Wired by Douglas E Richards (Wired #1)

I actually really enjoyed this. I downloaded it onto my kindle for free I think and if not for free it was pretty cheap anyway. When you get something for free you kind of automatically think it’s going to be kind of bad but this wasn’t. Yes the writing is a little cliché at times and yes the characters are sometimes a little too gung-ho and All-American for my tastes but I still really enjoyed the story.

The whole premise of being able to expand your brain intelligence capability really interested me as I always think that our brain is surely capable of so much more than what we use it for.

Not only was the story really interesting but the writing was so fast paced and exciting that it keeps you hooked the whole way through. The characters, although a tad cliché, were still likeable and you couldn’t help but root for them and hope that they come out on top.

The only problem I can see is that it’s the first in a series and I’m not sure where else you can go with the story and whether it would have been a better idea to just leave it where it ended here. We shall see I suppose!

 

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

I adored this book. It was one of those stories that you will find yourself thinking about again and again weeks after you’ve finished reading it. I enjoyed ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ and this is of a similar genre with it being based around a school shooting. However in this book we see the whole story from lots of different points of view including the shooters.

I found it strange that I really felt sorry for the shooter and a small part of me kind of understands why he did what he did. As the author writes in the book (I’m loosely quoting) ‘It’s not a surprise that a kid subjected to years of torture at the hands of bullies walks into a school and opens fire, it’s a surprise that more kids don’t’. I am not excusing this behaviour AT ALL but being bullied for even a day or two when you fall out with a friend is a scarring experience. Dealing with it day in and day out from the age of five or six until the ripe old age of seventeen is horrific. If only these kids could realise that these people who are doing this to them now will mean nothing to them in only a few short years. It’s tough.

I loved hearing from the other characters as well especially Peters mother as I always wonder how the family of someone who does something awful like this copes in the situation as not only have they lost their son but they have to deal with the fact that he caused ten other parents to lose their children. Permanently.

Even though these school shootings, which have sadly become something that seem to happen every few years in America, are absolutely terrible things I always wondered what drove the shooters to carry it out. I simply thought they were just insane but maybe not. Maybe there is logical reasoning behind it. It doesn’t make them any less terrible but it does show that maybe there are ways to prevent them from happening again. This is a sane person driven to do a terrible thing not a crazy person just letting off steam.

Related articles

• Book Review: Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult (confessionsofatwentiesgirl.com)

 

Pop Goes The Weasel by James Patterson (Alex Cross #5)

I was actually majorly confused for a good portion of this book as it doesn’t begin where the last book left off. It kind of skips backwards a few months and we see the lead up to Alex and his family’s holiday and how Christina goes missing. I thought I had read the series in the wrong order or something but anyway it sorted itself out in the end.

So basically this instalment follows Alex as he trys to once again stop a serial killer and also try desperately to find his missing fiance. The killer in this book is just as interesting and evil as previous Cross books and I enjoyed the chapters from his crazy point of view.

The ending is a surprise and it really makes you look forward to the next book as we begin to really care about Alex’s personal life and not just read these books for the thriller aspect.

 

Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris (Harper Connelly #4)

You know I wasn’t all that enthused by this series right from the very first book and even though I continued on and finished out the whole series I can’t say that they got much better in my eyes. I always thought that the whole premise of the story about Harper being struck by lightning and from then on being able to sense the dead was really interesting to me but somehow it just never seems to live up to my expectations.

First of all the whole situation with her and her ‘brother’ is too weird to even go into but I just found it uncomfortable and hard to read really. I never once found myself rooting for the characters that much and in actual fact Tolliver started to irritate me in this book and I actually kind of wanted Harper to get with her physic friend whose name escapes me.

Anyway I’m just glad that it’s over to be honest. It wasn’t a series I greatly enjoyed and I definitely won’t miss it all that much.