The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Amy  
Lynnie

psychological thriller, mystery

Rachel, The Girl on the Train, takes the commuter train every day and tends to focus on one particular house she passes every day.  As the story progresses, the reader learns more about Rachel, her past, and the people she encounters on the train and in her daily routine.  Something happens and Rachel finds herself in the middle of situation in which she should not be involved.  And yet, she is undoubtedly involved.  This is Paula Hawkins' first novel.

This is one of those very rare books in which Amy and Lynnie find their opinions to be very different!  Let us know what YOU thought about it!

Amy's review

Wow—what a ride! (And not just a train ride.) This was a gripping psychological thriller. The way the story begins being told from the morning train commute and the evening return train commute is creative and effective. Then, the changing points of view and the different time periods serve to fill in very interesting holes. The reader is given a more complete picture piece by piece while, at the same time, is made to feel uncomfortable and foggy like our Rachel. This book is full of misguided, mischievous, damaged people, reminding me a bit of the creepy folks in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. No one is genuine or well-intentioned except for Cathy. (But her problem is that she's too generous and forgiving. She was the least believable character amid all the crazies.) The novel was crafted well. I enjoyed the way the situations became evident and the resulting mysteries and discoveries came to fruition. I could barely put it down.    

Lynnie's review

The only thing this book has in common with Gone Girl (because lots of people compare the two) is that I shouldn't have finished either of them. I have to stop reading "mysteries" because I don't find them interesting & worse, I find them predictable. I thought it was obvious who the bad guy was about 20% into the book. Although an argument can be made that EVERYONE in this book is the "bad guy" in one regard or another.

I can excuse a lot about a book if the characters are interesting & give me something or someone to cheer for, but The Girl On The Train was depressing from beginning to end and full of miserable, messed-up people that I did not enjoy reading about. I thought the portrayal of Rachel's alcoholism was probably realistic, as was her decline in general but her non-stop woe-is-me attitude made ME want to start drinking. Also, I felt that her actions, after the book's catalyst (I can't be specific without giving things away) were so over-the-top and unbelievable that I rolled my eyes routinely at her antics. 

I'm in the minority opinion on this book- most people loved it. I just don't enjoy reading about a menagerie of horrible people.

The Calling (Endgame #1) by James Frey

Amy     
Lynnie 

young adult, action/suspense, fantasy

We both enjoyed The Calling.  Lynnie discovered it and her great review convinced Amy to try it.  This partial description from Goodreads is as good as any:  Twelve thousand years ago, they came. They descended from the sky amid smoke and fire, and created humanity and gave us rules to live by. They needed gold and they built our earliest civilizations to mine it for them. When they had what they needed, they left. But before they left, they told us someday they would come back, and when they did, a game would be played. A game that would determine our future. This is Endgame.

Amy's review

The Calling is like a combination of The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) and I Am Number Four (Pittacus Lore). Now, I know a lot of people have said that certain books are similar to, or in the same vein as, The Hunger Games but I’ve never agreed. However, this one is the most like The Hunger Games that I’ve read because the characters are teenagers who find themselves pitted against one another, most likely to the death. There is also a lot of graphic violence. However, these teens were trained their entire lives for the opportunity to play the Endgame so they are not as helpless as most of The Hunger Games tributes found themselves. This novel is similar to I Am Number Four because there is a lot of action and movement, lots of high-tech/super-smart/special-ability teens working towards a common goal (although, they are definitely not all on the same team), some members of the elite crew team up with normal humans, and there is the presence of probable aliens. And, guess what—there is a reason that this novel feels a lot like I Am Number Four—the author, James Frey, is one of the authors behind the pseudonym Pittacus Lore under which the Lorien Legacies series is authored.

I enjoyed the pace and the structure of the novel. It was interesting, creative, and full of fun characters to love and hate. There is also a real game woven into the story that readers can play with the goal of winning valuable prizes. However, I just wanted to read the novel and ignored all the special clues.

