The Bookfest and of Howl by James Lee

A brief announcement first!

The Bookfest is up at Suntec convention hall this 11 to 20 December from 10 am to 10pm. For those that are Popular, Watson or Maybank card members have an exclusive members’ only night on 10 December from 8.30pm till 11pm. Heh, they’d get a free tote bag and some surprise gift with a minimum of $50 of purchase though and as usual, while stocks last.

Besides the book buying, there’ll be storytelling, book signings, celebrity appearances and such. Just check the exhibition highlights on their official website here.

And now back to your regularly scheduled book review.

I had a double take when I saw this book on the local shelves. For those who don’t know, James Lee is the writer of Mr Midnight. It’s something like a local version of the Goosebumps series.

What made me have another look at it was the tagline.

Love can be deadly

Oh my heck.

So I read the blurb. Fret not! Let me type it down for you here to read.

Sometimes, starting at a new school can be hell

When Connor Crane is enrolled at St Christopher’s College, he dreads the thought of attending a boarding school in the wilds of Dartmoor. Little does he realize what awaits him. St Christopher’s is no ordinary school. Its students and teachers are all secretly werewolves. And the mysterious she-wolf, Siena Godwin, has been selected as his mate.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Whaaaaaaaaat?

No, seriously what.

I finished the book and had to look at the back once more to double check what genre this book was. James Lee can write a horror but he can’t write a romance. (The genre said it was horror/romance.) The concept is interesting in a way that his werewolves aren’t like your usual werewolves and that they need to wear a mystical belt to turn into one.

The start is a bit of an info dump though and while it’s all pretty uh, informative, I felt that it was turning into a history book of werewolves instead of launching into the story. There, we have Connor Crane, the protagonist of the story. Considering that he’s enrolling into college, he should be around 14-16? A teen at best.

Now, this book is targeted for teens and I’m probably not the target audience for it so I was pretty unimpressed at some of the actions of the characters. Unimpressed in the sense that if I’m reading for the romance, this is totally unbelievable. For the horror? Yes, it’s all good. He’s definitely the writer for that and action sequences. It’s definitely not for children though because there’s quite gory descriptions of students being ripped apart by wolves and blood and such.

I’m going to answer the question most of you have in mind right now when you see this.

No, it’s not like Twilight… Which is pretty good but the romance in this is as believable as said book. Which means it wasn’t believable at all. At least not to me and really, when I’ve read a lot of romances and with a page limit (for teenage books), they had the gradual liking bit. Also, the ending of this book will make you go, “What? WHAT?”.

It has a cliff hanger ending to rival New Moon’s movie ending (yeah, guess what I had been watching last weekend, we went there for the lulz since we knew it was going to be hilarious. PS. Twilight fangirls, don’t lynch us, some of us did read the whole series and all but still know that the movie is going to be funny).

It just makes you go… “What?!” because from this sort of ending, it looks like a book 2 might be involved which makes me frown. It meant that in the first place, if he had written to publish with this sort of ending to lead on a sequel, the romance could have been done much better and that Connor could have been friendly to Siena (the other protagonist aka werewolf girl) instead of just being all “I wantsss you” straight away. You know the Harry Potter series? Harry didn’t like Ginny THAT fast. Or I could give romance book examples instead but I might get carried away.

Oh and I don’t know, maybe it’s for teens and I’m not a teen anymore? (Teen!Sarah would still think this was meh though.) The story is written OBVIOUSLY. As in, you know who’s a werewolf and who’s not without letting the reader find out themselves. It’s like “Hey, I angst here because I’m a werewolf, oh woe, you have a boyfriend and I don’t even though my guardian is like one of the top werewolves and junk and your boyfriend lusts for me”.

I am not kidding.

And no, Connor doesn’t have a boyfriend, it was Siena’s roommate that has one.

It’s too freaking obvious. I like the subtle flavours of sushi, a good salmon sushi will melt into my mouth and I can taste it and enjoy the flavours on my own. THIS, this is like a jam packed burger. Nothing wrong with burgers but oh maan. The sad thing is his Mr Midnight series is pretty good and it’s generally NOT that obvious so I know he can write it. I guess it’s like an experimentation of sorts perhaps since he’s churning out other books besides the Mr M series. Hopefully book 2 whenever/if it comes out will be much better. Sometimes the second book tend to be after all.

In summary? Action sequences and plot is cool, the romance is totally not and slight infodump of werewolves might be boring to some people but it’s to weave a more intricate universe, I guess.