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review 2015-02-21 13:10
Ruthless Is Such An Understatement
Ruthless People - J.J. McAvoy

“She looks like a sweet little lamb from afar, but when you get close, you find out she skinned and ate the damn thing just to use it as a coat."

 

I struggled with my rating of this book. I can’t remember the last time I loathed and loved a novel, all at the same time. But it made me feel, and that is always a point in my book.

I’m going to start with the good stuff, so we can get to the ugly stuff lately.

 

The Good

 

- The Mechanics between the families were well made; I liked the idea of a modern mafia invested on drug dealing.

- No dull moments in here. The plot was fast-pace and hard to take your eyes off it.

- The chemistry between Melody and Liam was so obvious it could as well slap me in the face. When they weren’t doing this: 

 

 

They were doing this: 

 

 

And I was fine in both times.

 

BLOODY FUCKING MELODY. What an amazing character. Ruthless, strong, independent. This woman murdered and pillaged while wearing high heels. And I’m SO fine with that.

 

- The side characters had brilliant personalities, enough that each one of them could have their own book and it would be an entertaining read.

- I care enough to read the second book of the trilogy.

 

The Bad

 

- Oh god,THE PLOT HOLES. There we so many of them this book was starting to look like a Swiss cheese.

 

- The plot was also too predictable and sometimes it went borderline ridiculous.

 

- It was too close to insta-love/insta-lust to my tastes. My underwear may enjoy this, but my brain doesn’t. If you’re already writing sex at 20% of the book you hardly had time to develop the relationship of the characters before they do it.

- Who the hell bangs after being shot? TWICE?!

 

The Ugly

- I don’t know if this book had a professional editor but if it did the guy was blind. Remember that post I made about commas? The author did NOT read it. I started to take notes of the weird choppy sentences but gave up when I had about 50 of them.

 

*Sentence: Recommended if you need a fun read with some erotic thrown in. If you want something to think about…well. This is no literacy prize.*

 

If you by chance decides to try this book,let’s do a drinking game: Take a hit every time Liam thinks about grabbing Melody’s ass. We will both have drunk poisoning on the first chapter.

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review 2014-04-23 17:36
Huh?
Vivian Divine Is Dead - Lauren Sabel

***This review has also been posted on The Social Potato

Vivian Divine is Dead is so bad that it’s almost comical. I was craughing after finishing it. No joke. With its clichés and "coincidences", this book is like a big fat joke. This is something that would be a million times better on TV than on paper. When you write a book, it’s important you close all the loop holes or at least attempt to. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen in this book. What we have here instead are dramatic twists that are so predictable they just make you want to bang your head on a wall.

Vivian Divine came from a perfect family. Her mother was voted Hollywood’s most beautiful woman 3 times in a row. Her dad's one of the best directors in Hollywood and she herself was the youngest person to be nominated for an Oscar. She had a perfect boyfriend and a beautiful best friend (throw in some self-image issues, too, when she compares herself to her bff) but then her mother died (6 months before the start of the novel) and her father tried to commit suicide. They are trapped in a bubble of grief and no one can seem to catch a break. Her boyfriend cheats on her with her best friend (there’s that trope), her life is in danger (ooh, another one) and now she must go on the run (YAY! Another one, too).

The one thing extremely off with the situation is how her bodyguard lets her go off on her own into the wild without any backup. NO ONE lets celebs go on the run on their own, never mind a celeb who's not even an adult (she is like 16!). I cannot believe Vivian never questioned that. She must have lived a VERY sheltered life.

Which is kind of evident from the fact that Vivian doesn’t even understand the seriousness of the situation she is in. The police may or may not be trying to hunt her down and she is on her way to another country to take refuge, yet she still manages to be self-important and goes around expecting everything to be handed to her on a silver platter. Welcome to the real world, hon. But you know what? She is not ‘that’ bad; she realizes that the real world is completely different because like there are people who go to churches with enough gold to buy Beverly Hills but cannot afford to buy shoes. So, so sad. *sigh*

Vivian Divine also feels like people owe her. She commands people to help her, strangers that have no obligation to do so but should because she ‘wants’ them to.  *shakes head*. She is a flip flop of a character. I cannot actually decide what the author wants us to feel. Are we supposed to like her or are we supposed to be annoyed? Hell, what does Vivian even want herself? I GOT NO IDEA because she cannot make her bloody mind.

