Category: Book Talk

A Book Review: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Lauren2 Comments

It’s book club day!  Which means I liked my first meeting enough to go a second time.  Would you look at me just voluntarily going to social gatherings by myself without knowing a single person.  Who am I?  And is this what they call “personal growth”?

This month’s book was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (<– the author’s pen name!) and though the synopsis on the back cover had me prepared to read a more serious book version of Groundhog Day, it turned out to be much more thought-provoking, substantial and complex than Bill Murray waking up on Groundhog Day over and over and over again.

IMG_7745Quick Plot Overview: Harry August is a member of the Cronus Club, a group of unique human beings that are reborn to the same place and time every time they die.  The eventual crux of the story is his mission to find the other Kalachakra (that’s the technical term for his species) that is responsible for speeding up the evolution of technology and causing the end of the world sometime in the future.

Wait, WUUUUUT?

Yeah, I know, it’s kind of confusing and kind of hard to wrap your head around at first, but that’s kind of what makes it such a cool and interesting book!  Also, I think I used up my KIND OF quota in that last sentence…  The book is on the longer side of things, but I found it surprisingly easy to whip through because it’s such an imaginative concept and North has a total handle on the boundaries of that concept.  And though the climax of the book doesn’t seem to come until later on, just hearing about Harry’s different lives is plenty attention-holding.

My one complaint is that for being a longer book and really taking its time with the set up, the ending seemed a little rushed.  Otherwise, I really really enjoyed this one!  Anything science-related is pretty over my head but I didn’t feel like that really made a difference in my overall understanding of the plot.  One last word of caution: if you actually think about the concept of re-starting life in the same place every time after you die, your brain will explode.

A Book Review: We Were Liars

LaurenLeave a comment

CAUTION: Major spoilers ahead.

***********************************************

Alternate titles for this post:

That time I realized not all YA lit sucks.

So I joined a book club I found online… does that make me a loser?

When plots twists make you feel like your whole world flipped upside down.

we were liars

So yeah, after wanting to join a book club for years but not knowing any to join or where to even find one to join, I put the question out to the Facebook world and was directed towards the Meetup app, where I found a girls-only group to join!  I can’t decide if that’s awesome or desperate.  Is this like online dating for fellow reading fanatics?  Anyway, I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive when I hit up B&N and found this month’s book, We Were Liars, in the Young Adult section.  In my experience, YA lit is pretty superficial, predictable and kind of mindless.  But!  Turns out my literature snobiness needed a check and it totally got one with this book.

The book, in a nutshell, is about a rich white family that spends every summer on a private island, but the eldest grandchild (who is also the narrator) has some kind of accident during “Summer 15” and the rest of the book details her struggle to remember what happened and why no one in her family is willing to talk about it.  In the end, it turns out “the accident” was a fire she started with her cousins that resulted in their deaths.  She’s the only one who lived.  Whoa!  What!  I read that twist during my lunch break one day and was so distracted for the rest of the work day.

I guess the reason I liked the book so much was because it defied all my expectations.  The characters weren’t stupid.  The writing wasn’t juvenile.  The story was deeper than some WASP-y private island drama.  And I DID NOT see the plot twist coming.  In fact, no one in my book group saw it coming.  If  you think about it, that’s pretty impressive.  I actually found the writing to be enjoyable and creative.  There’s some interesting stuff going on stylistically that sort of reminded me of poetry.  I.e. short choppy sentences, line breaks, repetition (but not in an annoying overdone way), etc.

What’s more, the dialogue was done well (I usually think dialogue is entirely unnatural/unrealistic), the main characters were well developed and felt real (which is probably why I was doing some serious holding back of tears at the end) and the plot felt thought out.  One of my biggest book pet peeves is when I can feel that the author has a general idea of things but is kind of winging it and figuring out details as they go.  That wasn’t the case here.  E. Lockhart seemed to have a firm grasp on her characters, her plot and the details that connected the first page to the last.  Her writing felt confident.  I like that 🙂

P.S.  I think I really liked book group!