Charisma - Jeanne Ryan

Hey!

This book was so dull it put me off writing about it for nearly two weeks after finishing it. That bad.

Charisma is from the same author as Nerve, which apparently isn't all that good. It is, however, a basis for a movie from last year that was pretty enjoyable on its own right. So when Charisma, with its colourful 'from the author of Nerve' cover (right there on the right) started popping up at Waterstones and the synopsis sounded interesting enough, I thought I could check if it's really that bad.

Well that was a mistake, clearly.

The idea of the book is this: Aislyn has suffered from crippling shyness all her life, and would do anything to be more outgoing, so that she could live her life. When the anything comes in the form of an experimental drug called Charisma, she jumps at the opportunity. For a moment, she has everything; fame, popularity, charm, love. Soon, however, she comes to discover that you can't have your cake and eat it too, as the side effects prove to be dangerous, even fatal.

There's also this side plot that's supposed to have you wondering whether gene therapy is ethical or not, but all I could think of was how Charisma tried to seem all smart and deep, without any of the work or thought that normally goes into being either of these things.

The execution of the whole books is one of the worst ones I can imagine. Just for the plot, I have dozens of ideas of making it more tolerable, even good. That doesn't even start to cover the dull writing style...

Aislyn as a character is quite plain with the whole 'too shy to live' thing, but after the side effects kick in (this is around 1/3 in so the idea itself isn't all too fleshed out), she becomes downright tolerable. You'd be surprised to learn just how much a person can whine and cry and complain after (briefly, sure) getting everything they've ever wanted. Also, my empathy was further reduced by her knowingly taking the drug, acknowledging it's experimental and there might be side effects and even signing a consent form(!!!). So I didn't really feel for her.

Her best friend's name I've already forgotten, but she was the opposite of Aislyn in nature; outgoing, happy, brave. She also abandoned Aislyn when she really needed her to hang out with her new boyfriend, so that was nice.

Aislyn also has a super dull boyfriend, John or Jack or something. He's basically there so that Aislyn could complain some more about maybe dying in the future, just when she's so happy (although all the complaining she did could have fooled me).

All in all, this was the dullest thing I've read in a while (I'm at university, too!). I think I should stick to less obviously bad books for a change.

For Helmet 2017 I put this in category 10: A book with a beautiful cover (mostly because that's the only compliment I can give this book...)

PS. Apparently I didn't pick up a single quote while reading this. Yes, that bad.

Made You Up - Francesca Zappia

“If nothing’s real, then what does it matter?” he said. “You live here. Doesn’t that make it real enough?”

I saw this book, I wanted to read this book, I left Did I Mention I Love You? by Estelle Maskame at 53% so that I could read this book right about now. I'll go back to the former one day though - the author is from Peterhead so I feel like I should.

Anyway, Made You Up is about Alex, starting her senior year in high school, schizophrenic. She has an awfully difficult time telling apart her delusions and reality, and thus makes an unreliable narrator. I really love those. Anyway, she wants to graduate really bad and go to college and not be sent to a mental hospital, so she tries to keep all of this in check.

She makes friends, she tries to live a normal life, falls in love, all that. This part of the book was kind of interesting but at the same time I wanted more emphasis on the disease itself. Alex's friends are nice and interesting, Alex herself feels like a real person, it's all good...

...Except that the way schizophrenia is portrayed in this book is pretty much the most unrealistic thing ever. Alex portrays only the positive symptoms (named so because they add to normal behaviour, not because they're a good thing) and few to none of the negative ones. It's a special snowflake YA version of an actually serious illness, and that's just not okay.

Sadly, I liked it. My knee-jerk reaction was to give this book a 3.5,/5 and be happy with it, round it up and carefully recommend. But the more I think about it - how inaccurate are you allowed to be without it being dangerously awful? I mean, this amount of misrepresentation should be a crime (kind of like the Leave campaign for Brexit... forever salty.) and how can you give a book like that a good score, no matter what it accomplished (not much, really). So I went back and put it down to three, then two. Now I'll say it's just a half rounded up. The half simply comes from the likeable characters and the one good plot twist that I liked. The rest is just lack of research culminated into a pretty bad book. Charlie especially was so likeable, the little sister I never had. I want to give five stars to Charlie alone and none to the rest of the book.

'“C’m’ere, Charlie.” I spread my arms. Charlie hesitated, then ran across the room and climbed into my lap. I wrapped my arms and the blanket around her. She saved me from trying to figure out how much I should tell her. “I don’t like it when your head breaks.” I knew she was old enough and smart enough to know that my head didn’t actually break, but she’d been calling it that for so long it didn’t matter anymore. I think it made her feel better to think of it like something broken that could be fixed.'