The author tries to create a contrast between the environment and where our main character comes from, but the author takes it to the extreme, like to the extreme-extreme. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Her family is surprisingly normal (like before everything went down the shitter) and I have no idea how I feel about that. On one hand it's a positive portrayal of  families and doesn't follow the 'bad parents' stereotype (except her dad is overworked and doesn't give her enough time) but on the other hand, I feel like it just seems so weird that they are these famous Hollywood people and yet they appear extremely normal. This could be a result of my own bias but I definitely found the normalcy somewhat odd.

That wasn't the only thing that struck me as odd, though - the romance was off-the-charts weird. It was horrible. For the first day there seems to be hope that you might see a somewhat developed romance, but then the next day the L words are thought and it’s just like a wtf moment. This book has a tendency to make you go:



Chloe would look pretty damn awesome as the cover of the book. That also happened to be my reaction to the plot.Plot? What plot? This is a soap opera with dramatic twists that can be seen coming from MILES away. It’s not so much unpredictable as it is question mark inducing.

Vivan seems to arrive at the right places and strangers always seem willing to help her. She even compares this to how ‘back home’ people won’t help an old lady cross the road and everyone seems to be nice here. Wait, wait, hold on a second; is this supposed to be the real world because where the fuck is the real world? COINCIDENCES LIKE THESE DON’T HAPPEN.

With all that said, the ending was actually pretty nice. I said that. Go ahead. Throw stuff at me (I have a tendency to do this). I was surprised by it but it did nothing to redeem the book. The book still sucked and I wished I could have my time back.

In all honesty, I really wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. It’s a waste of time and unless you’re really bored and cannot find any books to read, skip this and read something that’s been on your shelf since the dawn of time.

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text 2014-03-27 23:00
Progress update: I've read 8%.
Fish & Chips - Abigail Roux,Madeleine Urban

Fake Relationships is one of my favorite tropes. Hard to do that one wrong.

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text 2014-03-26 23:07
I'm supposed to be reading this...
Fish & Chips - Abigail Roux,Madeleine Urban

.... because Kate is a big mean bully.

 

Admittedly, this is my favorite Cut & Run book, because of all the campy cheesiness and the whole lotta fun going on if you ignore the glaring plot holes. In fact, 'FBI back up team stuck in a cruise ship pantry for a week' has become my yardstick for plot holiness. On a scale of 1 to FBI back up team stuck in a cruise ship pantry for a week, how hard did you roll your eyes? So I have actually reread this book before. But I guess I'm still peeved at B&C (which Kate also forced me to read. Just like Stars and Stripes. I am starting to sound like a spineless whiner. Thanks, Kate), so my desire to pick it up right now is a little lacking.

 

Yeah, I am going to read this. Soon. Ish.

 

 

 

 

 

But first I am reading No Homo. Don't tell Kate.

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review 2014-03-19 21:08
The Testing - Joelle Charbonneau

It has taken me forever to get around to reviewing this book, even though I read it ages ago. And why is that you might ask? I rated it 4 stars, so I must have liked it! And the truth is yes, I did like it, but the issue that "The Testing" has, is that it is basically "The Hunger Games: Reloaded". It has almost all the same elements, it has the same setup. The difference between "The Hunger Games" and "The Testing" as far as I can see is the characters.

When I read "The Hunger Games", I laughed, I cried, I got mad. The characters and situations elicited emotions from me. I responded to the book, I cared about the "people" in it. When I read "The Testing", I recognized that situations were stressful and dangerous, I realized that people were evil and frustrating, but while I had those realizations they did not really affect me as a reader in any way, shape, or form. I am not sure if it is due to a lack of development of these characters, or maybe I just did not connect with them for some other reason. Maybe it is the way the plot is structured or the way obstacles are introduced. Whatever the reason, this book just did not live up to the book that it was essentially copying.

All those things being said, I did enjoy this book a good bit. I think that is because I liked "The Hunger Games" series so much that anything similar I can read as a "bonus" makes me happy. I have not read any additional books in this series but I really hope that Charbonneau finds her own voice in the subsequent books and diverges a little from the path that Collins has already taken.

I'd recommend this book to fans of "The Hunger Games" with the caution that you need to not expect anything new, and it would help to not compare this book and its characters to "The Hunger Games" if you can help it. It just will not live up to those kinds of expectations.

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