March Review

This month was kind of a weird conglomeration of books, only a few of which I actually enjoyed.

You may be surprised to see Simon Vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, since I featured it in my post about LGBT representation (which you can read here), but the movie Love, Simon happened, and I had a lot of feelings about the entirety of the movie. It was magnificent and thus, I reread the book, and then saw the movie again. BUT, this is a review about books, not my emotional upheaval over representation in movies, so let's get start on what I read this month!

I started out with Julie Murphy's Side Effects May Vary, which I ultimately did not enjoy. This book felt less like a story and more of a practice in character likability based on circumstance vs personality. Alice as a character was very compelling, and the story itself was an interesting concept, but I found Harvey's persistent obsession with her both irritating and unhealthy. His struggle with his feelings for her was more interesting than Alice's debate over what kind of person she wanted to be, simply because Harvey was a much more likable character.

Alice did change in the end, I'll give her that, but her life altering occurrence wasn't enough to do that. She had to make herself change. And while that's a good promotion of the idea that change has to come from within, it was preceded by a toxic story with characters the reader didn't want to like. Almost the opposite of They Both Die in the End, Side Effects May Vary is the reaction to the sudden gift of life in the face of death. A remission, instead of a death sentence. Only, instead of creating something worth living for, Alice finds herself wishing for death, because she used what were supposed to be her last hours to tear down the people around her.

An unique read, but ultimately driven by a terrible person and a foolish one, circling each other with obsessive severity and the need to be loved.

I followed up that book with Diana Peterfreund's For Darkness Shows the Stars. As a huge fan of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, I was exciting for this book, a futuristic retelling of her story Persuasion. And while it took me a bit to get into the novel (I blame second hand embarrassment and initial confusion over the world building), I ultimately couldn't put it down. Full of clever parallels and epistolary chapters, the exploration of Kai and Elliots relationship is both painful and hopeful, a true slow burn love story that Austen would have been proud of.

But it wasn't just about the romance, which I appreciated. For Darkness Shows the Stars is about a girl trying to keep the people under her care alive, despite the best efforts of her father to exert his complete control and frivolous desires over his estate. Elliot North is alone in her beliefs, alone in her struggles, and alone in her life, ever since her best friend Kai left for parts unknown. And that abandonment is felt throughout the story, as so much of Elliot is dedicated to keeping people alive, that she hardly has a moment to look at herself and realize she isn't truly living.

This story was interwoven with so much original lore, so much world building, that it took a bit to find the characters beneath their invented beliefs and social standing. But once I did, I held on for dear life, wanting to believe that love would win, even if it did take a little persuading.

There is a sequel, but I haven't decided whether or not I want to continue with the story or just leave it as the hopeful, lovely conclusion the first book presented me with.

After jumping around in time a little bit, I settled down with a quick read about lesbians, because LGBT representation continues to be an important thing to me. However, Sara Ryan's Empress of the World didn't impress me that much.

Empress of the World was one of those books whose potential was bigger than the actual story. It was a study in character image and development, and while it technically met all the requirements for a coming of age/coming out book, it still felt like it was missing something. The book itself was very surface level, and the characters felt half baked, like by tossing in their trauma and a few preferences it would be enough to make them more than clay gollums. The story progressed fast and hard, and the character's insecurity and jealousy made it hard to plow through the hundred pages that made up this book.

The formatting was the only thing that really provided insight into how the main character's mind worked. It's set up as a field journal for a future archaeologist obsessed with answers, to the point where she would create and assume her own in order to understand the world and people around her. Which is apparently a crime, according to the love interest, who's too busy trying not to define herself to actually understand how much Nic wants to love and know her. But maybe I'm projecting. Regardless, it was a quick and dissatisfying read.

Following Empress of the World was another rather dissatisfying read. Danielle Paige's Dorothy Must Die was a book I'd been eyeing for a long time, but none of my friends read it in high school, so neither did I. Now, however, I think I've read it a little too late, which is the unfortunate case with some young adult fiction.

While a lot of the book is focused on promoting who you are inside in order to become something more, a lot of it was also outer appearance based and focused on being manipulated into becoming who someone else wanted you to be. At it's basest level, it was about circumstance and how that shapes a person's identity.

