Target Audience: YA

Oh my, such a disappointment! After a wonderful, exotic, very gloomy and atmospheric 100 pages that got my hopes up, the awesomeness petered out. The world, the story, the characters – everything had so much potential! Unfortunately, the writing couldn’t live up to it and soon everything lost its glamour: the enthralling mysteries became far too obvious, the rugged beauty had to make way for a boarding school atmosphere and could never truly recover, and the characters turned out to be as flat as a pancake . . .

Wow, just wow. If I had to summarise this novel in one sentence, I’d say it’s X-men meets the Nazis – very dark, very disturbing, and even worse very realistic. It’s a story of survival and friendship against all odds, a story of coming to terms with oneself and accepting who and what one has become. It’s also a road trip through a bleak and dangerous US in search of the only hope there is: a safe haven and finding one’s family . . .

If you like interesting magical concepts, ominous Southern American settings, American Civil War re-enactments, male point of views, and awesome secondary characters, than this is just the right book for you – as long as you don’t mind instalove and more or less annoying main characters . . .

Pünktlich zum Erscheinen des 6. Bandes im Oktober habe auch ich es nun endlich geschafft, den 5. und ehemals letzten Teil der Reihe zu lesen, an den ich mich bisher nicht herangetraut hatte, da ich mich nicht von meinen geliebten Erben verabschieden wollte. Normalerweise kann ich es gar nicht leiden, wenn eine Reihe über den eigentlichen letzten Band fortgeführt wird, aber in diesem Fall freue ich mich über alle Maße, dass es doch kein Abschied für immer geworden ist. Anlässlich des First-Reads des 5. Bandes gab es natürlich einen Reread der ganzen Reihe, zum einen, um meine Erinnerungen aufzufrischen, zum anderen, weil ich von den jungen Vampiren einfach nicht genug bekommen kann . . .

There are not enough positive words in this world to do justice to Code Name Verity. It is utterly brilliant, intriguing, shocking – and it will rip out your heart. Thrice. Not that there was anything left after the first time … But isn’t that just the way we like our novels? Don’t we all adore magnificent writing, stunning plots, and believable characters? Unforgettable tales of loyalty and betrayal, of trust and fortitude even in the face of torment and fear? If you can’t answer these questions with a resounding YES, then you cannot be helped. This, my dear readingrats is the story of a friendship so strong and true, written so perfectly that it comes to life before the reader’s eyes . . .

I tried to like it. I really did, but The Host also failed to win me over on my second attempt to finish this book. The idea itself had the potential of becoming a gripping, fast-paced sci-fi action thriller, but the execution emphasised all the wrong aspects turning it into an often boring and lengthy tale that focuses on a questionable love triangle propped by flat characters and a story that sometimes seems to move rather backwards instead of getting anywhere at all. The ending could have saved the novel by breaking through my wall of indifference – if the novel had actually ended there.

Fascinatingly weird and ominous, this book poses more questions than it bothers to answer. The reader is depending on Chloe’s narration about her persuasive older sister Ruby, the drowned town of Olive, and an incident extinguished from the memory of the town inhabitants that keeps the reader wondering what is real and what is imagination . . .