Real Teen Award
-Worst Book 2010
-Worst Book 2010
*New York Times Bestseller
The Gist
Luce learns three things right off the bat at Sword & Cross reform school. Meds, beds and reds. Meds: medication. If you need medication, remember to take it. Beds: dorms, her room, her new home sweet home. Where she’d live until her parents sprung her from this school prison. A small cement-walled room she was not to vandalize. Reds: surveillance cameras that watch her every move. Don’t do anything that you don’t want the reds to see. Arianne Alter – a supposed dangerous Sword & Cross student – pops in during Luce’s school orientation and decides to show her around. Arianne explains to Luce that the classes are hard, boring and a waste of time, and that the students are worse as they head to their first class of the day. While they wait for class to begin, Luce notices somebody – the only person she’s seen here laughing. He’s good-looking and different from everyone else; she feels almost drawn to him. And when he notices her staring, he smiles at her…and then flips her the bird. Shocked by his hostility, Luce finds out from Arianne that his name is Daniel Grigori. And that no one knows exactly why he’s at Sword & Cross. Once class begins, Luce meets Cam, a boy newer to the school, and more than willing to show her around. After Daniel’s rude behavior, Cam’s pleasant and charming attitude makes Luce feel safe and loved. She feels almost drawn to Cam, too. Things go downhill as the day progresses. At lunch, Molly – a nasty girl who loves to pick a fight – dumps a tray of meatloaf over Luce’s head, earning her the silly, yet humiliating nickname, Meatloaf. Luce rushes to the bathroom to clean up and there – while shampooing meat and gravy from her hair – meets Pennyweather van Syckle-Lockwood, and instantly befriends her. Days go by in a haze of talking to Penn and Arianne, taking a few sparse notes in her classes, and daydreaming about Daniel. Though she knows he has shown no interest in her, and that she shouldn’t have any interest in him, she can’t help but feel that she knows him from somewhere, and that they have some kind of connection. But she can’t help but think of Cam who’s always there for her and being blatantly obvious about his feelings towards her. Should she give up on aloof Daniel, and be with Cam instead? With the help of computer-hacking Penn, Luce tries to discover the answers to important questions about Daniel. Why is he at Sword & Cross. Is his past anything like hers? And why does she feel so drawn to him? As Luce finds some answers she receives more and more visits from the shadows (creatures of darkness that only she can see) and puts herself in serious danger.
What We Think
What We Think
Reviewed by Dream Catcher
Number of Pages: 452
Where to begin? Oh, I know! Okay, this is what the majority of the people I know thought of the book: amazing, fantastic, five stars, A+, best book I’ve ever read! No. Here’s what I thought of the book: eh, stupid in places, melodramatic, no plot, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Reading this review could possibly save you a lot of time, and some money; I don’t recommend you go out and read this. It took me weeks’ worth of late night attempting to read something – any amount of pages would do – in order to eventually read the book. So eventually – and I do mean eventually (took me months to read it) – I finished the book. And let me tell you it was 452 pages of I-shouldn’t-have-bothered. I know this sounds harsh, and the book truly wasn’t agonizing (in fact the ending wasn’t half bad. WAY better than the beginning, to say the least) but if I’d known how I’d like the book before I’d bought it…I wouldn’t have bought it. Or at least I wouldn’t have really wanted to buy it. I kind of wish I had known – it would have saved me $17.99. Yeah. I bought the hard cover. Which brings me to my first point: the cover itself. Truly, it’s a beautiful cover. Wonderful cover-art. It’s eye-catching and dramatic and emotional. Very intriguing. That’s what really made me want to read the book in the first place, so points for a great cover. It’s weird. People always say to never judge a book by its cover but who doesn’t? Sure, I book needs great characters and interesting plot, but no one’s even going to look at it if the cover and title aren’t good! Now. The title: Fallen. Also dramatic and intriguing. That, along with the cover art, really made me want to read this book. I thought, hmmm, sounds like my kind of sad romance. I kept picking it up and setting it back down in the book stores, not sure if I quite liked what I read on the inside flap. But, obviously, the cover and the title finally got to me and I thought, oh why not? Everyone says it’s amazing anyways! Well, I’ll never go to those people for reading material ever again. Moving on. There’s only one tiny complaint about the book’s plot: there wasn’t one. So many pages and probably 400 of them meant nothing to anything. They were fluffy scenes that had little significance to the book (and the series) overall. No plot equals bored Dream Catcher. That’s what made the book so hard to get through. I had to put the book down every so often because I got bored. Nothing was happening in the story. Just Luce’s random and rather unsettling love for Daniel, Cam’s creepy one-way romance with Luce, and lots and lots of unnecessary stalking. Lots and lots.
