Interview with Ruta Sepetys

Hello, fellow novel loves! Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming Ruta Sepetys, author of "Between Shades of Gray" and "Out of the Easy".

Ruta, welcome!
 
Your debut novel, “Between Shades of Gray”, tells the somber, sometimes terrifying tale of a young Lithuanian girl, Lina, who lives through the Second World War. How would you describe the response to the book?
 
The response has been overwhelming. I had no idea that so many people shared this history. The book is now published in over 40 countries. I'm so grateful!

What was the biggest challenge in writing it? And the most rewarding thing?

The biggest challenge was that I don't speak Lithuanian. To truly capture the essence of a country you must speak the language, so I was at a huge disadvantage. The most rewarding was reuniting with the survivors I interviewed during my research and celebrating the fact that together we're bringing this piece of history out of the dark!

I was impressed by the level of detail in “Between Shades of Gray”. What kind of research did you do before you wrote it?

I traveled to Lithuania and conducted extensive interviews with survivors, historians, psychologists, etc. I did a lot of listening. I learned that if I asked questions I would get specific questions, but if I just let people speak and describe things on their own, I'd get a much deeper level of detail.

What is, in your opinion, the most important thing in a novel?

I enjoy when a novel asks questions but doesn't necessarily give the answer. Readers are very intuitive. They will come up with their own answers.
 
Finally, can you tell us about your next book, “Out of the Easy”?
 
My new book, "Out of the Easy" is also historical fiction. It's set in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1950. It chronicles the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who is born in to a very disadvantaged family but dreams of building a different life for herself. It's full of gangsters and scandal too. Please watch the video at www.outoftheeasy.com for full details.

Thank you, Ruta.

"Between Shades of Gray" and "Out of the Easy" are both available now from Philomel books.

Announcing the Torchbearers' Book Club

Hello everyone, and welcome to our newly found book club! I know I’ve been away for a while, so I think this is a lovely way for me to get back on track.

Well, I can’t take the credit for the idea of a book club: I’m merely following in the footsteps of others - Ana Mardoll, Jennifer Armintrout, our own Ceilidh, Something Short and Snappy and Reading With a Vengeance. In fact, Palice’s review of Divergent guided me to Whitley’s blog, and it is what made me take the step from fangirling over everyone and doing a big chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of my own. If the first takes off, I’ll do another.

I asked around Twitter and Goodreads - What book shall I start with? I had some ideas about City of Bones, but the truth is, I’m not really built for snark. Besides, a deconstruction means that I would have read a book half a dozen times by the end - I’d rather start easy on myself and take something I enjoyed. So this is how we got:

Review: "Reboot" by Amy Tintera

“Reboot”

Author: Amy Tintera.

Publisher: Harper Teen (release date: May 7^th 2013). 

Pages: 352. 

Summary (taken from Goodreads): Five years ago, Wren Connolly was shot three times in the chest. After 178 minutes she came back as a Reboot: stronger, faster, able to heal, and less emotional. The longer Reboots are dead, the less human they are when they return. Wren 178 is the deadliest Reboot in the Republic of Texas. Now seventeen years old, she serves as a soldier for HARC (Human Advancement and Repopulation Corporation). 

Wren’s favorite part of the job is training new Reboots, but her latest newbie is the worst she’s ever seen. As a 22, Callum Reyes is practically human. His reflexes are too slow, he’s always asking questions, and his ever-present smile is freaking her out. Yet there’s something about him she can’t ignore. When Callum refuses to follow an order, Wren is given one last chance to get him in line—or she’ll have to eliminate him. Wren has never disobeyed before and knows if she does, she’ll be eliminated, too. But she has also never felt as alive as she does around Callum. 

The perfect soldier is done taking orders.

It’s no coincidence that the book “Reboot” is being compared to most is “Divergent”. Indeed, this is a comparison that the publishers must welcome. After all, “Divergent” is one of the few YA series of the past few years that justified the huge amount of hype it received and continues to dominate the NYT bestseller list. I believe its success is down to two main elements: A great publicity campaign and a marketable central premise. While “Reboot” has built up a significant amount of hype, particularly amongst bloggers, the story just isn’t there.

