Review: Life Before Legend by Marie Lu (Legend #0.5)

Three years prior to the beginning of Legend, this story is divided into two parts, the first half belonging to Day and the second to June. Both halves take place within the same couple of days, but the two characters are not directly linked at all yet.

Day's section is about his life on the streets and how desperate he has become. His story mainly concerns the circumstances of his first kiss, what led up to it and what comes of it afterwards. When he attempts to steal canned goods from a rig, he is caught by the leader's daughter, a girl several years his senior. Because of his crime, the girl punishes him by making him work for her and her father for three days. Each day he receives food and he has a safe place to sleep.

On what feels like the other side of the world, June is beginning college at age 12. Because of a traffic hold up (which is Day's doing), she is late to her first day at Drake. Immediately isolated and harassed because of her young age, June stands up to a bully and is reprimanded afterwards for 'fighting.' From this story, it's fairly clear that June has always been a highly-skilled prodigy and that her years in school did not teach her all she knows.

I personally enjoyed June's story a great deal more than Day's. Perhaps the reason for this is that Day's story seems so inconsequential. Note I said that it "seems" that way. It could be significant for a variety of reasons. It could act as the catalyst of his long series of trysts, the start of his self-prescribed isolation, or the beginning of his career in anarchy. The last sentence of his story would certainly imply that, when he says that the Republic has not seen the last of him.

June's half is just so much more engaging. From the beginning of her story, the reader can immediately make the connection between both their lives, even at such an early stage. Day's action causes a reaction in her life that may very well set the tone for the rest of her college career.

It's certainly great to see how skilled both characters are, even at the green age of twelve. June is already impeccable at tracking the passage of time in her head, reading everything about a person by scanning their body language, and literally sidestepping physical attacks. Day is a budding thief and is surviving well on his own. He's clearly crafty and clever, but the handicap of his knee is so much more pronounced, even more so than in the rest of the Legend books. The injury is much more disabling than it ever seemed before. It sort of made me wonder if the pain diminishes slightly of if he just gets used to it over time.

But, as usual, the only unbelievable thing about this is just how young the characters are. If I thought fifteen was a young age for their skill level, then they are blowing me away at twelve. I won't deny that the two of them smooth out and mature throughout the series, particularly emotionally, but it's still so difficult to swallow that people as young as this have such a stirring impact.

I'm glad this was written. I wasn't quite ready to let go of the Legend world.

Review: Champion by Marie Lu (Legend #3)

As the final installment in the Legend series, Champion picks up eight months after the end of Prodigy. Day and June have gone their separate ways; he is fighting a detrimental illness and she is a rising politician, one of the three Princeps-Elects (check spelling). Trouble is stirring in the Colonies, where there is an unknown and rapidly spreading plague. The Colonies are accusing the Republic of launching this plague as a war weapon, and they haven given the Republic an ultimatum to either find a cure for the plague or to launch an all out war.

June and the Elector, Anden, are both of the belief that Day's younger brother, Eden, is the plague’s patient zero. In order to come up with a cure, they will need to experiment on Eden. June is certain that Day will refuse to let his brother be used, but she makes the request regardless. This request is the only reason that the two of them are reunited at all.

I have to admit: both characters frustrated me immensely in this one. They're both so skittish, so proud, too proud, in fact, to admit how much they care about each other and yearn to be together. This is so frustrating it's almost painful to read. Perhaps it's so obvious to us readers because we are inside both June and Day's heads, but it seems like it should be obvious to them (and everyone else) also. I don't want to spout any sort of relationship advice or anything, but it would have been just great had one of them broken their pride and been the bigger person.

This is not to say that I have grown to dislike June or Day. There are just fewer special moments between the two of them that make all that waiting worthwhile. I still love them and still root for them. At times it just seems that their love is ill fated and will inevitably go wrong. Hence my frustration.

There are fewer love triangles in Champion than there were in Prodigy, which I am a fan of, as always. Tess is no longer tempting Day, and June's attraction to Anden seems somewhat faded. In all actuality, it feels like there are no functional relationships in this book.

Luckily, however, there is so much more to the Legend series than the romance aspect. Nearly every page of Champion is packed with incessant and thrilling action. It's one of those hold your breath while you read books, and there's so little downtime to actually recover from it.

And the world has blossomed. It is so intricate; everything-from the map at the front to the detailed point structure in Antarctica to the lake in Los Angeles from the rising ocean-is carefully and purposefully plotted out. This is the first YA dystopia where I have not found a fictional history riddled with holes. Although certain things feel a little farfetched, they also seem completely plausible.

