"Otherworld" by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller

I honestly cannot recall a time when I did not finish a particular book because I found the mind of the narrator too unbearable to dwell in for a few hours.  Well, there is truly a first for everything. I downloaded Otherworld by Jason Segel as an audiobook to listen to during a recent weekend drive to another city. I like his middle grade series called Nightmares! and wanted to check out his other work.

Otherworld is supposed to be the YA version of a story in the vein of Ready Player One, which I loved. A few minutes into the book, it became very clear that the main character from whose point of view the book is written, cannot get his mind out of the gutter for even a second. I kept cringing at his descriptions and both my husband and I kept glancing at each other in disbelief. Thankfully, our teenage daughter was not particularly interested in listening to the book and had her earphones on.  We finally decided to quit midway through chapter two when the main character was about to pull a particularly cringe worthy prank on his neighbors.

Perhaps the book gets better later on. There are certainly very positive reviews on Goodreads, and it clearly merited two sequels. I did not stick around to find out, and based on the first two chapters cannot imagine the main character’s thinking would elevate above his waistline. 1 star out of 5.

"The Grace Year" by Kim Liggett

The Grace Year is a dystopian YA novel in the vein of The Handmaid's Tale and The Lord of Flies. Our main character Tierney James lives in a closed community that vaguely reminds me of puritan villages of colonial America. Men are in charge of all aspects of life. Women are either obedient wives, or if not chosen for marriage, lead lives of hard labor in the fields or one of the mills. Those who are punished for any transgression are banished to the outskirts and live as prostitutes.

Tierney assumes that no one will select her as their future wife and looks forward to being a laborer in the field. She is much more comfortable with nature than with people. Thus, she is shocked when her father presents her with a veil, which means that someone has chosen her as his future wife.

The people in the village believe that women are full of magic and possess supernatural powers. Girls who turn 16 are sent away from the village for the entire year - called the grace year - to live in a camp in the wild and expel their magic. This year it is Tierney's turn to join with other sixteen year old girls and depart the village for a year. Talking about the grace year is forbidden so none of them really know what to expect. They only know that not all of them will come back, and those who do return, will come back scarred both physically and emotionally.

Overall, I really enjoyed this novel. I do believe it is better to go into it knowing as little about the plot as possible. Liggett's writing is very suspenseful and discovering what happens next is part of what made this novel appealing to me. The only reason I did not rate this book 5 stars is because some of Tierney's views seemed too unrealistic to me. For an uneducated young girl who grew up in a closed, superstitious society, she tends to think in a way that would suggests she's had exposure to more radical ideas and ways of thinking, and those are simply not present in the novel. So whenever that happened, it tended to grate a bit on my enjoyment of the novel. 4 out 5 stars. I definitely recommend this book.

An e-ARC was provided by NetGalley.com

"10 Blind Dates" by Ashley Elston

I must admit I almost quit reading this book about 15% in. However, I am glad I decided to stick with it. Our main character Sophie is a high school senior and is looking forward to spending time with her boyfriend Griffin during the winter break while her parents are visiting her older sister. However, Sophie's joy is short-lived. The same evening as her parents leave town, she overhears Griffin telling his friend that he wants to break up with her. Sophie is devastated and goes to stay with her grandparents who live in a town a couple of hours away. There, she is surrounded by her large extended family, who take upon themselves to cheer her up and draw up a schedule to arrange 10 blind dates for Sophie. And so the adventure begins.

The book ended up having some really funny moments. I found myself laughing out loud a few times. Sophie's grandparents have 8 children, so her family is large, noisy and everyone is in everyone else's business. If you like the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you will probably enjoy this book. As often with YA contemporary novels, the main characters sometimes feel much older than they are supposed to be in the book: the fact that can be irritating to some readers. I myself almost quit reading it, as the beginning was a bit too melodramatic and hard to believe. I did end up enjoying the book and rated it 3 out of 5 stars. This would make a nice light holiday read.

An e-ARC was provided by NetGalley.com

"Enormity" by W.G. Marshall

With my book club this month, we read a Sci-Fi novel by a local Rhode Island author. The book is called Enormity. It is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and more modern takes on giants such as Godzilla or King Kong. So even though the subject is not new, W.G. Marshall puts a new spin on it. The setting is South Korea. Our main character Manny Lopes finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and accidentally gets blown up to giant proportions by a dark matter device.

Marshall’s giants are much bigger than we are used to seeing in this genre. Manny is over a mile tall which makes any sort of interaction with regular humans impossible: he cannot see them and basically causes havoc and destruction simply by moving around.

Another aspect of the book that I enjoyed are geo-political and military implications. Parts of this book are really witty and clever and I found myself chuckling as I was going through the novel.
It is a very quick and enjoyable read, and the book is definitely grossly underrated. I highly recommend it.

