Number of series I have continued/will continue: 1
  • Number of series where the idea of continuing on makes me want to cry: 9
Number of books I will be seeing in my nightmares: 4 (One of them has already been there and given me a great idea. Half-angel warrior with a necklace made of demon teeth!)

Amount of time wasted: None, in a sense. I've gotten something out of all the books, even if my only gains from a particular book might be headaches and the desire never to write such a horrible book.

Will I ever do a second H.Y.P.E. Project? I doubt it. If I have the chance to read a book people are talking about and interested in it at all on its own merit, I will read it. If what I've heard about it has kept me away from it (like with Nightshade, Matched, Halo, and Delirium, which I happily avoided until I decided they qualified), I'll stay away from it like I've stayed away from The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin. There is huge reader and blogger hype behind it, but I know it won't go over well with me.

Thanks for sticking around and dealing with me, everyone! I am so, so happy to be finished with this.

    H.Y.P.E. Project: Divergent by Veronica Roth

    Title: Divergent
    Author: Veronica Roth
    Publisher: HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books
    Release Date: May 3, 2011
    Pages: 487 pages (hardcover)
    How I Got the Book: Bought it for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

    In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself. 

    During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves… or it might destroy her.

    Debut author Veronica Roth bursts onto the literary scene with the first book in the Divergent series—dystopian thrillers filled with electrifying decisions, heartbreaking betrayals, stunning consequences, and unexpected romance.

    Review:

    Characters

    Hands-down, Tris was the best part of the book. Her fantastic character development as the switch from Abnegation to Dauntless changed her in some ways and left her untouched in others is the kind of stuff I want to see in every book, not every few months in rare books. When the boys took her to the Pit to scare her, I felt fiercely angry for her and hoped the boys would get their just desserts eventually. The other characters were so pale next to her, people colored with just twelve crayons instead of two-hundred fifty-six like Tris.

    It dampened my buzz a little every time I remembered there isn't anything truly extraordinary about Tris, though. Objectively, she is unusual because she is the average human being thrown into a sea of people wired like robots instead of human beings. Is that the best way for her to stand out? Because she is the only normal one in a crowd of abnormal people (and they are only abnormal because they are not written the way they should be)? Tris deserves better than that.

    Really, characters other than Tris (and possibly other Divergents) just don't form connections to their families and have no issues with dropping them if they leave for another faction? Are there drugs in the water? That isn't the way a human being works. Humans are social animals and form deep connections with friends and family. Being able to sever those connections as easily as everyone apparently does in the world of Divergent? That doesn't happen very often.

    Plot/Pacing

    This was largely what I heard about Divergent prior to reading it: It's so exciting that it will make you want to pee your pants and you'll be glued to the book from the first page to the last.

    Well? Where was the excitement for most of the novel?

    The last eighty pages did catch my attention and kept me reading when I had other work to do.The four hundred pages before that were a very different story. Jumping in and out of trains to get around isn't exciting to me; it's stupid, as demonstrated when a Dauntless girl died leaping out of a train. Really, when only ten new members are allowed into Dauntless per year, they need to keep all the people alive that they can. Until Tris started navigating her fear landscape near page four-hundred, I could easily put the book down.

    Moreover, it didn't take me thirty seconds to figure out what was going to go down, who was involved in the evil plot, and how they were going to do it. The hints had spotlights on them and such pains were gone to so Tris (and the reader by extension) would know what the big deal about being Divergent was that it gave everything away. So I suppose Divergent is decently plotted, but it is painfully transparent in its execution. I don't like waiting one-hundred fifty pages for the villains to reveal themselves when I've been aware of them the entire time.

    Themes/Conflicts

    I have little to say here. The points about what courage means (doing something even though you are afraid) are valid and everything Tris had to go through to figure them out was great character development for her. The conflict between the Dauntless initiates was well-drawn considering exactly where they were and what would happen if they didn't make it in.

    Writing

    The writing was nothing outstanding in terms of its stylistic choices and descriptions, but it never distracted from Tris' trials or what was going on and worked well with the kind of story being told. If I had to make a clear verdict (and I do), I would say the writing is great. Not poetic-great or I'll-remember-it-forever great, but a writing style so smooth that you never need to stop and consider a bad description or watch the atmosphere fall apart because of a disastrous choice of words is respectable.

    Logic


    I'm sorry, what?

    (I really don't use GIFs often, but this about sums up my feelings about the logic of Divergent... and it involves a kitten. Leave me alone.)

