"The Lovely Bones" - Alice Sebold

BLURB:
" 'My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighbourhood. My mother likes his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertiliser.'

This is Susie Salmon, speaking from heaven - which looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets, counsellors to help newcomers adjust, and friends to room with. Everything Susie wants appear as soon as she thinks of it - except the one thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on earth.

Watching from her place in heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet..."

REVIEW: I got to about halfway through this book when I realised something was missing. I couldn't quite put my finger on it for a while. And then it hit me:

Plot.

The Lovely Bones is sadly lacking in plot. Where had it even gone? Was it there to begin with?

To me, a plot has a clear Beginning, a Middle, and an End. In between the Beginning and the End, there is at least one cycle of 'Conflict' and then 'Resolution'. There's some kind of goal the characters are actively working towards. You know, the guy gets the girl. The tragedy is averted. The mystery is solved. That sort of thing.

Didn't happen in The Lovely Bones.

And what is a book without a plot? I guess you could call it an 'exploration' of a theme, or an observational 'study', or a collection of poems, or something along those lines. However, if you're going to craft a fictional work along those lines, it needs to be done brilliantly if it's going to work, otherwise the audience will virtually fall asleep whilst mid-read.

Like I did.

The first few chapters were interesting - I've never read a book where the narrator had died within the first few sentences!* - but later I realised that the emotional side of those chapters came less from the actual book, but more from imagining the pain that a murdered child would bring upon a family.

And then, it became a dreary, boring, highly unrealistic recount of people growing up, with the only added ingredient being that they were all dealing with grief and loss. Sort of like watching a generation of Sims growing up in The Sims 2 without having any interaction with the gameplay. I didn't feel for the characters, the story lacked depth, and most of all, none of it seemed real. The characters and their actions did not seem credible, even in the circumstances they were dealing with. Not a single character seemed 'right'. In a way, The Lovely Bones felt very slightly like a Jodi Picoult novel without the sheer, grippingly realistic characters and emotional punch.

Flicking through to the last few chapters, things only became more ridiculous. (Spoiler: highlight invisible text to read). After reading the scene where Susie possesses Ruth's body and then "makes love" to Ray "in the shower and in the bedroom and under the lights and fake glow-in-the-dark stars" - well, I kind of tossed the book down in sheer disbelief. Absolutely terrible. I mean, come on. Seriously?

Ultimately, The Lovely Bones wound up on a very, very short pile in my room: books that remain eternally unfinished because they were so incredibly unengaging that really, all things considered, I'd prefer to be watching paint dry.

RATING: I imagine voguelady will probably eat me alive for giving "one of [her] favourite books" such a vicious panning, but I cannot believe how much I disliked this book, despite its current popularity. 1 STAR

* No, The Book Thief doesn't count, since Death had never been alive and therefore had never died. See what I did there?

EDIT: OK, here we go, this is a first. An additional note for one of my reviews. How intriguing.

But really, people, what have I overlooked? Everywhere I look I find reviews that are nothing short of glowing. Plus, completely incorrect (in my mind) genre-categorising: people are calling it a "thriller" - why? It does not thrill. The pace does not keep smartly chugging along. Instead the pace seemed to get a bit lost in the pond where it's now become so stagnant that all the previously living creatures in that pond are now non-living thanks to the thick build-up of algae.

Anyway. Is this somehow another sign of my severe unsophisticatedness? My unappreciation for abstract art, unconventional writing, etc? Or am I just one of the few reviewers out there to not be swayed by both professional and public opinion and just tell it like it is?

Feel free to leave some thoughts in the comments for me.

'Buttons' (video) by Sia

BLURB:
There are no words to describe this. You simply have to watch it to understand it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUkje1lw4cA

REVIEW:
Despite the fact that you can't really 'read' a video, and this is a review site for stuff I've read, this just kind of got to me. My overall response to seeing this video clip can be summed up in three letters:

WTF?

You know you must be famous when you can make a video that consists entirely of lip-synching your song while contorting your face into grotesque positions by way of clear plastic (warning: danger of suffocation. keep away from children), stockings (retired bank robber perhaps?), pegs (which made me cringe just to look at) and sticky tape (not its most productive use). It's as though the singer said 'Hey, let's see how stupid and unglamorous I can look with this put on my face!' Followed by 'Hey, let's make this into a video clip!'
One question: why? Were you out of your mind and/or drunk and/or stoned when you made this?
Sia, I'm sorry, but you look like a complete idiot. I watched an interview with you talking to someone on a bus, and you seemed like a quirky, charming sort of person. But this video clip does not "make any statements about true beauty" (as one commenter claimed), nor does it make any statement at all, apart from perhaps "I'm bored so am mucking around with various materials in front of a camera". It's painful and sometimes very, very disturbing to watch.
The song is alright though.

