(I feel like I've written this review a thousand times. All of zem amalgamate into one.)

There was a turmoil watering down amongst us the day I realized there were too many bees in this world. I danced for the first time in a long while when I found this, experienced it first hand. Einstein lied, or whoever the fuck did saying there were too few. Not lied, per se, but subjectified it. Oh yes, they did. For there are people, and plants, amongst us for whom the bees stroll in orchards and gardens and whatever. For others like me, they pull the strings and make us dance like a marionette, stinging and inflating us with their acupressure of death. #trufax

There have been turmoils brewing in the readership for so long there have been books. For so long there have been books, some of the unrelenting cynicism- some of the jaded eyes that callously seek pattern, repetition, correlation- have been finding numerous others just like them. Historians and anthropologists debate over whether there is a causal link. This long standing debate begets much strife that compounds with each generation but one saying stands above all: if a story seems trite, should the reader continue suffering like a rat's fart? That remains for you, the reader, with varying and capricious demands, to decide. #sociallesson

Some call it infestation, others explain it in terms of demand and supply. I call it exploitation, but whatever floats *your* boat.

If I give off negatives vibes, will the Dark World ever get to shine?



If I am cryptic and no one understands, am I speaking hogwash or being cryptic?

If I keep asking rhetorical questions, not expecting answers, will you give a rat's fly? Will I give a rat's fly that you don't give a rat's fly?

YES, I will as well I should,
so without further ado,
scraping away the gobbledygook
here is my review for tu and vous
(but halt! behold a crappy rhyme
'cause you can't even with my psyche)

The Dark World, whence come monsters and predators, is not my choice of vacation but some creatures rage wars over it. Monsters v/s predators. It depends entirely on your perception who becomes the monster and what un-becomes these monsters. The ones on the other sides are the predators. For once, they don't want shit with human; nobody gives a shit about protecting humans; humans aren't fucking speshul snowflakes to be saved from the big, bad wolves. Partially, because good and evil are relatively used in this war.

Paige Kelly saves a kid's life and gets embroiled in this war: monsters hunt her and predators want to use her. No good deed goes unpunished, or so goes Faust. Actually, Faust says there are some waters humans shouldn't travel, but same thing, right? Good things are the domain of one deerLord. And let's not talk Pagan Gods, okay. They can be pretty scary and I'd rather not mess with them.



No offense, no one.

Demons after you, Paige Kelly runnnnnnn!

There are fights, creature in flames and blasts. Starndard stuff, you'd expect. *yawn*

Paige has a sarcastic, endearing(don't knock it till you've tried it) voice in the beginning but it's just one end of the spectrum. As she stars to grow and progress through the story(because character development, methinks), her narration becomes boring and soulful and messy. But mostly boring.

That's one word for the book: boring.

To ameliorate this, enters Logan Bradley. Logan Bradley is a teenage guy I could get behind. AT FIRST. But zen, character development, complexity and all the underlying crap. He's funny and faux-arrogant and sure, had he been limited to that, he wouldn't be a boring character. So of course, we have a tortured souls and haunted eyes and oh-so-sad past because war and death. This ruined him for me. RUINED!

Besides, my handwriting is awesome and everyone should be subjected to it at least once.

For sure he's not the wittiest cut of the veal, but these are funnies I could laugh at, because I am lame, but god no development. Not like that. Don't haunt your character unless you can convey it, unless your character has enough of a persona to handle it, make it look real. Don't use deaths to as a tool for your story or just for the sake of making characters more real. Two tortured souls as one, their passion and loyalty tested by one battle after another. Will their love triumph this war?

(If I make a face and no one sees it, are my emotions real?

Just in case:
)

The demons are vapid and the action scenes threadbare. You know you're in deep shit when magic swords that disappear(CARTER KANE) fail to rejuvenate you. You're in deeper, derpier shit when hai-yah! secret fighting lessons make you long for the inanity of Oggy and the Cockroaches. Which sucks, by the way.

Shultz did try to portray vivid side characters with layers, so kudos on that. There's a particular demon and a particular uncle who I could have classified as characters of interest, but sadly, the main voices were boring enough to make me reconsider. There are plots and going-ons and motives and parleys that mustn't be revealed which aren't ferried across to us because humans! and teenagers! Which, by the by, makes total sense but a being out of the loop does the book no favor, IMO. Shultz also goes for a non-instalove, making us wait for months that pass by in pages to see them fall in #truluv with each other. I appreciated this, but couldn't root for nor believe in it. Their chemistry didn't spark, principally because of the narrator's voice and her penchant for boring me.

