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

H.Y.P.E. Project: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Title: Across the Universe

Author: Beth Revis

Publisher: Penguin/Razorbill

Release Date: January 11, 2011 (hardcover)/November 29, 2011 (paperback)

Pages: 398 pages (hardcover/paperback)

How I Got the Book: Bought it for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

  

Amy is a cryogenically frozen passenger aboard the spaceship Godspeed. She has left her boyfriend, friends--and planet--behind to join her parents as a member of the Project Ark Ship. Amy and her parents believe they will wake on a new planet, Centauri-Earth, three hundred years in the future. But fifty years before Godspeed's scheduled landing, cryo chamber 42 is mysteriously unplugged, and Amy is violently woken from her frozen slumber.

Someone tried to murder her.

Now, Amy is caught inside a tiny world where nothing makes sense. Godspeed's 2,312 passengers have forfeited all control to Eldest, a tyrannical and frightening leader. And Elder, Eldest's rebellious teenage heir, is both fascinated with Amy and eager to discover whether he has what it takes to lead.

Amy desperately wants to trust Elder. But should she put her faith in a boy who has never seen life outside the ship's cold metal walls? All Amy knows is that she and Elder must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets before whoever woke her tries to kill again.

Review:

Amy signed up for being frozen for three hundred years while the ship Godspeed took her, her parents, and others to a new planet known as Centauri-Earth, but she didn't sign up for spending most of those years with her mind still active in her frozen state. She most certainly didn't sign up for nearly dying when someone unplugged the cryo machine keeping her alive and frozen. Elder, the heir of Godspeed and its eventual leader after Eldest steps down, is fascinated by Amy, a girl so unlike the others. Though he would love to get to know her better, they have bigger worries on their hands: Eldest is behaving suspiciously, Amy feels there is something very wrong on the ship, and someone keeps unplugging cryo machines, killing the people inside. To save Amy's father and the other Frozens, they will have to find the killer and it may lead to the breakdown of order on the ship.

Characters

I felt Amy was a little stronger of a character than Elder, though both of them could have been improved upon and their connection needed to be stronger than it was. Her early chapters from when she was frozen/getting frozen were terrifying and the strongest scenes of the novel. For those scenes alone, I will be keeping this book instead of giving it to my local used bookstore for credit. I never fully got a grip on Elder's character. Was he a rebel to the max, a whiner, a wimp, a boy wise beyond his years? All the above? None? I know his thoughts, but I don't feel like I know him well enough. Not to mention that his fantasizing about Amy at the beginning was pretty creepy.

And the big secret Elder reveals toward the end? B-U-L-L. We'd been in his head for half the book by the time it was revealed; that something that big didn't come up earlier felt cheap and unbelievable. I have abandoned other books halfway through for pulling the same trick and it has me so badly frustrated that I doubt I will pick up the next book at all.

Plot/Pacing

The plot line about who was unfreezing/killing the Frozens was painfully predictable and the book as a whole would have been much stronger if it had been dropped altogether. Honestly, “predictable” is this book’s middle name. There wasn't a lot about the novel I didn't see coming. Still, something about their narrative voices kept me reading when I got bored and wanted to do something else. Maybe it was hope I would see the triumphant return of strong scenes like those at the beginning of the novel. If only that hope had been rewarded.

Themes/Conflict

Across the Universe was unexpectedly as much of a dystopian novel as it was a sci-fi novel. It hits all the main ideas (people should not be controlled, they deserve to know the truth no matter what the consequences might be, ), but it doesn't try to do anything new with those messages. The standard black-and-white view is defaulted to without much of an attempt at bringing out the shades of grey in why generations of Eldests ruled the ship the way they did. Since the antagonist was clear from the start, there really wasn't much conflict going on.

Writing

I quite liked the writing style and it had its beautiful moments, but it was also one of the book’s problems. Elder and Amy are two separate people with very different personalities, but they described everything the exact same way and used the same evocative language. I constantly lost track of who was talking because there was so little difference in their narratives. It got bad enough that I would be reading through Elder’s point of view while he interacted with Amy and I would still think I was reading through Amy’s point of view.

Logic

I may be intelligent and incredibly pretty (your mileage may vary on the latter, but that’s what I think), but science is and always has been my worst subject. Still, even I can see how wrong it is when Newton’s first law of motion (an object that is in motion will stay in motion until an external force acts upon it) is ignored. There are probably deeper problems than that, but that’s the one that really sticks out. Then again, considering it gets retconned at the beginning of the sequel… Nah, that could have been easily fixed in this book with one simple note from Amy that Newton’s laws don’t work that way. I’m not the most believable person on this, but there wasn’t much else that stuck out as particularly illogical, nonsensical, or just plain wrong.

Was it worth the hype?

For all its strengths and flaws as a book, I think I can say that yes, it was worth the hype. It isn’t the strongest book, but it’s a good introduction to YA sci-fi that appears to be the start of a good series and could lead readers to even more YA sci-fi novels. After that cheap twist at the end, A Million Suns isn't high up on my to-read list.

Bonus cover section

I like both of them, but I’m a little more partial to the paperback’s cover. The hardcover’s cover is beautiful with the stars, but it’s also very cheesy and makes you think the book has a strong romantic element when it doesn’t. The paperback’s cover is more visually appealing to me. The circular shape, clear focus, and various shades of blue catch my eye just as well as the hardcover’s cover would and give a better picture of what Across the Universe is really about.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: Harbinger by Sara Wilson Etienne

H.Y.P.E. Project: Nightshade by Andrea Cremer

Title: Nightshade
Author: Andrea Cremer
Publisher: Penguin/Philomel
Release Date: October 19, 2010 (hardcover)/June 28, 2011 (paperback)
Pages: 452 pages (hardcover)/454 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

Calla Tor has always known her destiny: After graduating from the Mountain School, she'll be the mate of sexy alpha wolf Ren Laroche and fight with him, side by side, ruling their pack and guarding sacred sites for the Keepers. But when she violates her masters' laws by saving a beautiful human boy out for a hike, Calla begins to question her fate, her existence, and the very essence of the world she has known. By following her heart, she might lose everything- including her own life. Is forbidden love worth the ultimate sacrifice?