And so I move on to my next point: characters. Starting with our lovely protagonist, Lucinda. At times she was a normal main character and I could tolerate her. Other times she was weird, and not in a good way. More like a sketchy, I-love-stalking-random-reform-school-boys way. She almost constantly weirded me out. She’s often clueless and not particularly bright, despite the fact she has a four-point-oh in every one of her classes. I could have dealt with those characteristics. But there is one thing I can not condone in romance novels. Obsessive stalking. She’s constantly thinking about Daniel. Daniel this and Daniel that. Where is he right now? What’s he thinking about? Why is he thinking about it? Who are his friends? His Enemies? It got annoying rather quickly. I may have been able to stand this if he had shown even the tiniest bit or interest towards her. But he doesn’t! He insults her and tells her repeatedly that he’s creeped out by her.Yet she continues to obsess over him. I just didn’t feel that Luce was a particularly great main character. Weak and predictable. Next is, of course, Daniel. At first he’s rude and moody. Annoyingly so. To give him credit, he gets less annoying near the end. But that’s probably not good enough considering the author probably envisioned him as the next Edward Cullen. But I do think Daniel isn’t a half-bad character. Some of his dialogue is a little awkward, but so is Luce’s so I kind of got used to it. But if I thought Luce and Daniel were awkward characters, then I don’t know what Cam is. Omniscient Cam, popping up everywhere, knowing everything there is to know about Luce, and flirting his way into Luce’s heart. Or he tries to. Maybe Luce found him charming, but I certainly didn’t. Now whenever I think of the name Cam two words come to mind: creep and stalker. Sorry to any Cam’s out there. I’m sure you’re nothing like this guy. My two favorite characters in this book were Arianne and Pennyweather van Syckle-Lockwood. Arianne was creepy and obviously in reform school for a reason. But that’s why she was one of my favorite characters. She was wacky and funny and a person I always looked forward to in the story. Penn was the loyal friend. She was a nice, sensible character and added balance to a story that at times flew out of control. So for characters, Lauren Kate didn’t completely sweep me off my feet, but I didn’t find all of them terrible. Most of them were just a little off, for one reason or another.
There was a huge hole in the setting that I could sometimes overlook and other times almost laughed at: the lack of security at this reform school. This school is guarded only by half-working reds which obviously weren’t carefully monitored. I mean, seriously! This is a reform school. It’s rather silly and not very believable. I think that if Lauren Kate had done some research on reform schools, she could have made the experience more real. Here is a little more absurdity. Sometimes the writing just plain doesn’t make sense. For instance, there’s a part in the book where Luce is on a beach, and she’s been standing (key word being STANDING, not sitting, not crouching, not picking up handfuls of sand) on the beach for maybe two minutes. They haven’t touched to sand at all yet when she wipes her eyes it says her eyes sting from the sand on her fingers. Okay, how did she get sand on her fingers? Did a wind blow sand onto her fingers? If so, it doesn’t say anything about that in the book. The author should have written it. I know that’s extremely nit-picky and I know this isn’t a good reason for saying the book wasn’t satisfactory. But small details like this should be smoothed out and made perfect by the author during the editing process, or at least by the editor while they edit the book. Point being, someone should have caught that. But they didn’t. There were tiny things like that throughout the whole book, and I couldn’t let them slide. I had to mention them somewhere, because this is a published book, and I expect no sloppiness from a published book (though maybe I should stop expecting that).
Finally on to the writing style. This is why the book gets a pretty good grade (well, good for how I’ve been bashing it). The style of the writing is pretty good, actually. It’s unique and detailed and different from other books I’ve read. So that’s a plus. I don’t have much else to say about that. It’s her writing style, her voice, who am I to tell her it’s not good? And I wouldn’t because it sounded good anyways. What she really needs to work on are plot and believability. And maybe a little on character, too. Again, I wish I hadn’t started reading this because now I have to finish what I’ve started (meaning reading Torment and Rapture, books two and three of the Fallen series). I’ve heard rumors that there’s a love-triangle in Torment. I’ve grown to hate love triangles ever since the infamous Bella-Jacob-Edward triangle (more of a peak, with Edward and Jacob loving Bella, but not each other…but that’s beside the point). So, stay tuned for the second in the series, Torment, which will be a review similar this one (unless, for some reason, it’s infinitely better than Fallen, in which case I would give it a much better grade…). Sorry to all the people who loved Fallen – because I know many people adored it. I don’t mean to be harsh or insulting. I just didn’t think it was a very good book. Mostly, it was okay. But I know it’s not pleasant to read one of your favorite books be bashed. But Fallen just didn’t really work for me.
Real Teen Rating~ D : It passes time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment