Review of Wild Swans

Again...

BELGIUM WON AGAIN

BELGIUM - RUSSIA

1 - 0

Thanks to Origi!!

Now the review..

This is the second time I've read Wild Swans by Jung Chang. The first time I've read it I was 16 and it had been recommended by my English teacher. It was a wonderful novel then, but now, almost ten years later, I figured it was time for a reread. 

I see the novel differently now, than I did then. Then I was mostly taken by the struggle the women went through in order to survive, to not be prosecuted. Now I had more eye for their surrounding. 

The story is autobiographical, telling the history of the writer, her mother and her grandmother. 
Her grandmother being brought up in a traditional China, with the absurd rules and ancient traditions its inhabitants had to live by in order to gain wealth and prestige. The conditions were almost downright barbaric for women and she lived the life of a concubine. 
Against all odds, when her husband died, she found a new love in another man who, again not according to tradition, made her his wife and gave her the life she deserved. She did already have a child. 

That child was the Chang's mother. She grew up during the reign of terror by the Kwomingtan, after Japan got defeated and when in her teens, she began working voluntary and in secret for the communist party, which later overthrew the Kwomingtan. During these events she met her husband and they both were valuable assets of the communist party. 
She tells the story of how difficult it was for her to become a full member of the party. Always being under suspicion because her father had been a warlord, and because a lot of her friends during her teens had had connections with the Kwomingtan. She endured The Great Leap Forward, initiated by Mao, to try and be better then western economies, ultimately ending in a catastrophical famine that had cost the lives of millions of chinese. During this time she was in and out of custody, depending on the current propaganda campaign. She held her ground, because if she were to falter, her kids would be punished too. 

Chang was born during this time. She never knew how difficult it had been for her parents to survive and to be free. 
When she started high school, Mao began his indoctrination of the youth, supported by the government and the entire party. Normal classes were quickly abandoned in order to spend the time honouring Mao. 
Mao consequently ushered in the Cultural revolution and was supported by millions of chinese teens and students, resulting in one of the biggest manhunts and destruction of ancient treasures, China had seen. This revolution would last 10 years, in which people with a degree or the will to learn, were being cast out, depicted upon and discriminated.

It's fluently written, and is as wonderful a novel, as it is a history text book. 
The cultural revolution, Mao, the uprising of communism after WW2, alongsided with a story of a three women, the one who wrote the book, her mother and her grandmother, how even with only a generation difference, they all grew up in a very different China.

I'm giving this novel 9,5 out of 10.

Review of Divergent

First of all...

WE WON

Belgium - Algeria

2 - 1

Now, back to the review. 

Divergent is one of the better YA novels I've read. 

I've heard of this novel because it has already been adapted, so I was curious what it was about. Of course, film adaptation doesn't always mean that the source material is a great book. 

I'm glad this one was alright.

In short, it's about a young girl, Beatrice, age 16, who has to choose how she wants to spend the rest of her life. In this dystopia a war has happened and when that war ended, survivors began to analyse how it could begin in the first place. They developed 5 factions where each could thrive as best as they could. 

Candor - here live the ones who think dishonesty was the cause of so much trouble and they strive to be always truthful, even if it hurts.

Abnegation - People who think selfishness is the root of all evil thrive in this faction, as they put themselves second

Dauntless - Here you'll find people who believe that cowardness was the base of the trouble that occured and they challenge themselves to be as daring as possible.

Amity - Friendship lies at the base of this faction, as the people who join this group think that if everyone could get along war wouldn't exist.

Erudite - Knowledge is power, they think that the ignorance of too many people is the key to causing problems and eventually war and they work towards gaining as much knowledge as possible. 

Beatrice has to choose between these five different direction in life. She's been born in Abnegation and has been following that direction since then. Now she has to face the possibility of leaving her family to join a group that fits her. 

Of course this is only the premise onto which this story builds. Beatrice makes a startling choice, but she's somehow different. Before they choose they have to do a test, a kind of simulation which will tell them in which faction they belong. When Beatrice takes the test, something goes wrong and the girl doing the testing tells her she's divergent and she has to keep quiet about it. 

Beatrice chooses Dauntless and sets herself up to be tested to the very limits, but her curious test result keeps haunting her. She encounters friends and foes, even a romantic involvement and in the end she needs to solve a horrific chain of events. 

In the beginning Beatrice follows the same path as so many of the YA heroines have done before her, meaning she was unsure of herself, low selfesteem and an attraction to one of the teachers which she doesn't understand from the beginning and later on when it becomes obvious that he's as much into her as she is into him, she reads his signals wrong. At 16, you're supposed to know what this is all about. 

Luckily the author steers aways from this quite soon and she becomes more confident and I loved reading of her conquering the hurdles in her education. A wonderful role model. 

The climax being a bit over the top, mainly because it's completely unexpected (the moment between Beatrice finding out what is going on and the event actually happening is maybe two pages apart), doesn't hurt the story too much but I'm not sure the second novel can be as good as the first. 

I think of the Hunger Games. The first novel was wonderful, the second also because it followed the first in a lot of ways but made it more sexy and dangerous, but the third was a let down. It had fallen from a wonderfully stylished YA novel into something a bit off and on. Too much anticipation, too little action. 

That's why I'm wary that Divergent will travel along the same path. 

