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Better Than Dreams

Book Review: Bright Young Things, by Anna Godbersen

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I was really excited when I won a copy of Bright Young Things in a competition at Chicklish. I love reading about the 1920s, so I was delighted by the prospect of a new YA series set during that time (I’m also really excited about Libba Bray’s The Diviners and Jillian Larkin’s The Flappers series, of course). I knew that the same author wrote the ‘The Luxe’ series, which I’d been meaning to try. ‘The Luxe’ was described as ‘Gossip Girl set in the 19th Century’ by a Grazia reviewer so I wasn’t expecting anything world changing from Bright Young Things. I was expecting it to be a fun read, but one that wouldn’t wow me, and that’s exactly what I got.

I adored the atmosphere and all the period details. I thought the author captured the spirit of the age and how excited the girls would be to live through it. There were plenty of descriptions of parties and speakeasies and fashions, and I did love the characters’ names and the descriptions of clothes but all the repetitive descriptions of hair and eyes started to really annoy me after a while. The prose gets quite purple in places when the author is needlessly reminding us how beautiful her protagonists are – hair halos heads and skin is glowing and eyes are sparkling far too frequently.  By the end it seems like the contrast between Letty’s big blue eyes and dark hair is mentioned everytime she enters a scene or the narration starts to follow her again, and to use an appropriate idiom, it’s a bore.

In terms of the plot and characterisation – I could predict what was going to happen easily and I didn’t really love any of the characters, though Astrid and her mother Virginia did make me laugh with their cynical frivolity and love of drama, especially in later chapters. Although I was hoping for good things for Letty, she was lazy, naïve, and a little thoughtless. Everything happens a bit too easily for Cordelia and I could see so many places where the author could have made things a bit trickier for her and introduced complications. If her father was so pleased to see her, why didn’t he come for her years ago?

Yet despite all these flaws, as I said above I did enjoy the book, and  I will read the second in the series, Beautiful Days – actually, I’ve already read the preview pages!

If you can’t stand purple prose or require great depth from all your reading material, I would skip Bright Young Things. But if you want an enjoyable bit of escapism, give it a try, especially if you like all things 1920s.

Book Review: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

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This book is the second in a trilogy and therefore this review will inevitably contain spoilers for the first book, The Hunger Games. In the next paragraph below the picture! So if you haven’t read it or watched the film and want to without spoiling the end, stop reading this blog post now. Seriously!

 

Photo by Dave Stokes

So Katniss and Peeta have won the 74th Hunger Games and returned home to District Twelve, where they now live in comparative luxury in the mansions reserved for victors. Whilst her sister and mother enjoy their new surroundings, Katniss misses the comparative freedom of her old life – hunting with Gale in particular. The Victory Tour is approaching and Katniss knows she will have to start pretending to be madly in love with Peeta again, otherwise all their lives will be at risk. The stakes become even higher when she hears about  possible rebellions in other districts, and there is also the approaching Quarter Quell to worry about – a special version of the Hunger Games that takes place every twenty-five years.

Some readers have said that they didn’t enjoy Catching Fire as much as The Hunger Games. Not me! I loved it. I really liked how the plot developed and enjoyed trying to work out what was going on. However, I can see where they’re coming from in that there are a lot of similar scenes to the first book, and then not much is revealed until the end. You finally find out what’s going on at the end of the book but then of course it’s the end of the book! Argh. I wouldn’t say Catching Fire is filler as it does advance the plot and characterisation, but if I’d read these books when they were originally published, and didn’t have access to Mockingjay straight away, I would have been really frustrated.

I think the characterisation was better in Catching Fire than in The Hunger Games, simply because Katniss spends more time with more other people. In the first book, she spent most of her time in the arena, alone, which was fantastic for setting her up as a self-reliant, clever individual, but we didn’t really get to know the other tributes, or her family and friends. I really liked seeing how Katniss’ relationships with the other characters developed in Catching Fire, slow as that development might be, and finished absolutely thrilled about the prospect of the final book, Mockingjay.