In many ways, “Reboot” and “Divergent” are incredibly similar. The reboots of the title, essentially an army of super strong zombies controlled by the state, bear more than a passing resemblance to the Dauntless of Roth’s world, including sharing a penchant for unnecessary violence, something I’ll get to later. Romance plays an overwhelming role in each story, far more than is really necessary, and the heroines both bugged me to kingdom come. There is one main reason “Reboot” fails and it’s also similar to “Divergent”, although the former is better written.

The plot holes are so large that I could navigate the wreck of the Titanic through them. In this world, reboots are less prone to emotions than humans. Wren, the heroine of the story, frequently talks about having no emotions but will immediately follow that up with a description of how she’s feeling. It reminded me of a moment in “Futurama” where Bender talks about how as a robot he doesn’t feel emotions and that makes him sad. It’s so blindingly obvious in its clumsiness, both in terms of prose and storytelling, that I wonder how the editors could miss it. This becomes even more distracting when Wren continues to insist that she is cold and emotionless. She clearly isn’t, especially when she’s mooning over her dull and very annoying love interest. The science of the reboots is messy and haphazardly explained at best. I rolled my eyes a lot when Wren talks about how dying and being rebooted automatically makes you more attractive, because zombie soldiers need to be sexy for reasons unknown. I wonder if anything is allowed to be unattractive in YA anymore when even the undead have to be sexed up like this, especially when it has absolutely no bearing on the plot. Even Stephenie Meyer briefly explained why her sparkly vampires all looked like GQ models.

The action scenes are actually pretty well written in terms of content and pacing, and they certainly outdo anything Roth wrote in “Divergent”, but they’re few and far between and shoved into a plot that is quickly dismissed in favour of romance. Callum, the cut-out love interest of the day, is just too irritating. His humour falls flat too often and he fails in his obvious objective of being the moral emotional core of the story in contrast to Wren. He can’t be the emotional contrast to the cold zombie when said cold zombie won’t shut up about her feelings. The supporting cast failed to leave any impression on me and I can’t remember any of their names.

I have a feeling the author was somewhat aware of this emotional plot hole and decided to use violence as a way to counteract it. Wren is bloodthirsty, to say the least. She has no qualms with essentially slaughtering humans, and it comes across as rather gratuitous in the novel. She is constantly talking about how she wants to kill humans and it felt a little too serial killer in places. It certainly doesn’t endear you to the protagonist.

I think many readers will like “Reboot” a lot and I certainly see its appeal as a possible movie (albeit one with some serious script editing) but it fell flat for me. In terms of prose, it’s stronger than “Divergent”, extreme bouts of info-dumping aside, but it also exhibits too many of the problems of that series, particularly in terms of thinly stretched world-building, characterisation, romance and the portrayal of violence. I’m not entirely convinced this will be the hit that Roth’s series has become. I would pass on this one and go watch the series of “Aeon Flux” instead.

2/5.

“Reboot” will be released on May 7^th in USA. I received my ARC from Edelweiss. 

Review: The Eternity Cure by Julie Kagawa

Allison Sekemoto has vowed to rescue her creator, Kanin, who is being held hostage and tortured by the psychotic vampire Sarren. The call of blood leads her back to the beginning—New Covington and the Fringe, and a vampire prince who wants her dead yet may become her wary ally.

Even as Allie faces shocking revelations and heartbreak like she’s never known, a new strain of the Red Lung virus that decimated humanity is rising to threaten human and vampire alike.

There aren’t many books that can make me angry.

Ironic? I don’t think so. While there are a lot of books that make me sad, a lot of books that make me happy, and a LOT of books that bore me to tears, there is rarely one that gets me so pissed off I can’t see straight. I mean really: How am I supposed to be pissed off when most of the authors I read just don’t know any better?

