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Gratefultritone

Lilopinions

I'm a hardcore reader and more of a casual blogger but love writing about the books I love in Hope's of others reaching them, or finding others with similar interests to mine.

Currently reading

My Appetite for Destruction: Sex, and Drugs, and Guns N' Roses
Lawrence J. Spagnola, Steven Adler

Wasteland

Wasteland - Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan Well if this wasn't a weird one. Honestly, this is one of those books I saw somewhere from someone I followed from Goodreads. All I saw was the cover, and I thought that it looked promising enough, and upon getting the book I saw the first two sentences of the description: "Welcome to the Wasteland. Where all adults are long gone, and now no one lives past the age of nineteen." This is where I got sort of weary, because generally I knew most kids would act like kids, if the characters were portrayed right, and if not then we had unrealistically mature teenagers on our hands. Add in the hermaphroditic outcasts, and you've got more or less a mess.

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You know those books that you can't remember disliking or liking, forget the characters names within a week or so, and overall just have a faint memory that you read it? Yeah, this was one of those books. The characters weren't anything great, the world was falling into pieces (literally too, actually) and the plot was hardly even there. The point of view was always jumping, trying to do sort of the third person thing, but be inside the mind of the characters and such. It works with very few authors, and for these two, it did not, rather just confused me.

I can't say this book was entirely boring. It did have it's good points, some of the plot twists in there were alright. They weren't necessarily easy to spot until they were upon you, but they were ones we've all seen before numerous times, so in the end I didn't really care on a few of them. Strange little not-so-shocking moments that filled up this dying world.

Oh goodness the world. Where do I start. For one, we don't know why the world is like it is; you can't drink the water at all, rainwater and other. Food is sparse, and the looming of all things: No one lives past nineteen, and for some reason there are little people running around who are neither male or female. The later of the two things is later explained in a way, but it still left me questioning why, and how.

One of the main characters, Caleb, came from no where, and was supposed to be amazing and mysterious, when in fact his entire past was explained in a paragraph with the other main character, Esther, who he barely knew. I found Esther to be very annoying, and while she was fifteen, and was supposed to be more mature then the majority, she sounded more like a whiny spoiled child. All the characters, everyone from the ten year olds, to the sixteen year olds, seemed the same to me. They all talked and acted the same. There were no really just amazing side characters, which is not much of a surprise, considering the main characters needed so much more fleshing out.

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The plot, was not even there. I'm not sure what the authors were trying to do with this story, but really if there was a point to it I didn't understand what it was. It was mainly relying on the characters to run the story, but in fact, the characters were not all that interesting in the first place, so it just turned into a big ball of nothingness.

On the bright side, it was a fast read, and other then the POV changes (which annoyed the hell out of me) was rather easy to read as well. I didn't have any hopes or anything going into the book, which really probably saved it for me. Just going to put it on the list and go onto the next one.