One of my favorite chapters consists of June's visit to Ross City, Antarctica. The entire book is written with great imagery, but this trip to Antarctica is particularly powerful. Though it's unlike anything I've every seen or read, it is so remarkably easy to picture the towering skyscrapers connected by bridges, the floating levels over every person, and the detailed technology that transcends anything we’ve ever known. It sounds like a video game; in fact, I hope it becomes one.

I was a little disappointed we finally learn what year this all takes place in... It had been nice to imagine this world as some obscure, unknown point in the future. But at least it’s actually far enough ahead for all these advancements to be credible.

Marie Lu does an impeccable job of building momentum. Every chapter builds on the one preceding it; everything is relevant; there are no wasted pages or words. I guess I should mention that my frustration with June and Day is a good kind of frustration. As in, it means I care about them and the decisions they make, as if they are real people rather than characters in a book.

To avoid spoilers, I’m going to omit most of my feelings about the outcome of this series. I will say that I cried harder than I have for a while. I will say that the ending is a bit disappointing, but that it also fits with the characters. I will say I’m glad to get a peek into their future… But that’s all; perhaps I’ve said too much.

All in all, this has transformed into my favorite YA series, and I’m so terribly sad to see it end.

Review: Prodigy by Marie Lu (Legend #2)

I am absolutely delighted to have found a series that enraptures me so thoroughly. Usually, I find myself loving the first book in a series and either feeling indifference or disdain for the latter books, but Prodigy has thoroughly proven that this will not be the case for the Legend series.

I will admit that the story did start off a little slow for me. It shouldn't have, considering it picks right back up where Legend ends, but I guess there's always that awkward phase before a book truly blooms into itself. It doesn't take long to do that, to turn into something wonderful that is LIKE Legend but is also just like itself.

In the beginning, June and Day have traveled a long way in search of the Patriots. Day's leg was brutally wounded in Legend and they are now desperately seeking out medical help, even though they have no means of paying. Turns out, the Patriots' preferred method of payment is for both June and Day to aide in the assassination of the new Elector, The Republic's supreme leader.

June's job is to win him over, to use his obvious attraction to her as a strength and to lead him right into the Patriots' trap. Day's job is to act as a social icon, to grow in fame and seek out the public's support for the Patriots' cause. Throughout all this, both characters are exposed to a great deal of danger and are lead to ask questions concerning right and wrong, innocence and guilt, truth and lies.

That's one of the things I love about this book: the shadowy gray area that neither corroborates nor condemns any one character or movement. You think you know whom to trust, you think you know what is going to be right, but you can never truly follow your instincts in this one. I made my own assumptions, but I didn't prove or disprove them until the very end. And perhaps I still haven't, seeing how the story continues in Champion.  

The main characters themselves also live in the gray area, even as they gain so much depth throughout Prodigy. I loved both June and Day in Legend, but here they feel like such real, rounded out people with equal parts hope and fear, equal parts benevolence and resentment. Perhaps the reason they achieve that depth is because of the decisions they are forced to make throughout the story. They continue to show their true colors under pressure, such as June's refusal to go against her convictions and Day's refusal to go against June.

Can I just say that this is a great love story? The problem with love stories is that they are usually so overdone or so over the top, but this isn't the case here at all. Perhaps I'm too in love with this world to speak about it rationally, but I found myself rooting for the two of them, cheering them on, and then dying inside when they couldn't be together, and further on hating Tess for her part in taking Day away from June.

Literally, my only problem with the June and Day dynamic is that they feel so much older than fifteen. But then, I guess that's why he's a legend and she's a prodigy...

All the other characters are well rounded too. I disliked Tess, but that's only because of her attempts to seduce Day. I did not, however, dislike Anden, despite his obvious attraction to June. He is rather admirable (at least at this point) for his ambitions to turn his country around even though it is the opposite of what his politicians want.

That's another thing I like about this novel: how political it is. At least it seems political for YA. The fact that the present politics are so well thought out and mentioned consistently leads me to the conclusion that this is a good dystopia. Seriously, I oftentimes dislike when dystopias try to explain away how the world came to be in it sorry state. If it's going to be a poor explanation, I'd prefer there be no explanation at all and to let me just enjoy the world as it is. There were moments early on in Prodigy where I was dreading the upcoming explanations, particularly when they talked about the technological advancements of Antarctica.

