Fiction | Book Chatter

Catching Fire
By Suzanne Collins
Scholastic, Inc.
September 2009
400pp

The Short of It:

Catching Fire packs more action than book one and includes all of the characters you love plus a few others. A worthy follow-up.

The Rest of It:

I can’t talk about plot at all because doing so would give away the story but as far as series go, this one is pretty exciting. I liked The Hunger Games quite a bit, but felt that it was a bit familiar. I didn’t feel that so much with Catching Fire. Maybe because I was already familiar with the characters and in this book, the rules of the game and how it works is not as heavily emphasized as book one. In my opinion, this allowed the reader to focus more on the action and not so much the logistics of how it all works.

I plopped down to read this and pretty much read it in one day. I had hoped to drag it out a bit but I couldn’t put it down. It’s the kind of book that you cart around the house. I read it in between cooking, in between the Olympics and misplaced it several times throughout the day since I took it everywhere I went. That said, you must read it, but make sure you read The Hunger Games first. Catching Fire could stand alone but you’ll want to read book one to get the full experience.

Oh, and for those of you that are worried about its Young Adult classification, don’t worry. This series may be geared towards young adults but there’s a lot for an adult to enjoy here. As for young adults, there is some violence, since they are fighting to the death but it’s “survival type” violence which to me is a bit easier to digest than just killing for fun.

If you’ve been in a bit of a reading rut, pick up book one and then book two and you’ll remember what it feels like to read books for fun.

Now I am all ready for book three! Mockingjay hits the shelves on August 24, 2010. That’s a long time to wait!

Source: Purchased

The Things That Keep Us Here
By Carla Buckley
Random House
February 2010
416pp

Here’s the blurb from the publisher:

How far would you go to protect your family?

Ann Brooks never thought she’d have to answer that question. Then she found her limits tested by a crisis no one could prevent. Now, as her neighborhood descends into panic, she must make tough choices to protect everyone she loves from a threat she cannot even see. In this chillingly urgent novel, Carla Buckley confronts us with the terrifying decisions we are forced to make when ordinary life changes overnight.

A year ago, Ann and Peter Brooks were just another unhappily married couple trying–and failing–to keep their relationship together while they raised two young daughters. Now the world around them is about to be shaken as Peter, a university researcher, comes to a startling realization: A virulent pandemic has made the terrible leap across the ocean to America’s heartland.

And it is killing fifty out of every hundred people it touches.

The Short of It:

A gripping plot, likable characters, yet this one falls a bit short of its mark.

The Rest of It:

There are a lot of books out right now that deal with the end of the world, or a pandemic of some sort. This one deals with H5N1 and from its name alone, you can imagine the similarities to H1N1. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think about the H1N1 scare here, and how it could have been much, much worse. In this novel, things take a turn for the worse and Ann is forced to make some tough decisions. As a mother, I could easily relate to Ann. The decisions she made were not made easily. They were made out of fear, and an intense desire to keep her family safe. I felt that the author did a good job of making Ann’s situation desperate enough for the reader to understand her decisions.

There is a lot that didn’t work for me though. This is a story of survival yet when opportunities present themselves, Ann and her husband Peter, don’t always take advantage of them. If there is any chance of your kids starving, you are going to do what you have to do to ensure that they don’t. There are moments when they do take advantage of a situation, but not always and the inconsistency bothered me. As I was reading, I found myself asking about water or food or weapons, etc. To me, these things are basic necessities when dealing with a pandemic of this magnitude.

A couple of the characters really didn’t have much of a purpose except to cause conflict between the main characters. One example of this is a young woman named Shazia. As a reader, I never really got to know her and I wondered what her purpose was besides the obvious, which I won’t go into as it would give some of the story away. Her character, along with her back story seemed a bit choppy to me and could have been a bit more developed.

Overall, the situations that I expected to be the most difficult ended up being almost too easy. Too pat. Water becomes an issue and then all of a sudden there’s a stash of water at your convenience. Not very believable. A trip to the hospital, in the middle of a pandemic… and she gets in and out in under an hour. Not likely.

I received this ARC several months ago so I don’t know how the final version turned out, but the version that I received was a bit disjointed and could have used a bit more editing. There were some overused passages that could have been weeded out and perhaps a heavier hand could have been used as far as keeping things consistent. Without these distractions, I think I would have enjoyed the book quite a bit more.

I recently read In a Perfect World, which also deals with a pandemic, but it was much more moving for me than The Things That Keep Us Here. However, I would definitely read something from this author author again as this was Buckley’s debut novel and parts of it did show some promise.

Source: This ARC was sent to me by Bantam Dell via Shelf Awareness. The official release date for this book is February 9, 2010.