Review:

Alpha female Calla Tor knows what is expected of her: to remain chaste until her eighteenth birthday, when she will mate with the other wolf pack's alpha male Ren and rule the new pack together. Then she goes out on day and saves Shay Doran from death for a reason she can't explain. A few days later, Shay starts at her school and the Keepers who dictate what she and the other Guardians do say to keep Shay safe. What is the purpose of this human boy staying with the Keepers? And why can't she stop wanting him to touch her when she is supposed to be another? Questioning what she thought was her destiny could cost her everything if she makes the wrong choice.

Characters

My first impression of Calla came when she thought "wow, he's hot" (paraphrased) of Shay when he was on the ground writhing in pain. This surely should have warned me of what was to come. Calla's inability to get her hormones under control drove me batty. Feeling desire is good. Controlling your desire is good. Letting your desire dictate your every action is imbecilic. Having makeout breaks when it is not a good time to do so is borderline TSTL. "Oh my God, we just [plot event from Nightshade]! What do we do now?" "Make out and pin each other down!" It felt like seeing Red Riding Hood all over again.

Ren and Shay are just as disrespectful of women and overall disgusting. Ren's attitude of "sure, I dated all these other girls, but I'm all about you now, Lily!" is unrealistic; guys who act like that are never really going to be "all about" the girl they say it too. I think readers are supposed to prefer Shay or at least see what Calla sees in him, but when he calls girls gum-snapping bimbos, I'm more inclined to hit him than kiss him. Shay's insta-love connection with Calla did not get developed and only became more annoying with each page.

Plot/Pacing

I saw two sources of plot in this novel: Calla's indecision about Ren and Shay and the slow unraveling of the truth about the Keepers and Guardians. The former felt forced and her indecision got old very quickly. The latter was well-done, if predictable; in fact, most of the novel was predictable, especially Shay's role. The pacing of the novel was more impressive. It only took me three days to read, though I did end up throwing it a few times after reaching a boiling point in my frustration. After breaks lasting anywhere from five to twenty minutes, I got back to reading.

Themes/Conflicts

A very intelligent friend of mine said she read the book as a sexist dystopia of sorts and the deeply misogynistic dynamic of the packs had a purpose as both a message and a source of conflict. I did see how Nightshade can be read in such a way, but I could not continue reading like that because the messages the society was trying to get across (double standards, slut shaming, and general sexism are horrible) were continually being undermined. One such way it is undermined is detailed  under Logic, and the second way is how no such gender conflict was shown between female Keeper Lumine and male Keeper Efron. Are all feminist texts banned there? Do the female Guardians not look Lumine and Efron and wonder why they can't be equal to male Guardians the same way?

With the main conflict being Calla's feelings for Ren and Shay, there didn't seem to be a lot of interesting conflict. I've already made my feelings about that very clear. I wasn't a fan of the way the narrative showed a distaste for feminine things like skirts either. Feminine =/= weak. Then again, according to this book, it pretty much does. Giving Calla a position of power and continually subverting her and having her defer to men she doesn't need to defer to was just cruel.

Writing

Unremarkable for the most part, but it had two particularly bad moments that stick out in my mind. The first was on page 131: "The muscles in [Bryn's] jaw jumped about in a furious dance." Personally, I thought the muscles were doing a drunken tango for their lives. The other time was on page 231, when Calla couldn't stop staring at "the velvet darkness of [Shay's] irises." I could swear I've read a description exactly like that before, but it was in a vampire fic posted online and written by a thirteen-year-old girl during her first attempt at writing. Lazy storytelling in how there are two back-to-back chapters of info-dumping did not help.

Logic

So Calla is slowly breaking away from a society that disrespects her so she can have the free will to be with... a guy who disrespects her? Shay is supposed to represent the freedom to make one's own choices, but he is no less disrespectful than Ren and she defers to both just as easily. Not only does this undermine the the message the book is trying to get across, but it makes her look stupid because the book is about little else than her meebling about which boy to be with. After she brushed off the bite of a giant guard-spider until it nearly killed her, she needed no help in that department.

Was it worth the hype?

No. Just no. I heard this was a book with a strong heroine and a well-done mythos. The "strong heroine" conversation is a long, complicated one where everyone says something different, but I do not feel Calla is a good heroine or a strong one. I do agree about the mythos being well-done, but it is not given the attention it deserves.

Bonus cover section

This is probably my favorite part of the book. I have the hardcover edition and the cover model vaguely reminds me of my goddess Ke$ha.

2 stars!

What am I reading next?: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

H.Y.P.E. Project: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Title: Delirium
Author: Lauren Oliver
Publisher: HarperCollins/HarperTeen
Release Date: February 1, 2011
Pages: 441 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Borrowed a copy for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

Before scientists found the cure, people thought love was a good thing. They didn’t understand that once love -- the deliria -- blooms in your blood, there is no escaping its hold. Things are different now. Scientists are able to eradicate love, and the government demands that all citizens receive the cure upon turning eighteen. Lena Holoway has always looked forward to the day when she’ll be cured. A life without love is a life without pain: safe, measured, predictable, and happy.

But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: She falls in love.

Review:

Sixty-four years after love was declared a disease, citizens of the United States are regularly cured as soon as they turn eighteen--sometimes sooner if they are in danger of being infected with amor deliria nervosa. Having seen how the disease affected both her mother and her older sister, Lena is counting down the days until she is cured. About three months before it can happens, something terrible happens: she meets a young man named Alex and falls in love. Her procedure date comes closer and closer, and Lena will be forced to choose between a life devoid of love with her friends and family or a life on the run with the man she loves.
 
