Harken by Kaleb Nation

Weak beginning, strong ending. That is how I would describe Harken in a nut shell. Of course as usual if you don't want me to spoil this book for you, there may be spoilers.

Harken is about teenager, Michael Asher. Michael is known as the 'Eye Guy' because of his unique ability to read people's emotions, giving him an insight into people's thoughts. In this world, all of Earth is controlled by lizard like creatures, known as Guardians, who take on forms of humans. They control everything: from the news, to the police, even to the weather. They Earth on lockdown without the humans knowing. Michael finds himself caught up in this world and discovers that he is actually one of them. He is a Guardian.

The plot was what really intrigued me. I am a sucker for conspiracy theories and Kaleb Nation is a master at self promotion, so he intrigued me from the start. I've followed Kaleb's progress on the book on his youtube page for nearly the whole time he was writing it and none of us 'Nationeers' (as us fans of Kaleb Nation are called) knew what the name of it was... it was called #thesecretkalebbook (yes complete with the hashtag). The history around the book was a complete mystery to us. Kaleb self promoted his book through word of mouth via social network sites. We were all excited about the book. Which is why I really, really wanted to like the book.

Angst, Anxiety, Abuse

I guess those three A words describe The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Like The Fault in Our Stars, I thought I would not like Wallflower, partially because of all of the cliche and hipster like posts on Tumblr and of course the over quoted quote "And at that moment I swear we were infinite." But the book was.... well... it's a tad hard to really rate or describe how I felt about the book. I had mixed feelings about it. Before you go on just a warning; like The Fault in Our Stars, Wallflower is a book that if you know what the ending is it will ruin everything for you. So warning...



Charlie is a wallflower (well we should expect that since the title is The Perks of Being a Wallflower). I enjoy reading books in letter form and I did enjoy the form in this book, but the one thing that irritated me was Stephen Chbosky's writing style when he wrote from Charlie's POV. In the beginning he sounded like a little seven or ten year old boy instead of the fifteen year old he was supposed to be. But as I continued reading I began to see how naive and innocent Charlie was and I suddenly reminded of my writing when I was fifteen years old. Being a naive fifteen year old once upon a time, my writing resembled that of my ten year old self. But in later chapters I began to see Charlie's writing (and his speech, since he writes how he speaks) getting older as his year went by and as he began to grow.

There are some theories that say that Charlie is autistic, but there is a fault in that. Charlie is someone who feels, he feels feelings so much more then normal people (could call him a empath). Autistic children are known to not feel very much and are very much oblivious to other's feelings so I don't believe Charlie is autistic. He is simply a young teenager who feels far too much. The ending did make you understand why Charlie is the way he is. But I was kind of disappointed that Charlie had just simply been abused by his aunt. Of course all of the signs led to it, but I was kind of hoping that Charlie was the way he is because that is how he is. Some people don't have reasons for having anxiety or for being over emotional (I certainly don't have any reason) and I wish that Chbosky could have writen about those who suffer for 'no apparent reason'.

The reason why I have a few mixed feelings about Wallflower is mostly because of the other characters. Chbosky spent so much time on Charlie and his feelings that you don't really care for the other characters. I didn't really care about Sam or Patrick or Charlie's family. There wasn't enough character development for the other minor characters I think.
The 'subplots', I guess you can call them, were slightly unbelievable. I have never gone to public school so I don't know what it's like, but there was just so much drama and angst. Of course angst is what makes up like 90% of young adult anything (novels, movies, TV shows, etc)! I was kind of disappointed in the stereotypical outlook of teenagers. It almost seemed like everyone had some kind of issue and almost everyone close to Charlie had been abused (sexually or physically). All of the angst just seemed to build into overly large bubbles of emotions and continually popped in your face. In short, it became kind of annoying.