One word of caution: the book does contain several graphic sex scenes. When we met with the author, he said he included them to demonstrate how much privacy factors into our lives, and for a giant being privacy is just not even an option. Overall, a great read. 4 out of 5 stars.

"Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun" by Guillermo del Toro and Cornelia Funke

I grabbed this book from the shelf in my local library and it turned out to be a huge surprise. This is one of the best books I've read so far this year. It reads as a spooky fairy tale, and is a faithful adaption of the film Pan's Labyrinth. There are definitely parts in this book that are quite dark and macabre. At the same time, it is filled with magic and love.

The setting of the story is the fascist Spain in the 1940s. Our main character is a little girl named Ofelia whose father is dead and mother recently remarried and is about to give birth to a new baby. Ofelia stumbles upon an ancient labyrinth in the forest surrounding the mill where her mother's new husband (Captain Vidal) lives. There, she meets a Faun who tells her that she is a long-lost princess of the Underground Kingdom where her parents and loved ones have been waiting for her for a very long time.

The story is written from multiple perspectives. It also includes legends/stories from the past that allow the reader to see how the various characters and physical items are connected to the main heroes of the story. It also alludes to the invisible ways our past and our emotions shape us. Overall, the story is multilayered and complex. I definitely want to go back and re-read it just so I can trace all the connections. It quite unexpectedly gave me the vibes of reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez: same dreamlike and surreal atmosphere layered over real historic events. 5 out of 5 stars. Loved it.

My favorite quote from the book:
Mortals don't understand life is not a book you close only after you read the last page. There is no last page in the Book of Life, for the last one is always the first page of another story.

"Tiger Queen" by Annie Sullivan

Tiger Queen is a new standalone YA fantasy novel that is coming out in the US next week (September 10, 2019). Unfortunately, this book was very predictable and filled with typical YA fantasy tropes. The name of the novel also pretty much spoils the entire plot. In addition, the writing style was not my cup of tea. The author had to many "sand" things in the novel and an exorbitant amount of sand similes (sand dancers, sand blessings, etc). Finally, I thought the world was not very well developed and the entire book is set in the one city and the surrounding desert.

That being said, I do think this book could appeal to young (i.e., Middle School) children, particularly girls. The main character is a warrior princess fighting for the throne. All characters are pretty much either totally evil or good and noble. The plot also includes elements of both Peter Pan and Robin Hood, where "Desert Boys," a ragtag band of orphans, steal water from the King's wells and distribute it to the people. I did like the fact that this is a stand alone. I think it will be more accessible to younger readers who do not necessarily want to get invested in a trilogy or a series.

Overall, I rated this book 3 out of 5 stars. It was not for me, but I can clearly appreciate that younger readers could love it.

I received e-ARC from NetGalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

"The Idiot" by Elif Batuman

The Idiot by Elif Batuman is a meandering and slow-paced account of experiences of a freshman student at Harvard in mid-1990s. Even though it is a work of fiction, it is largely autobiographical in nature. The main character Selin is a Turkish-American girl and the entire novel is written from her perspective. In fact, it reads as a series of observations and impressions, which she writes down as she meets her roommates, registers for classes and tries to develop new relationships.

I believe Batuman borrowed the name of the book from Dostoyevksy in order to highlight the inexperience and naiveté of the main character. In particular, Selin struggles in her romantic life. Early on in the semester, she meets a Hungarian student named Ivan in her Russian language class. They then get into an email exchange, which develops into a fascination with the online personas both of them present to each other. Once they decide to meet and talk in person, however, Ivan and Selin are unable to recreate the magic they both felt while writing emails.

Selin also appears to be largely disappointed with her academic life. She feels that her professors are by and large self-absorbed and removed from reality. She reads incessantly and keeps looking for outlets for her intellectual curiosity but ends up bitterly disappointed each time. She feels she is not learning anything. In the summer after her freshman year, following Ivan’s advice, she travels to Hungary to teach English in a village school. However, even there, her experiences are marred by her unrequited love and obsession with Ivan. She admits that her objective in traveling to Hungary was to learn more about him.

Overall, The Idiot is a pretty realistic depiction of how confusing, disappointing and painful growing up can be. However, even though Selin feels she is not learning anything during this first year of her adult life, she is in fact gaining valuable experiences of living and traveling on her own, making friends, choosing classes and subjects to study and to be more comfortable in her own skin. This is not a book about overcoming insurmountable obstacles, or gaining some ground-breaking perspective. It is quiet, largely dispassionate, and self-absorbed. I believe a lot of college students would probably be able to relate to Selin’s story or at least to some portion of it. I ended really enjoying this book and gave it 5 out of 5 stars.