At first, I thought I would have trouble keeping track of all the key Players. But that turned out to be a non-issue. However, I am sure it is going to give me trouble when the new sequel is released after such a long span of time occurs. In fact, I wish I had just waited to read this novel until more of the sequels were out. While only one other sequel, still untitled, is currently slated to be published (in October 2015), the Endgame is set up to be played in three segments which would naturally imply a trilogy is in the works. I've made notes for myself about each of the remaining characters so that it’ll be easier to play catch-up with the sequels. 

Lynnie's review

I stumbled onto this book because another friend had posted it on Goodreads and I'm so glad I did!

The Calling is an action-packed story from beginning to end. I found some similarities to Frey's other work, The Lorien Legacy series (under the nom de plume Pitticus Lore)- certainly in writing style & that there's a group of impressive teens (no super powers in this book though) fighting to save the world, or at least some piece of it.

The Calling is more brutal in its end-of-the-world scenario than the Lorien Series. There's plenty of blood, gore, and fighting right from the beginning. There's no doubt that these teens mean business and will do whatever it takes to succeed in The Game they have been called to play. The characters are solid & it's easy to find favorites among them.

I did not play along with the game in the book- I simply found it too tedious to try to look up all the footnoted references, preferring instead to read & enjoy the story without stopping frequently to look something up on the computer. For those who want to play along though, there appears to be plenty to piece together.

Based on Frey's other series I was prepared for an annoying cliffhanger in the end, so I wasn't shocked when it happened. The Calling does end in a cliffhanger, but not one that's so ridiculous you immediately hate everything you've read previously. Most importantly, at the end of The Calling, I'm still interested in what will happen next & I look forward to reading the next book.

Over all, I think if you like the Lorien Legacy series, or YA action in general, you'll enjoy this.

The Body Electric by Beth Revis

 Amy  
 Lynnie


young adult, fantasy, science fiction

In The Body Electric, Ella Shepherd lives in a future society. Her world is completely man-made and filled with advanced technology of all varieties. Soon however, Ella discovers that everything she believes is not true--someone has altered her memories and she is never quite sure who to trust. Does she trust the government or the rebels to help her stop a war that seems inevitable?

Amy and Lynnie are almost perfectly in sync with our reviews on this one. 

Amy's Review:

What a disappointment. I LOVED Beth Revis’ Across the Universe trilogy. So, I had high hopes for her latest novel. Sadly, the world she tried to build was never believable, mostly due to the foundation of the story--the dream states (or “reveries”)—being described unsatisfactorily. With science fiction, the science part has to be plausible and it just was not.

Her “bad guy” had such an obvious bad guy name that I knew this person would be the source of the problems before I even knew what the problems were. The fact that Ella and Jack did not seem too concerned with how Ella located Jack was completely unrealistic. When two people do not trust each other and one miraculously shows up at the other’s door, you would think they would make it a priority to figure out exactly how that happened. Also, how could an apparently insignificant young man command the masses and secrets that he possessed? It just did not jive.

On top of all the problems with the storyline, the type-os and writing errors were prolific throughout. The editorial oversights made the novel seem cheap and rushed. Perhaps only the e-book suffered from the lousy editing, but it was worse than any other novel I’ve read with the exception of Advanced Reader Copies (which are expected to have issues since the editing process is not finalized at that point). This was not an ARC. In fact, this book has been out for 5 months and, thankfully, I only paid 99-cents for it on sale.

The storyline got better at the half-way mark and was very interesting (and there were no ridiculous reveries) until the far-fetched, laughable ending. While the author had moments of creative brilliance (the design of their location, the interesting underneath world, the caves, the auto-boats, the technological inventions in the house and city), I simply could not immerse myself into the story. I enjoyed the nod to the author’s own creation, the spaceship Godspeed, from the Across the Universe trilogy. But, overall, I would not recommend this novel.

Lynnie's Review: 

Very disappointed in Revis' latest book. I really enjoyed her Across the Universe series, so I thought I might enjoy this too- I was wrong.

First of all, the plot is incredibly predictable. There was very little suspense about what was going on (despite the fact that the book tries to convince us that we are unraveling some great secret) & what was going to happen in the end.

