Category: Book review

Frankie Gibbs, an unambitious adolescent on Universal Credit, wants nothing more than to keep his brother Dazzler out of the North Wales care system. Poverty isn’t Frankie’s only obstacle, as their boozing, coke-head single-parent father, Guy Gibbs, heaps misery on their plight through systematic abuse and never-ending wild parties.

Before we start this review I need to be hones there and confess that I struggled a lot to finish this book. Because I had a lot problems with staying engaged in the plot of this book. With that being said lets get into the review without making the intro longer than it needs to be.

The first thing I want to say about this book is that this book makes it clear that the author has a lot of talent for immersive storytelling, but this book felt to me like some weird line of consciousness rather than being a well structured book. And this is the main reason why I found this book to be so difficult to stay engaged in.

The characters in this book are okay, they have a fair share of personalities to them. But I personally couldn’t find in me the strength to actually like them because of this I just couldn’t bring myself to give this book a good rating as I wanted to when I started reading this book. 

But the thing I liked the most about this book is that it talks about a pretty seriously and dark subject, which I always like when it happens. But unfortunately that was the only thing I liked about this book.

The main thing about this book which I didnt like about this book is the amount of “Fuck”s this book has. I personally dont mind swear words (I use them too often to mind) but this book felt like it was trying to set the word record on how many “Fuck”s it contains. 

I Give This Book 2 / 5

A young governess arrives at Bly, a country home in Essex, England, to care for Miles and Flora, two precocious and pure children. But as ghostly visions take shape, the obsessively protective governess soon fears for the safety of her wards – only to wonder if these hauntings are a conjuring of her own imagination.

I need to be honest here and say that I’m very torn on this book, because on one side I really liked this book but on the other side I didn’t. But lets start this review and unpack this book and my opinions about this book. 

This book has some very good horror moments, but those moments are very rare at least in my opinion. And the time between those good horror moments is very long and that as good.

The writing style in this book could have been better, because the sentence structure in this book is very long. There are times were a sentence in this book can be close 200 words long, which in my opinion its too long for one single sentence.

However this book has a nice gothic vibe to it which I always love as you might know if you have read my previous reviews. And the battle between evil and innocence in this book is pretty okay even thou I didn’t like it quiet so much as I wanted because I felt like there was something missing in this aspect at least. 

The beginning of this book was very good in my opinion but the further I got into this book, I began to less and less enjoy it. 

The story here is okay, it reminded me of “The Haunting of Hill House” but written poorly. Which pretty much gives you a good summary of I think about this book. 

The majority of the characters in this book were pretty shallow. I just couldn’t bring myself to like the majority of characters in this book, thou I did like a lot the main character. There was something in the main character which really made me feel like me and the main character could easily be friends.

In my opinion this book is pretty overrated, because a lot of people say that this book is very good but after I read this one for myself I need to say that I have different opinions about it. I personally wouldn’t say that this book is “very good”, what I would say about this book is that it is pretty average.

This book had a very good and scary vibe to it, which really made me give this book some extra points for having. 

I Give This Book 3 / 5

River steamboat captain Charles Marlow has set forth on the Congo in Africa to find the enigmatic European trader Mr. Kurtz. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in “one of the darkest places on earth.” Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.

I need to admit here that this book might be a little overrated by a lot of people, because I’ve heard a lot of good things about this book, but after actually reading this book I need to be honest here and say that it isn’t as good as people claim it is. But at the same time I need to give this book some credit because this book has a few things I really liked about this book. But lets talk all about those things in this review. 

The first thing I really liked about this book was that out was very well written, it was like the author knew what kind of words to use to complete grab my attention and not let it go until the very end of this book even thou I wasn’t that interested in the plot. 

But at the same time the writing style could have been better on few fronts here, one of the issues I had with the writing style in this book was the fact that the paragraphs are very long and dense, which really made it hard for me to really enjoy the book and give it a good rating.

The last thing I need to mention about the writing style is that it is full of those four-dollar words which in my opinion would very quickly get boring and uninteresting. 

Another thing which I didn’t like that much about this book is the fact that it uses endless metaphors and the rare dialogs we do get in this book end up being those very big and bulky paragraphs of one character’s monolog before the other character starts his / her’s monolog.

