Chuckles Mini Reviews Catchup

I review pretty much everything I read, on my blog and on Goodreads. Most reviews are of a decent length but sometimes you don't have much to say about the book because of its length or you DNFed it or various other reasons. In cases like that it makes sense to write a few mini reviews in one post and clear them out your way! Time to catch up with a few books read between June and August!

1) Alexandra Oliva-The Last One
It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens—but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it human-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them—a young woman the show’s producers call Zoo—stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game. Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life—and husband—she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills—and learn new ones as she goes. But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways—and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.

I have to say that this is one of the worst books I've looked at this year. It sounded great but I struggled from the start. We follow Zoo as she goes through the game zone. She searches for food, walks, finds water, makes camp, sleeps, gets annoyed with herself for leaving her husband for this miserable show, searches for food, walks, finds water, makes camp and sleeps. Following her through the forest in the present in the first half of the book is pretty dull, repetitive and boring. When she finally bumps into someone who has survived the plague in the outside world, despite him being a young guy she becomes fixated on him being her new camera man despite the lack of camera. He's talking about the event and Zoo being the first person he's seen but she just isn't listening to him, or talking to him, just obsessing about the camera! Zoo is so dumb I wanted to throttle her! Had she asked one question like 'where's the camera' we would have made progress instead of her wandering on worried about her on air time. Plus the kid doesn't ask her anything about the event or say anything to make her pause and wonder what he's talking about so it was really frustrating!

Then there is the confused storytelling. Zoo refers to the other contestants by their real names and thinks of things that happened with them during the show. When we switch to flashback the TV crew talks about them by their network nicknames so we don't know who has each nickname, making it impossible to work out who Zoo was thinking about. The flashbacks have a ton of detail about the dull contestant tasks which really have no relevance to the story of Zoo's survival situation. The timeline jumps about all over the place which made it difficult to follow. And worst of all we get nothing on the event itself after the prologue-at least to the point where she travels with the guy and I finally DNFed it. Disappointing and dull.
Read August 2018.
DNF 1 star. 

2) Kayla Olson-The Sandcastle Empire 
Before the war, Eden’s life was easy—air conditioning, ice cream, long days at the beach. Then the revolution happened, and everything changed. Now a powerful group called the Wolfpack controls the earth and its resources. Eden has lost everything to them. They killed her family and her friends, destroyed her home, and imprisoned her. But Eden refuses to die by their hands. She knows the coordinates to the only neutral ground left in the world, a place called Sanctuary Island, and she is desperate to escape to its shores.

Eden finally reaches the island and meets others resistant to the Wolves. But their solace is short-lived when one of Eden’s new friends goes missing. Braving the jungle in search of their lost ally, they quickly discover Sanctuary is filled with lethal traps and an enemy they never expected. This island might be deadlier than the world Eden left behind, but surviving it is the only thing that stands between her and freedom.  

This book started really well with the interesting escape from the prison after two years of Eden waiting for the right moment. I was still interested in the story even with the info dumps when they get to this promised island sanctuary but after that it began to really drag. There is the trudge across the island when one of the girls goes missing, trying to find her when they have no idea which way she went, bitching at each other as they go. Eventually they find the Temple with no monks and run away from it because it has laser protection and bugs that chase them. I expected the traps in the jungle bit to be more exciting, tense and interesting but I just found it all a bit meh and lacking interest and they trudged back to the beach.

Back at the beach they find the missing girl with a group of guys that Alexa just happens to know and they all camp on the beach. It lacked detail on what was going on, where this Wolf Pack were and what they were doing-just too vague on the details I wanted. Maybe there was more about this and where these guys were from later on in the book but I was too bored to get there. I could see it was headed into instaluv teen angst territory with the inevitable pairing off starting to happen and I quit reading at that point. 
Read August 2018.
DNF 2 stars.

3) Sarah J Maas-Throne Of Glass 
Meet Celaena Sardothien. Beautiful. Deadly. Destined for greatness. In the dark, filthy salt mines of Endovier, an eighteen-year-old girl is serving a life sentence. She is a trained assassin, the best of her kind, but she made a fatal mistake: she got caught.

Young Captain Westfall offers her a deal: her freedom in return for one huge sacrifice. Celaena must represent the prince in a to-the-death tournament—fighting the most gifted thieves and assassins in the land. Live or die, Celaena will be free. Win or lose, she is about to discover her true destiny. But will her assassin’s heart be melted? 

I'll be honest, I went into this book with real doubts about it being my kind of thing and I was right. I actually did like the characters, finding Celaena interesting and enjoying the way she was constantly thinking and planning. The Prince was ok but I did like Chaol best. He was smart enough to be able to match wits with our flawed hero. I liked the idea of the plot with the tournament to become the King's Champion and was looking forward to seeing that all unfold. But I never got there!

I just found the pacing pretty slow with the journey to the castle, her getting settled, the court bitches and then the training sessions. It was taking quite a while to get to the main part of the story. However, I would still have stuck with it to see what happened but the hints were already being dropped about the inevitable love triangle and I just found myself feeling really frustrated at the thought of that getting in the way of an interesting plot. When I confirmed in other reviews that we do get the love triangle, I decided I had to cut my losses and DNF as a love triangle is a dealbreaker in books for me. 

I can see why people enjoyed the book though as the writing was good and it had the potential for a great story but I didn't feel the relationship angst was worth battling through to get to the main story.

Read August 2018.
DNF 2 stars.