The book was long but rushed. Like Paige was trying to shove as much action as possible into one book, deciding at the last minute to shake things up by finishing with a sequel. A lot of the things she wanted to seem emotional--sacrifices, deaths, etc--came at the wrong time, too early for the reader to have a real emotional connection. Characters appeared in droves, and then disappeared almost as quickly, making the pages cluttered and the interactions stilted, because I didn't know who I was expected to remember.

Amy, the main character, is callous and doesn't have much of a personality beyond sarcasm and comparing herself to others.

The love interest and subsequent sort of love story is practically nonexistent, and, in my opinion, completely unnecessary. It was there just to (barely) be there, and was kind of distracting and annoying in it's irrelevance. While it was nice to have a boy exist solely as a love interest, a gender swap I kind appreciated on principal, the practice of characters serving only romantic purpose is overplayed and ridiculous. Nox as a character had a lot of potential as a warrior, but the fact that every girl in the resistance was in love with him and that jealousy over him was a factor that played into training, made reading a decent chunk of the book unenjoyable.

The violence in the story was almost comically gruesome. It reminded me if Yu Hua's novel To Live, where the deaths are still tragic, but satirical and strange, too ridiculous to be believed. Most of the terrible stuff in Dorothy had that strange feeling: perhaps it was a feeling of detachment on behalf of the reader? Or trouble with suspension of disbelief?

The premise, however, was clever. I have a soft spot for retold fairy tales, and given my immense love for Wicked, a twisted oz where things are not as they seem should've been my cup of tea. But it didn't quite hit all the boxes I wanted it too, spending too long on things that didn't matter and bypassing the really interesting things without much thought.

I don't plan on continuing the series, although I supposed on of you could and then tell me about it.

The last new book I read this month (shout out to Simon, I love you, but I already wrote about you!) was Alice Oseman's Solitaire. I've been reading Oseman's webcomic Heartstopper since last year, and quickly fell in love with the characters. So when I heard about Solitaire, a standalone novel that featured the characters in the comic, I jumped at the chance to read it.

A clever mix of coming of age and schoolyard mystery, Solitaire looks into the life of Vicotria Spring, a British high schooler who just kind of wants to stop. Tori doesn't care about much. She's a depressed person without knowing it, and her circumstances and interactions with her friends and family don't help.

What I originally feared might be a reverse manic pixie dream girl trope turned into a study into human nature and the choices we make to live our lives. Nothing is easy and most of the time it seems like no one cares. But caring, it turns out, is a conscious choice, because if you don't choose to do something, the nothingness will consume you, until you realize you've lost yourself along the way.

Tori's struggles with changing friends is only amplified by the sudden appearance of both the mysterious prankster group solitaire and by the notorious Michael Holden, a boy known more for his exuberance than anything else.

It's cliche in that it's girl meets boy, girl finds herself, but it's the steps in between that matter. Tori meets Michael, Tori realizes that she has to be the one to step forward, but that it's okay not to do it alone. It's okay to fail. It's okay to be messy and sad and angry, because the world is messy and sad and angry. It's okay to be true, and not everyone is fake. Sometimes, humanity is just as it seems, be it good or bad. So, yeah, Tori meets Michael, Tori finds herself. But she finds michael too. And he finds himself, and her. And she finds her brother, buried within himself, because she's buried too, and sometimes it takes digging for someone else to uncover yourself too.

Solitaire isn't just solving a mystery; it's realizing that people are real, that you are real, and sometimes that realness just means being sad. It's okay to be sad. But choices are still important, even in the midst of finding who you are, perhaps even more so then.

However, reading a book set so deeply in the mind of someone who is depressed did some strange things to my mind. Shout out to people who have depression, because that stuff is Hard, and I got kind of lost in my own head trying to keep myself separated from Tori. I got a little lost and had some emotional problems, but such is the life of someone very empathetically attached to literally everything.

Regardless, I enjoyed Solitaire a lot and definitely encourage anyone who made it all the way to the bottom of this review to read it.

And that brings us to the end of my March reading list. I hope you found something to read among the reviews, or at least enjoyed getting to read about what I read.

As always, keep writing, my friends.

Sam

Literary recommendation: Ask the Passengers

Movie recommendation: Love, Simon

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