Let’s be real here - the things that annoy me in books are usually the cliches, the tropes and the constructs which the author repeats over and over again without any real thought about the meaning of it all. Need character development? Just add rape. You need to make your characters drop their barriers and become emotionally involved? Near death experiences, or attempted rape would do the trick. Wanna make your bad boy suddenly sweet and loveable? Add a cutesy younger sibling and/or elderly parent for them to be the caretaker of. They don’t do it maliciously, mind you. But it works! It’s paint-by-numbers easy, and why reinvent the wheel when it clearly does a good job?

Problem is, you CAN get paint-by-numbers wrong (all of those tiny 6 and 9 are a bugger on the eyes) and we HAVE reinvented the wheel. Several times, actually. We changed the materials, for one thing, and we use it in a lot of machines. Some people are probably finding new uses for it as we speak.

What I mean to say is, I get it, Julie. I really, really get it.

But this is your seventh book out. You should know better by now.

If you read around the YA blogosphere, the name of Julie Kagawa will probably crop up at some point or another, either in relation to her Iron Fey series, or the Blood of Eden, which started with The Immortal Rules and continued with The Eternity Cure. In relation to the latter series, you will also hear a lot about how badass the female protagonist is, how awesome Julie is to return vampires to their dark roots, how dark and cool the whole series is…

And yes, The Eternity Cure is that. It is all of those things. It’s cinema in book form (which must be pretty convenient for the production team.) It’s a big bag of popcorn with coconut butter which you finish in one go while the commercials are still running - it has the exact same nutritional value, and will probably make you just as queasy.

Oops, didn’t I use the same barfing metaphor in my review of the previous book? I must be getting unsubtle with my old age.

So what is the plot? Well, after delivering Zeke and the others to Eden, Allie sets out to find Kanin, her sire, who is currently in the clutches of a mad and powerful vampire. On the way, she meets Jackal, another one of Kanin’s children, and the two team up to save him in spite of the fact that their end goals are VERY different. Jackal, in spite of the events of the previous book, quite likes Allie, and wants her to stop pretending to be a human, embrace her vampire nature, and rock the unlife by his side.

Then shit goes down. A lot of shit, and as is the habit with this series, it’s super-entertaining. Unfortunately, Kagawa is so focused on the action, she forgot the character development scenes in the bin again. Again, since this was one of the issues I had with the first book.

For example: Jackal and Allie have to go cross-country, but thanks to the magic of the time-skip, we don’t see any “minute” adventures they have along the way. And yeah, okay, that’s good in that it prevents the reader from losing the main plot, but it also means that we don’t get to see any key character-building moments. Allie goes from despising Jackal and everything he stands for, to defending him almost overnight. And yeah, I know it wasn’t overnight in book terms, but it sure as hell feels like it.

But this is stuff I could (and do) forgive in other books. In fact, I’ve forgiven this in books that are much less entertaining. So why am I so hard on Julie?

Because Julie knows better.

For one thing, not all of the book is flat and boring. There’s plenty of scenes that have held me on the edge of my seat. Nearly every single one where Stephen is present, for example, sizzles with tension and poignancy. Kanin’s are great too. Jackal, who is clearly the Lestat of this series, owes the shit out of every scene he’s in; and he brings some much needed ambiguity in Allie’s world of cut-and-dry moral boundaries.

Unfortunately, this only makes things worse. Kagawa introduces all of these interesting themes, and then only barely scratches the surface - just enough to show you glimpses of what this book could have been, and make you wonder why it never came through.

Even if I rated this book for potential (which I don’t, otherwise Hades would have gotten a five-star from me) the ideas and themes are really just continuations of what happened in the previous book. And the problem with that is that Allie already completed that character arc - getting comfortable-ish with her vampire nature. It was done - she had had her revelations and was doing what was right. Why are you beating that dead horse when you clearly can’t take the time away from your plot to develop your characters, Kagawa?

And to top off that little sundae, we have the ending two chapters, which pretty much give the finger to not only the first book, but the whole of the second as well. Really, Julie? Really? It wasn’t enough have your main character go back and forth like a ping-pong ball, you actually want to have your cake and eat it too? No. Just… no. Enough with the cop-outs already. If you wanna have a big moral horizon moment, than have the balls to go through with it.

I’m done with this.

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley.