Book review: Flawless by Lara Chapman

When I read the blurb on the back of my copy of Flawless, I thought this was going to be a cute, fun read. It didn't occur to me at the time that the story seemed a little familiar, but a few pages in and I clicked - this is a modern retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Only, it's not a very good one.

I love modern retellings of fairytales and the like, but Flawless just didn't do it for me.

Sarah Burke has a huge nose. When a gorgeous new boy joins her school, her best friend Kristen asks Sarah to pretend to be her and write to him, otherwise Rock (yes, that's his name), will think Kristen is really stupid. And so Sarah agrees, and finds herself falling ever deeper for Rock while determined to stay loyal to Kristen.

The big problem with Flawless was the characters, who were all over the place. 

Take Sarah. One minute she's preening in the mirror and talking about her fabulous hair, the next the only thing she can see is her nose. There is one moment in the book where, when thinking about another boy, she thinks: "We're both blond, attractive, and have great smiles." And then she's back to worrying about her nose again.

She's confident in her school work, really comfortable standing up for her mum, but on the other hand can't say no to Kristen or rationally explain why. I get that people have many different facets, but I felt like the only consistency about Sarah was that she was so in love with Rock.

Then we have Kristen, who really didn't seem like a great friend, despite what Sarah constantly said in the novel. Kristen was manipulative, and worse, really coy and girly with it. She might not have meant to be, but I felt like she was quite devious and I wouldn't want to be friends with her.

And then there's Rock, who both girls fell in love with really quickly. Sure, he was gorgeous, and clever, but I never really got a sense of who he was or why he was so dreamy.

As a second storyline, there was Sarah's relationship with her mum, a famous news anchor in Texas. I hated this right from the start, since the first time we meet Beth Burke is when she's put a plastic surgery leaflet next to her daughter's breakfast plate and is trying to tell Sarah to get a nose job. No matter how nice she is for the rest of the book, or how much she tells Sarah that she should be herself, I was completely put off by the fact that a grown woman was trying to persuade her 17-year-old daughter to get a nose job. Plus, a conflict within Sarah's mum's life which Chapman spent chapters hinting at was solved within the space of a page, which left me feeling a bit cheated.

Things that did work well in Flawless was the use of modern technology, which brought the Cyrano story right into the 21st century. I also loved the quotes about beauty from famous writers which started each chapter. The cover, with its image of a gorgeous face with no nose, was also striking.

Unfortunately, for me the book just wasn't a good read. It's a pity, because Chapman's writing style is easy to read, but her characters were not.

How I got this book: Picked up from the publisher Bloomsbury.

Stacking the Shelves (#8)

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews, and it's all about sharing the books you've added to your shelves, be they physical or virtual, sent to you for review, bought, or borrowed from the library.

I've had a few quiet weeks book gathering wise, but in the last week I picked up loads.

For review/gift
A bit of a confusing categorisation. I have a friend who works for a publishers, and before meeting her for dinner this week we scoured the storerooms and she let me take a bunch of books (mostly YA fiction), some already released and some unproofed copies of books yet to be released - and there's a couple of real gems in the pile.

Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas - yes, I've got my hands on the sequel to Throne of Glass, which I loved.
Winter Damage by Natasha Carthew
All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill
Fortunately, the Milk... by Neil Gaiman (one of the best looking uncorrected proofs of a book I've ever seen)
Ghosts by Daylight by Janine Di Giovanni
The Dead Men Stood Together by Chris Priestly

Throwing Sparks by Abdo Khal (banned in a whole bunch of countries, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait)
The Wall by William Sutcliffe
The Rise and Fall of Television Journalism by Steven Barnett
Game On by Monica Seles (yes, the former tennis player)
Madd Addam by Margaret Atwood
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (you have no idea how much I love The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri



I also got another book sent to me by a publisher for review, but I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get a copy, so all I can show is the packaging the book came in:

Bought

I did quite a lot of second hand book shopping, picking up a variety of things.

Among them were the first five books in Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series:
Stormbreaker
Point Blanc
Skeleton Key
Eagle Strike
Scorpia.





I also bought the sequel to Wicked by Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch, which has a lovely cover:

And finally I bought:
Quantum of Solace, The Complete James Bond Short Stories by Ian Fleming
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Heroes by John Pilger
Picture Perfect by Jodi Picoult.










Phew! That's my haul. What have you added to your bookshelves?

London events for book lovers

This week it seems like all the literary world is talking about Book Expo America. But New York isn't the only place that holds events for book lovers. Here are a couple of different ones coming up in London...

London Literature Festival at Southbank Centre
This is a long-running event (it doesn't finish until September 8), and there's something going on for everyone at the London Literature Festival - poetry, fiction, talks, debates.

Among the highlights is an event on June 4, when the festival hosts the Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist Readings. Now in its 18th year, the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize for Fiction, was set up to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world. The June 4 events sees the six shortlisted authors reading and discussing their work.

The Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist:

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven
Zadie Smith, NW
Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Poems on the Underground
Literature isn't to be confined to lecture halls and hushed grand libraries, and Poems on the Underground is a great example of what literature should be - accessible to all.

The next set of poems go live next month, so keep an eye out on Tube trains across the London Underground network, and make sure to note down your favourite poems (and let me know which you like).

Books NOT Books
We all know there is so much more to the world of books than just words on a page, and the Books NOT Books exhibition, hosted by the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (ABA) explores that.

Held in the National Exhibition Hall at Olympia in west London from June 13 to June 15, Books NOT Books shows the book in a variety of different forms - books as art, books as boxes, books as anything-other-than-books – whether it is a handbag, pin box or biscuit tin.

What book-related events are you looking forward to?

The Sunday Post (#9)

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It's a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week on your blog, showcase books and things we received and share news about what is coming up on our blog for the week ahead.

Reviews this week on Girl!Reporter

The Hit by Melvin Burgess

A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy

 
Memes

Top Ten Tuesday - Top Ten Favourite Covers of Book I've Read

Harry Potter Moment of the Week (#5)

Non-book stuff this week on Girl!Reporter 

Game of Thrones recap/review: Second Sons

Coming up next week on Girl!Reporter

So I had a car accident last week, and am a bit sore, and a bit sleepy from the tablets I'm taking, which isn't conducive to reading. Therefore, once again, it's a surprise week ahead.

What's new with you?

Book review: A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy

Traditional stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, and while A Family Daughter is supposedly about a traditional family, the telling is not so safe.

For a start, it features the same characters as author Maile Meloy's first novel Liars and Saints, except they have completely different fates in A Family Daughter.

It's the summer of 1979, and seven-year-old Abby is ill with chicken pox. What happens that summer will affect her life, and the lives of all her family for years to come.

A Family Daughter doesn't have a traditional narrative - there's no problem presented that needs to be solved, no life dream the protagonist needs to take steps to complete, no quest to go on.

Instead, it's a story about life, and love, and family. It's almost a collection of the everyday happenings of family life, with events linked together by their effect on other events and other people.

The story follows Abby through college, into adult life. The reader travels with Abby from her home in California, to university, to Argentina, back to California. And as we travel to these places, we get to know more of the people she interacts with.

It has some soapy elements, in particular with scenes involving the beautiful and flighty Saffron, but I enjoyed these slightly tabloid-esque moments in the novel.

This is a beautifully crafted book which flows from one chapter to the next, even though they can be set hundreds of miles apart and feature a completely different set of characters. But the emotion that runs through the whole book is constant, and what happens to every character, even the ones introduced in the last third of the book, matter.

A Family Daughter raises questions about truth, and fiction - as Abby writes a book about her family life that's not quite her family life - and what happens when lines blur between the two, and what can be trusted and what can't.

An irresistible read, A Family Daughter shows how every person in your life leaves a shadow, no matter how brief the encounter with them.

Harry Potter Moment of the Week (#5)

Harry Potter moment of the week is a meme started by Uncorked Thoughts. The aim of this meme is to share with fellow bloggers a character, spell, chapter, object, quote etc. from the books/films/J. K. Rowling herself or anything Potter related.

This week's topic is...well, there isn't one. It's a free week, so I can pick absolutely anything I like.

What to pick, what to pick...Quidditch.

I flipping love Quidditch. From Harry's first lesson with Oliver Wood, to the Quidditch World Cup, to Ron winning the cup, every moment of Quidditch in the books is wonderful.

I particularly love the Quidditch World Cup in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Not only is it a great insight into the social lives of magical folk, it's also a wonderful way to bring many, many characters together, properly introduce us to Cedric Diggory (we didn't see much of him in Prisoner of Azkaban), it's a riot of colour and sound, and it shows us how magic does, or doesn't, fit into the Muggle world. It's also full of some really funny bits (the Leprechauns and the Veelas), and some great description that is very amusing.

They trudged up the misty field between long rows of tents. Most looked almost ordinary; their owners had clearly tried to make them as Muggle-like as possible, but had slipped up by adding chimneys, or bell-pulls, or weather-vanes. However, here and there was a tent so obviously magical that Harry could hardly be surprised that Mr Roberts was getting suspicious. Halfway up the field stood an extravagant confection of striped silk like a miniature palace, with several live peacocks tethered at the entrance. A little further on they passed a tent that had three floors and several turrets; and a short way beyond that was a tent which had a front garden attached, complete with birdbath, sundial and fountain.

And, of course, the Quidditch World Cup also introduces us to the Death Eaters and really starts the rollercoaster journey that won't finish until the end of the series.

Rowling takes the best elements of a lot of sports, and then adds in brooms and lots of outrageous rules, and creates a game that most of us would love to play.

In fact, there is an International Quidditch Association (IQA), which actually exists and where you can play a version of Quidditch in real life. Amazing. I wish my university had had a Quidditch team, maybe I'd have been interested in sport then.