Characters

Lena is our typical protagonist devoid of personality, self-esteem (until Alex comes along--that all these heroines have to be validated by men before they can feel worthy angers me), and the ability to realize that Romeo and Juliet is not a love story. If I had a dollar for every book that misinterpreted that play... She says at one point that most people only spend time with her because they have to, and I can't help but think there is a good reason for that. I wouldn't want to hang out with a girl whose thinks (paraphrased) "Thank goodness we don't have free choice or I would have no one because all those pretty girls would have all the boys" either.

This book would have been much more fun if Hana had been the main character instead of flat, dreary Lena. (Yes, I am aware of the Delirium-related novella Hana. No, I am not reading it. I'd rather not chance the ruination of the only character I could stand.)

Plot/Pacing
 
Hm? There was a plot and forward momentum? The book trudged along so slowly without greater action that I must have missed them. My economics textbook was more interesting three-fourths of the time.


Themes/Conflicts 

The government is supposed to be constantly watching the people for any signs of sympathizers or dissent, but they are woefully ineffective as antagonists until the plot demands they do something. Lena and Alex should have been caught much earlier than they were. Something else that annoyed me is that there are two main examples of love in the book: the relationship Rachel had before she was cured and the one Alex and Lena have, and the former helped define who Lena is. The problem is that neither relationship demonstrates love. They look more like infatuation with very slight obsessive elements to me.
 
Writing

I've heard much about the beautiful prose Lauren Oliver spins. I saw brief flashes of what people were talking about while reading Delirium, but I was largely unimpressed. I suppose she had to much of it in Before I Fall (which I have not read yet but may read one day) that she was spent by the time she wrote Delirium.

On the bright side, the fake excerpts at the beginning of each chapter made me feel horrified just like they were supposed to. It's not for the reason the book wants me to feel that way, but I'm horrified nonetheless.
 
Logic

I kept the other sections deliberately short so I could expound on how this book is by far the most flagrant in its disregard for logic among the hundreds of books I've read over the years. It is a black hole, sucking in all attempts at logic and destroying them within seconds.

Let's think about economics. Love is not just an emotion; it's an industry. Everything to do with love, from the candy and cards to matchmaking services, pump millions, possibly billions, into economies around the world every year. Suddenly, love gets outlawed. Severe economic damage ensues unless there is something to immediately replace all that lost income. How is the loss of such a large source of income replaced? The United States as portrayed in Delirium has closed its borders, rendering itself entirely self-sufficient and unwilling to import goods from other countries. Yet there is no sign that there is any sort of economic hardship among the people or that there ever was one. Really? All of this would result in a worldwide crisis and possible collapse.

Now we can think about it in terms of how humans love. Just as naturally as we blink and think, human beings love. Removing the ability to love from them and then forcing them to raise children is asking for disaster. The children, raised by parents that don't love them when the children can love, would rebel in large numbers as they aged and the world would have been fucked with rusty kitchen utensils dipped in a toilet before being shoved in an open wound.

Finally, who decided to outlaw love in the first place? Why? What did they have to gain from removing something so necessary as the ability to love from human beings?  We love love. It causes us pain sometimes, but that is the nature of love and we persevere. I can't understand for the life of me how we would get to that point.
 
To me, the power of a dystopian novel and what truly makes it great is the sense that our society could really fall that far and become the horrid environment the book of choice portrays it as. For all the reasons I just explained and more, Delirium does not have that power. The world appears to exist more to enhance Lena and Alex's story than anything and that is an insult to what dystopian novels are about and why they are written.

Was it worth the hype?

Nope. It wasn't worth a word of it. The writing, the dystopian elements, the characters--I found all of them underwhelming. I wish I could say I knew what my friends were talking about when they praised this novel, but I do not.

Bonus cover section

I am unimpressed with the covers for both the hardcover edition (the blue one with the girl slightly visible within/beneath the text) and the paperback version (clearer picture of girl's face).

1 star!

What am I reading next?: Croak by Gina Damico

H.Y.P.E. Project: Die for Me by Amy Plum

Title: Die for Me
Author: Amy Plum
Publisher: HarperCollins/HarperTeen
Release Date: May 10, 2011
Pages: 341 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

My life had always been blissfully, wonderfully normal. But it only took one moment to change everything.

Suddenly, my sister, Georgia, and I were orphans. We put our lives into storage and moved to Paris to live with my grandparents. And I knew my shattered heart, my shattered life, would never feel normal again. Then I met Vincent.

Mysterious, sexy, and unnervingly charming, Vincent Delacroix appeared out of nowhere and swept me off my feet. Just like that, I was in danger of losing my heart all over again. But I was ready for it to happen.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Because Vincent is no normal human. He has a terrifying destiny, one that puts his life at risk every day. He also has enemies... immortal, murderous enemies who are determined to destroy him and all of his kind.

While I'm fighting to piece together the remnants of my life, can I risk putting my heart--as well as my life and my family's--in jeopardy for a chance at love?

Review:

After her parents' deaths in a car crash, Kate lives with her older sister and grandparents in the heart of Paris. The pain is ever-throbbing in her chest and she spends all her time floating around museums and sticking her head into books instead of trying to move on. Vincent dares to accost her when he sees her at a cafe and Kate decides to give  him a chance. Why not? It's not like there is any other guy in the picture. As they grow closer, she discovers his secret: he is a revenant, a being compelled to give their life to save others. But Vincent has enemies in the numa, polar opposite beings compelled to destroy lives, and both Kate's heart and her life could be in danger if she stays with him.

Characters

Unfortunately, the characters let me down. While certain secondaries like Charlotte won me and the cast of Die for Me is a marked improvement over the casts of some of the other novels I've read during the course of the H.Y.P.E. Project, the main characters Kate and Vincent inspired only indifference in me. Disappearing Parent (or grandparent in this case) Syndrome struck again so Kate would have less supervision when falling for Vincent. Their connection was too-much-too-fast for me and I didn't completely understand what they saw in one another.

And just a little thing? I hate the role Jules fills. You know, that flirty friend of the male lead, the one who later becomes a love interest to the heroine. I have seen this irritating, almost-never-done-right character in two books straight and three or four in the past month alone. Authors, quit it. Stop writing this character. I beg you.