It's not going to stop me from reading it though. 

Review of Broken Flower

First thoughts? Hmmmm... Not the Virginia Andrews I'm used to.

She was too grown up for childish game but too young to become a woman. 
Living with her parents and brother, Ian, in her Grandmother Emma's enormous mansion, Jordan March tries to be a good girl and follow her grandmother's strict rules. It's easy for Jordan to hide in the shadows  between Ian's brilliant, all-consuming talents for science and the ever-more-frequent arguments among the grown-ups. But one day, without warning, Jordan's body begins to change  and everyone notices her in a way that seems dark, dangerous, and threatening. Suddenly the March family secrets are unleashed, and Jordan is ashamed and afraid that her soft curves are unwelcome indeed. Shipped off to a lakeside hideaway, Jordan and Ian befriend a girl whose shocking revelations make for a summer of scandal and explosive emotion. Outraged, Grandmother Emma sets out to make Jordan pay for her family's past mistakes, sending her world spinning wildly out of control. . . (www.goodreads.com)

Are you done reading this summary? This is what I read at the back of the book, but trust me... It's all a scam. The ghost writer pushing this through must never have had a Virginia Andrews novel in her hands. For instance the severity with which Emma punishes Jordan is almost laughible when you compare it to the Dawn-series or the Heaven-omnibus. That's shocking, this was boring and altogether a waste of my time.
Of course I've bought an omnibus and I've got second novel still waiting for me.. The best of Virginia Andrews has already been written.

Just to warn you.. Grandmother Emma isn't making Jordan pay for her family's mistakes. Not in this novel anyway. The next might clarify more, because you have no idea what kind of mistakes they're talking about. This novel is a major cliffhanger, followed by an anticlimax.

It's been a while since I've been so disappointed.

I'm giving this novel a 1 out of 10. 

Bleak House

It took me a while to finish this book. I have read but one Dickens before this one, which was Oliver Twist and I don't recall much of it frankly.

Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dickens invokes to portray London society, rich and poor, as no other novelist has done. Bleak House, in its atmosphere, symbolism and magnificent bleak comedy, is often regarded as the best of Dickens. A 'great Victorian novel', it is so inventive in its competing plots and styles that it eludes interpretation. (www.goodreads.com)

Charles Dickens is supposed to be one of the best writers of the Victorian Age, but I feel this era has been surpassed many times now.
I'm romantic by nature, but Dickens feels very naive and innocent. The characters living in this novel seem a little childish. Bleak House is like a fairy tale of a 1000 pages.

Of course being almost 1000 pages long, it's longwinded. There are chapters I would've ommited, but of course in the end you'll notice how every little bit of information, and he gives a lot of info on every character and subcharacter possible, fits in this puzzle he's created. I know of only one writer to do so, and here I'm again with my praise for Stephen King. Although the main difference between the two in their writing is the content. While King can hold you on the edge of your seat, with Dickens I felt like it could be hurried on a little faster. Bleak house might have been better if it were to be comprimized into a novel half its thickness.

Now, what about the story?
I'm not sure how I feel about it. It made me smile sometimes, but I felt frustrated more often. Bleak House starts out with a young girl who's been made to understand that she's the shame of her mother. You quickly get the idea that she was an illegitimate love-child and forced to hide away. This is Esther, and Esther is the main protagonist in Bleak House. When Esther's warden dies, she eventually ends up with Mr. Jarndyce. A goodhumoured man, although a little wayward in avoiding praise or trouble. He's part of a suit in court, which goes on for ages and is a bit of a laughing matter in London.
Together with Esther, two other young persons come to live with him, Ada and Richard. Ada is a beautiful girl and Richard a handsome young man who hasn't found his way in the world yet. Both are also parties in the Jarndyce suit. Mr Jarndyce tries to steer Richard in a good direction, but eventually Richard severs all ties because he thinks that Mr Jarndyce is trying to fool him. He spends too much money and energy in the failing suit. Meanwhile Esther is trying to live her life as innocently as possible, because she has been imprinted with the thought she has to work double as hard to overcome her shame of being born illegitimate.
She's a good soul and tend to take her kindly, because she doesn't have a selfish bone in her body.
While she is living with Mr Jarndyce, a man who's gotten fond of her, Mr Guppy, is trying to find out the ancestral trail of Esther, so he might find her worthy enough to make her his wife although she doesn't intend to let him. He comes daringly close to the truth and Esther finds out who her mother is.

Meanwhile she falls in love, but the man she loves is on a  ship to India to try and seek good fortune. When he comes back, Esther is altered in appearance due to a sickness and thinks he doesn't like her in the same way anymore. This sets other events in motion, but as Dickens writes quite romantically in Bleak House, you can expect a happy ending for most of his characters.

Only one time did he stop my heart and made me fight back tears, which was when Esther is desperately trying to find her mother. Of course Bleak House is written more satirical, than truly heartbreaking, so I wasn't expecting it.

I can't say I was overjoyed while reading Bleak House. More times than not it was a chore. I was glad when I finally finished the last page and could go on to something else. I'm not sure I'll be reading Dickens again, not soon anyway. There are novels of his I'm intrigued by, so I'll probably read more, but not so in 2014.

I'll give Bleak House a 6,5 out of 10.