Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

I first picked this book up many, many months ago, sucked in by the intriguing blurb and the general good things I'd heard. It then sat on my Kindle until a couple of weeks ago when we got the physical book into my workplace and I was reminded of its existence. I then found out Joe Hill is Stephen King's son and that cemented it. I was going to read this book.

Those of you who have read my Gerald's Game review will know that books don't scare me easily. While I am a complete wuss when it comes to horror movies, books have a harder job. I adore Stephen King but I would say that only one of his books has ever scared me. Maybe I should have been reading his son this whole time instead.

Heart-Shaped Box terrified me. It is ultimately a ghost story and it probably isn't as original as it seemed to me, but something about this elderly ghost relentless hunting down the main character and trying to drive him to suicide got into my head in the way few books do. This book has all the intensity of a Stephen King book but it is streamlined. There is little of the character and narrative quirks that plague King stories, and the result is a very extreme and relentless experience. I think the best part is you genuinely have no idea if the main character will survive or not. There is none of the security that comes from protagonist immunity and I love it for that.

I can't say much more about this book without spoilers sadly, but there are just a few more points I wanted to add. The characters are very complex and grey in their morality, and this is handled very well within the story. You don't dislike them by any means but you're not sure you always agree with them either. There is only one sexual moment that I can think of which makes this a great book to choose if the sex elements in horror stories normally bother you. Finally, the middle of the book does change the tone a little and not really for the better. However, it soon returns back to the scary atmosphere of the earlier sections and it does end very strongly.

If you are a fan of horror, I strongly urge you to pick this book up. It is one of the best examples of how to successfully create an atmosphere and I promise you won't regret it.

Overall Rating:

.5

To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo

You know, I've heard this book called 'a retelling of The Little Mermaid' by many, many Booktubers and honestly I think this is really unfair. For starters, it isn't even about a mermaid. Apart from sharing the plot elements of a prince and the ocean, there really isn't anything in common between them.

To Kill a Kingdom is the story of Lira, a siren princess who is allowed to steal the heart of a human prince every day on her birthday (a siren tradition). When she breaks this rule and steals a heart early, she gets punished and (after another transgression) transformed into a human. Now she must steal the heart of the richest prince in the land without the use of her siren voice (originally I am pretty sure she is given until her birthday to do so but then this deadline is never mentioned again so...oops?).

The story is told in dual narrative, with chapters alternating between Lira and the prince Elian. This style bothered me at first mainly because, until Lira became human, I didn't have much interest in Elian's story. Don't get me wrong, he is a great character and I liked his crew a lot, I'm just not particularly into adventure stories. I thought this book would be a bit of a drag but it picks up as soon as Lira is human, and ultimately it has a wonderfully solid plot. It is definitely more heavy on the fantasy elements than the books I usually read but this was by no means a bad thing. I loved the world the author created and there was a lot of inventiveness in the detail of the creatures and such.

There was only really one problem for me with this book and while it wasn't handled appallingly, it was quite a large part of it. Once human, Lira arbitrarily avoids murdering Elian for chapters and chapters, purely so they can keep the plot going and eventually fall in love. Everything about the love felt sudden to me, though this is more from Lira's feelings being badly described than not having enough time dedicated to it in the story. I liked their interactions and felt they had an interesting vibe going on, but love? I didn't buy Lira's change in feelings with the amount of description dedicated to her trying to work them out, even with the excuse of newfound humanity.

Having said that, I still really love this book. I found all of the characters compelling, and Lira in particular was very well fleshed-out. The world-building elements of the underwater kingdom were so cool, and the same goes for the actual kingdom as well. As is typical with these books, the ending felt a little rushed and not entirely clear but it wasn't unsatisfying. I would definitely recommend giving this book a try if you enjoy fantasy, and this author deserves more credit than 'a retelling of the Little Mermaid'.

Overall Rating:

.5

Heartless by Marissa Meyer

So this month I have been on a bit of a YA fantasy kick which is quite nice because I haven't felt like that for a while. After reading To Kill a Kingdom, I fancied another alternative origin story type thing so I opted for Heartless, a retelling/origin story for the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. I must admit, I was a bit apprehensive about how Wonderland could be handled (after all, we all saw what Tim Burton did to it) and while this does make some of the same mistakes as the Tim Burton movie, it actually does a fairly decent job.

The main issue this book has is pacing. Our main character is Lady Catherine, a girl who is about to be proposed to by the King of Hearts but really wants to run off and start her own bakery with her maid. Almost three quarters of the story is her trying to dodge proposals, all the while going on dates and flirting with a court joker named Jest. The actual plot kickstarts just after this point and then finishes abruptly with the end of the book. It would have been far better paced had the plot started earlier and then been the main focus as opposed to her personal drama.

The other issues are all fairly minor. Catherine really could have been Alice under a different name, and I disliked how several Alice quotes were given to her. How does that work in the sense of Alice In Wonderland following this story? It's a little weird to have Catherine go through the mad tea party and the Caterpillar exchanges etc when Alice will presumably do the same. A lot of the Wonderland elements were incorporated very cleverly and there's some neat stuff in here, but unfortunately there is also very mild political elements. It's nowhere near as bad as the Burton film but it was enough to make me doubt how it worked within the world itself. Having said that, I liked the creativity behind things such as the Mock Turtle and Mary Ann, and it is remarkable the amount of detail Marissa Meyer has included.

Apart from slight plot and pacing flaws, this is genuinely a very creative and enjoyable book. I can see some people being uninterested in the whole 'dodging the King' plot point (after all, it is a given that she will become the Queen of Hearts) but as I said, the world of Wonderland is very creative and the characters are similarly quite likeable. The tone of Wonderland is also handled very well, with enough nonsensical elements to feel like the original book but also a coherent story and characters with coherent goals. It may be a bit of a slow journey but this is a wonderful world to be in. I found it to be worth the slower elements for the character-driven story and the ultimate plot at the end. I just wish that ultimate plot had been given the time to be explored properly.

