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Scarlet110

Bibliomaniac Scarlet

I came here to keep in touch with all my friends who left GR after the censorship debacle. I read a little of every genre. I co-blog at Musings of a Bibliomaniac.

Currently reading

Burial Rites
Hannah Kent
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Ana Juan, Catherynne M. Valente
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
SPOILER ALERT!

Ultraboring

Ultraviolet  - R.J. Anderson

The good thing: Misleading blurb alert!! Ultraviolet is much more than a murder mystery.

 

The bad thing: It still bored me to death -_-

 

Before I justify my (unpopular) opinion, I have a confession to make. I was never really interested in Ultraviolet. Reading this book was an act of desperation. I badly needed a break from Picoult's super-sentimental preaching in The Storyteller and this was the only book on my Ipad that wasn't emotionally draining. So I guess this was doomed from the start.

 

 

---Some spoilers, nothing major---

 

Ultraviolet has a fabulous concept. The MC, Allison, has Synesthesia, which according to Wikipedia "is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway."

 

o_O

 

In more understandable terms, all of Allison's senses are cross-wired.

 

As a result, our MC can:

- see/taste sounds

- feel/taste words

- see numbers as colors

- sense colors by touch

- taste feelings

 

She also has a condition called Tetrachromacy, which according to Wikipedia... no, forget it.

 

It basically means that Allison can see into the ultraviolet range so a lot of the colors she sees have no names. Yet.

 

Both disorders exist in reality. However, Allison's condition in the book is very, very exaggerated (like most things in YA). It's like super-synesthesia or something. She can even see heartbeats, taste the wind, hear stars, blah blah.

 

Here's what I don't understand: How did she not end up in a psych ward sooner??

 

The kind of sensory overload this book describes.. it's too much. She lived like this for 16 years and nobody had a clue?? How did she not have a major mental breakdown as a child??

 

That's not the reason for my low rating, by the way. That's just a random question that popped up in my head.

 

My reasons are:

 

- Allison. She annoyed me. For someone with such gifted sensory perception, her narration felt painfully monotonous to me.

 

- The writing. Too simplistic.

 

- Nearly 80% of the story takes place in a psych ward, which is not a setting I like very much.

 

- The Ending. I mean, SERIOUSLY?? It was absolutely lame. It hit me like a paint-ball in the face - sudden, painful, unpleasant.

 

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!


[

Allison's therapist turns out to be an alien.

Her classmate Tori, who 'disintegrated' according to the blurb was just sucked into another dimension.

Oh, and Tori is an alien too.

But they're not aliens, they are actually humans who come from another colony.

And of course, the human Allison is in love with her human-yet-alien therapist.

 

WTF.

 

Ever since The 5th Wave, the word 'alien' in YA makes me see red (no synesthesia-related pun intended). So maybe it's me, not the book.

]

 

Sorry if this review is disjointed, I'm mentally exhausted.