Review: This is All by Aidan Chambers

Dear Blog,
a review In Which Tesni Fangirls. 

Summary (from Goodreads): Using a pillow book as her form, nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn sets out to write her life for her unborn daughter. What emerges is a portrait of an extraordinary girl who writes frankly of love, sex, poetry, nature, and, most of all, of herself in the world. As she attempts to capture “all” of herself on paper, Cordelia maddens, fascinates, and ultimately seduces the reader in this tour de force from a writer who has helped redefine literature for young adults. A book not to be missed by any serious reader.

Review:  I honestly have no idea where I ought to start.  I've spent the last week entirely engrossed in This is All, and now I finished it's like all I can do is completely fangirl over it and want to re-read the whole thing over and over again.

It's like a journey in some respects, that begins when Cordelia is fifteen and ends when she's about twenty.  The book is her life, and the reader is like her shadow so it kind of becomes a part of theirs, too.
 At some points in the book it makes for very confusing reading.  Part two of the book is split so that you have to read all the left sides of the page from 200 to about 400, then go back to 200 again and read all the right pages.  Also part four of the book, which chronicles her creepy experience with Cal, a man who's obsessed with her, will cut suddenly from her talking about what's happening to her to her thoughts on other, completely irrelevant things.  It's actually very clever in that sense; On one hand you want to whizz through those parts of the book to get back to the central plot, but on the other when Cordy's experiences with Cal are so terrifying, the interludes about school, sleep etc seem almost like relief and a diversion. 

I loved Cordelia for the range of emotions she possessed, and the variety of reactions she could get from me; one minute I would be shouting "Yes!  Life feels like that!   Poetry is like that, and loneliness, and music is that satisfying. If you were real and I would totally follow you around everywhere",   The next I wanted to hug her; others she made me facepalm (the "It's...it's your period" scene *cringes* 'nuff said), others she made me want to cry.  She's intelligent but naïve, romantic but selfish, sometimes intense and others silly.  How does Aidan Chambers, a man and an adult, manage to write the thoughts of a teenage girl so powerfully and so personally?   There are some sections about periods, masturbation and the appeal of breasts; sex is quite an important topic. It's quite a mature read, certainly, and some of the topics I imagine a lot of parents wouldn't want their little darlings to be reading; but all I can say to them is  to just deal with it.  It's an entirely enlightening, frank book.

If I said I didn't like Will, that would be lying.  However, if I said I liked him, that also wouldn't be true. There were some moments when I really wanted to slap him and shriek; "But you care about Cordelia and you need her and she needs you!  The balance of the universe can only be restored if you love one another!" I hated him for his actions, or lack thereof.  Other times, however, I just wanted to steal him for myself,  and I very much envied Cordelia. That's part of the glory of the book; it portrays love in an entirely realistic way, ups and downs; Take for instance their "sex saga".  Aidan Chambers has eight hundred pages to build up a really deep emotional connection between the two of them.  It's not just lurrrve at first sight, complications ensue, they break up and Cordy learns a valid life lesson. There's way more substance to it than that.

Miss Martin.  MISS MARTIN IS JULIE FROM NOW I KNOW.    When I realised this I totally punched the air.  And she's all kinds of awesome in This is All because she has a deeper understanding of herself, and after taking on Nik she's pointing even more people in the direction of fulfillment.  And she's an English teacher, too, so she reads books, which is always a huge hit with me.
Now onto Edward and Cal *shudders*.  They're both...yeah.  I absolutely loathe them both, but then I think I was supposed to.  Note to self:  Never go out with a man in his thirties who works in sewage.  Especially not if you yourself are only seventeen.  Cordy's experience with Edward was one of the only points in the book I wanted to slap her. Why? What did she see in him?  I guess there was a lot of psychological stuff going on about it; how after she breaks up with Will and Izumi goes back to Japan, she needs to feel loved and he makes her feel sexy and mature.    As for Cal *shudders again*.  The less said about him the better.  He's creepy right from the start, and you know he cannot bode well.  More I shall not say.

The ending.  I totally didn't see it coming.  More I shall not say because it would totally ruin everything if I gave it away. But the impact is sudden and entirely frank; one of those endings that both makes me want to burst into tears and smile at the same time.  It's also kind of like Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness in the way it ends; how when you've finished it all you can do is just stand there in an entirely shocked and/or blown away manner.

In conclusion=  Whoooah. Aidan Chambers you are amazing for being able to write that well and that convincingly, to the point where you forget that it's only a story.
In Three Words: incredible incredible incredible.
Recommended for: mature teenagers. Adults.  Everyone. 
Rating: 5.

Review: Impulse by Ellen Hopkins

Dear Blog,

I know my blog has been kind of dead lately, and for that I'm sorry. Outside of string ensembles and guitar orchestras I don't really have a life, so you'd expect I would have plenty of time for blogging, but the rest of my free time seems to be sucked away by Goodreads and Ravelry  other bits and pieces that appear out of nowhere.