Overall Rating:

.5

Three Sides of a Heart: A Short Story Anthology

From one fantastic cute anthology about love to...well, this. This isn't the worst anthology I've ever read but it's one of the dullest. Most of the stories don't even follow the basic premise and the whole thing is super disappointing. I'm going to do what I've done in the past and go through each short story in turn, only expect a lot less detail for most because I don't actually a) remember what happens or b) like most of them.

Riddles in Mathematics, 2.5/5-One of the better ones, not that that's saying much. It's written in a very dull and kind of hard to follow way. It's also one of the ones that follows the love triangle premise the closest, although yeah, it still doesn't really count as a love triangle. Basically there is a girl, her brother and a girl who is their best friend. Girl fancies best friend girl but thinks she is dating her brother. You can probably guess what happens.

Dread South, 3.5/5-Not. A. Love. Triangle. This was such a weird story to follow the first one but also it was pretty great so I can't fault it too much. It takes place in an alternate timeline where zombies exist after the American Civil War. Black women are trained as warrior servants to protect rich white people, and the main girl gets bought one by her rich fiance. She then falls in love with her servant protector. Bit of a weird context but enjoyable on the whole.

Omega Ship, 2.5/5-Kind of a cool idea? So it's the end of the world and humans are evacuating the earth. However, the ship breaks and only three people manage to escape-one girl and two boys. The girl is overcome by the idea of having to have babies forever and has to choose which boy to have a baby with first. The problem with this is that it could have used more time to explore the emotions of the characters and the themes it was trying to consider. I could totally see this working as a full-length novel or YA series. As it stands, it's a bit weak.

La Revancha del Tango, 1.5/5-I have pretty much no memory of this apart from skim-reading it. A girl dances? Someone gets jealous? Somehow the person she is dancing with symbolises who she is going to be with for the rest of her life. One of the weaker ones.

Cass, An and Dra, 1.5/5-Told sooooo badly. Again, this could have been a cool idea. I'm not entirely sure what the point of the whole 'Cassandra' thing is beyond a reference to Cassandra the fortune teller. Basically Cass (none of the characters have gender in this) is dating An but then is tempted by Dra-or at least, I think that's what this was trying to convey. Cass can see the future and see how each decision they make will result in different options, so each time they have to actively choose An. Obviously the names spell out 'Cassandra' so I was expecting some kind of split personality thing but nope. I don't care enough to try and sort out what this clumsy mess was trying to say I'm afraid.

Lessons for Beginners, 3.5/5-A actual love triangle! The main girl gives kissing lessons to people at school. She gets employed by an old childhood friend and her new boyfriend to try and improve his kissing. The two girls have insane chemistry but aren't sure where it's going to lead. I don't remember just how good this was but it was cute and far more interesting than most of the other stories.

Triangle Solo, 1.5/5-Erm, so this was needlessly sci-fi. It just kind of dropped the sci-fi in there as well, like shoving ham into a vegetarian sandwich. Effectively this is two guys fighting over a girl they used to know who went away for ages and came back hot. I barely skim-read this one.

Vim and Vigor, 4/5-By far the best story in this. There is a love triangle in this but it's not actually part of the story really, just the set-up. These girls were best friends and massively into a fandom when one of them died in an accident. They then stopped speaking to each other and drifted apart, but this story is about them learning to cope with their grief and re-establishing their friendship. A sweet story and a breath of fresh air to the anthology.

Work in Progress, ?/5-I don't even remember this one.

Hurdles, 3.5/5-Another solid one rooted in reality. A girl is set to become a star athlete and has a lovely boyfriend. Her ex boyfriend has just come out of prison for drug use/other bad things. She is trying to decide whether or not to run away with her ex or stay with her new boyfriend and go for an athletic scholarship (or something similar). The only thing holding this story back is you never find out what she chooses. Very disappointing considering one option would be extremely bad for her.

The Historian, The Garrison, and the Cantakerous Catwoman, 3/5-Apart from giving me serious Buffy ripoff vibes, this story was pretty cool. The main character is a girl who helps a superhero-type figure fight demons by basically being his researcher. He then meets another superhero-type girl who he falls in love with. This story is all about the main character's jealousy and feelings of betrayal at this.

Waiting, 1.5/5-I only vaguely remember this story but I definitely know I was not happy with the love triangle resolution. I'm pretty sure the main character ended up picking the worst possible option and treating a perfectly nice guy like crap in the process. This story was clearly going for 'pick passion over companionship' and while I understand that to an extent, they shouldn't have made the other option so appealing. Instead it just seems like she had learned nothing and was making the same bad mistakes all over again.

Vega, ?/5-Erm...this was probably a story in this anthology?

A Hundred Thousand Threads, ?/5-I skipped it sorry.

Before She Was Bloody, ?/5-I also skipped this one. I tried, I really did.

Unus, Duo, Tres, 3.5/5-This was really well-written and quite a cool concept of a story buuuut...polyamory is a thing guys. I don't want to say too much but this is about undead vampire lovers and what happens when they both fall for another human and yeah, polyamory should have been the resolution.

Okay, so as you can probably tell this was a very long anthology and my memory of many of the stories is pretty hazy. I read it only a month ago and even from reading the story descriptions from other reviews, there are some I just can't remember anything about. Overall though I would say it's not worth picking up this anthology. Even the good stories didn't really blow my mind massively, and there are so many that it really drags near the end. It's such a shame because this could be a great premise for a bunch of interesting short stories but that just doesn't happen.

Overall Score: