theanitaalvarez's Reviews (1.77k)

It is hard to review this book. Especially because I’m not quite sure I enjoyed it. Not because it was a bad book, mind you, but because of how depressing it is. It’s a tragedy from beginning to end and it’s very sad in a hundred different ways.

I like Tolkien’s style because it is very much archaic and it works so well with his subject matter. The tragedy of the children of Hurin is pretty much like something you can find in Norse sagas and classical plays. In that sense, it works pretty well as a mythological work.
As a hero, Turin (because the book is called The Children of Hurin but he’s the one who gets most of the spotlight, is quite annoying. He’s a mighty warrior, he’s smart and so on, but his pride… It is hubris in its best expression. I cannot count all the times I wanted to kick this guy’s butt throughout the book.

Of course, we can explain all of Turin’s bad luck because of the curse Morgoth placed in Hurin’s family. But I like the fact that Tolkien was pretty much ambivalent as to what caused everything. It could have been the curse, or it could have been plain bad luck, fueled by Turin’s utter pride. And to be honest, I’m inclined to the second option. It seems a lot more dramatic than just a curse.

So, what does Turin do in this book that made me want to kill him? Well, he begins like a sweet kid; he loves his family and takes care of his little sister. But then things go sour quickly after Lalaith dies. Soon, Hurin leaves his family to go to war and is taken prisoner by Morgoth. And then orcs invade his lands, leaving Morwen and Turin trapped into their own house.

However, Morwen is a cool mom. And she manages to get her son to safety (the elves’ woods), before she gives birth to a third child: Nienor. While Turin is living with the elves (under the care of Thingol, Luthien’s dad, if you’ve read The Silmarillon), he learns all the skills he needs to be a mighty warrior.
But then, he messes it all up. One elf who wasn’t particularly friendly, Saeros, decided to mess up with him. Of course, it turns up to be a very bad idea, because Saeros ends up dead. Understandably, Thingol gets angry and banishes Turin, before listening to his part of the story. When a elf-girl who was friends with Turin comes up and reveals what happens (Saeros fell to his death on his own), Thingol forgives him and sends Beleg to look him.

In the meanwhile, our hero has joined a group of outlaws. When Beleg finds him, they both join forces to fight over the invaders in the land. However, this being the kind of story it is, things go bad again. Turin is caught by the orcs, and when Beleg goes to rescue him, Turin ends up killing his friend by mistake.

And then, a lot of things happen. Turin goes back to the elves (though another group of them , lead by Orodreth), a elf-princess falls in love with him, but then gets killed by the orcs after being captured by a dragon, Glaurung. So, this guy has really bad luck.

Finally, he meets a pretty and naked girl in the forests, who seems to be a little lost. He takes her to where he’s staying and ends up falling for her. They get married and she becomes pregnant. Things seem to be getting better for poor Turin.

Do you remember that bit about his bad luck?

Yeah. That comes up again to bite him. After a fight with Glaurung, his wife, Niniel, comes looking for him. Her husband is in the floor, fainted after being in contact with the poisonous blood of the dragon. Glaurung undoes the spell with he had placed some time on her. And… she remembers she’s Turin’s baby sister.

Yeap.

So she decides to kill herself. And when Turin learns the truth, he also kills himself.

I told you this was depressing.

And in the very end, Hurin is freed by Morgoth and finds the grave of his children. There, he also meets his wife, Morwen, who dies in his arms.

I’ll admit I was crying like a baby when that part came. It’s so sad and so beautifully written that it made me feel a little depressed because I can’t write like that.

I’d recommend this book mostly to Tolkien’s fans. I don’t think that if you’re not a fan of Tolkien’s work you’d enjoy this, as it quite complicated to read (he has a style that’s pretty much old fashioned, as I mentioned before, so I think is harder to read him if you never had). I love how he expands the world he created and how it makes it all become alive here.

The first part of this book took me ages to read. AGES, I tell you. I think it was so because I despised most of the characters and had a really hard time trying to feel empathy towards them. After finishing the book, I failed miserably in that aspect. No, the first world problems of a WASP, Wall Street yuppie didn’t manage to get my sympathy in any way possible. Sherman McCoy was a really irritating character.

