Mini Reviews: Divergent and The Gathering Tie-in Short Stories

Note: These reviews contain spoilers of the novels that the short stories tie into, Divergent and The Gathering.

I like to review every book I read, even the tiny ones, and so last time I read a couple short stories that tied into novels I'd loved I did some mini reviews on them (see here). Now I have stories from two other awesome authors, Veronica Roth with a tie-in for Divergent and Kelley Armstrong with two tie-ins for The Gathering. Although both novels have sequels I've read recently, and loved, it's been about a year since I picked up the originals and these stories were a great opportunity to revisit some crucial scenes from those novels.

Roth's Free Four and Armstrong's The Invitation retell scenes from the original novels from the perspective of the male love interest, which seems to be common in these free tie-in short stories, as that's what happened in both Miranda's Eleven Minutes and O'Brien's Tortured. But if that's a new thing for authors to do, I'm not complaining, as I loved the insight into what those moments would have been like for the guys, and it was great to get a chance to find out exactly what the character's voice was like.

In Free Four by Roth, she retells the Divergent scene that involves Four throwing knives at Tris, his future girlfriend. As a reader we get to see how Four feels about her, before any of the romance has had a chance to happen. Tris is such a strong narrator in the Divergent Trilogy that it was really cool to see what she is like from an outside perspective. Unsurprisingly, this is a really intense read– even though you know that Tris isn't going to get a knife into her face, I found myself anxious as things unfolded, because that's how Four feels. Overall, it was really cool to see the other side of the story, and I hope that Roth decides to do this again with an Insurgent scene in the future.

The New Guy and The Invitation are two bonus short stories available in a special e-book of  Kelley Armstrong's The Gathering, but she's also posted them on her website which is awesome. Like Free Four they really compliment the original novel and provide plenty of spoilers if you haven't already read it. If you have picked up The Gathering then these are both a great way to get a little more insight into the characters and the events that unfolded.

In The New Guy, Maya has to deal with her first day back at school, a day that used to be her best friend Serena's favourite day, and it includes some flashbacks into what life was like two years ago when Serena was still alive and gives the reader an even better idea of her personality. It also contains the first meeting between Rafe and Maya, which I thought was really interesting to read especially since I knew how things ended up between them.

The second bonus short story from The Gathering is The Invitation, which is written from Rafe's perspective and shares the scene when he goes to Maya's birthday party. It also showed some interaction between Annie and Rafe, which I found especially neat to read about because I got to see how Rafe felt about his sister, and how much he wanted the "real" Annie back. As a result, it was even more clear why Rafe was willing to use Maya to make that happen. Armstrong also did a great job of showing the complex dilemma going through Rafe's mind, even as he was happy that Maya might be the one he was looking for, he was already dreading having to tell her the truth about what he was doing there, already realizing that it would probably be impossible for her to trust him once she found out the truth.

Overall, I really enjoyed all three of these short stories. Free Four, The New Guy and The Invitation all give added insight and development to two amazing novels. It is especially neat to read scenes you already know from the perspective of another character, and I feel like Roth and Armstrong both did an awesome job with the new point-of-view and male voice. I don't think any of these short stories work on their own, but if you've read and loved Divergent and The Gathering like I have, you'll definitely want pick up these stories as well.

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

Release Date: May 8th 2012
Pages: 305
Format: Hardcover
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Buy It: Book Depository

Enchanted was a very, well, enchanting story. Unlike a lot of fairytale retellings being published these days, like Beastly by Alex Finn, this isn't set in contemporary times and it isn't, strictly speaking, a retelling at all. In fact, it's more like Finn's Cloaked in the sense that Kontis combines half a dozen traditional fairytales into a unique story.

Enchanted is the story of seven sisters, each named for a day of the week and each 'blessed' with their own gifts. Sunday is the seventh sister, born to a seventh sister, and that makes her especially blessed. Sunday loves telling stories, the problem is whenever she writes them down they tend to come true, and not in the way that she intended. When Sunday befriends a frog in the woods, she feels like she's finally fallen in love– but after giving him a kiss she leaves before she sees his transformation, back into the prince, a man that her family abhors.

Back at his castle, the prince wants to make Sunday fall in love with him again, but he keeps his frog-identity a secret. However, his quest won't be easy, and there are curses and fairies to consider as well.

I really liked the traditional style of writing for Enchanted and the interesting way that Kontis combined the fairytales. The problem, for me, was that many of the fairytales she pulled from have pretty weak female characters and she didn't do a lot to remedy that. At times Sunday came across as not nearly as interesting as her sisters like the feisty pirate queen Thursday and the hardworking Saturday– and I'd love to read a novel from either of their perspectives, because of they weren't so predictably princess. It felt like Kontis tried to remedy this at the end it a haphazard way involving Sunday going barefoot, which really felt like much more of an afterthought because as far as I recall, she'd never gone barefoot earlier in the story, so I didn't get why she was starting now.

In the end, this is a story about balls and beauty and transformation, but I wanted Sunday to have a little more fight in her. Also, I know this is a fairytale, but I really felt like love came too easy in Enchanted. That said, it was clear Sunday cared deeply for her family and in spite of all the difficulties she faced she managed to remain positive, which was a pretty big accomplishment.