    What happened to Chicago? How did this deeply flawed society develop? How did it not fall apart ages ago? Why did anyone think the faction system was going to prevent war when history has shown time and time again that creating deep divisions between people like the faction system does will lead to war? The prejudice the Erudite had against the Abnegation demonstrates exactly this. Also, what kind of government would let large numbers of the factionless stay around, become bitter at the system for its highly unfair processes and its inability to give everyone a fair go, and possibly plot their own revolution? It looks like you're pretty much done for life once you're declared factionless. Because of that, I'm surprised and a little disappointed the factionless played no real part in the novel..

    Stick around for the sequels, some of you might say to me. That's what sequels are for: expanding on the first book. Why should I get the sequel? Tell me. Why should I? The first book of a series is supposed to hook me for sequels and Divergent failed to do so. Too many questions are left unanswered or with hints at an unsatisfying answer and I did not like the book overall. I highly doubt paying $17.99 for Insurgent when it comes out and spending several days reading it will be a worthwhile investment of my time and money.

    Was it worth the hype?

    Not at all. For all the good word I've heard, for all the time my friends have spent talking it up, and for all the accolades it's getting, I don't see what the big deal about Divergent is. So many questions are left unanswered, but I lack the motivation to keep an eye out for Insurgent when it comes out in about three months.

    Bonus cover section

    I envy the abilities of the person who made this cover. As I've learned in the past year and a half, digital design is not easy and the cover, down to the details of each and every little flame of the Dauntless symbol, looks flawless. Great focus, understated fonts--I would love to be able to create something like this some day instead of turning green over someone else's ability to do it.

    2 stars! (But I would put it closer to 2.5 stars.)


    What am I reading next?: Embrace by Jessica Shirvington

    Monday, February 27, 2012

    Coraline by Neil Gaiman

    Title: Coraline
    Author: Neil Gaiman
    Publisher: HarperCollins
    Release Date: July 2, 2002
    Pages: 162 pages (paperback)
    How I Got the Book: Bought it.

    The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring...

    In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close.

    The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.

    Only it's different...

    At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter about the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.

    Others are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight using all her wits and any means she can find if she is to save them--and herself.

    Review:

    Coraline the movie is one of my all-time favorite movies. There is no need for me to argue it. One of the few good things my brother's then-girlfriend did for me was to make me sit down with her and my brother to watch the movie. I'm not a huge fan of Dakota Fanning, but I thought she was fantastic while voicing Coraline and both the animation and plot of the movie wowed me. After that fantastic cinematic experience, I wanted so badly to read the book, but I had such trouble finding it in stores. Now I have my own copy to cherish and I won't be letting it go anytime soon.

    At first, I found the writing a little simplistic even for a children's book. She did this, he did this, she did this, she said this or that--I like it when a book is direct, but there is a difference between that and telling us everything instead of showing it. As I kept reading and saw Coraline make statements like this:
    Coraline sighed. "You really don't understand, do you?" she said. "I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything. What then?"  (Coraline, p. 120)
    I realized the book was not simplistically written; it was merely understated. Some sage words of wisdom are in these pages (one piece in particular is especially relevant to another book I am reading right now) and the choice to keep the novel so sparsely described lets the truly extraordinary moments and phrases of Coraline's shine.

    The other mother is a thoroughly creepy character and I love her for it. My friends may or may not share this opinion, but it is often the creepiest characters in a novel that I love the most. Wait, I should revise that because I don't love all creepy characters (the idea of me even tolerating the creeptastic Patch Cipriano of Hush, Hush fame and similar characters is both laughable and frightening). I love the creeps that are not romanticized and are allowed to shine in all their creepy glory. When it is shown as it is, I find it interesting; when it is romanticized and I know it most certainly should not be, I find it infuriating. The other mother ends up on the good side.

    (And that was me seeing how many times I could say creepy or some variation of it before it stopped sounding like a word anymore. It still sounds like one, so I haven't used it nearly enough. I'll do better next time!)

    In a way, my love for both the movie and the book is affected by nostalgia for a long-lost time. Being able to sit on the top bunk of my brother's bed, watch a movie, and feel like nothing bad could happen--I'll never have that back. My brother and his girlfriend broke up; the bunk bed was later broken during a home invasion that has become one of the defining moments of my life due to the trauma. Coraline takes me back to a time where I could sit on the ancient, creaking bunk bed and feel safe. Two and a half years of fear, paranoia, and the inability to feel safe is a very long time indeed.

    So should you read Coraline? Yes. I don't hand out five-star ratings lightly these days and this book deserves one. For the echo of safety it can take me back to and its subtle charm, I love it.

    5 stars!


    What am I reading next?: The Alchemy of Forever by Avery Williams