Category: Book review

Swindled out of his inheritance, recently orphaned David Balfour finds himself kidnapped and aboard a slave ship bound for the Carolinas shortly after the Jacobite rising of 1745. A shipwreck leads to a chance encounter and an unlikely rescuer. Highland rebel and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. An incredible friendship blossoms between the two young men, who occupy opposite ends of the political and religious spectra. Together they return to the mainland, outwit many murderous foes and schemers, and attempt to restore David to his rightful fortune.

I gotta admit that this book is slightly overhyped on the internet. I read this book since I’ve read on internet that this book was very good, but after having actually read this book I need to say that this book is so much less impressive as people on the internet claim it to be. 

This book had a intriguing and good premise for a plot since we follow a 17-year-old named David Balfour, who is alone in the world of 1751 Scotland. I gotta admit that if I was him in that scenario I would be very fucked. 

The plot here is very sad because the main characters seems to be followed by a dark cloud of betrayal and danger while he is trying to search for his own identity after his father dies. 

I gotta admit that I liked the rich historical context this book has, and at the same time I also liked a lot this book’s backdrop of 18th-century Scotland. I found both of those aspects in this book to be very fun, interesting and intriguing and thats why I said above that this book had a intriguing and good premise for a plot.

The author is able to capture the landscape and cultural tensions of the time in which the plot of this book takes place in. Which in a way gives us a vivid sense of place. 

But there are a lot of times where this book drags a lot which made it difficult to say interesting and engaged in the book as I was reading it.

The main character here was okay for the most part. He begins as a very reliable protagonist for this book but the deeper we get into this book the more the main character’s journey begins to lack a form of depth to it which made it difficult for me at least to connect with him the deeper I went into this book. 

When it comes to the side characters of this book, they feel very one-dimensional and gave me the impression that the author didn’t really care about the side characters but needed them to connect the dots for the plot to be complete. 

The writing style in this book is fun because for the most part it is very rich, descriptive and it sets a very nice tone to the plot. But at times the writing style uses way too many words about situations or things which could have been explained in one sentence. And in a way this affects the action happening in this book, because the moment something interesting begins to happen the writing style uses way too many words to describe what is happening that it distracts you from the actual action happening.

I Give This Book 2 / 5

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up — she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true. Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

I gotta say that this book surprised me a lot because its the only Colleen Hoover book I’ve read so far that I actually liked. But before we get into this review I gotta give you a warning that this book talks about abuse and have some very hard moments like pushing someone down the stairs or rape attempt. 

The plot in this book is very interesting which really surprised me because the books I’ve read in the past by Colleen Hoover were pure torture for me. But this book and the plot of this book is actually interesting and somehow good written.

If you have read some of my past reviews of Colleen Hoover’s books you might know that she is the author I hate the most because of how bad her books are. And I don’t understand why her books are so overhyped while being so trash as they are. But this book made me think more lightly about Colleen Hoover, and that maybe I’m being to harsh on her other books.

This book turned out to be very quick read for me because of how interesting it was for me. I personally didn’t expect this book to be so interesting because of my experiences with Colleen Hoover’s books. 

The characters in this book were actually pretty good and I liked them a lot. The characters in this book are very well written and are very decent characters to follow for the entire book.

The ending was very good as well. At the same time it is very satisfying and really makes this book a little bit better.

I Give This Book 3 / 5

Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters – with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and the brutish Yahoos – give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift’s savage satire view mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves.

I gotta admit that this book didn’t work for me, even thou I read a lot of good things about this book on Goodreads. But after reading this book I need to say that this book is slightly overhyped for me personally. 

This book has a intriguing premise for the plot. Since we follow the main characters’s fantastical in a way voyages to really weird and strange places and we get to see his encounters with some very strange societies which would make the FreeMasons blush if they read this book. 

But after having read this book, I need to be honest here and say that the plot felt very tedious and overly lengthy. Because it would drag a lot at times because of the very long elaborate descriptions and intricate political commentary. Which really made take a few breaks from this book while reading it. 

At times the plot comes off as convoluted and detracting because of the narrative’s overdone enjoyment of the plot in this book.

There are times when this book feels very heavy-handed and preachy because of all the critiques about human nature and society the plot chimes with every so often. And because of this, the book feels like it is trying to give moral lessons to the readers.

As I’ve said above, this book has a tendency to drag a lot at times, which really makes the book feel boring and uninteresting. Thats what happened to me while reading this book.

The characters in this book aren’t as good as I expected them to be. The reason why I’m saying this is because I felt like all of the characters in this book were simply tools for the authors ideas for how the book should be like rather than the characters having their own personalities and having things which would make them relatable to the readers. 

I Give This Book 1 / 5

Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women—the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia—both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin’s honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him. In her revision of the Garnett translation, Anna Brailovsky has corrected inaccuracies wrought by Garnett’s drastic anglicization of the novel, restoring as much as possible the syntactical structure of the original story.

I gotta say that I didn’t have a lot of expectations for this book, and after reading this book I am glad that I didn’t have expectations for this book because if I had I think I would have enjoyed this book much less than I actually did.

To be very honest reading this book didn’t take me too much time, if I remember correctly I have read this book in 6 or 7 days which isn’t that long if you look at the fact that this book has over 700 pages (at least my copy of this book was over 700 pages long).

The plot here is okay. It talks about corruption and a guy who had fallen in love with two women who are up to no good. My problem with the plot in this book is that it drags for too long fir the majority of this book which really made me so demotivated to continue reading this book.

The characters here were okay. I don’t have any strong or any thoughts or feelings towards the characters in this book because I simple didn’t care about them enough to have any opinions about them. They weren’t bad because if they were bad characters I would have gotten negative opinion about them.

The writing style as you can expected from Dostoevsky is very chunky and heavy. Which shouldn’t surprise you if you read any of his books in the past. 

Yes Dostoevsky’s books are hard to read because of the chunky and heavy writing style combined with the big plots. 

Even thou this book isn’t my favorite book from Dostoevsky, its pretty far from it. I’m in a way happy that I read this book even thou I wouldn’t be recommending this book to anyone looking to get started reading books from Dostoevsky.

I Give This Book 3 / 5