RATING:
Singing with a stocking over your head just makes you look like a moron. 1 STAR

"The Phantom of the Opera" - Gaston Leroux

BLURB:

"The lights dim at the Paris Opera House. The exquisite Christine Daae enraptures the audience with her mellifluous voice. Immediately, Raoul de Chagny falls deeply in love. But the legend of the disfigured "opera ghost" haunts the performance, and as Raoul begins his pursuit of Christine, he is pulled into the depths of the opera house, and into the depths of human emotions. Soon Raoul discovers that the ghost is real and that he wields a terrifying power over Christine--a power as unimaginable as the ghost's masked face. As Raoul and the ghost vie for Christine's love, a journey begins into the dark recesses of the human heart, where desire, vulnerability, fear, and violence unravel in a tragic confrontation."

REVIEW:

I love the stage show and absolutely adore the 2004 movie, and while I was well aware that the actual novel is NOT the same as the Andrew Lloyd-Webber creations, and that it is an older book written in Gothic style, I was still expecting to be caught up in that rather charming way you often do (or maybe it's just me...there's a weird thought) when reading a book written in an older style. I don't do it often; I'm a girl who likes the gloss of big-budget Hollywood movies, slick and polished studio CDs, and modern books. (With a few exceptions of course, "Jennie" by Paul Gallico is a slightly older book and I love it to bits).

But back on track. I eagerly dove into this story and was swept up in the enchanting tale of the mysterious Opera Ghost. For the first few chapters I happily read the story that inspired the stage and film adaptations I love so much. Yes, it was different, but still quite good and it was interesting spotting all the similarities and differences.

Then, after about the first quarter of the book, the charm started wearing off. Especially the descriptions of Raoul. I'm not a fan of Raoul anyway, in either the stage or movie production, but in the book (even though he's the one the readers are supposed to be backing, not the phantom!) he was even more cowardly, weak and insipid than anywhere else. It seemed on every other page he was bursting into tears and whining about Christine. At one point it became intriguing, as Raoul was mysteriously found one morning almost dead and unconscious in a cemetary, and as he recounted what happened I was expecting him to say something like "I had a brief sense of the opera ghost stealthily creeping up behind me - the next minute, I felt a devastating blow to the back of my head - then blackness." No, it was much less exciting than that. It was "I saw the opera ghost, and he looked so terrifying that I fainted and nearly froze to death." He fainted because the ghost looked scary. Grow some guts, Raoul!

Even besides the frustratingly insipid Raoul, by the time I was halfway through the novel, I was sighing and wishing it was over. I flicked through the second half and noticed nothing much else that might attract my attention. What a pity.

RATING:

This one's going straight back onto the shelf, and I'll stick with my beloved movie and the memory of the time I saw it on stage. Admittedly, a lot of my dislike is probably simply due to my dislike of the genre, and not the book as a whole. But this is my review site, so I can give it whatever rating I want. 1 STAR

"The Man in the Black Suit" (short story) - Stephen King

BLURB:

The Man in the Black Suit comes from the book 'Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales' by Stephen King. It is about a nine-year-old boy who goes fishing one afternoon in 1914 and encounters...well, a 'man' in a black suit who he believes is the devil.

REVIEW:

I ordered this book from BookMooch, since I haven't read King before and my friend seemed to like his books, plus I like short stories and particularly liked the movie '1408' (the short story of which was included in this book). So far I've read a couple of the stories - one was excellent, one was quite interesting, one was fairly standard 'burried alive' material, and two stories were kind of crap, IMHO. This was one of them.

The man in the black suit has a head like a skull, and eyes that were "completely orange" because "he was on fire inside". (Cliche, anyone?) This 'devil' man proceeds to taunt the "fisherboy" by telling him that his mother was dead. As you can imagine, this works Gary (our fisherboy) into quite a state of distress. However, the devil goes one step further and claims he's very hungry. He eats the fish that the boy has caught and then goes to eat him too. The boy runs away, the devil chases him...obviously it would be stupid to give away the ending, even though I've already given away most of the short story's plot. Which isn't much.

The ending, however, delivered absolutely nothing. I was hoping for some kind of message - any kind of message: moral, inspiring, whatever - but there was none. I thought right from the outset that the description of the devil was laughable, like a monster story told to a little child rather than a story intended for an adult audience. Furthermore, the devil just sounded like a big old pedophile to me ("You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear this, my little fisherboy...") There was no point to this story at all and I can't believe it won an award (O Henry Best Short Story 1996). This is an author who's supposed to write horror stories so...well, horrifying...that some were banned! What happened to the disturbing imagery and haunting qualities of '1408'? They're completely absent in this particular story. A devil in a black suit taunts and chases a boy who went fishing. THE END.

RATING:

It was rubbish. I expected more from such a popular, bestselling author. I hope the other stories make up for it. 1 STAR