Review: How To Be Brave by E. Katherine Kottaras

Publication Date: November 3^rd 2015
Publisher: St Martin’s Press
Length: 288 pages

Thanks to Netgalley and St Martin’s Press for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

An emotional contemporary YA novel about love, loss, and having the courage to chase the life you truly want.
Reeling from her mother's death, Georgia has a choice: become lost in her own pain, or enjoy life right now, while she still can. She decides to start really living for the first time and makes a list of fifteen ways to be brave - all the things she's wanted to do but never had the courage to try. As she begins doing the things she's always been afraid to do - including pursuing her secret crush, she discovers that life doesn't always go according to plan. Sometimes friendships fall apart and love breaks your heart. But once in a while, the right person shows up just when you need them most - and you learn that you're stronger and braver than you ever imagined.

Something about this book just didn’t click with me, so whilst I saw a huge amount of love for it before I started and I was expecting to love it myself, we never really hit it off.

At the start of the novel I was engaged, interested in these characters and their problems and I loved the idea of the living with no fear list – all things combining to set up a truly great novel. But then it starts to drift. Georgia starts to smoke, do drugs, skip school, and all in the name of her mother’s memory and this list of living with no fear. She acts as though what she’s doing is living, when she’s actually just throwing it all away. Whilst she does realise how badly she’s screwed up later in the novel it felt like too little too late after the borderline glorification of taking drugs etc. that occurs throughout.

With the drugs everything seems to spiral and it turns into a very different novel to the one I started out reading. It loses focus, it drifts, Georgia spends a lot of time isolating and feeling sorry for herself and sabotaging her life and it’s frustrating to read. It also serves to make Georgia come across as extremely unlikeable as she blames her dead mother for the fact that she forced her to live without fear – to do this list in the first place. At no point does Georgia’s mother force her to create this list, or to do anything on it. It’s an interpretation of her wishes that Georgia devises and then spends a good portion of the novel being angry about. As a result my empathy for her decreased sharply and by the end I really didn’t care for her at all.

Throw in a love story with a caricature of the hot guy from school who we never really get to know, or get to see and understand the attraction between them for the three scenes they have together, and I was more than a little grumpy by the end of the novel.

It has its good moments, some truly emotional scenes that had me feeling more than a little bit teary, but they aren’t enough to balance out the problematic aspects. Ultimately it’s a quick read that sadly lacks anything to truly make it shine.

Review: Now is Good (Formerly 'Before I Die') by Jenny Downham

Huge thanks to Random House for giving me a copy to review

Tessa has just months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It’s her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is Sex. Released from the constraints of ‘normal’ life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up. Tessa’s feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, and her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallised in the precious weeks before Tessa’s time finally runs out.

With the up-coming release of the film, ‘Before I Die’ has been given a brand new look, and a brand new title to correspond with the film title ‘Now is Good.’
I’m not going to lie, I cried like a small child reading this book. It’s not an easy read, nor is it particularly cheerful, but it is incredible.

There is very little I can say about the book that hasn’t been said before. It’s an incredibly powerful book, emotional and engrossing, and the fact that the ending is known before even starting the book in no way diminishes the impact.

Tessa is an incredible character, she’s strong and feisty and determined, but she’s also incredibly angry at times which could have made her less likeable, but I just found that it made her even more realistic and I warmed to her more – who wouldn’t be angry in her situation?

Her desperate search to cram as much life as possible into the time left to her wraps the reader up and completely immerses them in her impulsive and frenetic struggle to truly feel alive.

It’s a tragically beautiful story that celebrates and mourns the fragility of life, and every important aspect of it – love, family and friendships.

 “I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you.”

The film will be released on September 19^th 2012, and I strongly recommend going to see it. The trailer looks amazing, but I’m certainly going to be taking a box of tissues with me…

Review: The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 12, Hazel was prepared to die until, at 14, a medical miracle shrunk the tumours in her lungs... for now. 
Two years post-miracle, sixteen-year-old Hazel is post-everything else, too; post-high school, post-friends and post-normalcy. And even though she could live for a long time (whatever that means), Hazel lives tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a constant chemical assault. 
Enter Augustus Waters. A match made at cancer kid support group, Augustus is gorgeous, in remission, and shockingly to her, interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health, life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind.

This book is stunningly beautiful.

I’ve spent a long time after finishing it thinking about what I wanted to say in my review. So much of it has already been said before in the numerous reviews out there that talk about how beautiful, how heartbreaking, how tragic this book is, and I feel like I’m just going to repeat all of that, but here goes.