While the world the characters live in is interesting, the plot itself felt like a mishmash of stories I've read or seen before. Revis does no favors to herself on this front by including multiple references to Across the Universe throughout the story, which made me question her creative ability. One reference is fun, multiple references feel forced. I also didn't enjoy how the characters repeated themselves over & over & over- I understood the intention the first time a character said something. I think it was supposed to imply uncertainty in the character, but instead it was just repetition for repetition's sake. Also, there are numerous typos & issues where a word (or two) is left out of a sentence entirely so that you have to read it a few times to figure out what you just read & what it's supposed to mean. Bottom line, this was a book desperately in need of an editor.

Funny Girl by Nick Hornby

Lynnie 


Contemporary Fiction

I really love Nick Hornby, typically. He writes characters that are interesting, entertaining & flawed & he writes them in such a way that you want to cheer for them, no matter what shenanigans they get themselves wrapped up in.

Unfortunately, I rarely found myself caring about what would happen to the cast of characters in Funny Girl, and the story was, unfortunately UNfunny. Barbara from Blackpool decides that she's not living the life she wants to live, so she heads out to London, changes her name & books a major role in a tv series in no time flat. Then, we watch her live her life. Perhaps hilarity was supposed to ensue, but it did not.  In fact, it's all quite predictable from there. A few of the characters were interesting, but even they had little to do but chew the scenery. 

Certainly not my favorite Hornby novel, but I still look forward to what he'll write next. 

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

 Lynnie


Young Adult, Contemporary Fiction 

I wanted to like Fangirl, I really did. And yet, in the end, I don't.

I love the way Rainbow Rowell writes about people. Her characters are always wonderful & charming- jumping off the page with their personalities. The book had a lot of potential- a girl (& her twin) going to college for their freshman year and their first real time apart as the main character, Cath tries to find out who she really is. When the book focused on that, it was engaging & often quite good.

BUT- Cath isn't just a fangirl. No, she writes her own fan-fiction & has a huge online following. The problem: we are forced to read pages & pages & pages & pages of Cath's fan-fiction that REALLY has little to do with the story at hand. I don't care to read fan-fiction about a fictional book (that is meant to remind you of Harry Potter anyway). So eventually I just began to skim those parts- because they weren't relevant to the story I wanted to read about, the story of Cath. While I appreciated that the stories were important TO Cath, that didn't make them move the story of Fangirl forward in any way.

So, in the end it's a 2-star book. Thumbs up for the story of someone trying to find their way in college and the great characters, but thumbs way down for the "book in a book" aspect because it was overdone and unnecessary.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Amy          
Lynnie       

historical fiction, fantasy

We both enjoyed 11/22/63 by Stephen King and gave very similar reviews. This is the story of Jake Epping's journey back in time. His dying friend shows him a time travel portal and asks him to adopt his quest to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Since Jake has nothing amazing holding him back in 2011 (and only 2 minutes pass when someone travels through the portal, no matter how long they stay back in time) he decides to give it a try. He finds that he loves living in the '50s and '60s. Alas, as 11/22/63 draws closer, he has many decisions to make.


Amy's Review

This was a LONG book. Thankfully, most of the time, it was extremely interesting. However, there is at least one big reason I’m not a private detective doing stake-outs: sitting around for long periods of time spying on people is boring. Well, unfortunately, reading about people sitting around for long periods of time spying on people is also boring. I get it—the readers are supposed to get a sense of the effort that Jake put into his endeavor and we, therefore, have to feel the burden a bit. We have to understand how the time passes. But, when that happens halfway through a 900-page book, it’s very disheartening. Thankfully, after quickly scanning the sections about Lee Harvey Oswald’s back-story and all his “friends”, the story got intriguing again. King was smart about the way he structured this novel because it could have been even longer and slower. He knew that re-living the same scenes over and over again would also be boring. That’s why Jake takes the baton from Al after Al has figured out all the basic designs of time travel and has done all the really painstaking Oswald research before the novel even began. Whew!

I liked the experience of reading about the late ‘50s and early ‘60s—the picture King painted was delightful and complete. I also felt his characters were charming and real. I wanted to keep reading to find out how things turned out for them. The creativity of the novel’s concept and the “harmonies” and “obdurateness of history” were fun. The ending was very satisfactory. The only major disappointment about this story was the existence of the Yellow Card Man. I can’t say much without giving things away, but I will just say that I feel the story would have been fine without him and that his reason for existing made the time travel seem far less believable than it had been before we got his explanation.


