Scookie Reviews

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER by Stephen Chbosky 4 stars Verdict: Very 'readable'. It's my favourite type of narrator, the naive in a broken world. Charlie (if that is in fact his real name) watches, listens, and both understands more than others as well as fails to comprehend what is obvious to the reader. He's very different from others his age, more honest, possibly slightly autistic, and broken. Definitely broken. The book is written as a series of letters from our narrator Charlie to an unknown receiver, and trying to work out whom could drive you insane. It's a character we don't know, a character who could be us, unless of course you did sleep with that girl just because you could. That aside, it's left purposefully vague. There's not too much plot, just things that happen, the story bumbling along, and then a moment at the end that reveals a little more about Charlie, and then that's it. A lot of the characters were pretty nice...

RUIN AND RISING by Leigh Bardugo 2 stars Verdict: Didn't really enjoy it. #1 Shadow and Bone #3 Siege and Storm The author has all the signs of an awesome writer, but I just didn't think it was an awesome book. There’s a fantastic twist which links all three books together, and while it was amazing it doesn’t change the fact that I only enjoyed reading bits of this series. It didn’t seem so bad at the time, but I couldn’t read more than a couple of pages before deciding I needed yet another a break. There wasn't enough to get excited about, and even though there are some great sequences, they were too short and far between. A good book makes those mundane linking scene, like travelling, seem interesting, but the amount of travelling in this book was a tall order, and it ended up feeling as if a lot of irrelevant buffer material was plumped into the book’s sparse feathers. I realised at some point that I didn't really like or connect with any of the charac...