I loved this book. I loved Hazel. Her strength, her quiet determination to try to just keep going each day, her humour, her realistic outlook – it was pitched absolutely perfectly. She was such an incredible character and was the perfect narrator to take us through. At moments I was laughing out loud.
“Congratulations! You’re a woman! NOW DIE.”
And then I would be sobbing my heart out because it was so unfair and horrible and downright depressing, and yet Green manages to keep the story as a compelling a beautiful piece of artwork, instead of some morbid look at cancer children.

I adored Augustus, he was such a fantastic character, and the two of them bounced off each other and created some beautifully funny, poignant and touching scenes. They made such a fantastic pair, the humour, the realistic outlook on life, the downright tragic moments. It was written so beautifully

That’s one of the things I love most about Green’s books. His writing is so unbelievably beautiful. I can’t even put into words how stunning it is. I first found it in ‘Looking for Alaska’ and I wondered if that was a one off, or whether this book would speak to me in the same way, and it really really does. It’s so incredibly beautiful, and it was for his writing that I originally picked up this book. Not for the story – I’m more of a fantasy kind of girl – but his prose.
Although once I started reading I couldn’t help but fall in love with the story.

At the same time Green has made it very accessible and relatable even to those who aren’t cancer sufferers. I have chronic pain syndrome, something that makes me similarly have good and bad days, try out a plethora of new and exciting medications to ease the pain, and provokes a reaction in friends not unlike the reaction Hazel experiences. Whilst I am in no way comparing my own experiences to those of Hazels, I still found some of her thoughts and sentiments about those things to really strike home in a way that I truly wasn’t expecting from this book. It suddenly made it feel more personal in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. And I was impressed. When I went into the book I almost expected it to be some sort of cloying preaching book about cancer that I, as someone with no experience of it personally or in my family, wouldn’t really connect with. Whereas in reality it was a touching book that brought so much to the table, and allowed me to identify with it in ways that I wouldn’t have expected.

And I cried. God how I cried. It was inevitable and yet utterly heart breaking, and despite the fact that it was a book, and despite the fact that I had only known these characters for a couple of hours, it touched me and provoked emotional responses in me that I didn’t expect to have.

I loved this book. I cannot recommend it enough. It is beautiful, and heart breaking, and took my breath away. And stayed with me long after I turned the last page.

Review: Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy

Simon Van Booy brings to the page his unique talent for poetic dialogue and sumptuous imagery in this his remarkable debut novel of love and loss, dependence and independence. Rebecca has come to Athens to paint. Born and raised in the south of France, Rebecca's mother abandoned her and her sister when they were very young, left to be raised by her loving yet distant grandfather. Young and lost, she seeks solace in the heat of Athens. George has come to Athens to translate language. Dropped off at a New England boarding school when he was a child, he has close to no relationships with anyone, except the study of ancient language and alcohol. Henry has come to Athens to dig. An archaeologist, Henry is on-site at Athens during the day, and roams the Agora on the weekend. Three lost and lonely souls whose worlds become inexorable enmeshed with consequences that ripple far among the ruins of ancient Athens.

Simon Van Booy has a beautiful way with prose that left me in tears at some points when reading his two short story collections ‘Love Begins in Winter’ and ‘The Secret Lives of People in Love’. So I was eagerly anticipating his first full novel ‘Everything Beautiful Began After.’

And it does contain a lot of the things that I loved in Booy’s shorter prose. His trademark lyrical beauty and skill with words is present throughout, but unfortunately some of the skill that weaves his stories together isn’t quite as tight when lengthened to encompass an entire novel.

The story is divided into four ‘books’, each dealing with a new phase in the story. Book one covers half of the span of the novel and is exquisite. Told in third person the story details Rebecca, Henry and George in both the present and the events in their past that have shaped them into the people they’ve become. It twines their lives together beautifully and I loved reading this section. I was swept away in the descriptions, the scenes and the use of all the senses to create the world of Athens. It’s melancholy, stunning, a little depressing but utterly gorgeous.

However, books two and three really didn’t do it for me. They’re told in second person perspective although still from Henry’s side. The lyrical beauty of the first book is turned here into an overly obsessive list of things that ‘Henry’ can see, feel and hear. It became overly depressive and as a result I just wanted it to be over. I don’t mind depressive books – book one is depressing, but it couples that with beauty. This was just pressing and heavy and I wanted to finish it as quickly as I could.
That’s not to say it wasn’t still good and well written – it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Book four made me feel a little less like sitting in a corner and crying – it offers hope at the end of grief and darkness, and leaves the reader with a lot to think about long after the last page has been turned.

Van Booy’s first book is a gorgeously melancholy look at love, grief, death and the way that grief can distort our memories and thoughts, and take on a life of its own.