Another problem I had with the book were the side plots; all of them were weird and unrealistic and disconnected; I just didn't feel like they added much to the story. There's this thing about the scoreboard at the high school that was mentioned again and again and again and Alex didn't understand it and neither did I. There is, however, a very good central theme about a lobster tank (red lobsters, to be more precise), and it's a shame it's wasted on a pretty bad book.

The writing isn't that bad, it's just the research that's lacking. And by extension, it's also lacking the care to write a good book. What a pity, really. You shouldn't write about these things without any background knowledge / research or at least asking someone a lot smarter than you. I wish this book had never been published or alternatively, that Alex was just portrayed a different kind of weird. Some fantasy special snowflake weird, whatever. What I read was just plain disrespectful. And I really wanted this to be good, too.

Everything, Everything - Nikola Yoon

“Maybe growing up means disappointing the people we love.”

There is much to be said about Everything, Everything, but sadly most of what I have in mind isn't going to be good.

Here's what I can say about it that's nice:

I enjoyed the read for about a third of the book. It had good description - sometimes - and cute dialogue. There were a few characters I liked. The layout was quirky. The book was somewhat in touch with the times (tumblr is mentioned, of course, and it's set in 2015), but at times it feels awkward. Does someone still use IM as main way of online communication? What about Skype, FaceTime, Facebook messenger? I don't know why, but this really bothered me. Mostly the book could be set in any year in the 21st century, and I feel like it could have felt a bit more current.

Let this be said: I have seen many reviews from people who loved this book on Goodreads and I have also read many of those reviews. I also expected to like this book because I find the bubble baby syndrome very interesting and have been looking for a novel quite like this for a long time. This should have, by all means, been a book I had been trying to find all my life, and I should have loved it. Then what went wrong?

The main character is Madeline Whittier, and she is both a bland, unlikeable vanilla personality and a half-Japanese half-African book nerdy special snowflake with a very rare but also very popularised disease, SCID. Don't get me wrong here - I'm all for multiculturalism and POC getting all the love in the world. Here, though, I feel like her cultural heritage begins and ends with the mention of where her parents are from and a reference to her skin colour, without bringing anything to the story. She could well be Generic Girl From Anywhere™. To put it in a nutshell, she can never go outside because she could die from anything.

At first she talks about her condition with understandable detachedness, but because of a boy - Olly, whom I wish to describe with annoying lack of character faults, even though I couldn't really dislike him - she soon turns reckless and decides she doesn't want to live anymore, dashing outside even though she has never in her life been able to do that without risking dying. I hope that sounds bad because it is.

Of course, there's a lot wrong with her that's not limited to just this. I'd personally be more interested in reading about an inspiring character with unfair optimism, spiralling into depression or something, anything else than this. She describes the same things over and over again - my white room, white shelves, white life et cetera, without it adding anything to the story. Yes, it made me feel just how boring her life was, but it didn't make me really relate to her.

Also, near the beginning, she mentions having precious online friends. This is nice and can see this happening. The issue is that I don't think they're ever returned to, even though they have to be pretty much the only friends in her bland life. But who cares when she falls in love, right?

Her mother seems nice, but for a character with such a major role in the story, she is given very little space to grow. She has devoted her whole life to Madeline and is very... motherly. If you have ever seen a mother in real life, you can probably imagine.

I didn't like the book at the beginning. I think it was because of my initial hatred for the main character, but I got over that. I enjoyed it for a while after that, when Olly was introduced and we got something other than Maddy describing her bland room and her average test results over and over again.

What ultimately ruined it for me was the ending. Possibly never in my life have I hated the end of a book so much (and I spent years as a child seething over the way Marilyn Kaye's Replica-series ended, effectively ruining the previous 23 books for me, just like that), and you will want to stop reading now unless you want to have the ending spoiled.



You've been warned.



She doesn't have SCID. She never did. It was her mother all along, traumatised by the deaths of her father and brother, convincing her that she did. It's a twisted, stupid and pointless Rapunzel ex machina, and it does the book a huge disservice. It's a fairytale ending in a book that's supposed to end badly. It feels like Yoon didn't know how to end the story, but this may well be the worst possible way to do it. Of course, this is every terminally ill person's dream - you weren't sick after all, go outside and be happy! - but it's also widely unrealistic and not the story the reader was promised. It's not what I wanted, at the very least.

I wanted to read a story about a teenager condemned to live their life indoors because of the disease and possibly gain hope and learn to accept their fate. I did not want to read a book where the teenager also has a Bella Swan -syndrome, risking her life at the tip of a hat for a boy she hardly even knows and ending up finding out that she wasn't sick after all. This was like a terrible piece of The Fault In Our Stars fanfiction, rather than an actual book I bought with real money. The worst thing is that it didn't need to be bad. I was fully prepared to give it three stars, never return to it again but admit that it was okay. Now I can only complain for the next month to anyone who will listen.