2014 Reading: Daughters of Eve

Okay, this book was horrible!

Seriously, at the beginning of the book, I was totally on board with the whole girl power thing. One of the first things I write for this update was: "One of the character's brother said something about not helping to clean up because he wasn't about to practice being a housewife, and the parents just went along with it and continued to force all the housework on the girl... Oh hell no... HELL no."

But then, it just kept getting more and more ridiculous. HUGE exaggerations of misogyny and female oppression (even for 1979) spawn even grander acts of female empowerment and radical thinking.

Okay, I'm a feminist and all, but holy shit.

And then it ends, with little to no resolution and everyone gets away with everything and lives happily ever after. WHAT?!

Definitely not one of my faves, Lois.

2014 Reading: Killing Mr. Griffin

I decided a while ago to just gta ALL the Lois Duncan books and finish them off one by one. So, after the seriousness that was the last book, I wanted to go with some easy, short books.

Holy shit, that kid was a psychopath. I mean, I've had some tough teachers, but none that I've hated THAT much.

And seriously, what was with Sue saying she loved Mark at the end?! I thought she was all into David (you know, the nice one) but then, when she's being burned alive by the man no less, she says she loved him...

WHAT?!

That was one of the weirder books by Lois Duncan. But, meh, what can you do?

2014 Reading: Summer of Fear

I promised myself I would finish these tiny books as quickly as possible. So, with nothing to do on my day off, I sped through this one.

I called the ending by page 24. Sure, they added a supernatural aspect to it, but my hypothesis was still the same and I was right on all counts.  It was kind of a predictable story line when you think about it.  All the supernatural element did was make the choices and actions of some of the characters more easily forgivable.

Seriously, though... Did teenagers really talk like that back then? I mean, really? Is there evidence of this somewhere? Some bit of unscripted film footage that I could look at and finally know for sure if people from the 60's really did talk like that? I would really like to know.

Yeah, these books are fun if you just want something short to read and you can finish them really quickly before forgetting all about it and start on something completely different.

I'm thinking of it as a kind of mind-sorbet. Cleanses the mental-pallet.

2014 Reading: Ransom

GLENN IS A SOCIOPATH!

Seriously, if anything with this book stuck with me, it's the fact that the Glenn character is a fucking sociopath to the highest degree and should probably be in therapy and DEFINITELY be in jail. Wow.

But anyway... I wanted something lighter for a little while so I got three more of the tiny Lois Duncan books to fill in the gaps before I started another major book.

Man, one theme that keeps coming back to me as I read her stuff is that kids just DON'T talk like that. I don't even know if they ever did, even if it was in 1966. If they did, then I feel so inferior to them. By, like, a lot.

Once again, this book left me wanting to know what happened to the characters after the action died down. I wanted to see if Jesse and Dexter got together, I wanted to see what happened after Bruce found out his brother was a fucking psycho and decided to not cover for him anymore.

THESE ARE THINGS I NEED TO KNOW, LOIS! For my sanity!

2014 Reading: Down A Dark Hall

I think this is going to be my last Lois Duncan book for a while. I have too much other stuff to read. Plus, they are so short, I kinda want to space them out a bit so I don't read them all at once. Three at a time is enough, right?

Typical ghost story, I guess. I'll tell you, though, if I noticed some of the things that the main character was noticing, I sure as fuck would not have waited as long as she did to confront someone about them. Fuck that noise. I would have been the one demanding answers and then finding a way to climb over the fences to get to a phone.

In many ways, I like the way this book left off: abruptly but with hope for the outcome of the characters, but another part of me wanted to see her confront her parents in "HA! I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!" way. Also to see what ever became of her and the quote-unquote romantic interest in the story. Sure he was part of the evil scheme from the beginning, but he had no idea and I think he really cared about her. Sort of. Eventually.

Yeah, I think I'm going to move on to other things a while. These books are goo for a very short read so they get my numbers up for the year, but I'm ready again for some of the more in depth stuff. Maybe I'll start another series or something.

2014 Reading: A Gift of Magic

Should have been called "Stubborn 12-year-old Brat Selfishly Tries To Ruin Everyone's Lives With Her Weird Psychic Powers."

Seriously.

Throughout the entire book, I wanted to smack this little girl in the face. I understand that to some extent, a person of such a young age can be somewhat emotionally unstable, especially in the face of divorce and big life changes, but come on! This girl was a nightmare. She thought of nothing but her own happiness and actively tried to ruin the lives of her family just so that she could have them all to herself with no one else to interfere.

And can we talk for one second about the poor choice of covers they have for this book?

Nancy, the psycho main character of this book is LITERALLY described:

"Her wheat-colored hair hung straight 

down her back, and her brows and mouth were 

straight lines across her face with her nose a 

straight line down its center. She was twelve 

years old, but her body was still as thin as an 

arrow." (p 4)

Now keep that in mind as you look at this picture:

No.

Who was in charge of this? 

You had ONE JOB!

2014 Reading: They Never Came Home

This book was really odd. The concept is a familiar one: boy gets in trouble with the law (smuggling "dope" across the Mexican border), decides to leave and never come back, takes money, runs away, but then for some reason decides to take his friend with them... What? He pushed him down a mountain or something and tells him they're brothers when he wakes up with amnesia.

...

Riiiigggghhhhhtttt...

It's like the plot of a really bad telenovela.

But of course, in books like these, everything ends alright. The guy with amnesia's girlfriend find out he's alive and YAY happily ever after and stuff.

So much of this book was kind of odd for me to grasp. Maybe I just didn't like the fact that the girl was placing so much of her life on the guy (something that I have done in the past and have since learned to abhor now that I know what it does to people) that she just decides to stop her life when he goes missing and they think she's dead.

Maybe it's the character of Frank who is CLEARLY a sociopath. He seems to have no emotion and seems to not identify with anyone in his life and was even willing to kill "his best friend" in order to leave everything behind, not caring about his family or anything else he was leaving behind.

Maybe it was the fact that at the end of the book, you never hear what happened to Frank, the little brother who helped the girl find out what really happened to the missing boys. I came to feel strongly for Frank while I was reading and then by the end of it, I was left with nothing. NOTHING.

What happened to you, Frank? Dan and Joan, what did you tell people when you got home and everyone found out you were still alive? Dan, how did you explain you coming back but not Larry, who, by the way, is DEAD now?

You can't leave me like this, damnit! I need to know!

2014 Reading: Don't Look Behind You

Yet another one from Lois Duncan, Don't Look Behind You.

This is a terrible title for this book. Given the subject matter, it SHOULD be called "Look Behind You At All Times, Because People Are Trying To Kill You And Your Family In Horrible Ways Because You Are A Whiny Bitch Who Can't Keep Her Fool Mouth Shut."

I kept wanting to punch the main character in the face throughout this book. Boo hoo, you had to leave your high school boyfriend (who started dating your best friend right after you left anyway) behind. THERE ARE PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY. Quit being selfish and man the fuck up. And stop telling people who you really are!! OMG, do you really not understand the point of the Witness Protection Program?!?! Put on your big girl panties and stop fucking whining!

Other than that, the book was pretty good.

I think at some point, I want to read more of Lois Duncan's work because it is short and easy to get through, plus it gets my mind off of things for a while without actually taking over my life like a longer piece of work would. Since I work in a library now, that might actually happen because it doesn't really require any extra effort on my part. (I am laaaaaazzzzzzyyyyyyyy....)

It also seems as though a lot of movies have been made off of these books. They may not be named the same thing but most of the plots are the same. They seem like they would be good for 80's horror/thriller movies (that I would then make fun of in my other blogs).

2014 Reading: Gallow's Hill

Another of the Louis Duncan books that my friend gave to me that is just short enough to allow my limited attention span these days enough time to read in about a day and not want to kill myself afterwords.

I liked the book. The subject matter was not really something that usually appeals to me, but the book was just fast paced enough for me to get into it without looking too hard into all the flaws.

Except one...

When did the internet first really start to catch on? Because I went into this book thinking that, like I Know What You Did Last Summer, this book was written back in the 70's or something and people had no real ways of communicating or getting information other than telephones or going to get books from the library, therefore justifying some of the themes presented about the  fact that this little town still had, like, bans on Halloween decorations and divorce was something to be kept under wraps.

After a quick internet search... heh... it was around 1990 that the first website was launched on the World Wide Web. So it stands to reason that this book MUST have been published before then because the internet caught on like a witch house on fire...

1997.

...

Really?

Are you telling me that no one in this little town had the internet, cell phones, pagers... in 1997?

Having said that, I honestly don't know what I would have done with myself had I been in the lead character's predicament. Probably either run away from that place as quickly as possible or stop speaking all together and then moved the fuck away as soon as I was able to steal the car with a full tank of gas.  Wow.

2014 Reading: I Know What You Did Last Summer

It took me WAY longer than it should have to read this book. I try using my new job as an excuse, but I WORK IN A LIBRARY. PART TIME. I'm just really fucking lazy and that's all there is to it. Plus, I gotta keep up with the million and two shows that I watch on a weekly basis.

Okay, so, I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan. Saw the movie oh so many years ago, never actually knew it was a book until one of my good friends (the same one who knows how much I love shitty 80's horror movies) gave it to me. It was a tiny little thing so I thought I would squeeze it into my list as I actively avoid one of the other books that I am just dreading to pick up. Hell, I even read ANOTHER book IN THE MIDDLE of this one, just to have another excuse to NOT pick up this one book, which I think I am just going to throw out because I no longer give two shits about it.

BUT ANYWAY, back to I Know What You Did Last Summer (which is seriously the longest title ever for a book that is only about 199 pages.

My first serious thought while I was reading this was "Who the fuck talks like this? These people are, like, high school seniors..." Seriously, who says shit like "Why, if that's the sort of thing you can find at the Good Will Shop, I'm going to start shopping there too."? Never mind that it's not even punctuated properly. There are a bunch of other things in there, too, I'm just too mazy to find them.

It has a kind of vocabulary and speech pattern that is just vague enough to be considered up-to-date, but with tiny little differences that just seem wrong if you were to say them out loud to yourself (which I am wan to do when something confuses me while I'm reading).

So I checked the publication date: 1973

!!!!!

I had NO idea that this book was that old.

Still holds up, though. Quick little read that is sort of predictable from the beginning, but you want to follow through just to make sure anyway.