All in all: run-of-the-mill premise, a couple atypical elements, good effort, almost-400 pages and a tedious narration make for a review that could be short but isn't because I tend to bullshit. A lot. AMAZING COVER, though.


Because I shouldn't be the only one creeped out.

Thank you, Harlequin Teen!

But sometimes you need to light a fire.

If only. Dorothy Must Die was one of the most anticipated debut novel of 2014 of mine, and so far, it's been the biggest disappointment for me and my three bags of wool. It was barely a flame, not even able to attract a moth like me, driving me to skip it at times for Archie comics and I don't even like them. Not to say it was a drag(it totally was but I'm being nice), but it's the same fairytale-the Wizard of Oz- extended, instead of retold with imagination and fuckery like I expected.

Dorothy is evil, the yellow road is crumbling, and crows have human eyes and ears.

-in times like these, the Wicked will rise!

What entails is a shoddy revolution, Wicked Witches, mutilated monkeys and the rest. And yet, it's pretty much the same story I saw(sadly, yes) back when I was in the second grade(woe used to be me). There's the evil ruler(in this case, Dorothy), there are the witches(in this case, Wicked) who recruit a girl from Kansas(in this case, not so sweet and named Amy), and words are flipped. However, this didn't affect, or contributed to my mild feelings for the characters were interesting, and had more depth than your average prom king and queen in a typical American flick(where, incidentally, they're the first ones to be slashed/chopped/mutilated). And that was the strongest factor in favor of Dorothy Must Die for me.

From Kansas girls to her rat to the witches and the Tin Woodman, not one character was brushed off with superficiality. Certainly there were character who didn't play much of a part, didn't have enough screentime for us to get acquainted, but in snide and side remarks, one can gather that they're much more than they appear as first, or act as. Case in point: Mombi, the Wicked witch of...somewhere.

Another pro to be noted was there were certain gruesome creatures, certain whimsical beings that were fun to imagine.


Creepy


Creepier


Creepiest

While we're on that, I must add that the book lacked a certain atmosphere, sans which the story didn't work for me. The enchantment was lost on me, and I was bored for a 4-fucking-32 pages while. In itself, the writing and telling of the land of Oz, its description, was juvenile, and had it not been for the dark subjects discussed(self-mutilation, forced child labor et cetra), I would've suspected it to be a light read. Yet I don't mean to imply that Amy's voice was lacking; simply that when one encounters an exotic, decrepit land like Oz, one expects a tone to be set for full engagement in the story. And Ms Paige failed to meet my standards on that count.

The story is straight-forward for most of the book, with no twists or turns or misdirections taking place. All work and no play(with the characters) made the book a bogus read.

Moreover, and I wholly realize I might be acting fastidious and impossible, there were a number of inconsistencies, trivial details lacking/erroneous/mismatched. Strap in, it's gonna be a long one.

1.First off all, the biggest twist to this rather plodding story, the one that provided a bit of umph! factor that is introduced at almost the end has already been given away in the blurb. Spoiler much?

2.Amy and the trailer she lives in are flown away by a tornado to the land of Oz. Yet weeks later, she spies on her mom searching and finding an old sweater of Amy's in a strange place. Where did that come from?

3.

The princess felt that their conversation ruined the apple-eating experience and was therefore a violation of the Happiness Decree...
It[eating apples] was against the Happiness Decree. It's not worth the risk.

Is it deliberate or am I reading it wrong?

4.Nox is introduced as the strongest fighter in the Order, yet Melindra almost always defeats him because Melindra was by far the best of us all. I guess you could always say there's a difference being the best and the strongest, but I'll tell you that that registers on bullshit-radar.

5.According to some:
Amy is the one one to kill Dorothy because.
But the because is so stupid you don't want to know.
Because you[Amy] understand her(since they're both from Kansas).
There was no understanding required for their plan.

According to others:
Amy is the one to kill Dorothy just because.
Because there are certain tools and people and methods.
(They're both from Kansas.)
(I think I like this better, more mysterious.)