But it turns out this world was very well planned-politics, history, and culture all included. Marie Lu definitely doesn't launch into heavy explanations, but she presents her world with such consistency that you really wouldn't dare to question it.

Review: Armada by Ernest Cline

The best word that comes to mind to describe this book is "disappointing." It has such an interesting premise and such PROMISE that I was looking forward to reading it for months. The result of all that waiting was slugging through one of the most boring books I've ever read.

Thing is, it should not be boring. It's an apocalypse book-which by default is right up my alleyway. On top of that, it's about aliens. On TOP OF THAT, it's about a government conspiracy that uses video games to train everyday people (including children) as soldiers. I love all of these things. I should have liked the book.

And yet... and yet...

Zack Lightman is a senior in high school, part time student and full time gamer. From the way he talks, it's as if he has spent all of his life researching anything and everything to do with nerdom. Not only does he know about every video game ever created, he knows about the history, the creator, the tie-ins to other video games. And not only does he know this, he knows every SciFi movie, every director, every actor, every book, every scientist... I’m not exaggerating when I say he knows everything.

Zack has been obsessed with his father for most of his life, as he "died" when Zack was very young. This doesn't seem odd in and of itself, but, as I reader, I never actually believed his father was dead, and was therefore unsurprised when he turns out to have been alive the whole time. (This is revealed fairly early on in the book so is not really a spoiler.) Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but the infatuation he feels for both of his parents is, well, sort of creepy. Particularly with his mother. It's almost like he has an Oedipal Complex.

Zack thinks he is crazy when he sees an aircraft from his favorite video game flying by his school. When he returns home, he unearths his father's old journals that contain lists of games, movies, and books that lead him to the conclusion the government has been preparing civilians for alien existence for decades.

Shortly after all that, he's picked up from the same Armada ship he saw flying past his school. After a few side trips where he meets his love interest, Lex, and gets a briefing on the history of alien interaction, he ends up on the dark side of the moon with his father and several other... accomplished pilots (the highest ranked Armada players).

And then the war happens.

And then it ends.

That's basically how I felt while reading it. It just happens. Everything just happens.

To be fair, I think I began resenting this book by the end of the first chapter. At first, I was rather impressed by all his intricate and esoteric knowledge of pop culture, but it quickly got old. Many of the references are generic enough to where most people will understand them (at least people of a certain age or of a certain social group), but there are just so many references. The beginning of Zack's story is packed with allegories and metaphors that somehow all pertain to his obsession with anything SciFi.

So after all that got old for me, I sort of tuned everything out. More or less, I began skimming. I only kept reading for the hope that something exciting would happen (well, something exciting that FELT exciting, I should say). But that never happened for me. I never liked the characters, the plot, or even the moral of the story. I only finished it at all because I am an obsessive-compulsive reader and could not abandon something I had been looking forward to for so long.

But this feels as if it's written in real time, sort of like a never-ending story. The whole book takes place over a span of two fictional days, but it took me longer than that to read it.

This review is coming from someone who likes SciFi. This is coming from someone who adores aliens and graphic novels, who games and reads apocalypse lit. But, this is my advice: do not read this book unless nerdom is your life. Even then, I cannot guarantee you will like it. I personally do not think this book is suited for anyone just looking for a good alien/gaming adventure. It's not written for people that are not a part of this world; as in, it's not meant for people that have no interest in games or meticulous nerd history.

Review: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

I wish I could write you a better summary about the book, but I'm finding that hard to do as not much really... happened in the story. It's basically an angry teenage boy ranting about all the things that irritate him and all the things he hates (and, believe me, there are quite a lot of things that he hates). He has severe problems with most of the people in his life and spends much of his time complaining about them, but, at the same time, he compulsively needs to be around them.

Let me try to summarize. Holden Caulfield has just flunked out of school. From the way he attempts to keep this from his parents for a lengthy amount of time, I'd guess this isn't the first time he's been expelled. He spends a great deal of time in the city, uses an exorbitant amount of money on bars, food, and taxis, rents a hooker that he only wants to talk to, and goes on a date with a girl that he loathes. Thought Holden tells us his story as though it is current, he does allocate a great deal of time for ruminating on things that happened in the not-so-recent past, such as the death of his brother, Allie.

Allie's death is subtle but quite significant, although Holden himself never quite tells us that. The way I interpreted his reaction was that he became embittered and hateful because of the death (before the start of this story). The loss caused him to hate everyone and everything. Maybe this is the case; maybe it isn't. Maybe he's just legitimately an angry person with no reason for being angry other than being alive.