Summary (from Goodreads): Aspen Springs Psychiatric Hospital is a place for people who have played the ultimate endgame. The suicide attempt survivors portrayed in this novel tell starkly different stories, but these three embattled teens share a desperate need for a second chance. Ellen Hopkins, the author of Glass and Crank, presents another jarring, ultimately uplifting story about young people crawling back from a precipice.

Review: You should know this by now, dear blog; I cannot get enough of Ellen Hopkins' novels.  The four that I've read have been so intense and hard-hitting that I finish them feeling all exhilarated and shocked.
But be warned: they aren't for the faint-hearted.  They're full of contemporary issues that make you think that Melinda in Speak has it easy.  Impulse is no different. The story begins narrated by some unknown narrator; one of the characters, or someone else entirely, you don't know.  The first of the characters to be directly introduced is Conner, who has ended up in Aspen Springs after trying to shoot himself following the end of an affair with a teacher. Soon afterwards, Tony is introduced; before he came to Aspen Springs he was among other things living on the streets and selling his body for drugs. Last but not least, there's Vanessa- a cutter with a dark secret.  When the three of them meet, their lives change in ways they could never have expected.

I think it's kind of impossible to properly dislike any of the characters, with the situations they're in and how vividly their thoughts and actions come off the page. That doesn't mean, however, that I liked them. Conner, for instance, was a complete train wreck of a character who seemed to be having the hardest time of the three emotionally.  I would have disliked the idea of him, nay, I do.  A rich boy who allegedly has it all but is struggling under the surface seems to be done so often nowadays, and his relationships and attitudes towards the other characters didn't really make me warm to him either.  He was also the character that didn't change or develop at all throughout the novel.
But I couldn't really dislike him. I just felt sorry for him, I suppose, just experienced his emotions so vividly it was hard to be like, "Ugh, just be likeable." So much as  "Confront your parents. Tell them how you feel.  Just speak to somebody." 
 I wanted to slap his parents.  Oh, how I hated them *insert scowling gif here*. So, I must have wanted the best for him if I felt that way. 

Tony was probably the character that I found both most likeable and the one with the most interesting story to tell; but as with all the characters I had to kind of piece together his story; nothing was really revealed straight out.  He was witty, observant, kind; He deserved happiness and a relationship with Vanessa (though I don't think Vanessa deserved him, if that makes any sense). 
Speaking of Vanessa; I thought she fell somewhere between the two of them.  I found it pretty hard to really sympathise with her, mostly because her thoughts often felt like she was keeping the reader at a distance...almost cold, in a way.  But conversely, her actions, and her emotions, seemed vivid; like how she felt when things were "blue", for instance. 

As for plot; this is one of those books where there isn't really a very distinct storyline; It's very much  a character-driven novel.  The writing style was slightly confusing at times; the narrative shifts every three or four poems or so, and often the three voices weren't very distinct and I ended up being like, for example, "Wait, but, Vanessa's the narrator at the moment isn't she?  Hmm, maybe not." quite often.   Still, it's great poetry- or rather, verse.  It flows like poetry, but it isn't really- it's too unsettling, too clever, too unusual and clear to really fit in amongst another of the YA free-verse books I devour so.

This is one of those books where I can't really talk about the ending, because it's so...yeah.  It's more closed and more obvious a conclusion than, say, Burned; but  more shocking and sudden and aaaargh.  For some of the characters, things end well; for others things are worse than when they first entered the story. And the last sentence; for a lack of a better, more professional word: Omigod. It is the conclusion to all conclusions, the most powerful and final last couple of lines I've read for months, probably.  
It's a good thing, then, that a companion novel, Perfect, is coming out in the autumn. I can't wait for another installment set in that same world, where among other people Conner's twin sister Cara takes centre stage. We'll see.

In three words: haunting, dark, riveting.
Recommended for: Mature teenagers.
Rating: 4

Foreign Language Friday: Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

Dear Blog,

Be warned: this is a very, very long review. I don't actually expect anyone to get to the end of it.

Name: Notre-Dame de Paris (or The Hunchback of Notre Dame) 

Written by: Victor Hugo
First published in: French
Translated by: John Sturrock
Summary (from Goodreads):  In the vaulted Gothic towers of Notre-Dame lives Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bellringer. Mocked and shunned for his appearance, he is pitied only by Esmeralda, a beautiful gypsy dancer to whom he becomes completely devoted. Esmeralda, however, has also attracted the attention of the sinister archdeacon Claude Frollo, and when she rejects his lecherous approaches, Frollo hatches a plot to destroy her that only Quasimodo can prevent. Victor Hugo's sensational, evocative novel brings life to the medieval Paris he loved, and mourns its passing in one of the greatest historical romances of the nineteenth century.

Review: It's a tricky business being a bookworm and/or book blogger. Because you read a lot.  Well duh, I can hear you say, what else would you be blogging about if you were a book blogger?  but let me finish.  It's hard because you read a lot; and you want to talk about the books that you read, but talking about them cuts into your reading time. And seeing as you read so much, your chances of coming across awesome books are pretty high.  But then there are so many good books, you set the bar higher for books that when you've finished them make you go whoooooah holy snood* that was awesome.
Anyway.  I can safely say that Notre-Dame de Paris (or The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), is one of those Holy-Snood-This-Is-Awesome novels.