Plot/Pacing

The pacing was all over the place and the plot liked to play peek-a-boo. The book starts off with a fight scene under a bridge involving the numa and the revenants, but then it slows down while Kate and Vincent get to know one another. The mystery of finding out what's going on with Vincent drives the reader to the reveal around page 100, but the pace almost comes to a halt for around 150 pages while the plot pokes its head around the corner every now and then to giggle, then tries to pretend it's not there. Then we come to the end and OMG STUFF! Then more over-the-top romance and the book is over. What little plot there is to the novel is solved over the course of it and could function as a stand-alone if needed.

Themes/Conflicts

The strongest point of the novel is Kate's genuine conflict about whether or not she wants to keep seeing Vincent. Her parents are recently dead and she's still torn up inside over it, but she starts falling for Vincent and slowly getting better. Then she finds out his secret and that if she gets into a serious relationship with him, she'll have to endure the pain every time he dies saving someone. Even if he comes back to life, the pain will still be there. This is the one point of the novel I stand up and applaud for. The overdramatic way this is set up as being true love and no one ever considers that this could be just another relationship between two people gets at me, but I digress.

Whether or not you mind that a boy is the reason Kate begins to heal is unique to the reader. I minded it a little bit, but not enough to impact my opinion of the novel. At the very least, she questions whether or not she is being expected to save Vincent. Most heroines don't get that far.

Writing

The descriptions of Paris were lovely and it was great to experience a change in setting to the beautiful City of Lights from the usual small-town America settings of YA paranormals. Otherwise, I found the writing unremarkable. There were no muttered "wow"s or mental markings of good passages from me.

Logic

Refreshingly, Kate made logical decisions most of the time. When she feels Vincent is acting strangely and thinks he could be doing something he shouldn't be, she does the smart thing and runs the hell away. Though I was overall unimpressed by the novel, this is another quality of it I can respect: that Kate has a brain. Kudos for being one of the few fictional Kates I've gotten along with lately. Other than that, all is well in the world of logic--or as well as it can be in a paranormal novel, but that's why suspensions of disbelief exist.

Was it worth the hype?

To sum it up, how much a person will enjoy this book is directly proportional to how much they mind reading a novel derivative of Twilight. I do not make comparisons to that novel easily--you could check and see that this is the first time I have directly compared a novel to Twilight. For me in particular? Twilight and I have a nonaggression pact. I don't care about it and we leave each other alone. This is good for Die for Me because I don't mind the similarities as much, but what creates protection one way creates a problem another way: I couldn't emotionally invest myself in it.

Die for Me both manages to live up to its hype as something different in a sea of the same old trite novels and does not live up to it. For all the tropes it twists around, it still falls into the same cliches and is at its heart a paranormal romance. Readers who buy Die for Me thinking it will be more than that will be sorely disappointed.

Bonus cover section

While I like the final cover of Die for Me due to its bold covers and the swirls (kudos to the illustrator Johanna Basford because they really are lovely), I am more partial to a draft cover I saw back when the novel was first being advertised. At least, I think it was a draft cover. Maybe it's an international cover. This is what I'm talking about:

While I can see why the publisher would change the cover and I think they made a good choice, there's something I like about this old cover. The bold red boat, perhaps? The reflection of the title in the water? I'm a sucker for reflective images on book covers like that.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick (Just don't ask. I'm being an idiot again.)

H.Y.P.E. Project: Matched by Ally Condie

Title: Matched
Author: Ally Condie
Publisher: Penguin/Dutton
Release Date: November 30, 2010
Pages: 366 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Checked it out of the library for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

Cassia has always trusted their choices. It's hardly any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one... until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now Cassia is faced with impossible choices: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she's ever known and a path no one else has ever dared follow--between perfection and passion.

Matched is a story for right now and storytelling with the resonance of a classic.

Review:

The nights of Cassia's Matching, she is as nervous as she can be. Why wouldn't she be? It's one of the biggest nights of her life, the night she will meet her Match and see who she will spend the rest of her life in love with. Her best friend Xander is announced as her Match, unusual enough as it is because two Matches rarely live so close to one another, but then something else strange happens. Cassia tries to take a look at the microchip that is supposed to include information on Xander, but another boy's face flashes across the screen: Ky. Now torn between her feelings for the two, Cassia will learn how to make a choice and then be forced to make one for the first time in her life.

Characters

I'm only an hour removed from the book and I can hardly remember anything about its flat little characters. This is not a good sign, I believe. The relationships between the characters are never developed; we're just told that they are and we're supposed to accept that these two are best friends despite seeing no evidence of it and that these two are in love despite seeing no proper development of their feelings.

Neither Cassia nor Xander nor Ky nor any other character inspired any emotion in me other than disinterest, and I had a big disagreement with Cassia over how strong her mother was. Is it wrong of me to believe a person is weaker for holding in their emotions than for letting them all out to share with their loved ones? Letting people in is much harder than keeping them out.

Plot/Pacing

...Wait, you're telling me there was a plot? You're kidding. No wait, I see that look on your face. You're not kidding. Well, you've got to be joking about the pacing, right? This book moved so slowly a dead man would beat it in a race! There was no such thing as pacing in this novel!

...And there's that look again. Oh. Well. Let's move on.

Themes/Conflicts

Okay, this time, you just have to be joking. There is no way you can say this novel has some big conflict or theme (that wasn't gleefully and blatantly ripped off from The Giver) with a straight face.

Oh. Oh.

Writing

"I sort and sort and sort until there is no data left for me. Everything is clear on my screen. I am the one who makes it go blank." (Matched, p. 33)

While I read, I took notes in my personal notebook so I wouldn't forget anything. Fun fact, but I used a neon green pen to write those notes for the sake of matching.  My note for the above quote: "Well, duh. You failed badly at being deep." (Well, it was a word other than "duh" that starts with s, but I'd like this to post on Amazon without trouble, so not cursing here.) The writing tries so hard to be pretty and so hard to be deep so it can impress us, but all it ever achieves is a cheap pseudo-depth that can't even be given credit for trying.