This novel is about him and the consequences of one night in his life. While driving his mistress (so, yeah, he was a cheater) to their secret rendezvous, the couple hit a young black man, Henry Lamb. Dismissing the incident, they go about their business as usual. The problem comes when this young man ends up in a comma because he hit his head after his encounter with the car.

Despite the sever unlikability of almost every character in this book, I do believe it manages to paint a pretty decent image of this type of world. We get people with good intentions but without the resources to do any actual change, people who manipulate others for their own gain (oh, Reverend Bacon), and others who just worry about the money. Even the journalist who helps to get attention to the case is pretty unlikable. And the D.A. that does everything he can to convict McCoy is also a cheater, so maybe the message is that they’re not so different in the end?
The only moments in which I sort of liked Mr. McCoy were when he thought about his daughter, Campbell. He was genuinely worried about the effect that his arrest and eventual conviction, and even the media coverage were going to have upon his little girl. In that sense, he gained a few points with me. During the rest of the novel, he came across as an annoying guy who never wanted to assume his responsibility.

All the other characters, lawyers, officials of the government and so on, were also pretty unlikable. I felt (and it might have been the author’s intention) that they were more concerned with getting better publicity than actually doing justice. Henry Lamb was for them a mere excuse to convict a rich dude (he deserved it, though) and show them in a positive light, as if they were doing something.

The same goes for Reverend Bacon, the guy who supposedly wants to change the things for the people in the projects. In his discourse, everything is more an attack on the establishment than explaining the actual problems the people in the projects have to face every day. And he never mentions specific ways to change all that, he keeps calling the authorities out on the McCoy/Lamb case.

So, when the story ends, we know that nothing is going to really change. McCoy may go to prison, but the projects will always be pretty much the same and so on. One man’s life will be changed forever, but the city will go on as usual.

That’s depressing, to say the least. I wish the book had ended with a more positive outlook.

Getting inside a character’s mind is pretty hard, especially when the character in question has some sort of mental condition. Normally, it would be really hard to feel empathy in these cases, because it’s really hard to understand them. So, Haddon’s portrayal of an autistic character is a very interesting perspective to tell a story.

Christopher was a very compelling character, all in all. His struggles to understand the world were almost painful to read. As most autistic children, Christopher has problems trying to relate to others, he just can’t understand them. And the lists of the things he liked or disliked was endless, and for most people they probably seem irrational. Christopher, however, finds them to be perfectly normal. And it was really sad to read him being frustrated over those things that seemed so little to me, but were really important for him.

Another thing that caught me about this book was how everyone’s relations were shown through Chris’ eyes. It was pretty obvious that his mother felt that Chris was completely overwhelming her, and his father was also pretty frustrated over him. It can’t be easy to have a child with such a condition, and his wife has just left him. Though my sympathy for him ends right there. Lying to Chris about his mother being dead was insane. And pretty unfair, as well.

The story begins with Chris holding a dead dog, in his neighbor’s yard; the poor thing was killed with a yard fork. For Chris it’s easier to connect with animals than with people, so the crime horrifies him even more than a person being murdered would have. Being a Sherlock Holmes’ fan, he decides to take on the investigation of such an ugly affair.

The investigation works more so the readers can learn about Chris’ way of thinking than as a plot device. It shows how obsessive he can be when something interests him, and the limits he’s willing to push for getting the answers that he wants. In that way, his obsession with Maths was pretty understandable. He’s trying to make sense of the world, as he does when he resolves equations and all that jazz. He fits things into a coherent line.

The way the book is narrated allows you to get into Chris’ mind, and to understand how he thinks and how he sees the world. I don’t know much about the autistic spectrum, but I do know that all these disorders are pretty heavy for both the children and their families. I think that in this book all that plays an important role. We get to see how hard things are for Chris and his own parents. Even if they’re not the best parents around, they also show that they love him a lot. One of my favorite parts was the moment when Chris’ father attempts to reconnect with his son. It’s hard when you know that Chris may never hug his father (he can’t stand touching others), but it’s still a sweet moment.

