book info: on sale: now copy from: public library pages: 348 review written: 21.12.17 originally published: 2009 edition read: Penguin NAL 2009 title: Rooftops of Tehran author: Mahbod Seraji In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran's sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari's stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah's secret police. The violent consequences awaken him to the reality of living under a powerful despot, and lead Zari to make a shocking choice... my thoughts: This book was first published in 2009 and I remember adding it to my list around that time but never actually reading it since I preferred checking out library books to ...
Adventures of a Graveyard Girl by Milda Harris
Series: Funeral Crushing #2
Source: Bought kindle copy
Publisher: indie
Publication Date: April 23rd, 2012
Age Group: Young Adult
Kait Lenox is back! It's Homecoming Dance time and Kait is excited. It's her first dance with a date and that date is none other than one of the hottest, most popular guys in her school, Ethan Ripley! For once Kait doesn't feel like a funeral crashing weird girl and it's the most perfect romantic evening ever...at least until a girl gets murdered in the high school bathroom. Rumors fly, panic ensues, and Kait can't help herself, she assigns herself to the case!
DNF
But I think I've also reached the point where I treasure the enjoyment I get from every book, and if I don't really enjoy it... well, there isn't much point in reading it, is there?
Still, I don't always review DNF books... Only if I can explain exactly why I didn't finish it, and I'd like to share that.
I picked up this book because a while back (like, two years ago), I read the first book and enjoyed it. It wasn't A-mazing, but it was cute and fun and I decided I wanted to continue with the series. But then I couldn't. At 48% of the book, I called it quits. My heart just wasn't in it. I kept looking at reading the book as a chore, which is never encouraging.
I had three big issues with Adventures of a Graveyard Girl.
1. It was way too... dare I say it?... childish to me. I don't need characters to be my age to enjoy them, but here they just read like immature 12 year olds, and not teenagers. And I've read and enjoyed books with twelve year old more than this. It was just... too exaggeratedly childish. Teenagers are allowed to have their immature moments, for sure, but not 100% of the time.
2. Then there was the poorly edited text. There were a lot of missing punctuation marks, or places where I felt a dot should've been but weren't. There were a lot of duplicated words in a way that made no sense. A lot of describing sentences that lacked finesse. It felt like... well, like an amateur job. Like no one actually read over the book and corrected all of these. It was like reading a draft, and not a finished product. And I don't know about you, but that bothers me.
3. And finally, the repetition. How many times can you say the same thing on one page? apparently, a lot. Enough that I totally lost count. It was like Harris didn't trust we got the information the first time, so she mentioned it 50 times more just to be sure. In very similar wording. That's one of my major writing pet-peeves.
So in the end, despite enjoying the first book, I decided this is as far as I and this series go. It's just not for me, really.
Nitzan★
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