6.Multiple characters change their appearances, Polyjuice Potion style.

First character is Amy, pretending to be someone she isn't amongst people who have known the person she is pretending at for a long time. I think it's safe to assume Amy had been magically provided with the poor person's voicebox along with their entire appearance, because surely Amy wouldn't have been able to fake her voice for so long.

Second character is...let's take a variaable:X. And yet, here's how X is recognized:
Their[gender pluralized] voice was all X.

Third character...whatever.

7. A sly, nervous grin.
What the actual fuck is a sly, nervous grin?
I can't grin slyly and nervously simultaneously, and believe you me, I did try. Hell, I went out to smile at the stray dogs lazing outside my gates. And I have a little-graver-than-slight phobia of canines.

8.I didn't know what was Good or Wicked anymore. All I knew was what was right.
And ignoring an innocent kidnapped and tortured is so right.

Whew! Glad we're done with that, now I can concentrate on expounding on the very few positives I have.

Dorothy was a fantastic protagonist:kick-ass not only because she can literally kick-ass, but because she has the personality and voice of a kick-asser. She is bitter, and doesn't have the noblest reasons for wanting things always, albeit she's a good person at heart.

...just to say I had someone

Here she admits that she would help someone, anyone just to say that she had someone to help whom she'd go to any lengths for. She is played or maybe she isn't, she never knows; this, as expected, confuses and frustrates her. Doubt and questions creep in; is her noble cause really hers?

Despite failing to set the tone, each chapter ended on these awesome punch lines; and there were wonderful quotes in between that helped in describing the characters, their passions and so much more.

Something about that much sweetness didn't feel right.

And then I thought: Bring it on. There’s no place like anywhere but here.

I didn't want to believe her, but I knew all too well that you can't always get what you want.

"Magic loves change," she said with a sigh. "Do enough of it and it will warp you in strange ways..."

A personal favorite:

We're off to see the wizard!

Thus my mixed bag of feelings can be shortened down to two indisputable particulars:
The land of Oz didn't enchant me.
Monkeys are awesome.

A better book, with similar outline, would be The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It's middle-grade, but it will twist your emotions so much more, and the little hint of wayyy-into-future romance is more heart-warming than the one here.



Ultimate rating: 2.5

Abandoned at 30%

I'm trying and trying and trying to figure out how come I was so fucking fascinated with Cinder, and how did I even get through Scarlet?

These characters are so lackluster, the setting has no meaning, there is no atmosphere, and politics? Fuck politics, we'll have stupid decisions and idiotic emperors and angst instead. But I love Cyborgs and I loved Cinder, as a character and she wasn't so bad in this one as well. But hear me out:

Each bloody character falls into either of the two groups: Bad or Good. Misunderstood, misheard, failed system, manipulated! Even Thorne and Wolf are just. such. nice. guys. This is where the book Cinder beat the next two installments because the step-mother wasn't really bad from every perspective. And the bad characters. Evilllllllllllll. Can we have any other development besides their fucking evilosity? No no no!!!!!!!

The worst is I had so many expectations, and now I don't give a rat's ass.

There were so many inconsistencies and things I couldn't wrap my head around. Like, Thorne says to Cress that they better hurry or they'd be eaten alive by vultures. Excuse me, I'm thinking mutant vultures but why wouldn't you say so? Thorne and Cress make ropes of Cress's shorn off locks. Terribly inconvenient is what I think. Cinder lands in the middle of a no-name African town/village, and kids converse amongst themselves in English. Could be I'm narrow-minded or Cinder was automatically translating.

The first two books had more than their fair amount of faults and mistakes and, in all propriety, I should've rated them 3.5 and 2.5 respectively, but the fun they provided trumped everything. Not in Cress's case.

So yeah, no can do. I don't want to be the black sheep because I used to be in love with the series, the spin on fairytales and cyborg princesses, but at the moment, I have buttload of ARC's, exams tomorrow and other upcoming books. For now, I'm abandoning it. I'll probably pick it up and finish it, maybe even read Winter when it comes out, but for now, goodbye book.

[But I really do want to finish the story if the cyborg-princesses. Because a) it was so fun, fun, fun and b) I don't come across many cyborg princesses.]

Minority opinion, mine. Everybody and their bastard niece they're gonna kill loves this book, so take this review with a grain of salt.