Drawy82 Female. Manchester, United Kingdom

Full review also available here: http://www.drawy.net/index.php/2013/05/now-is-good-by-j…

Many have had their negative said on this book, and I’m just about to reflect their very impression and comments.
I searched for other readers’ opinions only once I had finished this book. I did not want to be influenced by their point of view before starting, nor incurr in any spoiler. When I got to the last page I was so uncertain on what I thought of it that I couldn’t help going on Internet and find out if I was the only one who found this book a useless pile of crap.
Internet proved that I am not.

Tess is 16 and is about to die of leukemia. She knows that the time to go is getting closer pretty fast, but as she still has so many things to do she decides she’ll put the most urgent in a list and will do all she can to go through those points, one by one.
On top of the list, as she’s never done it before, there’s sex. Her closest friend or, better, the only person around who did not run from her as if she was contagious, is Zoey. Zoey will help Tessa to go through her list and to find the bloke with whom she could have sex for the first time.
In the list there are other things Tessa’s willing to do such as shoplifting, say “yes” to everything for a day, fame, drive a car for the first time, and so on.

I won’t discuss whether this list reflects the actual wishes of a dying teenager or not, as no one is capable to imagine what a teenager, or any person at all for all that matters, might or might not plan to do with the short future she is left to live. What I want to discuss – and strongly argue – is the way the whole plot has been used by the author.
I believe that flat is an understatement as well as poor, not to mention the characters – and here’s where my point of view matches with that of other readers.
I did hate Tessa all along. I can understand the anger and the hate she might feel while looking at the world around her and knowing that she’ll soon be nomore part of it. I can understand that the pressure she feels when thinking of what’s happening to her body, so out of her control, is such that it looks like she’s bursting with anger. However, despite the anger, she still contraddicts herself over and over again. She hates the world around – even though she never clearly admits it – she asks to be left alone and yet she’s continuously angry because the people do leave her alone.
I wonder whether with a mother like Tessa’s I wouldn’t feel like to burn the house down myself – with my mother shut inside, of course! Because the character of Tessa’s mother is another detail I could not understand of this book: she cares about her daughter as much as she’d care about a bent teaspoon. Why? Why isn’t she feeling anything at all, why is she so indifferent? Does she care for her daughter at all? Why does she keep skipping hospital visits, leaving Tessa on her own? This has got nothing to do with being selfish and incapable of handling the situation, as Tessa suggests a few times. I believe Tessa’s mother’s attitude has more to do with the fact that she was born out of the pen of someone who did not manage – or know how – to create a credible character.
Then we have Tessa’s dad, which Jenny Downham created – thank God! – credible enough, her kidbrother, absolutely hateful and just as contradictory as she is, and Adam.
Adam, the love of the short life she’s left to live.
Someone said that Adam is the only character they really cared of. I’m afraid I didn’t. I found him just as uninteresting as all the others. I wasn’t bothered to understand his feelings, about why he did care about Tessa so much or what he could go through once Tessa was gone. I saw Adam just as another ingredient thrown in the massive pigswill bucket Now is good.

The main issue with this book is that I was not in the slightest interested in the story or its characters. There was no gripping feeling at the beginning nor, as I hoped there would be, at the end of the story. To speak frankly once I got to the middle I couldn’t wait for Tessa to die and the story to be over. I hoped until the very last page that there’d be something, anything happening and changing the appalling idea I had of the book. But nothing happened.
I haven’t got the feelings of a streetlamp and I get involved in the books I read quite often, but in this case I can’t help but wonder how can grown up people find this story the book of the year. I can quite understand teenagers, as their requirements and feelings in terms of books are completely different from adults’, but what about over-20s?

Full review also available here:
http://www.drawy.net/index.php/2013/03/the-absolutist-b…

How could the author put so well war, hate, love, regrets, grudge and resignation in the same mix I do not know. Surely this book came as a totally unexpected suprirse to me, as no review or plot summary or comment (as I did my best to avoid them and, thus, spoilers) had prepared me to such a story. If I was to chose a word, I would pick beautiful. Yes, it is a story beautifully written.
When it comes to topics like war and gay love it is really easy to screw the story up. In this case I did not feel that Boyne was trapped in his own mine camp. On the contrary I feel that he brilliantly managed to express what he wanted. Maybe what he wrote does not 100% reflect the way things actually went over there, as no book could ever describe what our grandads experienced and saw and felt in the battle camp, and yet somehow this novel manages to give us an idea on how those guys must have felt, the horrors they must have faced, the shock that came along and that stayed with them for the rest of their life. Many of us have seen all that on our granddads’ look.
In the middle of all that we find are Tristan and Will, two young guys not yet in their twenties, who enlist for the Great War and are trained together at Aldershot.
I’m sorry to say that I’ve hated both of them. I liked the story very much and I liked the way it was written, but the main characters were both equally unbearable to me.
Tristan sees Will on their very first day at Aldershot. Will notices Tristan more or less at the same time, but would not introduce himself. They later become close friends, until the day a dreadful murder of one of their comrades pushes Will to the borders of despair. Tristan is there to wash his tears away. Will falls for Tristan. Then Will changes his mind, ashamed, and keeps Tristan away. Tristan will be once more the one offering Will a shoulder to cry on, a few months later, and once more Will will use him for a brief moment and then will run away. Both cases Tristan will get out of it seriously hurt. Tristan loves Will unconditionally, but Will sees in Tristan nothing more than a trusted friend to rely on in his shitty days. This selfish attitude of Will will lead Tristan to take an extreme, desperate action that will put an end to their friendship, their life together and his own innocence.