I didn't spend too much time trying to psychoanalyze Holden. It's just hard not to notice how hardened and cynical he is, particularly for a teenager. I've heard it said that he is an icon for teen rebellion, but, honestly, I didn't see a whole lot of rebelling at all. If by "rebelling," people mean that he spent all of his money wandering around in the city for a few days, then I guess the saying is true. I guess his notorious defiance is more evident in the way he tells things rather than what he does.

Don't get me wrong: I love Holden. The book is certainly funny. Holden is certainly enjoyable. He truly is the opposite of an exemplary person. He really is quite the character, hilarious and delightfully derisive. Really, if he hadn't been, I don't know that I would have made it through the (less than) 200-page book. I just couldn't get past the fact that I kept waiting and waiting for something to happen and it never did.

Certain bizarre and/or uncomfortable things occur in the book, such as his classmate's suicide and his teacher's strange behavior when Holden spends the night. There's the hooker's pimp that demands twice as much money as he initially asked for. There's the girl named Jane who Holden continuously thinks about calling but never does. There's the promise of a fight when he encounters a girl he doesn't like in the bar. There are all of these things that promise action and never amount to anything. There's all this constant rising action, but it never leads to a climax.

I guess the faint moral of this story would have to be that innocence should be preserved and held onto as long as humanly possible. Holden is surprisingly defensive when it comes to people he views as having fewer hard-life experiences than he has, such as when his roommate dates a girl he used to know. He's constantly mindful and watchful of his younger sister. It seems like his biggest wish is that his sister not end up like him, even though he's quite young to be so hopeless.

When I finished this book, I felt like I was missing something. For years, I've viewed this book as a hole in my personal literary prowess, something that was necessary to read. In fact, when other people talked about it, I was rather embarrassed that I hadn’t read the book, and that shame is what led me to reading it now.

I enjoyed Holden, despite the fact that he is a miserable hypocrite, but I still don't get the famous big deal or how this was a life-changing experience for so many generations.

Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

This little book is exactly what the title says it will be. It is the story of our narrator, his friend Earl, and a girl dying of cancer (Rachel-but she may as well go unnamed because she has a surprisingly little part in the story). Our narrator, Greg, is a social skater, friendly with every clique but never connected with one group more than another. He prefers to remain an obscure part of the crowd, lest someone get close to him and hate what they see. His only friend is an angry, short guy named Earl. Since they discovered their shared interest in movies during childhood, they have been creating mediocre films of their own.

Greg's whole life changes when Rachel is diagnosed with leukemia. He used to be friends with Rachel when they were younger; her mom is a friend of his mom’s. His mom insists that he spend time with Rachel during her time of trouble, befriend her, and bring comfort and encouragement to her, although the severity of her condition is initially unknown. At his mother's demands, Greg comes to find that he actually enjoys spending time with Rachel because he can make her laugh so easily and she is probably the only person in the world who likes his movies.

I have to be honest with you: I did not like Rachel. This is a terrible thing to say about a dying person, even if they are fictional, but it is true. She is two-dimensional and bland, just present in the story for the convenience of it. She does not feel like a real person. Aside from her posters of half-naked celebrities and the vague "she used to read books," there are no interests, no facts, and no past events. It's like she has no history.

Let me rephrase my earlier comment: it's not that I don't like Rachel. I don't like how she is portrayed. And, in the sense of this book, she is portrayed through Greg's eyes. Maybe her vapidness can be written off as Greg simply not attempting to get to know her, but he sure seems to be trying very hard. Aside from her snorting laughter, this girl really gives him nothing in the give-and-take of conversation. 

I don't particularly like many of the other characters either. I feel as though most of them are caricatures of stereotypes. His mom, his best friend Earl, even his father as the nutty professor. Greg has everyone labeled into a group in his social ecosystem, and it definitely shows when he tells this story. Now that I think about it, nobody breaks out of the status quo.

Greg himself reminds me a whole lot of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. He is funny from the beginning, cynical, candid. Despite all my complaints, I cannot deny that Greg is funny. In fact, a whole lot of his quips did make me laugh out loud to the point of embarrassment. He uses dirty, middle school boy humor, and I guess I'm immature enough to appreciate it. It felt like my sense of humor was on autopilot, that I was compulsively cackling at gross things.