Wallflower was hauntingly disturbing. I don't know if anyone else felt that way while reading it. For myself, personally, it was haunting. It was haunting in the way that I thought Chbosky was talking about me. I have anxiety and have experienced the feeling of going crazy, over thinking, over emotional, panic attacks, etc. So reading Wallflower brought up a lot of memories that I didn't really want to remember. During the time I was going through the panic attacks and stuff I tried to look for someone to blame. Like Charlie tried to find something to blame, but in the end "I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them." 

A Series of Unfortunate Events

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters.”

I have heard of this series from the 2004 movie adaption, I watched the movie and instantly fell in love with the concept. I have always been a fan of fantasy novels and this particular story perked my interest. I unfortunately (no pun intended, honestly) did not get to read the books until this year and I will have to say I was completely blown away. Unfortunate Events is under the category of children’s lit, but it is probably one of the most intelligent children’s lit I have ever read. Daniel Handler (known as Lemony Snicket for Unfortunate Events) has such a witty way of writing and an especially unique writing styles.

I enjoyed Snicket's way of explaining certain words. At first I thought that this was just his writing style, until I reached the end of the series and thought back to his explaining those certain words. There are some theories that there are clues hidden in those little explanations which has led myself to go back and read the entire series again and look for those clues. Unfortunate Events keeps your interest and just when you think things cannot get any worse for the Baudelaires, it gets worse. I was a bit disappointed in Snicket's display of the series main antagonist Count Olaf. But before I continue I must tell everyone, if you start reading your have to read all thirteen books. Some complain that Count Olaf was just every other villain  But the thirteenth book completely changed my mind. Snicket hints in the books (especially in the later ones) that there is a reason behind his villainy and why he hates the Baudelaire family so much.
There really are no answers for really anything in the book. Everything is hinted at, but that is kind of Snicket's point in the books. We always search for answers, but sometimes those answers lead to more questions. It is tricky to end a series without really explaining anything, but Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) does it so elegantly and he does leave answers it's just you have to dig for them. He ended the series in a tasteful way or I guess not so tasteful, I guess the best way to describe it is that Snicket left you full and yet still hungry for more. 

The thirteen book series may be intimidating to look at, but each book is only roughly around one hundred pages long, the longest I believe is only two hundred to three hundred. They are very fast reads and enjoyable if you like reading just for the sake of reading, but I cannot promise you that you will not stop thinking about it once you finish The End.

The Fault in Our Stars

So it's been a little while since my last blog post, but I've been on my senior trip! So good times and I had plenty of time to get some reading done. Among the three books I finished (personal yay!) I finished The Fault in Our Stars. And I will admit, sitting in the hotel lobby I cried unashamed. But I do have a few problems with it. Okay so now here's the SPOILER ALERT! Like seriously, if you have NOT read the book do not read this next section.... seriously. It'll ruin everything for you...

The ending seemed a little hopeless. It made life out to be kind of simple and hopeless, well not entirely hopeless and simple but more like: you're born, you live, maybe you'll live life without anything seriously damaging your body (in Hazel's and Gus's case they both have to live with cancer), you love and hopefully that love will be an infinite love, and you die. It seemed like that to me. You're born, you live, you love, you die. I know that this book is a lot deeper then that, but that's just how it came across.

Augustus's outlook on love was, like quoting Tennyson, "It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." Of course in my mind that quote has always made me want to barf. But after reading Fault it begins to make sense. In the beginning Hazel, who has lived a tad longer than she meant to, believes that because she could die at any moment what is the point in love when she's just going to die? Augustus showed her differently and after his death Hazel would not have taken back the time they had together. So that is one of the positive outlooks of this book.

The one theme through the book is after death. And one of the questions is if we would still love someone even after their death. Will Hazel's mother still be Hazel's mother after Hazel dies? Will Hazel still love Augustus after he dies? And of course, anyone who has read the book knows that the answer is yes. The point in the book (at least what I got from it) is that even though you only have that small amount of time, it's an infinite amount of time.

So even though Augustus's death seemed a little hopeless for me, that nothing really happens when we die. The subject of love is a beautiful picture in this novel.