It’s easy to understand why I hate Will – I bet most of the people who read this book do. I hate him from the moment Tristan begun to speak ill of him. That’s normal, that’s an emotional transfer. Weird enough, though, I started to hate Tristan just as well, as in order to justify his hate towards Will he showed a nasty snappy side of him we didn’t know before. It looked like he was continuously trying to justify himself and the reasons why he hated Will. Which is understandable, seen what Will had done to him, and yet the way all that is explained to us left me with the feeling that Tristan was almost as guilty as his once best mate. I understood that Will, as well as his sister, who Tristan meets years later, were right: Tristan is a coward. He could have had his revenge on Will so many times, not last the half a day they spent in the canteen together before the end of it all, but he preferred not to take any action. He left Will free to hurt him as if he wanted to show how 100% a victim he was.

I’m not sure if this was the reaction Boyne expected from his readers. It really doesn’t matter. One can love or hate the main characters of a story, as long as the story leaves them something, a trace, once it has come to an end.
As for me, this book certainly did.

Let's put things straight: this book has got a huge, unacceptable discrepancy. I confess I almost throw it out of the window when I noticed it.
I won't go through the plot - you can find it on the Internet, so let's move ahead - I will go straight to talking of THe mistake. Because I feel that, if she had no time to review her own book to adjust it, then she'd better not submit it to editor's attention at all. Or, at least, I do hope the discrepancy was due to a lack of review, because if she missed it even after reviewing the manuscript may God help her.

The discvrepancy occurs when Emily, the main character, goes to the petrol station in Upper street. I hope you read the book, so that you won't be annoyed with spoilers and you'll understand what I'm talking about.
So, Emily getting off, heading to the petrol station. Page 161 on. Ms Byrne reports the following events:
1 - it's October, it's night, and Emily wants milk in her tea so badly that she gets off looking for a place still open at that time of the night;
2 - she's just got home from a night gig, so her t-shirt is still drenched with sweat, but she doesn't care (author puts emphasis on that, so you do remember that detail);
3 - She ends up in a petrol station in Upper Street as it's the only place open, head to the counter, can't find the purse, so she scatters her bag's content on the till;
4 - She can't pay, but Mike, her best friend's foster father, steps in from nowhere and pays for her purchase;
5 - Mike drives her home.

Is everything clear? Yes? Good. Let's move now to page 189, where the author goes back once again to that night's account. A report that, for some reason I swear I do not guess, is totally different from the above.
It's still late night, we're still in October and Emily still wants some milk to put in her tea so badly she still goes to a petrol station in Upper Street,

BUT:

1 - She never gets there, as she is stopped on her way to the shop by a guy in a car who wants to rape her - what?? what about her purse's content scattered on the petrol station till, and Mike paying for her purchase, and driving her home?
2 - She has no purse, no bag, no mobile on her to call for help - of course she does not, are we talking about a different person by any chance, Ms Byrne?
3 - That night she has been at a Halloween party, not at a gig - OK...
4 - Mike still appears, but he is with his wife and he gets off a cab on time to prevent the rape, put Emily in the cab and they all drive to their place together.

That is that.
I went back to page 161 to double-check if I had made a mistake. I understand now that I was not the one who made a mistake here.
I wonder how could Tanya Byrne possibly miss such a massive incongruence. And how could her agent.

The story is a plain, even boring teen drama. Until the very end - fortunately, or I'd stop reading at page 20 - the author keeps feeding our curiosity not telling us what happened to Emily and why she is in a psychiatric unit, but then we discover that nothing special has happened, nor are special the reasons that led her to do what she did. Reasons she did it did not look convincing enough. Overall it all sounds pretty shabby and weak.
Honestly, I was greatly disappointed. After discovering the above discrepancy I still had hope for this book, but once I got to the last page I definitely throw it away.
Poor to say the least.