Book Breakups (1)
A fun feature created by the lovely Lori at Pure Imagination.
Some books just aren’t for us. Sadly you can’t love them all. Here are a few recent reads that have become DNFs for me.
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Paranormalcy by Kiersten White
Read: 125/335 pages
This is a really popular book and at first I thought I would love it as well (I found the image of Steve the vampire dejectedly asking for the train fare after being tagged quite amusing), but I just couldn’t get interested in this. Evie, though sweet in a kid sister kind of way, didn’t have all that much going on upstairs. She calls her taser (which is pink and glittery) Tasey. She only gets interested in knife training when her instructor gives her a pink knife — which she squeals over. She spends most of her spare time reading celebrity magazines.
We were never going to hit it off.
This book seems like it would be a light-hearted read for a young teenager and I would urge them to give it a go. Personally, I found the writing lacked tension or action, the dialogue was awkward and it was all just felt too childish. Evie is supposedly sixteen, maybe seventeen, but I would have put her at twelve or thirteen. The other characters were equally uninteresting but then, I prefer my paranormals to have an edge or a quirkiness to them. Paranormalcy had neither.
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Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead
Read: 136/332 pages
I tried. Really I did. This book is so popular I figured that even I, a Buffy fan who just cannot seem to get into vampire books, would like this one.
It wasn’t meant to be. And there’s a very simple reason for that: Rose.
I intensely disliked this character. Many reviewers have cited her as a kick-ass heroine, strong, loyal etc. I found her arrogant, rude, prejudice, full of her own self-importance, vain and not half as talented or clever as she liked to think she was. Perhaps Rose would have eventually have won me over had I stuck with it, but I can’t say I was compelled to find out. I just didn’t want to spend any more time with this character.
It’s a shame because I quite liked the idea of an academy and the bond between Lissa and Rose, but neither was developed enough over the first hundred-odd pages to convince me to continue reading. The only bright spot was Christian.
I completely agree with your comments on “Vampire Academy”! Haven’t read “Paranormalcy” yet though.
As for my own book break up… I tried to read the first “Beautiful Dead” book by Eden Maguire, but failed. I felt like I was reading a piece of work by one of my year 9 students while I was reading it! The pacing was off and the characters seemed predictable… perhaps it gets better as you get into it, but that’s hardly a commendation. Even as a confessed lover of YA lit, this book was too juvenile for me.
It’s a pity that you couldn’t get through Vampire Academy because it really is a great series. The first time I had read the series, I read the second book, Frostbite, first. It was on my sister’s bookshelf and she didn’t have the first book. I was too excited after reading the back cover to not read it and wait until I could find the first book. I devoured this second book in hours. A few days later, I went on to read the first book, and I was sad to say I didn’t love it as much as the first. If I hadn’t read and loved the second book already, I’m not sure that I would ever have continued on with the series. If you are unwilling to read any more of the Vampire Academy books, I would still recommend that you try to read Bloodlines, a spin off series of Vampire Academy with a more relateable narrator. :)
Aw, sorry to hear you didn’t finish the first Vampire Academy. I hope you try picking it up again in the future. To be honest, I’m not a big paranormal fan at all and it took me until the third book (yeah that’s perseverance) until I was hooked with the series. I wasn’t such a huge fan of Rose in the beginning either. :P