I’m not sure what I expected from this book. Anyway, it was a fine read. As many others, I grew up with lots of superhero stories and the idea of reading a story about the beginnings of the comic book industry was pretty interesting. Besides, I’ve always liked historical novels, so I gave it a shot.

It was a very pleasant surprise, overall. While it is pretty long and I was constantly interrupted (things that happen when you’re in a house with other seven people), I never got bored at all when reading.

The protagonists are Joe Kavalier and his cousin Sammy Clay (Klayman, actually, but he changed his name to be in the comic book industry), two young men who are willing to do anything for their dream of creating their own tight-wearing superhero. Actually, it begins more like Sammy’s dream, as he is the one who was born in the US and has been reading comic books (which were a recent invention at the moment when the novel begins) for the longest time. Kavalier, on the other hand, is born in Prague and is forced to leave due to the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Before that, he was trained as a magician. I’ll admit that it was then where he began to grow on me: my dad is an amateur magician and I’ve grown between magic tricks and all that stuff. So Joe was pretty relatable with that. And I loved the references to Houdini’s life and tricks, of course.

When he arrives to New York, his cousin discovers how amazing an artist Joe is and proposes him to join him is his new project: creating a new superhero. So, Sammy and Joe end up going to Sheldon Anapol, Sammy’s boss, and suggest this idea. They end up creating the Escapist, a superhero that’s kind of similar to Batman (rich playboys with a hidden identity) but with magic. Of course, the comic books become a success and the guys get really rich.

One of the topics I found throughout the novel is escapism. Joe has trained to be able to escape different locks and bindings (just like his hero, Houdini), and Sammy tries to escape from his dreary reality with brilliantly-colored comic books. And as the novel goes on, they both get different instances of escaping at some point. Joe wants to escape the horror and dread that come from losing his whole family during the war, to the point of actually escaping New York and disappearing completely for twelve years. Sammy, on the other hand, tries to escape his own identity (understandable for an early 20th century gay man, though). They are both obsessed with escaping, and it ends up shaping everything in their lives.

Throughout the novel, also, there is confusion between comics and reality. The characters that the two cousins create get their own chapters, which tell the stories of their origins. And both Sam and Joe live lives that remind one about superhero’s lives. They get an arch nemesis and some sort of secret identities (Joe’s more straight forward than Sammy’s, but still).

Overall, is a fun and interesting book. I had lots of fun reading it and can totally recommend it to anyone. Great read!

I’ve heard that Joyce himself said that the Ulysses was going to worry scholars for years. So far, he’s been right. I’ve always heard that this was difficult book to read. Not because it is pretty long (it is, there’s no denying it), but the way in which it is written is really incredibly complex. I had to re-read several times some parts and look for guides in order to understand what I was reading. But, for everyone who feels threatened by the length of this huge novel, I’ll say that you shouldn’t fret it. It’s readable, I swear. It took me more than most books, but still, I could read it.

I don’t know what to say about this novel. There’s just so much in it. Joyce has an amazing way of getting into the characters’ minds, and show how incredibly complicated is the flow of our thoughts. I believe that this is why he worked with characters as Stephen and Leopold. They are completely realistic and life-like, it’s amazing.

Also, choosing these characters and throwing them in a completely normal day in a city allows for them to feel even more real. It’s not only that they think like us and so on, but they could also be us. With the almost insane amount of detail thrown in, I practically felt as I was walking about early 20th century Dublin (by the way, I really want to go there some time).

When I began reading this book, I felt almost compelled to compare it episode by episode to The Odyssey, which I’ve studied several times. But the correlation between these two books is not exactly one to one. However, it is useful to have even a superficial grasp of classic literature before reading this, because there are a lot of references either to Greek lit or Shakespeare, so… yeah, you should know a little about them.

Another tip to approach this novel: take your time. I had to read and reread different parts several times to get what was happening. It is complicated and I happened to lose concentration every once in a while. Though, I’d think that losing concentration is part of reading Modernist fiction. In a way, it allows you to follow the way in which thought acts through the novel. If you lose concentration, your mind begins to imitate what the author is trying to portray (as in this case, the flow of their thoughts). You’ll see that the characters also change their subjects several times (especially in the famous no-punctuation-whatsoever final monologue). One cannot help but wonder whether all of them had some sort of ADHD, really.

But, again, it’s interesting to see thee thoughts’ processes and all that. Maybe I have a little voyeur in me, but I like seeing people thinking and figuring out how they do this.

Finally, I can recommend this book. It’s hard, but it’s totally worth reading it (you can also get bragging rights after finishing this bulk of a book). So, if you’re like me and are really curious about this book, it’s a must-read. I’ll probably read this again, because there is just too much for only one reading.

I had a few chuckles at this book. I don’t usually laugh out loud at books, but this one made me laugh quite a bit.

Mainly, it is so because of the narrator. I think I’ve said before how much I like when we have this kind of overt narrators, that give their opinion on the actions of the characters (I’ll add that this is a very British thing to do) and so on. The narrator here anticipates the story, retells the past and goes on.

The story at hand is that of Arthur Dent (played by Martin Freeman in the film adaptation, I’m sensing a pattern here), who, on the day of the end of the world, is taken on a trip by his neighbor, Ford Prefect. Ford is an investigator for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an excellent travel guide for those who roam the space.

When the story begins, Arthur Dent is fighting off a construction company who wants to demolish his house. A few moments later, the entire earth is demolished to make way for a space highway or something along those lines. One of my favorite parts was around that moment, when the Volgon announce the imminent demolition of the planet and they say that the information has been available for millions of years.

And then he learns that humans haven’t worked out intergalactic travel, he growls in frustration and goes destroying the planet.

But our good friend Arthur Dent was saved by Ford Prefect and by the time the Earth was shattered in a million pieces scattered around the galaxy, both guys have managed to smuggle themselves into a Volgian spaceship or something.

As they journey through the galaxy, they meet Trillian (a girl who is actually a human woman that Arthur met once at a party) and Zaphod Beeblebrox, who was the president of the galaxy and now is on the run with a stolen spaceship.

The book was fun and easy to read (after a full-load semester, that’s always a plus), and it did manage to make me laugh a little several times. Arthur is my favorite character, because it was so funny to read him trying to make sense to the new and senseless world he’s been thrown into. He’s a little like Alice as he travels through the galaxy of nonsense. Whenever I read him trying to use logic and reason, he was so funny. I want to read more about him, really. Trillian was another great one, with her being the normal one in her relation with Zaphod. He’s the crazy, spectacular one, and she’s level-headed and bookish. She’s a great female character, and clearly more than just an eye-candy or a love interest. And Ford is very endearing in his relation with Arthur (and Zaphod, but more with Arthur). The whole group is pretty fun and sweet.

I’m going to keep on reading this trilogy in five parts because I enjoyed this one a lot, and because of Arthur. He’s pretty awesome.

I finished this book last night, very late, and with a very messy mix of feelings about the whole thing. So, I’ll try to make my thoughts a little coherent and such.

I’ll admit I had some doubts about this book. To begin with, the plot sounded too much like the life-time movie of the week and I always end up hating those things. Sorry, but it’s the truth. Frankly, if this book wasn’t in Rory Gilmore’s reading challenge, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. I haven’t seen the film, but my sister told me that it’s completely different from the book, so even if I had, there wasn’t much to compare it with.

The story is pretty complex. It all begins when a thirteen-year-old girl, Anna, goes to a lawyer’s (Campbell Alexander) office and asks him to represent her in a lawsuit against her parents for complete control of her own body. At first, Campbell is a little incredulous, but he ends up accepting the case for free (and for all the publicity it’ll generate). Soon we discover that the reason why Anna is so distressed is the fact that her parents had her with the main purpose of being a donor for her elder sister, Kate, who suffers from an extremely rare and destructive type of leukemia

This book is narrated from a lot of different perspectives, but that wouldn’t have mattered much if each section was told entirely in the same way. But no, the author has some paragraphs in past tense in the middle of a present-tense chapter. The past-tense parts are those in which the characters remember the past, and the present-tense are their thoughts in the current time (when Anna makes her lawsuit). The good thing about this is that we get a pretty complete picture of the whole situation.

I’ll admit I hated Sara with a passion. I get that when one of your kids is sick, you probably focus more attention on them than in the others, that’s okay. But there’s a limit for parental neglect. And Sara crossed it way too many times. Jesse, her oldest kid, is constantly being ignored. And he becomes a freakin’ arsonist (more on that later). Sara’s obnoxious attitude about her daughter had me frustrated through the whole book. When she wasn’t looking after Kate, she was trying to convince Anna to stop with the lawsuit and donate a kidney for her sister. She was constantly saying that she wanted the best for both her daughters, but I just couldn’t buy it.
And on the other hand, there’s Brian. I liked him a lot. He seemed like the kind of person you can depend on and, while he has been mostly focused on Kate, he ends up realizing he has two other kids besides her. He loved Anna and tried to make her happy, not only as a donor for her sister. His pride when Sara’s sister offered to pay for Kate’s treatment was almost funny, but I could get it. He doesn’t like to appear weak. The only moment in which I didn’t like this guy was when he found out his son was an arsonist and didn’t denounce him (more on that later). That’s obstruction of the law or something! Anyway, I still teared up when they thought that Sara was going to die and he was writing an eulogy for her, because if he didn’t do it then, he wasn’t going to be able to write it later.

Then we get to Anna. I felt sorry for her. She was clearly thorn apart throughout the whole book. As a teen, she was trying to get an identity, something that didn’t involve being Kate’s donor and only that. She knew how and why she was conceived, and I can imagine how terrible it must feel to think of one self’s as basically a bunch of extra parts that are meant for another person. Horrible. I liked her sense of humour and how she reacted to everything. The big plot twist

that Kate was the one who suggested the lawsuit

made me like her even more. I read somewhere that letting someone go is the ultimate proof of love. I think Anna loved her sister more than Sara loved her daughter.

Campbell Alexander is the lawyer that takes Anna’s case. At first he does it because it’s an easy case, with chances of getting lots of publicity, and that can’t hurt him. He has a service dog and whenever he’s asked about it, he answers with funny made up stuff, that’s obviously false.

He ends up having an epileptic seizure in the middle of Anna’s hearing, thus revealing the truth about him

. He’s a rich kid, used to having the very best and so on, but he also appears to be very lonely. He also ends up bonding with Anna in a way that felt very sweet. They shared a weird sense of humour, and could get each other.
There’s also Julia Romano, the guardian ad litem appointed by the court to overlook Anna’s family and give advice about whether or not the girl can take her own medical decisions. She’s someone from Campbell’s past: they went to school together (a private school in which she had a scholarship) and he was the first one to have sex with her. But they broke up without many explanations from Campbell’s side (It was due to the accident that provoked his epilepsy), and she has spent ever since then asking what is wrong with her and failing at relationships.

To say the truth, I felt that Campbell and Julia’s subplot didn’t add anything to the book. If it wasn’t there, everything would’ve been mostly the same and that. They were very sweet together, but also very useless.

Jesse, Kate and Anna’s brother, got a lot of my compassion. At least Anna got a little bit of attention because she was the donor, but nobody really cared about him. That he did drugs, drank and burnt stuff was almost a response. I’m not justifying him or anything, he was pretty unstable, but he was basically left to thrive on his own since he was a kid. There’s a moment in which Sara cancels Jesse’s visit to the dentist because she doesn’t feel like going. Yes, she’s tired of taking care of Kate’s health, but that doesn’t allow her to ditch the other kid’s health as well. I didn’t like that Brian kept silent about his son being an arsonist. He deserved to spend at least a few months in jail.

And then there’s Kate. Most of what we learn about her is from the eyes of her family. We see her as brave girl who’s fighting an awful disease, as the big sister Anna admires and loves, as the friend Jesse doesn’t want to lose, as daddy’s girl. I loved her story with Taylor (the jokes, the sarcasm) and her own trying to be a teenager even if she’s sick and all that. She was quite a mystery, and a great character.

But let’s talk about the ending, shall we?

When the judge ends up ruling in favour of Anna, but appoints Campbell to be her medical attorney. As the two of them are getting back home, they get hit by a truck. Brian is the on-call firefighter and he gets his daughter out of the car, just to find out that she’s not going to make it. After she’s declared brain-dead, they are asked if they want to donate Anna’s organs. Campbell, who is the one in charge of her medical decisions, tells them to go ahead, and Kate gets the transplant.
The book ends with Kate in 2010 reflecting on what happened. She’s been in remission for six years, and she’s working with children. She still misses her sister and, in a way, has become her sister’s keeper. That part was okay.

But I still feel the ending was too rushed. In three pages we get that Jesse has become a policeman, that Brian drowned his sorrows in alcohol after Anna died, but came out of it, and that Sara is still recovering. Very fast, and very perfect, in a way. Everything ended up being okay for the family, except that poor Anna is dead. For that reason, I just couldn’t like the ending. It would have been a lot better if the story had ended up with the family struggling to make it work, instead of after the whole struggle.

Overall, a good and quick read. Not excellent, but decent enough.

I don’t remember reading Peter Pan as a child. I remember, however, watching the Disney version over and over again; and when I grew up, I replaced it with the version with Jeremy Sumpter (oh, my pre-teen crush). I even read the sequel that was written by another author.
And yet, I’ve never read the original novel (and not even the original play).

I’m sorry I didn’t do it before, because I truly loved the book. Yes, I know that there are a lot of sexist (Wendy being the mother and staying at home instead of having adventures with the Lost Boys) and racist (let’s not start with the Indians that appear) moments, but overall, the novel was pretty enjoyable.

We all know this one, don’t we? One day, the three Darling siblings (Wendy, John and Michael) decided to go out the window with a mysterious magical boy named Peter Pan. Peter Pan is a boy who at some point decided he didn’t want to grow up and run away from home.
And he, somehow, got to Neverland, a place in which children never grow up and they can have adventures all day if they want to. Yay!

But the things begin to get complicated when the Darlings, especially Wendy, begin missing their home and their mother. Peter doesn’t want them to go, so he avoids the topic. That’s a specialty of the boy, actually. Whenever things get complicated, he just avoids them as much as he can. This is somewhat given, considering that he’s a boy that never grew up, no maturity whatsoever.

I loved the contrast between Peter and Wendy. On the one hand, there’s a boy who pointedly refuses to grow and assume responsibilities, while Wendy, more than not wanting them, is afraid of becoming a lady.

If you want to read Peter Pan as being about Wendy rather than Peter, it makes a lot of sense. In a way, she’s getting her final adventure before turning into a young lady in the early 20th century. People expect her to become all proper and so on. At first she appears to reject this image, but when she gets to Neverland and finds out about the Lost Boys and how they live, she installs herself in the position of their mother. In a way, while she’s going to Neverland to escape her growing up, she also ends up growing up there.

And I felt a little sorry for her throughout the whole book. She clearly had feelings for Peter (there’s a moment in which they discuss if they play-acting mom and dad was real or not, and she so wanted it to be real), but he was stuck in the stage in which girls are a bother, rather than anything else. Sorry, Wendy, he’s just not into you!

Peter was so fun to read! Quite full of himself and always patting his own back for everything he did, but he was so sweet in a boyish sort of way. Whenever his insecurities (which he tried to hide most of the time) appeared, I just wanted to hug them.

In the end, the Darlings and the Lost Boys leave Neverland, and Peter, behind. They grew up and got jobs and families, but they kept going once in a while to Neverland with Peter. That is, when he remembered.

The final chapter was the saddest one. First of all, Peter forgetting his friends for many years was terrible. But the worse thing was what happened when he did remember and came back. Wendy was in the nursery, taking care of her little girl. And Peter recognized her voice when he came to look for her.

And then, there’s the moment when Wendy tells him she can’t go with him. And it’s like Peter has just realized what happened with his old friend. I teared up in the moment when Wendy told him that she was going to turn on the light, and Peter was so scared of that… There were people around me and I didn’t even care. I cried like a baby. #SorryNotSorry

I seriously enjoyed this book a lot, even as a grown-up. I think that it’s because, in the long run, I’m still a bit like Peter Pan and refuse to grow up and take responsibilities. I’ve taken some, of course, but I still don’t have my own life figured out and I’m afraid about what’s to come. But I guess we all are.

And we can’t be Peter, so we just have to grow up.