Enchanted is a busy story, but Kontis manages to keep it moving along quickly without getting muddled. The world she creates has a lot of interesting backstory, usually pulling from various fairytales, and is filled with a massive cast of characters. Despite having at least a dozen significant characters, I never got confused about who was who, except maybe with some of the prince's wait staff. That's because Kontis gives each character their own unique personality and quirks, so that even though there are so many characters, they don't blur together. 

The traditional aspect of Enchanted was what I both loved and disliked about it, I wanted something a little less quintessentially princess, a more realistic love and a stronger Sunday, but I loved the cleverness and the large cast of interesting characters. Ultimately, Kontis has written a complex and exciting story that manages to take fairytales that the reader is probably familiar with, and combine them in a way you'd never expect.

The Year of the Beasts by Cecil Castellucci and Nate Powell

The Year of the Beasts by Cecil Castellucci (Author) and Nate Powell (Illustrations)
 
Release Date: May 22nd 2012
Pages: 192
Format: E-galley
Source: NetGalley/Publisher
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Buy It: Book Depository

Every summer the trucks roll in, bringing the carnival and its infinite possibilities to town. This year Tessa and her younger sister Lulu are un-chaperoned and want to be first in line to experience the rides, the food . . . and the boys. Except this summer, jealousy will invade their relationship for the first time, setting in motion a course of events that can only end in tragedy, putting everyone's love and friendship to the test.

This is a pretty strange book, and it took me awhile to get used to– probably like three quarters of it's short, less than 200 pages– but at the end everything came together, two storylines: one in words, one in graphic novel form, and together they combined to make for a strong and emotionally compelling story.

I really felt like Castellucci, who wrote the text, captured the feeling of sisterhood and the complexities of that relationship extremely well. Lulu and Tessa have always been really close, and even if Lulu sometimes gets on her sister's nerves, Tessa loves her. But then a fateful moment at a carnival leads to Lulu beginning a relationship with Tessa's crush, the boy she wanted more than anything... and where does that leave the two of them as sisters? The jealousy that Tessa felt was so real it was painful, and even when she does manage to find a boy of her own, it does little to heal the damage that has already been done. The Year of the Beasts captures Tessa's inner conflict, her mix of happiness and anger, in an incredibly authentic and believable way.

Powell's drawings are dark and beautiful, even if I found their connection to what I thought was the "real" story to be very confusing at first. When I realized how things worked, and went back and looked at them again, I was even more impressed. Ultimately, The Year of the Beasts isn't a book that instantly blew me away, it was far more subtle in its power, but when I was finished the story I was left with a lasting and emotional image of sisterhood both from Castellucci's words and Powell's images.

Freedom To Read Giveaway Hop: BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE (INTERNATIONAL)

Welcome to the Freedom to Read Giveaway Hop at In The Next Room. I'm going to do an international giveaway (assuming Book Depository ships to your country for free).

Giveaway for 

one book of your choice

valued up to $10 

from the Book Depository

open Internationally

June 29th - July 5th 2012 

To give you some inspiration, here are some of the books you can pick from, and that I'd be tempted to choose! 

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Shine by Lauren Myracle

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

Dear Bully edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones

And now... your chance to win:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck to everyone and thanks for entering! Check out the rest of the Freedom to Read Giveaways here.

Insurgent by Veronica Roth

Note: This review contains no spoilers of Insurgent, but may contain spoilers of the first book in the series, Divergent, a review of which can be found here. 

Insurgent (Divergent #2) by Veronica Roth

Release Date: May
Pages: 525
Format: Hardcover
Source: Won
Publisher: Harper Collins
Also by this Author: Divergent (Divergent #1)
Buy It: Book Depository

Tris's initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable—and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.

Unlike Divergent that hooked me from page 1, Insurgent has a slower start, probably because Tris is dealing with huge amounts of grief and guilt from what happened with her parents and her friend Will. I felt like Roth tackled these complex feelings in a way that felt authentic, Tris couldn't just brush them off and pretend like nothing happened– they were eating her from the inside.

The plot in Insurgent is a bit more slow-moving and straightforward than Divergent but that doesn't make it any less exciting. I loved the look into the other faction's lives, in particular Amity and Candor neither of which Tris had an aptitude for but this just shows how people aren't straightforward or just one thing, because even in these factions she finds some connections to the people who belong there. Neither is the relationship between Four and Tris straightforward, it isn't just mushy romance, and in that way it felt more real and genuine, the beautiful moments they had together were even more special. And of course, no love triangle– Roth revealed this before the book was released, but I still found it such a refreshing relief.

And of course, the ending, wow. When I finished Insurgent I couldn't help feeling like the entire book, the first 500 pages, had been preparation for those final 25 pages. Twists and turns and reveals, and even when I saw one coming (minor spoiler: like what happened with the Dauntless and the Factionless at Erudite headquarters) it still felt so perfect it gave me chills. Especially I loved the unexpected bad and good guys, how characters I thought I knew did things I didn't expect, but in the end I still believed it because of how fleshed out and real they were. Plus, as intense and insane as the ending of the book is, there is still a full story and not a cliffhanger midway through; instead, like Divergent it is the kind of ending that changes everything.

Picking up Insurgent reminded me just why Divergent was one of my very favourite reads of 2011, a list its sequel has now made of the following year. These books are just so much fun and excitement to read. Really, if you loved Divergent like I did, I really don't think you'll be disappointed in its sequel Insurgent, because even if the story takes awhile to get moving the ending is completely worth it. Now begins the anxious wait for book 3 in fall 2013.