Death, Books, and Tea: john green

Showing posts with label john green. Show all posts

Saturday, 21 September 2013

Book Review-Will Grayson Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

I’m back! I am SO SO sorry for the random disappearance! Stuff happened with the internet and then I didn’t have motivation to do things. Seeing as it’s now impossible to fit everything into the original schedule, Rainbow Reads will run over into the beginning of October. All giveaways will end on the 29 September as planned. Normal posting resumes today!

Title: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Author: John Green and David Levithan

Series: N/A

Published: April 2010 by Dutton Books, 10 May 2012 by Penguin in the UK

Length: 308 pages

Source: publisher

Other info: David Levithan has written Boy Meets Boy and some other things. John Green has written The Fault in Our Stars, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns and looking for Alaska. John Green is awesome.

Summary : One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two teens—both named Will Grayson—are about to cross paths. As their worlds collide and intertwine, the Will Graysons find their lives going in new and unexpected directions, building toward romantic turns-of-heart and the epic production of history’s most fabulous high school musical.

Review: Will Grayson goes to a concert with his friends, but isn't let in because his fake ID says he's not old enough. Will Grayson goes to Chicago to meet a boy he has been chatting to over the past year. Both of them meet in an adult shop, meaning their lives go in different directions. Will starts dating Will's friend, Tiny, who is putting on a musical at school.

I read this sometime last year. I forgot to write a review. I reread it again for Rainbow Reads. It didn't seem any better or worse second time round.

For ease of reviewing, the Wills are going to be referred to by the person who wrote them. John's Will starts off with a funny quote from his father and his explanation of why he is friends with Tiny Cooper. David's Will starts off telling us that he is “constantly torn between killing [himself] and killing everyone around [him]”. They're two different characters with different issues and things to work out, but they're both intriguing and well fleshed out.

Tiny is a little annoying to start with, but you soon get used to him. He's very OTT, but does become a bit more complex as it all goes on. I really liked Jane, and the way the relationship between her and John's Will progresses.

I like David's stylistic point of David's Will only writing in lowercase. David's Will is living with depression, and the way David gets into the head of someone with depression is powerful and emotional.

Plotwise, there's Tiny's putting on of a musical, and there's David's Will and Tiny's relationship, and there's Jane and John's Will's relationship, and there's the varying friendships, and there's character development from everyone, mainly David's Will. Not particularly epic, but you get to like the characters so much that you just want to know about and spend time with them.

Will Grayson Will Grayson covers the full emotional spectrum. There's happiness, there's heartbreak, there's anger, there's a good bit of humour, everything conveyed really really well.

Overall: Strength 4 tea to a fun story about four peoples' journeys through life.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | John’s website | David’s Website

Sunday, 24 February 2013

Books too perfect to review

You know how there's some books that you finish and your reaction is a mix of I love this and I can't deal with this and this has temporarily broken me and I can't put down in words my utter love for this?

This will be a page with these books on it. I might attempt to do a full post for these, but for the time being, just know that they are awesome. I'll update this page as and when I come across these books. Because there will be more.

Thursday, 7 February 2013

Book Review- An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Title: An Abundance of Katherines

Author: John Green

Series: N/A

Published: September 2006. Recently in UK, 10 May 2012

Length: 272 pages

Source: library

Other info: John Green has also written Looking for Alaska, Will Greyson Will Greyson, Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars. He is one half of the Vlogbrothers and generally awesome.

Summary : When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact.
On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun--but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl. Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.

Review: Colin has had nineteen Katherines, nineteen girlfriends and has bene dumped nineteen times. After being dumped by Katherine XIX, his best friend Hassan decideds that the best thing to do is go on a roadtrip. They end up in a town in Tennessee, where there’s a girl called Lindsey. As their friendship grows, Colin’s hard at work. He’s got a theorum to prove-can variables be plugged into a formula to graph, and predict, any relationship?

I read Ppaer Towns and Looking For Alaska and thought that they were good, but not amazing. I am looking forwards to reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I love the Vlogbrothers videos. I read The Fault in our Stars and practiacally died from all the feels and beauty. Mixed reacitons to John Green.

An Abundance of Katherines starts quite well. Colin’s situation, that he’s been dumped many times by many girls with the same name, probably isn’t meant to be funny, because if it happened in real life it wouldn’t be, but here it is. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from John and his crazy awesomeness.

Colin is a child progidy, who wants to be a genius. Therefore, he pushes himself a lot. I’m all for ambition, but I think Colin takes it a little to the extreme at times, coming across as egoistic, and annoying. He’s also a little bit whiny, which comes from his wanting to matter in the world. You do feel sorry for him a bit, but at times, I wanted to slap him.

Hassan is the general opposite. His sarcastic comments and livelyness is really nice. It’s also nice to see an Arab-American as a main character, something that should happen more on our white-centric bookshelves. Lindsey Lee Wells is cool. I’m not saying that just because she lives with her mother, Hollis, in a pink house. But I liked her personality, and she makes a good friend.

The setting is really vivid. The atsmosphere of Tennessee is really good (at least, I asusme it is. I’ve never been to Tennessee, or indeed any part of America. But the general atmosphere seems right for this book).

The plot...there wasn’t much of it. I couldn’t get into the storyline. There weren’t any stakes, and I didn’t see hwere it was meant to be going. It felt a bit like a cutout of a diary (except for it being in the third person) of a part of someone’s life, which is important to them, but not to the rest of us.

The maths is really complicated. I followered it to a point, but ended up thinking “it probably works”. It’s nice seeing Colin’s dedication, and it comes to a nice, but not really epic conclusion.

With the writing, the prose isn’t that amazing. The shedload of factnotes are a differnt matter, rivalling the hilarity of Good Omens’ footnotes (something which I wasn’t sure was possible).