It's very rainy here in Sweden today (been very rainy the whole of May), but when It's Saturday I just don't care that much since I have my books! :)

               Arc provided by Atria Books through Netgalley

                       Release Date: March 17 th

DNF at 30%

I'll start with the positives: The pretty cover and the enticing title...both of them, made me click the request button.

The writing:

The story is mainly told in such a boring, fastidious way, that I cannot in full conscience give it more stars.

Who knows? Maybe the story does get better...although I doubt it, with such a simpering leading character...

 I'll admit that I am not this book's intended audience, mainly because I like strong plots. And even while reading fantasy, I like it to have solid bases.

 For me, being bombarded on all sides with fashion décor is not what I consider a strong plot...strong descriptive abilities, yes.

Plot? Non.

  The flimsy way in which the paranormal aspect was inserted in the story, was so vague and  unremarkable, that I just couldn't force myself to keep reading this. It was like Sandrine tripped in it: Oh, here it is, I must follow it.

When I reached the twenty percent mark, what did I have?

Long, boring, pretentious descriptions of this and that.

I am all for setting a story's tone, but with such nonsense "floating" around, there's no reason for me to suffer through this.

The sound of "tears being shed"?

This is not magical realism, nor does this read as an horror novel_much less sci-fi! what's with those time dates on the paintings?_, and those were the only logical "explanations" for what happens, or for what the character says. But with such sugared, cheesy descriptions _ of all that is pretty and nice _ the plot doesn't have a proper strong voice as an historical romance.

Also, I really dislike soap opera twists, and having a guy drop dead because he was slapped, was really pushing it. Slap a guy, and he has a fulminant asthma attack?

Really? -_- Well, if he were in a House's episode maybe...

Not that he didn't deserve to die! 

He was an eighteen year old messing around with a fourteen year old girl! *off with his balls!*

Oh, and insta love? Can I just say how "lame" that description felt?

I lost count of the amount of pointless descriptions this book has...so, here's an idea: why not develop a proper romance between grown ups?

Then there were the plot inconsistencies: For instance, the thing with Sandrine's age?

We are told that she was already involved with Leon when she was fifteen, but at the beginning, we are told that he dies in the morning of her fifteenth birthday...

So, what is it? Fourteen sounds "problematic", but fifteen doesn't? :/

Then there's a phrase in which we get a demure twenty five year old Sandrine, imagining how it would feel  to turn around, and to kiss an almost complete stranger _ the love interest _ and how she had never done anything so spontaneous...

Are you kidding me?

For someone with such a good memory, she sure has selective amnesia. Hello?

What about the time when "you" were fourteen and were caught in bed _completely naked _ with "your" beau?

First and probably last book, I'll ever read by this author.

Author's Official Site

Amateur journalism was exactly the right thing for Lovecraft a this critical juncture of his life.  For the next ten years he devoted himself with unflagging energy to the amateur cause; for him it was not merely a hobby, but a full-time occupation.  For someone so unworldly, so sequestered, and - because of his failure to graduate from high school - so diffident about his own abilities, the tiny world of amateur journalism was a place where he could shine.

This man could be considered to be the literary equivalent - or, at least, something quite similar to - Nikola Tesla.   Taken advantage of, at least, in his lifetime?  Check.  Misunderstood/too ahead of his time?  Check.  Suddenly chic in intellectual circles?  Double check.  A very passionate genius whose body of work and entire persona is essentially one of the brightest points of inspiration to a good deal of both contemporary as well as future geeks? Oh, triple check.

 I actually know very little about Lovecraft, in terms of his everyday life, so I truthfully can't tell how accurate or inaccurate this book is - I can only attest to how the book reads, and what it ended up teaching me about the man, the myth, the legend.

In some areas, the author lingers for a phenomenally long time on the sort of things that I would think of as being, well, unimportant and bordering on boring.  Much of Lovecraft's life, prior to his leaving high school, is not all that interesting to me.  I have to say, if most of the information in the book was not of interest to me, then the author's rather dry and, yes, uninspired narration of the major points of Lovecraft's life would have left me dropping the book even before I managed to get to Lovecraft as a young adult.   It reads almost eerily as though it was originally conceived as a short book-length report on the life of Lovecraft.

A saving grace would be the shortness of the content in the book itself (artificially inflated, I will say, with large text, admittedly interesting pictures and the not-so-occasional inclusion of enhanced quotes from the text of the book that fills up to a third of the page at a time.  My problem here is that, despite the very real shortness of the text itself, the version of the book that I have is this space-hogging, thick and hardcover rectangular block of a book.   It's a coffee table book, but an ugly one at that, with an ominous-looking, cheesy cover that looks more as though it would be a book of Lovecraft-inspired art than an oddly shaped and constructed book of the bare essentials of Lovecraft's life.  So I wouldn't exactly want it for my coffee table (if I *had* one to begin with) because it's quite ugly and gaudy.  And this is *me* talking, the woman who found a collection of little postcards inspired by exploitation films and used them as cheap wall art.

At times it does prove to be a good beginning introduction to Lovecraft as an actual person, despite the awkward size and shape of the book (I love to read in the bathtub, but I couldn't exactly balance this mess in any comfortable way while I soak, so that was irritating, to me), but if you already know a lot about Lovecraft (as I hope to, one day) then this one really has very little to offer, aside from some interesting photos that are cool to look at, once.  To be frank, I bet anything that there have been better biographies of the man made already, and there will definitely be better biographies made in the future, in the face of the awesome popularity of everything Lovecraft.

It's a good thing I got this at, oh, one dollar while in the clearance bin at my work, or else I would have felt pretty bummed about buying it, period.   While I was reading it, Monster Man (my S.O) mentioned to me that it's odd that I was reading this to being with, instead of just reading a story or two out of the collection that he had bought for me as a gift.  Touche.

What Will I Do With My Copy of this Book? : Eh, sell it to Half-Price, most likely.