OVERBREAKREADING

             I am not ashamed to say that over break I read a four and a half hundred-page book called Fallen. Honestly, my neighbor gave it to me to read so I could tell him if I liked it or not. I liked it. I really liked it. Like most books, or just the general manifestation of society of the novel goes, it started out really suckish and it just sort of dragged on for a bit. Like I do with all these books, I propped it up on my shelf for a couple of months until the subconscious guilt forced me to take it back out and open it. Read the first page. Read it again. Put it down. Walk away. Pick it up. Skim through it. Weigh out the pages. The print size. Put it down. And come back later to read it again. And then continue with the rest of the chapter. Only to find that I kind of was into the book a bit. And once I got a little bit into it, I found a part of my day to read the next chapter. This was the beginning to a long relationship where I ended up not being able to put the book down for an entire day of my February break and read for an entire day. Yay me. So now that I have established that I liked this book, I want to share with you why it was so different and captivating. It was mind meddling and I just couldn't stop reading. Well, one tactic that I think the author used to keep me the reader tied to this book was by having a beginning that didn't really make so much sense, where not much was said about the characters or the situation. But enough was said to know that there was some sort of weird thing going on, something deviant about they’re being shadows and the whole "she doesn't know it, but I know it. This has happened before". And something was kind of strange about the "every first time we touch" thing. What made that a good element to this book was that it kept haunting the main character. After you get through that beginning part with the shadows and the girl and the guy... it's a new story. And the author makes sure that the reader knows this, but then she starts to push in characters like Daniel and the author makes you begin to think, "wait. Is this the same guy as the guy in the beginning?" and "are these the same shadows?" Piece by piece everything comes together. Every time the author gives you a new piece, you want to come back for more. It's like the author has a little basket of candy and she drops one candy here, and one candy there and you just want to keep going because you want more candy, you want more pieces. Overall, I just really think the author Lauren Kate does a real good job of keeping her reader into her book. And though I was not too keen to start up with this sort of genera -love, dark fantasy- I was glad that I did because it was a book that was able to emotionally overwhelm me at times. I really liked it. Did I say that?

              Another thing that I found about this book was that it reminded me a lot of Romeo and Juliet. The whole idea of star-crossed lovers the whole idea of not being able to control your feelings. In the book Fallen by Lauren Kate, an average girl named Luce was chosen by an angle to fall in love with. (Bear with me) And both lovers are inseparable. Their love however brings them to a disastrous war and everything, really falls apart. One thing the author mentioned in an interview was that "people are always falling for the same type of person even when it ends badly you find yourself looking again for that same disaster" And it got me to really think about the book in a deeper since. Where it wasn't just some dark fallen angle book, it was sort of describing society as some place where nobody is perfect even something that seems as great as perfect as an angle and even when we realize this - even when we experience this and get hurt, we keep going back, picking ourselves back up and trying to find the one. Or the perfect lover once again. Which brings me back to Romeo and Juliet where Mercutio was talking to Romeo about love, and being rough with love if love was rough with him.