[Review] Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder

Rating: 2 Stars
Genre: YA-Fantasy
Synopsis: A teenage girl about to be executed gets a second chance at life as a poison taster.

I really thought I would love this book and get hooked onto this series. During the first few chapters, I thought I would spend the rest of the week with dark circles under my eyes trying to read everything, but unfortunately that didn't turn out to be the case.

All in all, there isn't really anything too bad about the series. The heroine is pretty awesome. The whole poison taster acrobat angle is definitely a new one for me. She has a tragic past without whining about it. She is attracted to men without throwing herself on them and wailing bitterly whenever they aren't paying attention to her. Every male in the series is not slobbering at her feet. When she's in trouble, her immediate thought is not for someone to rescue her. She does not feel entitled to anything except basic human rights, and even those, she'll bargain for.

So why did the book feel so long? Why did her character still seem flat? Is it because she actually has little to no flaws? Is it because every part of her is a good and hardworking person? Maybe it's that her extremely traumatic past doesn't actually manifest itself into her personality in the least? Okay, given, she does seem like a person who had been oppressed to such an extent that her first and foremost thought will always be in on survival, but where's her resentment and bitterness?

Isn't it normal for a sixteen year old girl whose life had been completely destroyed and then redestroyed to be a little temperamental? Everything she says and does bears no ill-will and no bad intentions. At some points, she makes Valek, the cold-hearted assassin seem emotional and petty. He literally has to push her to the point of breaking to get a reaction, and even then, she bounces back pretty quickly as if being betrayed by the only person she was beginning to trust was only worth a few day's worth of brooding.

So let's get to Valek the love interest that you don't really expect to be the love interest, which is actually pretty awesome twist. We don't even get a description of him the first time we meet him. He's deadly, smart, agile, mysterious, and can't be trusted, A+ love interest right?

But first. How old... is Valek exactly? Let's do some math. Yikes.

[Review] The Zahir by Paulo Coelho (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

"No one should ever ask themselves that: Why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy."

Rating: 2 Stars
Genre: Literary Fiction
Setting: Somewhere between Milan and Paris
Timeline: Close enough to present day
Synopsis: A successful author's life disappears. He looks for her, and along the way makes some discoveries about love and life.

The synopsis of the book is rather misleading. It appears on the surface to be a love story, but it's actually one of those inspirational stories about spirituality that doesn't make as much sense as the characters want you to believe. Yes, there is a lot of moaning and groaning from the narrator about how much he loves his wife and how much he obsesses over her for every second of his waking life (even though he is a serial adulterer), but the wife seemed more like a plot device for the narrator's self-discovery than an actual autonomous character. For one, she is missing throughout almost all of the book, only appearing in random flashbacks when it is most convenient for the narrator to make some supposedly poignant observation about humanity's many flaws.

I mean, look at the cover of this book. Beautiful right? Check out that subtitle, "a novel of obsession". HMMM, let's think about that one for a second. Who is the narrator obsessed with? His wife? Well he certainly seems to think so. He calls his wife the Zahir.

Now what in the world is a Zahir? Well, some may be familiar with the Islamic concept of zahir, but the zahir that Coelho's protagonist is obsessing over has little to nothing to do with the Quran, but with a short story with the same title by Jorge Luis Borges. How do I know this? Three reasons, the first being that he quotes Borges in the beginning of the novel; the second reason is because Coelho releases another book called Aleph, another Borges story, that is the conceptual polar opposite of the zahir. And finally, the third reason is because of the whole obsession theme (if you read the original short story you will know what I mean).