Another things which I really didn’t like about this book is the fact that the author was jumping from one topic to the next constantly and in the blink of an eye. Which really made it hard to get invested in the plot of this book because the topics would constantly change. At times I felt like the author was on cocaine or heroine and was just rambling about stuff without knowing about it because of how often and quickly the damn topics changed in this book.

But at the same time this book had some good moments, because it touches onto some topics I found interesting, and when the characters doesn’t go onto those very long monologues, I actually liked this book a lot even thou I wont probably read this book again nor recommend it to anyone.

The characters in this book were okay for the most part when they weren’t doing those very energy draining monologs which I really hated. But I gotta say that I liked them because they weren’t too complex but they still had that unique thing which made them feel like real human beings rather than characters on a piece of paper. 

The plot in this book is pretty much all over the place. Because as I’ve said before, the author dumps from topic to topic in seconds in this book, which is really hard to follow the main plot in this book without getting confused and wonder what the fuck is happening.

I Give This Book 3 / 5

On a drowsy afternoon by a riverbank, a young and distracted Alice follows a rabbit into a fantastical underground world that grows curiouser and curiouser. Dared, insulted, amused, and threatened by a succession of anthropomorphic creatures, the indomitable Alice falls deeper into a swirl of the imagination where logic has no place.

I gotta say that this book had disappointed me, since I was expecting to love this book. Because I remember watching the Alice in Wonderland movie with Johnny Deep and Alan Rickman when I was 8 years old (yes I am a 2002 kid) and completely loving that movie, So I was expecting to also love this book. But oh boy was I wrong on this one ? But enough of chit chat, lets get into the review. 

I gotta say that I love the plot, because it is filled with crazy surprises, amazing adventures, very rational beheadings and tea parties. Whats there not to love about this plot right ? 

I feel like the narrative this book, makes the entire plot feel less fun like it tries to hard to contain the plot and make it seem realistic. But then again it could be just me here, wouldn’t be the first time I had a controversial take on a book. 

For some reason this book took me very long to finish because I needed to take breaks from this book as I was reading it because I would get tired and bored off this book in a way. But in the end I finished this book, which I am really happy that I did. 

To be honest here if I didn’t know the basic plot of this book from the 2010 movie of Alice in wonderland and pop culture, I wouldn’t like this book as much as I did. Because I found it very hard to actually focus long enough on this book to get into the plot.

The characters here were okay, but we don’t get to know them a lot in this book. Because this book does have a lot of characters in this book and we simply don’t get enough time to get to know them on deeper level as I wanted to.

The writing style in this book wasn’t that good as I expected it to be. Because it is very simplistic, in my opinion way too simplistic for even children which is primarily who this book is aimed towards. 

I Give This Book 3 / 5

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist’s ‘eternal imagination’. Both an insight into Joyce’s life and childhood, and a unique work of modernist fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to blossom fully into themselves.

I gotta admit that this book was much better than I expected it to be, because I had expected to not like this book and give it a 2 star rating at tops before I got into the book. But after reading this book I need to admit that I liked this book much more than I expected even thou I didn’t quite love it, but I still like it.

The plot in this book is very interesting and enjoyable. And I had a lot of fun with this book as I was reading it. The plot in this book talks about reflecting on life experience to and your coming of age story which I liked a fair share, because I personally like a lot the coming of age books. Which easily made me give this book some extra points for doing.

The narrative of this book is very basic, as I said the book has very promising aspect but the way it is gives us makes it feel like a generic college novel about the main character trying to find himself and what he wants to do in life which we all face at some point in our lives.

But at the same time I found this book to get very repetitive at times and some of the descriptions and moments in this book would get pretty wordy. Which made me bored of this book a few times as I was reading this book. I personally think that at least 100 pages could have been cut out of this book making this book better, which really shows how many repetitive it was and how unnecessarily long the descriptions were at times in this book.

The characters in this book were okay, we don’t get a lot of characters in this book but those characters we actually got in this book were pretty okay. I personally didn’t have a lot of strong feelings about the characters in this book because I didn’t care about them or hate them. Yes the characters could have been better in this book but they were for the most part bearable unlike characters in other books which I really hated.

The writing style was okay for the most past, but as I’ve said above it gets pretty receptive and the descriptions get way out of hands very quickly in this book. I don’t know if it typical of this author because this book is the first book I’ve read from James Joyce, but if his writing style is the same in his other books as in this one, I think I will have to pass his other books.

I Give This Book 3 / 5