The book has a bad habit of telling us what we don't need to know and then skimping out on the stuff we would like to know a little more about, like the worldbuilding. What's the deal with Singles? Anomalies? Why is it necessary for us to spent an entire page on some seeds? So many pages and yet so little of importance is written. It is also incredibly predictable; a clumsy attempt at infodumping about Ky at the beginning of the book ended up giving away a big twist of the novel that wasn't revealed until page 300 or so.

Logic

Now, dystopian fiction has its own special brand of suspension of disbelief with me. I've got to accept more unusual things than I would have to with most other books and consider them possible or plausible. There are things I did accept about the book, but there are far more things I couldn't accept because my suspension of disbelief only has so much coverage and these little issues fell outside that protective blanket. I cannot believe under any circumstances that the urge to create has been squashed out of the people and that complicated emotions such as love, lust, attraction, etc. can be so easily controlled without any sort of drug to force them down.

Where are the gay people? Seriously, where are the gay people? Matching pairs up one boy and one girl, so what if that boy likes boys or that girl likes girls? You can't government regulate the gay out of someone. You can't genetically manipulate the gay out of society. Gay isn't genetic or as easy to get rid of as that! Gay people exist, Matched! Don't pretend that they don't! Pretty much the only group Matched allows to exist is heterosexual people.

Was it worth the hype?

As was the case with Starcrossed (a book I recently read and... well, there are no words for that book that don't start with a, s, b, f, or d and that aren't considered vulgar by greater society), Matched gained its hype from major pre-publication buzz, much of it centering around the authors' seven-figure advance for the entire trilogy. It should mean it's good if the publisher paid so much for it, right? No. This book is not worth its hype or the money spent on it.

On the other side of the spectrum, I heard a lot about the book being a cheap rip-off of The Giver from multiple people and trusted sources. So I could accurately see these supposed parallels, I read The Giver a little over a month ago. They're 100% right. This book rips off The Giver so badly. Anything halfway good is ripped out of that book and everything else is just bland. The messages, the main events that are supposed to tug at our heartstrings, and all of that were better done there than here. Books so heavily derivative of another book that they're ripping it off do not easily win my heart.

Bonus cover section

I have an unusual relationship with this cover: I only love it if I'm looking at it online. When I looked at the print copy I've been carrying around for the last few days, I made funny faces at it because I didn't like having it in real life. (Okay, that's half the reason. I've spent this entire review outlining the other half.) Don't ask me why I only like seeing it and its sequel's cover online because I have no idea.

2 stars!

What am I reading next?: Swear by Nina Malkin

H.Y.P.E. Project: Starcrossed by Josephine Angelini

Beware: spoilers for Starcrossed lie beyond this point.

Title: Starcrossed
Author: Josephine Angelini
Publisher: HarperCollins/HarperTeen
Release Date: May 31, 3011
Pages: 487 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Read it on my Kindle for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

How do you defy destiny?

 

Helen Hamilton has spent her entire sixteen years trying to hide how different she is—no easy task on an island as small and sheltered as Nantucket. And it's getting harder. Nightmares of a desperate desert journey have Helen waking parched, only to find her sheets damaged by dirt and dust. At school she's haunted by hallucinations of three women weeping tears of blood . . . and when Helen first crosses paths with Lucas Delos, she has no way of knowing they're destined to play the leading roles in a tragedy the Fates insist on repeating throughout history.

 

As Helen unlocks the secrets of her ancestry, she realizes that some myths are more than just legend. But even demigod powers might not be enough to defy the forces that are both drawing her and Lucas together—and trying to tear them apart.

Review:

"She was hunkered down on her knees, her face covered by her filthy hair, moaning names and saying "blood for blood" as she hit her forehead repeatedly against the wall." This is a quote from Starcrossed (the page can't be cited due to reading it as an ebook) about one of the Furies, but this is also an accurate description of me once I finished reading this book.

For sixteen years, Helen has lived on the calm, small, and very boring island of Nantucket and wished she could go somewhere else. Then Lucas Delos and his family moved to town, and Helen introduced herself to them by attempting to kill Lucas in the middle of school. According to Lucas and his family, they and Helen are Scions, demigod descendants of the Greek gods, and the Furies are forcing to play roles they have forced on others throughout history. Helen and Lucas have broken one part of the cycle of blood for blood, but they will still be forced to play the starcrossed lovers.

Characters

Not very good. Helen is surprisingly stupid for how smart she supposedly is (telling the reader about a character is bad due to contradictory characterization like this) and a massive Mary Sue the likes of which I have not seen in a long time. All the descriptions of how beautiful, talented, perfect, and flawless she was made me want to puke. I would like to see Lucas put through a shredder. Wait, Helen isn't the only one with the Idiot Ball; everyone has a personal Idiot Ball they carry at all times and clutch like pearls toward the end of the novel, when Daphne comes in and everyone believes her despite her being who she is. Otherwise, the characters are unremarkable.

Plot/Pacing

While the novel does have a plot and is generally well-paced (by this, I mean the reader doesn't have to wait until they are three-fourths through the lengthy novel to find out what is going on), it still manages to be boring. The plot and pacing, as derivative as they are (and not of The Illiad and Romeo and Juliet, the two works that inspired this novel), would have earned the novel another star if not for the outstanding sexism and misogyny detailed in the next section.

Themes/Conflicts

This has to be one of the most sexist pieces of trash I have ever read, if not the most sexist piece of trash. Helen has no say in her relationship with Lucas; she is subject to his whims and the boundaries and terms of their relationship are solely defined by him. It's all about what he wants and what he can handle and nothing she ever says is taken into account. It is always up to him to impose control on Helen so she won't tempt him because everything she does tempts him, and she has to stop tempting him or else bad things will happen. It's always the woman's fault because she tempted men into doing it, you see.

