The Pain, My Mother, Sir Tiffy, Cyber Boy & Me
Michael Gerard Bauer
Maggie has three realistic goals for the year. Unfortunately, her past seems to be halting any sort of progression – she’s going to need to step outside what she thinks, and think about other people too.
This novel takes both its name and its conversational writing style In the ‘tradition’ of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Now, if you’ll remember my review, I didn’t particularly like that novel, I preferred The Haters. Instead of sex and penis jokes, this novel is filled with puns. If you love puns, you might love the way the novel is written. For me, I could have done with less humour and more substance.
Although the different chapters purport to reveal and hide things in equal measure to how Maggie’s life goes positive to negative, I found the progression of the novel slow and the storyline typical. There are better novels out there that will give teenage readers more to bite into.
I have faith from other reviews that this author’s other offerings are better – maybe I will pick up The Running Man in my spare time if it crosses my path. I’m not going to seek it out though, enough teenage fiction for me.
No outlasting love for me here. Maggie is a self-absorbed brat that although her character develops throughout the novel, for me she never became more likeable. For that, I’m going to give it 3 stars. The main reason I read it was so that I could leave it for my niece to read and I didn’t have to bring it home with me! BCID – 352–14075986.
As long as you can get past the extreme amounts of explicit swearing in the prologue and first chapter, you’ll be golden for reading this novel. If that sort of thing bothers you, I advise skipping straight ahead. I put the book down and tried to take a nap instead of keeping reading at that point. Anyway, I persevered and it got better from there.
I couldn’t work out what the main part of this novel was. Finding someone? Yes, ok. Saving a magazine? Yes, ok. Exposing some sort of crime? Yes, ok. Character development? Nope. Boring stuff about jobs that I didn’t care about? Oh, yes. None of the action happened in the first half. I wanted to love it, I really did.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this novel. I wanted something fantasy because I was sick of teenage drama. No fear here – a scrap of ‘isn’t she pretty’, but otherwise fantasy running wild. Very satisfying and light to read.
Whiplash! The ending took me completely by surprise. Phew! My head may have literally flipped backwards. I couldn’t believe it. I just had to keep reading, but in fact, it was in a course of a couple of pages that the whole thing ended up on its head.
This should have been called The Slow News Sisters instead of Keep Me Posted. What’s wrong with using a catchy term, even if it is later used in the novel? Not to mention it would have been a heads up for the progress being glacial.
You’d think that since I was up until 1am finishing this book (and doing some other writing) than means I enjoyed it. Honestly, I’m not sure that I did. There were huge time gaps and gaps in Jinhau’s memory that made me fall out of the novel time and time again.
I put off reading this novel for a very long time, because I knew it was the second in the series. Finally, in a bid to cull down the number of older novels I had sitting on my shelf, I decided to pick it up. A quick google of the first novel in the series seemed to suggest that I didn’t need to read the first one – this was definitely the case.
This was such a slow novel. I was halfway through and saying to my partner that I wasn’t sure I could face keeping on reading it. I started out being a bit wary of it, because of the changing perspectives.