Review: Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

 

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐

My feelings on this book are very mixed. Before reading it, I had seen so many people raving about how great this book was and up to around page 150, I felt the same. But then something changed. The story seemed to lose viability because the conflicts didn’t seem to warrant the reactions. It felt like the author had written out a timeline of when certain relationship milestones had to be reached and then to make Chloe and Red’s relationship fit that, conflict was added in to make up the time in between.

 

A spoiler example of this was the fall out on the ‘bar crawl’. I knew that they would need to make up with each other before the camping trip they had planned for the next weekend and predictably the plot followed that so that they were back together for the next weekend. It made the relationship feel fake and too planned out.

 

Having said that, the representation of physical and mental illness in this book was refreshing. The recognition that when you find a partner, no matter how amazing they are, it doesn’t make you recover and that medication and therapy are important parts of navigating such illnesses.

 

The premise of this book was also really fun and interesting. The prologue was a really good opener and set up the book in the best possible way. I’m really sad I didn’t enjoy this book more because when I first started reading it, I thought it would be an easy five stars, but such is life.

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Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney

 

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I started this book, but I didn’t expect what it actually was. I knew that it covered a time span of years and so I was really surprised by the size at first; I had been expecting at least a 400-page book.

 

I think I had been trying so hard to avoid spoilers as well that I failed to look for trigger warnings for this book. Mental illness (depression and anxiety), suicide, eating disorders, physical abuse, mental/emotional abuse and sexual abuse are all major triggers for this book. Thankfully I was alright reading these, but I know some people who would not be. I’ll probably find loads of posts about Normal People with the trigger warnings, but I had no clue about them going into the book.

 

The other thing that really shocked me was the lack of speech marks. In a way, I’m glad that I didn’t know this before reading because I feel like it might have put me off the book before I’d given it a chance. Whilst it did put me off for the first fifty or so pages, I ended up really enjoying the lack of speech marks because it removed the temptation to skip paragraphs and just focus on the speech.

 

Overall, I gave this book four stars because of the realness and emotional connection I felt towards the characters; I was really invested in their story. This wasn’t a five star read for me because I would have preferred it to be longer and there wasn’t that something that five star reads have.

 

Connell and Marianne remind me of the ‘relationships as lines’ that I have seen. They come together and drift apart, end up wound together tightly but separate, only to find that they can’t stay that way. It’s the most accurate description of those lines that I’ve ever read, and I love it for that.

[Goodreads parallel]

Review: Sherlock Holmes - The Complete Novels and Stories Volume II by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐

With any compilation of stories, there will be ones you like more and ones you like less. The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box and The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane stand out as really good stories, but others were less interesting or highlighted the time the books were written in negatively. This is particularly the case with racist descriptions of black men, suggesting their inferior intelligence and portraying them as thugs. It speaks to the early 20^th century when these stories were being written, but it’s not okay to just pass over the fact and pretend that it doesn’t matter.

 

Having said that, the friendship between Holmes and Watson was lovely to read about and made me tempted to push up my rating. Holmes is often seen as cold and calculating but in these stories, you could also see how much he valued Watson and his opinions. It is a shame in a way that there aren’t more stories, but with the countless adaptations there’s plenty still to dive into if the temptation arises.

[Goodreads parallel]