Monday Minis
And welcome back to Monday Minis, Switzerland Edition, the second. I’m still here, hanging out with my favourite person in the world (my grandma, sorry lads). I got to meet up with some lovely nerdy friends this weekend and eat lots of great food, so a fantastic time was had. Sadly, I didn’t have quite as much of a good time reading this batch of books… Once again, thank you to the wonderful publishers for sending me (e)ARCs for review, all opinions are my own.
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed is a fun YA contemporary with an added historical narrative woven into the story. Khayyam is spending the summer in Paris after losing an important art history essay competition and feeling like she has failed at everything she worked towards. And then she meets Alexandre. Alexandre Dumas, to be exact. Descendant of that Alexandre Dumas, the one who she was working on. Together, they follow her seemingly insane theory about a missing painting once belonging to Dumas, and thus end up following in the footsteps of Leila, a young Muslim woman living in the Paris of Dumas’ time. There is much here that makes a great story. But I ended up loving the premise a lot more than the actual book. To me, there were a lot of pieces that just didn’t quite fit together properly and the story and characters ended up like a puzzle with half the pieces missing or wrongly assembled. I might have approached it from the wrong perspective as someone very familiar with academic work in both history and art history, so it might well be that I am just the wrong reader for the book – but the way historical documents were treated in the story made me cry and that Khayyam’s parents (PROFESSORS!) encouraged her in this endeavour made me VERY upset. JUSTICE FOR RARE MATERIALS! I think this was a three star read for me, but ultimately more due to who I am than anything else.
Dare To Know by James Kennedy frustrated me to no end. It starts out very intriguing – it’s a high concept thriller about a narrator who works for a company which developed an algorithm able to predict people’s deaths, until one day, he is in an accident, which causes him to calculate the time of his own death… which is half an hour in the past. This leads him on a wild goose chase for his ex-girlfriend who is the only other person who knows his time of death and might be able to help. But the story loses itself in a confused stream-of-consciousness narration skipping through moments of the narrator’s past, ultimately not leading to much of a coherent plot line. What further annoyed me is that the narrator is a self-centred narcissist who thinks he is smarter than everyone around him and I could not stand the bastard. I was close to throwing the book across the room many many times because of what a dick the narrator is – I don’t think he has any redeeming qualities. And because the book is so closely focused on his experiences, that is a major aspect of the reading experience. So, sadly not one I’d recommend.