Expectations vs. Reality: Unremembered

Expectations vs. Reality is a feature here inspired by Small Review that will compare my expectations from a book cover before seeing the summary with the summary itself.

This week I'm looking at Unremembered by Jessica Brody.

EXPECTATIONS

This cover is so pretty! The blurry face and of course the title make me think this is a book about amnesia. Perhaps the protagonist, a teenage girl, underwent some sort of accident and emerged from it with her memories missing, which makes sense with the subtitle at the top. "A love unchanged" definitely implies there's some sort of romantic angle going on.

REALITY

Here's what Goodreads has to say:

When Freedom Airlines flight 121 went down over the Pacific Ocean, no one ever expected to find survivors. Which is why the sixteen-year-old girl discovered floating among the wreckage—alive—is making headlines across the globe.

Even more strange is that her body is miraculously unharmed and she has no memories of boarding the plane. She has no memories of her life before the crash. She has no memories period. No one knows how she survived. No one knows why she wasn’t on the passenger manifest. And no one can explain why her DNA and fingerprints can’t be found in a single database in the world.

Crippled by a world she doesn’t know, plagued by abilities she doesn’t understand, and haunted by a looming threat she can’t remember, Seraphina struggles to piece together her forgotten past and discover who she really is. But with every clue only comes more questions. And she’s running out of time to answer them.

Her only hope is a strangely alluring boy who claims to know her from before the crash. Who claims they were in love. But can she really trust him? And will he be able to protect her from the people who have been making her forget?

Okay, let's just take a moment to contemplate how utterly AWESOME this summary sounds. I suppose I was fairly close with the whole wiped memory aspect.

What do you think of this book? What were your expectations when you saw the cover?

Dark Parties: Review

Title: Dark Parties
Author: Sara Grant
Release Date: August 2011
Published By: Little, Brown
Pages: 320
Goodreads Rating: 3.51 stars

Review: Sixteen-year-old Neva has been trapped beneath the Protectosphere since birth, a shell that both keeps citizens safe from outside and locks them in. Neva and Sanna believe the government is lying about what lies beyond the sphere and decide to stage a dark party to recruit others who are questioning the government as well. But as Neva begins to uncover the truth, she realizes she must question everything she's ever known, including the people she loves.

As soon as I started DARK PARTIES, I discovered how wonderfully addictive this story is. It's true that the summary sounds like it belongs to a generic dystopian novel, but the actual details of this story are what make the book unique, not to mention utterly engrossing. Once you really get into the middle of the book, it becomes close to impossible to put this book down and just ignore the suspense ratcheting higher and higher.

Apart from the suspense, another reason this book was such a page-turner was because of the protagonist. Neva had a voice that made the novel very easy to read, and as a character, she was everything you could want. She had a personality that felt like it belonged to someone in real life, and while she was strong and admirable, she still had character flaws that made her someone readers can relate to.

Of course, a reading experience can be soured by a poor ending, but this was luckily not the case. I loved the ending in this book and thought it wrapped up the story line very nicely, both with the plot progression and with her familial, friend, and romantic relationships tying up mostly neatly with plenty of room for growth. I'm excited to read the sequel to this book, which better come out soon.

All in all, I ended up enjoying DARK PARTIES a lot more than I would. If you're finding yourself tired of reading dystopian novels that all have very similar plots and writing, you may find this to be a refreshing change. There's something about it that's uniquely addicting and suspenseful, and of course, once you pick it up, there's no guarantee you can put it down.

Ripper: Review

Title: Ripper
Author: Amy Carol Reeves
Release Date: April 2012
Published By: Flux
Pages: 340
Goodreads Rating: 3.54 stars

Review: In 1888, after her mother's sudden death, Abbie lives with her grandmother in London and volunteers at a local hospital, but as bodies murdered at the hands of Jack the Ripper show up, she comes to a realization. She and the Ripper are connected through her visions, leading her on a perilous hunt for the killer where she uncovers a mysterious brotherhood that affects not just London but all of mankind.

I had high hopes for RIPPER, but unfortunately I was disappointed, largely because of the characters. Abbie had a lot of potential to be an interesting character, but instead she came across as rather flat and wooden. There just wasn't anything that particularly stood out in her personality, making her a generic "I don't want to be a lady" female protagonist in historical fiction. I just couldn't care about her enough to be much affected by the twists and turns nor the love triangle she found herself swept up in.

Speaking of these twists and turns, I do have to say that there were places where the story became rather suspenseful. However, these were in contrast to other areas where the suspense was just not there. There were supernatural twists that didn't excite me, perhaps because I didn't feel that the historical and paranormal aspects meshed well enough. It felt almost like the element of her visions was just thrown in there.

I also thought that a good deal of the plot was rather cliche. The idea of there being more to Jack the Ripper than just a serial killer was interesting, but as I said, Abbie was generic and her love triangle was woefully predictable. There was just wasn't enough to make it unique, and the new aspect of the brotherhood and all that didn't really balance out the flaws.

All in all, RIPPER had a great deal of potential but didn't measure up. The protagonist just came across as too dull to me, and the suspense was not as high as it could have been. The melding of the two genres (historical and paranormal) wasn't that smooth either, and overall I felt a bit disappointed with this book.

Hush: Review

Title: Hush
Author: Eishes Chayil
Release Date: September 2010
Published By: Walker Children
Pages: 368
Goodreads Rating: 3.96 stars

Review: Inside the closed community of Borough Park, where most Chassidim live, everyone abides by the strict rules laid down in an ancient text thousands of years ago. But one thing not covered is abuse, and when Gittel learns of the abuse affecting her best friend, she doesn't know what to do. Everyone around her tries to persuade her it's nothing and to forget about it, but as she's continually confronted by the situation and her own overwhelming guilt, she begins to question everything she was raised to believe.

I'm not entirely sure why - perhaps it had something to do with the cover - but when I started this book, I thought it was going to be a dystopian novel. I was certainly far off the mark! But even though this was not what I expected, I found myself loving this book far beyond my anticipations. HUSH was truly eye-opening, a novel told through elegant writing that slowly peeled away the layers of this dark, dark story.

There are a lot of books out there that cover topics like abuse, ranging from within a family to external forces, but HUSH provided a unique look at this issue by telling a story about the not-so-well-known Chassidim culture. I am not a religious person and didn't know much about this type of community, so I really appreciated getting the opportunity to learn about it, especially because it seemed to be an unbiased view, highlighting both the positive and negative aspects of the culture.

This book's most obvious aspect, of course, is how emotionally wrenching the storyline is. It is very difficult to get through all these pages without crying or at the very least tearing up at some points during this beautiful and moving story. Gittel was a fantastic narrator, and through her voice the reader can glean information not only about the events and people around her but her own complex character.

All in all, HUSH was a phenomenal story, the rare kind of book that you can only come across once in a while. It is moving and complex, with an emotional beauty that will rock even the hardest of hearts. I cannot recommend this book enough, and encourage everyone, particularly fans of "issues" books, to give it a try.