80 Books No. 32: The Way Things Look To Me by Roopa Farooki

I've only been keeping a list of what I've read for the last couple of years, so I can forgive myself for accidentally reading this book again - I must have first read it in 2010 or 2011. When I picked it up in the library the storyline did ring a bell, but then I've probably picked a lot of the books in the library up before so I dismissed it as simply a book I'd read the blurb of and discarded; I do that a lot.

However, once I began reading it, some of the details of the story rang a bell: some blind guy, a girl with debilitating eczema, a breastfeeding woman. The story itself was one I vaguely remembered reading. What I didn't remember was any reaction I'd had to it which was weird; I just felt largely ambivalent to it, and I still do. Some of the reasons why:
- Reason #1: I didn't really care about any of the characters. They were all pretty 2D in my opinion and had little character development in their own right. In fact, the only reason they changed at all was due to...
- Reason #2: the book seemed to claim that everything could be solved by falling in love. Lila overcame her hatred of her own body because of falling in love; Asif overcame his hatred of his own name because of falling in love; Yasmeen wondered if her life was worth living as she may never fall in love. These characters weren't especially independent. I mean, what would happen to Lila if her and Henry split up again? Was she going to start self-harming again? It sent out a very odd message in my opinion.
- (Controversial) Reason #3: it all centred around Yasmeen's autism and how it affected everybody else, and the high focus upon autism in modern popular fiction is becoming a bit tedious, something I'll explore more in my next post.

So it was okay, not amazing, not one to especially recommend.

80 Books No. 31: Guilt Trip by Anne Cassidy

So it's pretty clear by now that I'm a big fan of books about weirdo teenagers. Four of the books I've read so far this year have already been about teenagers or children doing bad things, either to themselves or to other people. I'm not sure why I keep getting drawn towards these novels; it must be some weird gene in me.

Now I've actually met Anne Cassidy through my job and so I've read a few of her books before. And her stuff can generally be typified by 'teenagers do something bad, to themselves or others'. Looking for JJ is about the rehabilitation of a child killer, whilst Just Jealous, if I remember rightly, involves a girl murdering someone by accident cause she's got some jealousy complex over her boyfriend. Her stuff is therefore a pretty safe choice of novel if what you're wanting is teenagers behaving badly. Which obviously I can never get enough of...

The jist of this story is that a group of teenagers witness a boy trying to kill himself and rescue him, only to sort of befriend him - and then wind up accidentally killing him. This secret is kept for a couple of years and then it all comes out. I make no bones about spoiling this plotline as it pretty blindingly obvious from the blurb and the entire set-up of the novel.

I'd had a massive issue with reading until reading this novel, having started and given up on A Clash of Kings, TimeRiders and something else I can't even remember right now. So this broke my dry spell so that's a good thing. The topic obviously appealed to me and it passed the time, but it's not a hugely memorable novel; already I'm forgetting things that happened in it. I think I should probably call time on Cassidy's novels now because I've never been blown away.