Lucas never puts any trust in Helen and will not let her be in control of her own sexuality. He even makes all of her decisions (with only minor, temporary objections from Helen)! I won't even go into the implications of needing to destroy a feminine object of power to free men from their lust. I have lot to say about "A lady never cheapened herself by using foul language" and most of them begin with a word starting with f. No lady is any less of a lady for cursing and sexist rhetoric like this really grinds my gears.

This quote is telling of the novel:

""She hasn't been feeling well," he explained to Castor, who looked on with sympathy.

""I have a daughter," Castor replied gently as if that explained everything."

However it is meant, that is not a joke. That is flat-out misogyny and it only gets worse throughout the novel.

Writing

The stuff of my nightmares. It tells the reader absolutely everything, especially if it's as unimportant as what car the teacher drives or that a one-off nameless character has a leather fetish. It seems like a Herculean task for it to show the reader something or stay on-task. The imagery is atrocious and the narration is constantly cheating. It's one thing to change to another character's point of view for a chapter because it's important to the plot; it's another thing to do it for exactly one paragraph or even sentence or when it has no importance in any possible way. Even the action scenes were made boring thanks to the info-dump heavy, clunky writing.

Logic

There is one thing that can't even be called a plot hole or hole in logic; the only proper term for it is a brain fart. Close to the end, Helen and Lucas decide they can't be together because they're first cousins. This would pass me by without comment (I am unbothered by first cousins being together) if it weren't for the fact that marrying your first cousin is legal in Massachusetts, where Nantucket is located. In Spain, where Lucas's family comes from, it is legal to marry your first cousin. Finally, the ancient Greeks Helen and Lucas are descended from practiced--guess what?--first-cousin marriage.

They are not cousins after all (I suppose someone said there couldn't be any genuine conflict in the novel), but the point is that at the end of the novel, they believe they are. Someone should have done their research because if it's supposed to be a conflict of some sort, it shouldn't be legal from every possible angle. There is the social unpopularity to consider, but Lucas and Helen don't seem like the type that would let that stop them. When you're truly in love, public opinion no longer matters.

Was it worth the hype?

As many did, I heard about it when Angelini received a seven-figure advance for the trilogy Starcrossed is the beginning of. Even then, I took issue with the novel; its sexist pitch of being "Percy Jackson for teenage girls" told me this would not be the book for me (my thoughts on the pitch are better explained here). Alas, the H.Y.P.E. Project is about hyped books and such a massive advance gave Starcrossed a lot of hype, so I read it anyway. I do not always make smart decisions, as you can see.

It is wonderful that Angelini's advance got her out of a rough situation, but I do not believe, based on what I have read, that the trilogy will be worth the advance it got or recoup all the money spent on it. The novel is most certainly not worth the hype. I will not be reading the next installments, but I do hope there is not a happy ending. Star-crossed, as you know, means ill-fated. Star-crossed people do not have a happy ending and if Lucas and Helen end up with a happy ending, we have another case of people not knowing how to use words correctly.

Bonus cover section

Pictures of it you see on the Internet, such as the one I used above, are very plain and don't seem likely to catch the eye, but they're slightly more noticeable in real life, such as if you see them in a bookstore. They have a certain metallic shine to them that catches light well, effectively making it a noticeable cover despite how truly plain it is. I take issue with Lauren Kate's author blurb on the cover, though; YA novels in general should not be allowed to use starcrossed and saga, among other words, until they learn how to use them correctly.

0 stars!

What am I reading next?: dancergirl by Carol M. Tanzman

H.Y.P.E. Project: Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

Title: Hush, Hush

Author: Becca Fitzpatrick

Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

Release Date: October 13, 2009

Pages: 391 pages (paperback)

How I Got the Book: Bought and read it for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

When Nora and Patch are forced together as lab partners, Nora would rather fall to her death than put up with his elusive answers to her questions, his teasing, and his infuriatingly handsome face and hypnotizing eyes. It seems Patch was put on earth just to drive her crazy.

But before long, Nora's defenses begin to break down as her curiosity about Patch heats up. Why does he always seem to be wherever she is and know exactly what she's thinking? How does he know what to say to both attract and repulse her? And what is up with those V-shaped scars on his chiseled back?

As their connection grows stronger, Nora's own life becomes increasingly fragile. Nora needs to decide: Is Patch the one who wants to do her harm of the one who will keep her safe? Has she fallen for one of the fallen?

Becca Fitzpatrick's New York Times bestselling debut is a page-turning leap into the unknown world of fallen angels. Do you have someone to catch you?

Review:

Something is off about Patch Cipriano and his unfortunate new biology partner Nora Grey is determined to find out what's it is. She can tell there's something more going on behind that pretty face and those demeaning remarks of his. In her investigation, she comes to find herself attracted to him and she could quite possibly be falling in love with him, but could what she's finding be true? Could Patch really be a fallen angel out to kill her (and maybe Vee too, but who cares about her?)? If it is, it doesn't look like he's the only one who wants to see Nora dead. Strange things are happening and only some of them are in her head.

Characters

Characterization is thin and calling them two-dimensional is an insult to the term. Nora seems to lack any brains and my I've no doubt she is mentally unstable; if she thinks faking a bomb threat to get Patch's file is okay because she's his biology partner, something is wrong. The only person I can stand is Marcie Millar, the classic mean girl (who apparently becomes a love rival in the second book or something; I've got no plans to read it, so I don't know all the details), but she is busy being slut-shamed and made the butt of a thousand jokes. Being mean makes her a bad person, not being flirtatious or sexual. Got that, book? Okay.

Two characters in the cast stand out for the wrong reasons. Vee may be the worst best friend I've ever had the displeasure to know in both fiction and real life, and I've had a terrible best friend of my own (but that's another story). She makes excuses for a guy who threatened her "best friend" Nora, abandons Nora, and pressures Nora to be with a guy she does not like, among other things. She is the second-worst character in this book.