Lynnie's Review

At almost 1000 pages, this book is a commitment.

I enjoyed the story thoroughly for the first half of the book- the characters are fun and it's an interesting look into another era. I was most fascinated by the idea that someone might go back in time and stay there, just living a new life in another time and finding a way to fit in. As always Stephen King has a way with words and his stories and their settings are so vivid that you can crawl into them and stay for a while.

At the halfway mark, we finally get to the crux of the book though- can Jake/George stop the assassination of JFK. Honestly, this is where I started to get bored. I wasn't interested in reading about Lee Harvey Oswald and what a horrible person he was, nor about his machinations before the assassination (Amy nailed it in her review- reading about stake-outs is dull business). The events of the second half of the book truly strained my patience, though I don't want to spoil it by pointing out the specific events.

In the end, the story came back around to catch my interest, but it's hard to forgive the chapters that bored me almost to the point of putting the book down for good. The past is obdurate- I believe that's mentioned in the book in nearly every chapter. Knowing that, the book is less of a surprise than it otherwise could have been.

The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman

Lynnie
Amy   

historical fiction, magical realism

Lynnie's Review:

There is a lot to like about The Museum of Extraordinary Things, but also a fair amount that I could've done without.

The main characters (Eddie and Coralie) had interesting stories to tell, but I got hung up with the historical depiction that Alice Hoffman constantly relied on.  When the historical aspects of the novel fit with the narrative of the characters (the Shirtwaist Factory fire or the Dreamland fire are examples), everything flowed wonderfully.  However, it was very common for the character narrative to be interrupted by some "rich historical detail" that Hoffman felt the need to enlighten me about, but really added very little to the story of the characters.  I suppose some might consider New York City in the early 1900s to be a character itself, but if that was the aim, I often felt that her need for detail detracted from the story she was trying to tell.

I enjoyed the story, and the ending was satisfying, although predictable. I would recommend this book, but with the caveat that you are a person who enjoys reading about the history of a time period as much as you enjoy reading about the characters. 

Amy's Review:

This novel gives you a very complete picture of the New York City area in the early 1900s. It follows two main characters, switching between their points of view as well as their own past vs. current experiences, from childhood through their 20s. Their stories include personal challenges, parental issues, financial struggles, interesting secondary characters who influence their lives, assumptions about circumstances, animals, good and evil, and love at first sight. It was an interesting story that kept me wanting to continue reading.

Alice Hoffman succeeds at submerging the reader into the atmosphere of the times. However, she does so a bit forcefully. There were times I felt like I was reading a history book or a magazine article or a nonfiction novel. I don’t feel she wove the story into the history in a graceful way but rather wrote a fictional story and then inserted long passages of historical fact throughout. The story would suddenly snap, in the midst of a section about our featured characters, to a broader description of New York’s history and then stay there for so many paragraphs that I had to remind myself what the characters had been in the midst of doing when the storyline suddenly left them. But, I did eventually get used to the abrupt changes of view.

I loved the characters. They were very well drawn and appealing in their struggles, desires, and sensibilities. I wanted to keep reading in order to find out how everything turned out for them. And I liked the way things ended.

I find it interesting that, somehow, this story has drawn comparisons to The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern. I suppose, when forced to contemplate, it is because there are magicians in both books (although, the magic in The Museum of Extraordinary Things is not the focus of the novel as it is in The Night Circus) and both center around a boy and a girl dealing with growing up to meet others’ expectations for them. Also, there are references to a carnival/circus type atmosphere now and then. But, I really had to stop and think about it to notice any similarity. So, I disagree with any parallels that might be drawn between the two novels.

Also, I must say that the idea that a body that had been submerged for so long would be visibly recognizable is simply wrong from every other account I've ever heard of submerged bodies. Waterlogged bodies become very bloated. Usually, dental records are needed for correct identification. The ignorance of this scientific fact really bothered me as I read the story.