The good thing about this book is that it was all action. No navel-gazing, will-they-won't-they nonsense, just a lot of stuff happening. None of the stuff made sense and it was very silly but you have to commend the book for being pro-active. If I tried to explain the plotline now my head would probably explode. I'll give it a go anyway. At the end of the last Vampire Diaries book Elena comes back from the dead. Dunno why. In this book she's back and she can fly. There are these two evil foxes. They are influencing people. But the trees are also evil. Elena has multiple wings. And it's just dreadful. When the fourth book in this series was released I thought, "Why?" and it wasn't great but it was short and readable. The Vampire Diaries colon The Return colon Nightfall is neither short nor readable. There are hints in places of that old L.J. Smith fun and creepiness but it's not worth wading through 500 pages of boring, embarrassing, bollocks to get to them. I don't know if I'll bother with the next one; it's longer than this by about a hundred pages and (I hear) it involves Bonnie and Meredith being led into the underworld on leashes. Yikes. Just yikes.
ADORED
This series is dumb now. I mean it was dumb before but it was fun. Now it's not fun. Stopping in the middle of a series of books is more serious than deleting a series link on V+ but here I am thinking of cutting ties with both The It Girl and The Vampire Diaries. Harsh times.
THE CHILDREN'S BOOK
I went for this book because I loved Possession (I even read the long-ass fairy poems but if I did a re-read would definitely skip those bits and just enjoy the rompy, exciting, romantic bits) and the cover art is irresistible. This book concerns a group of irritating people, creative types, who blunder around doing whatever they feel like. They all have children who are at least a hundred times more sensible than they are. The book is about the children coming of age during the early 20th century and then all going off to war. I really liked this. It was nice and thick, it had sumptuous descriptions of fancy fancy things, about a million characters all angry about something, all incestuously interwoven and it was interspersed with edifying chapters on the history of the time that were surprisingly not boring.
ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND
After spending most of the month on The Children's Book I got through this in about an hour and enjoyed it thoroughly. Do I even need to say anything about this? You either like Roth or you don't. This is the second book in his Zuckerman series and it deals with Zuckerman's fabulous success as an author. He's zipping around the country, banging famous actresses, alienating his family and hating every minute. He's one of my favourite characters in all of bookdom and although this isn't as satisfying a reading experience as say, The Human Stain it was absorbing, I was moved in places. I don't mean moved like in a Jodi Picoult way I just mean that it stirred me, I reacted to the events of the book rather than just sitting there cramming Wotsits into my mouth waiting for the book to end (see: Adored).
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