The worst? Patch Cipriano. His behavior is disgusting, borderline abusive, and the sort of behavior parents tell their children to watch out for because it could turn into a toxic or abusive relationship. When the heroine is genuinely afraid of her love interest and thinks he might rape her (and there were plenty of moments where it seemed like he would do just that) as in Hush, Hush, the love interest is on my blacklist. There's being a bad boy or anti-hero (which requires redeeming traits) and then there's being a borderline rapist, which Patch is. He's the polar opposite of sexy.

Pacing/Plot

The pacing and plot are disjointed. This is about how the novel goes: Nora and Patch are falling in love (personally, I think they're falling in lust, which would be fine if it weren't being passed off as love when the two are very different), a creepy event or two happens once in a while, Nora and Patch fall in love some more, more creepy things, rotate between the two and add in liberal amounts of  disgusting behavior by Patch added where needed, big reveal, sudden reveal of villains, an almost-sex break, climactic scene, and end on a sappy note. That is Hush, Hush in a nutshell, only it's far less interesting.

Themes/Conflicts

Hush, Hush competes with only one other novel for the award of Worst Themes. According to this book, it is okay for a boy to humiliate, threaten, dismiss, and treat a girl badly because that just makes him a sexy bad boy. This is probably only okay when the guy is as insanely hot as Patch is supposed to be (I don't find him hot; I find that when a guy has a personality as pleasant as the smell of dog crap, it becomes impossible to appreciate how hot they are) because if it were a plain or ugly guy doing it, it would be Not Okay. Nora never has any true conflict to deal with and the book's conflict isn't genuine.

What I hate most about this book is how its themes help glorify creepy, pseudo-rapist behavior through Nora's initial weak rejection and ultimate unconditional acceptance of the way Patch treats her (which does not change throughout the entire novel). His behavior is horrifying and the people who instead call it flattering are often the people who say I should be flattered at all the awful, creepy things guys have said and done to me over the years when I didn't want them behaving like that towards me and made it clear.

There are simply so many offensive ideas and phrases within the book, such as the heavy reinforcing of rape culture, but I don't have the space or time to cover them all.

Writing

Painful. Description is often bad or repetitive and there appears to be no such thing as subtlety because hints are like a bag of bricks to the head each time they pop up. Then it gets lazy for the sake of plot convenience when the symptoms of a concussion, such as difficulty or unwillingness to talk due to the injury, are waved off so Vee can testify to Nora about her attacker and when Vee gets out of the hospital far quicker than someone in her condition would, or when Elliot is identified in a news story as someone questioned in the death of another student. I don't need to be a three-year journalism student to know no news service would identify a minor if they had only been questioned. Charged or convicted? Often, yes. Questioned? No.

There is also one offensive issue regarding word choice that I would like to bring up. Vee, an overweight character, is described as "voluptuous" multiple times. Right now, the United States (where the book is set and where I, the author, and countless fans live) is experiencing a problem with obesity and there are multiple campaigns against it. What comes to mind when you think of "voluptuous" women? Personally, I think of women with large breasts, usually thin waists, and sometimes large butts. At one time, it was used to describe more than women with that figure, but that is what it's used to describe most often now.

Vee is clearly not this body type from her description and the book creeps around describing her as overweight or fat. The creeping around is bad enough because of how much it reveals about what Nora really thinks of Vee, but the I don't appreciate that women with that sort of figure (hourglass figure, right?) are indirectly being called fat. Nine times out of ten, they can't control their figure that easily; losing weight won't make their breasts any smaller in most cases because it's genetic. This is the author's problem now, not the book's. If there's anything the author can control, it's the specific word choice.

Logic

Almost nonexistent. Why would an entire class as important as biology be axed over sex ed? More likely, the teaching guidelines would be changed to exclude sex ed. No teacher would ever allow one student to humiliate another the way Patch humiliated Nora and if they did, they wouldn't get away with it. Then there's what happened due to the lazy writing, discussed in the writing section. The biggest fart in logic may be, as I said earlier, how in the world Nora falls in love with Patch when he treats her so terribly. Someone can make you feel tingly all over and make you want to screw them, but that doesn't always mean you're in love. That's lust, a separate entity from love, and that's what's really between Nora and Patch.

I may not be a mother, but I am baffled and horrified at the behavior of Nora's mother. Just a year after the murder of her husband, Nora's mom has a job that takes her far away from her daughter for long periods of time and they appear to have very little contact with one another. Shouldn't she be getting closer, not farther away? I speak from personal experience on that. Honestly, there were so many farts in logic, writing, characterization, and everything else that I couldn't find the words a few times and could only write squiggles in the book.

Was it worth the hype?

The hype that this book is sexy, dark, has the sexiest hunk of man/fallen angel to grace the pages of a book, romantic, and great? Absolutely not.

The hype that this book is terrible, infuriating, boring, anti-feminist, provides the world with both one of the worst best friends/friendships to grace the pages of a book and the worst love interest to exist in any media, and is most likely the most reprehensible YA novel to be published in recent memory? Without a doubt, yes. I wouldn't wish this book on my worst enemy.

Bonus cover section

This may be the best part of the book: its cover. While the color scheme has difficulty standing out, the image is striking and can easily catch the eye of someone passing by in a bookstore (which I tested out and confirmed last time I visited a bookstore). However, it immediately gives away what the book is about and if a passing reader decides to buy the book and read it, they will probably become frustrated that it takes Nora so long (about 250 pages) to figure out what Patch is when they knew before they even began reading.

0 stars!

What am I reading next?: Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev

H.Y.P.E. Project: Halo by Alexandra Adornetto

Title: Halo
Author: Alexandra Adornetto
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Release Date: August 31, 2010
Pages: 496 pages (hardback)

How I Got the Book: Got it on my Kindle for the H.Y.P.E. Project (details here)

Nothing much happens in the sleepy town of Venus Cove. But everything changes when three angels are sent from Heaven to protect the town against the gathering forces of darkness: Gabriel, the warrior; Ivy, the healer; and Bethany, a teenage girl who is the least experienced of the trio. They work hard to conceal their true identity and, most of all, their wings.