But many passages were good examples of "too much of a good thing." Like, Greg would say something funny and then take it way too far. He would exhaust it to the point where the original joke was no longer funny. Not to mention the general dirty talk. I’m not one to quickly say this, but the profanity in this book seems a little excessive to me.

One thing I do like about this story is the sheer lack of romance. Heck, Greg doesn't even TRY to find a girlfriend or love interest because he's so hung up himself being undateable. It does get a little old listening to his self-hating rants. And he absolutely refuses to accept any compliment ever, whether or not said compliment is true.

Even when he is realizing that he never knew Rachel or that he should have done more for Rachel or that the movie that he created for Rachel was more about him than her, that does not change the trajectory of the story. He uses these selfish self-realizations to make even more selfish self-realizations and it never turns out to be more than Greg figuring out Greg.

I'm not saying that this is not a realistic book, and I'm certainly not saying I didn't enjoy reading it. I just had a whole lot of problems with it. The main problem was that Rachel is painted into being as so much of a non-person that she hardly seems alive. Her only purpose in this story is to push Greg onto the path to fix his own life.

Greg is open and honest about all of his faults. He says from the beginning, “I learned absolutely nothing from Rachel’s leukemia.” But, see, I think he should have learned something. I think there should have been a lesson. I guess he learns more about what he wants in life, like pursuing a degree in film, but he doesn’t seem to learn much about the world or the other people in it.

Review: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Let me preface this by saying that I have never really reviewed a classic, so this is a new sensation for me. But I felt too strongly about this book not to. Anyway...

Catch-22 chronicles fictional characters in a fictional country fighting in the very real World War II. The majority of these characters are soldiers with interesting names and even more interesting idiosyncrasies. The primary character (in the myriad of characters) is a fellow named Yossarian with a stronger than usual disdain for his superior officers and the authority they hold over him. You can't really blame him for said disdain, as Colonel Cathcart is  continually raising the number of missions required to complete service. 

With this trend, you'd think that more soldiers would rebel. However, most of them are only quietly disgruntled and surprisingly contented. The catch in Catch-22 states that "a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he's sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved." Aside from death, desertion, or indefinite physical illness (which Yossarian often relies on), there is legitimately no way out. (I never quite got the 22 part of Catch-22. There's not a catch 1-21... :P)

This is easily one of the funniest books I've read in my life. But, thing is, I can't really explain why it's so funny. A whole lot of it made me chuckle to myself, but huge chunks of it made me laugh out loud until I almost cried. Seriously, this is a funny book. Again, I'm not sure why, but that doesn't change the fact that it is. Especially the scene with the moaning men... Good gosh, scenes like that I had to read over and over because they are simply too comical to only read once.

Despite the hilarity, this book can be confusing, what with the multitude of characters and the fact that the story doesn't necessarily follow a chronological order. Also, if you're like me and know next to nothing about the military ranking system, it can become daunting trying to keep up with who is in charge of whom. It all gets a bit overwhelming when you think about it too much. The process I took to reading this was to try not to overthink everything. I just sort of accepted it all, let it roll over me. It's definitely not a slow read, but the reading process itself can be quite time consuming.

I was also pleasantly surprised when a story began forming out of the babble. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the book from the start, but, for a very long while, it seems like nonsensical ramblings from irrational soldiers and unreasonable officers. For that long while, it seems almost like Joseph Heller is painting a portrait of each individual character but leaves no overlap from character to character. There are the characters and there is the world, but the story of those characters and that world itself emerge slowly and out of a clutter of confusion.

I guess it's to be expected with a war story, but there are harsh bits of tragedy that pop up in the book. You can't have a war without violence or bloodshed, but the brutality in these pages is thrown in randomly and without warning. Some of the passages manage to freeze the world for a moment. Most of the story is a goofy, ironic view of the world. It's so absurd and silly the majority of the time that it is very easy to forget the serious subject in which it is really about.

All in all, I think this is a brilliant book. You probably had to be pretty bright back then to get a word added to the dictionary, before everyone became ridiculous.

As for the ending, I think it is perfect-the only way out of the Catch that makes sense for Yossarian, but I won't say more. Apparently there is a sequel, but I am not yet sure if I want to read it. I hate when sequels ruin the original for me, and that happens more often than not. Unlike lots of other books with lots of others words, all of the words in this particular book feel necessary. I wouldn't add or detract a thing.

SIDE NOTE: I intend to name my next pet Yossarian. It just feels right.