Victor Hugo is my hero for many reasons, but one being; he wrote the book in four months.  Yes, around 200,000 words in four months.  That's like doing NaNoWriMo four times over. So I look up to him for being able to pull off such a feat, and he's probably the first person I'd say if someone asked me the question, "If you could invite any authors to a dinner party, dead or living, who would you invite?" he would be on the VIP list.
In the midst of my novel-writing frenzy that was November, this was one of the few books that I actually stopped hammering away at my laptop for in order to read.  What's not to like, and what does it miss?  Nothing.

I had better warn you; it's a painfully difficult book to get in to. Practically nothing really gets going until 170 pages in or so; a lot of it being banter between various minor characters and the escapades of Gringoire, a bumbling philosopher who's nice enough at first until his comings and goings seem to get slightly irrelevant, and then you're like, "okay, thanks Gringoire, but you really should get going now."  A similar character is Jehan Frollo, brother of the infamous Dom Claude (who I'll get to later).  But Jehan was highly amusing, and his arrogance and foolishness was actually what amused me so much.  As the plot progressed he became a welcome distraction from all the darkness was occurring, until his demise.  Which was actually to me a bigger loss than any of the other characters in the multitude of those who died, because despite his flaws and however annoyed he made everyone else, he was like a sudden pause of rain in a thunderstorm.

Another, and probably the main, thing that stands in the way of actually getting to what's otherwise known as the good part are some of the descriptions.  They go on for chapters, I kid you not.  The descriptions are utterly beautiful, it's true, but after 20 pages describing the cathedral your mind starts to wonder.  Some whole chapters could easily be skipped, unless if like me you get consumed by guilt for skipping things out, especially if you're one of those people who endeavours to finish books, because that's hugely hypocritical (strangely I have no problem with giving books up if I don't enjoy them- I just dislike skipping passages out).  Perhaps I should have taken the fact that I was contemplating skipping out a few passages as a sign that I should have given up, but I didn't want to.  Especially seeing as the rest of it was so compelling. 

And about the plot, the relevant parts themselves- well,  it was well worth it. I would say that the plot was fast-paced, but that would be lying, so I won't.  Instead I'll say; persevere.  Get past those unneeded dialogues, those descriptions that go on for pages, and in short you have a story that's so dark, and so fascinating, and so incredible, when you've finished you're asking yourself why you had ever contemplated giving it up. It's romantic in a twisted sort of way, and both disturbed and disturbing.
Mostly because of the characters. 

Who should I start with?  Well, Quasimodo I suppose, seeing as he seems to be made out to be the protagonist.  He wasn't as central to the story as I had expected; but he was still a good character.  The only word I could really use to describe him would be...interesting.  I had a lot of misconceptions about him; so he was largely a complete surprise.  I wasn't sure what to make of him, even by the end; did I root for him (yes)? Did I pity his devotion to Esmeralda, or admire it (not sure)?  And speaking of Esmeralda, she was another surprise.  Only sixteen, so she wasn't all that different from any other teenage girl in the fact that after a while what was supposedly heartbreaking naïveté just actually seemed to be a pathetic yet inescapable form of lovesickness.  My general attitude towards her was; "Yeah, I hate that you should be the object of Frollo's desire, and I really want you to escape his lecherous clutches, but honestly?  Please get over Phoebus, and then I'd like you a lot more." 
Oh, how I hated Phoebus.  What did she see in him? In this respect Notre-Dame is no different from some contemporary teen novel.  It's like The Truth About Forever and Living Dead Girl and a baby (You're probably all, "The Truth About Forever, what the heck?"  But seriously:  Phoebus=Wes). Also that would be some messed up pregnancy, with Notre-Dame being almost 200 years older; but this is all hypothetical. 

I said I would get back to Dom Claude Frollo earlier and now I will, because I'm saving my favourite character for last.  And why is such a character my favourite? I have a thing for misunderstood, tormented villains for one.  But also, and mostly, because he has so many different dimensions.  He's the most three-dimensional, well-developed character that I've come across in months. He doesn't come into the book, properly, for over a hundred pages.  And when he does it's two chapters that basically describe his childhood and such.  He's a fascinating character from the start, and it's interesting to watch him change; how his first attraction towards Esmeralda gets bent out of shape into a terrifying obsession .  He's weak, but you fear him.  He's sinister, but you pity him.  He's tormented, but you understand him. 
Yet his demise was hugely satisfying.

So I wonder if I must seem slightly geeky for writing such a hysterically enthusiastic review about a classic that often gets overlooked because it's commonly associated with an animated film.  But, really?  I hope I've done it justice.  And Kudos if you got the end of this review.   

In three words: fascinating, incredible, loooong.
Recommended for: everyone who doesn't mind a challenge.
Rating: 5.  OF COURSE.

*Yes, I have been watching a little too much Vlogbrothers lately.