But the mission is threatened when the youngest angel, Bethany, is sent to high school and falls in love with the handsome school captain, Xavier Woods. Will she defy the laws of Heaven by loving him? Things come to a head when the angels realize they are not the only supernatural power in Venus Cove. There′s a new kid in town and he′s charming, seductive and deadly. Worst of all, he′s after Beth.

Review:

It is suspected that the town of Venus Cove is under attack by Agents of Darkness, so three angels are sent to the town in order to help the people regain their faith and become closer to God: warrior archangel Gabriel, healer Ivy, and Bethany, an angel only seventeen years old in mortal years. They're not supposed to get too close to the humans while on their mission, but Bethany immediately falls head over heels in love with Xavier Woods. Their relationship is not without its obstacles, including the objection of Bethany's angel siblings and the arrival of a strange new student from Great Britain named Jake Thorn who wants Bethany.

Characters

The characters in this book lack any depth and it would be more accurate to call them caricatures. The angels lack any personality; in-book, Bethany says that angels have no need to develop humans personalities because of what they are, but this excuse doesn't work because characters, angels or no, need personalities to make a good novel. (I would cite this quote exactly, but I am unable to due to reading it on a Kindle.) Xavier and Bethany's relationship is no sort of love anyone would call healthy; at best, it's an unhealthy infatuation between teenagers and at worst, it's obsession.

Every human character besides Xavier is made out to be shallow; boys only want to get in girls' pants and girls talk about nothing but prom. As anyone who knows real teenagers would know, real teens are nowhere near this shallow. It seems like they're all portrayed so shallowly and placed around Bethany to make her look better, but the trick doesn't work. Even Jake Thorn, the antagonist, was just a bunch of cliches thrown together instead of anything halfway memorable or remarkable.

Pacing/Plot

The plot was nonexistent until about the last fourth of the novel, when the antagonist Jake Thorn (whom Adornetto goes through pains to make obvious as the antagonist with passages far too heavy in foreshadowing) stepped up his game. Before then, it had been all about Bethany and Xavier becoming infatuated in one another. Neither of the characters are interesting enough to make the first three-fourths of the novel character-driven and the pacing suffers for it.

Themes/Conflicts

Feminists should stay away from this book at all costs. Many of the themes and messages within Halo carry a heavy antifeminist slant and it's not easy to ignore or avoid while reading. When many of these themes came around, it felt like I was being preached to by the author, and I didn't enjoy that at all. To start with (all of this is according to the book, not me; I don't believe in any of this), Christianity is the only way. The mistakes of a young woman reflect badly on the reputation of her entire family. A young woman is not responsible for her own mistakes because the man of the family takes them on as his own mistakes. You should judge a person by how they look because if they wear Gothic clothes, they are either evil or under the control of evil.

Throughout the entire book, women are very passive and it's always the men that take the first step or fight the big battles. The women are always the ones in need of saving. Even the dog refuses to sit when a female tells him so and then immediately sits when a male tells him so. This book is supposed to take place in the twenty-first century, and all these outdated values and blatant displays of sexism deserve no place here.

Conflict? There was none. Bethany and Xavier's relationship never faced anything I thought was a threat for even a second; I always knew they would just go around it or ignore what they were told to do so they could be together. The battle of good vs. evil didn't happen until the last ten percent of the novel and even that climactic scene lacked any tension or true conflict. To demonstrate, the following song was stuck in my head throughout the climax:

(What can I say? Sailor Moon will always have a special place in my heart, and this song fit the climactic scene too perfectly not to tell the world about it.)

Writing

Halo's writing was amateur at best and at worst...I really don't know what to say about it when it was at its worst. So much description could have been cut from this book without negatively impacting the reading experience--actually, cutting even half of the overly purple prose, unnecessary description, and just plain outlandish description would have made for a significant improvement. I'll just drop a few quotes here that I found while reading. They should say enough. Once again, I'm unable to cite page numbers due to reading it on my Kindle.

"Gabriel turned to look at me, his eyes the color of thunder."

"That was the effect he had on me--an explosion of happiness in my chest, scattering like little beads and making my whole body shiver and tingle."

And finally, the quote that has made many a feminist reader angry, one that definitely shouldn't have made it into the final copy. I take offense to this too and nothing I can say hasn't already been said:

"For the evening at least, feminist philosophy had been abandoned, and the girls, like fairy-tale princesses, allowed themselves to be led up the flight of steps and into the foyer."

Logic Only a select few books have ever made less sense. If my Christian mythology is correct, God has thrown angels out of Heaven and made them fallen angels before for putting anything, from love to their own selves, above God and their duty as angels. Bethany did just this, but she was not and never becomes a fallen angel. Angels are supposed to possess all human knowledge, but Bethany has no idea how to use a tube of lip gloss, and that's human knowledge too, albeit a different kind. It doesn't stop there. Where does a demon from Hell get a British accent from? Who brings a human who can easily get killed to a battle between a warrior angel and a demon? If Xavier is so in love with Bethany, why is he so unwilling to let her give her side of the story about what happened on prom night? Didn't the author know that an inverted pentagram (which is worn around Jake's neck at one point) is a pentacle, which is a symbol of good and white magic instead of black magic like she likely meant it to be? I could still go on. As I said, only a select few books have ever made less sense. Was it worth the hype? Admittedly, all the hype I heard for this book was negative. This is one of the worst books I've ever read, many friends said, and you should never read it if you value your sanity. Can it be helped that I got curious? But now that I've read it, I have to agree with them. It lived up to its negative hype and exceeded it. The one nice thing I heard was the the cover was lovely and in that respect, it also lived up to the hype. Bonus cover section The cover, I admit, is beautiful. The models' poses and the sun shining through creates a striking effect. Such a lovely cover is part of why Halo had so much hype. When beautiful covers like this are made, word gets around and people want to see if what's between the covers is as good. Some say that good covers often hide bad stories; in this case, I agree. Lovely covers do not a good book make. 0 stars! Halo was as bad as I'd heard it was and then some.

What am I reading next?: Chime by Franny Billingsley