Saturday, July 16, 2011

Entangled by Cat Clarke -- Review


Entangled 
by Cat Clarke
Synopsis (courtesy of Goodreads):

The same questions whirl round and round in my head:
What does he want from me?
How could I have let this happen?
AM I GOING TO DIE?

17-year-old Grace wakes up in a white room, with a table, pens and paper - and no clue how she got here.

As Grace pours her tangled life onto the page, she is forced to remember everything she's tried to forget. There's falling hopelessly in love with the gorgeous Nat, and the unravelling of her relationship with her best friend Sal. But there's something missing. As hard as she's trying to remember, is there something she just can't see?

Grace must face the most important question of all. Why is she here?

A story of dark secrets, intense friendship and electrifying attraction.
 

Review:
First off, I LOVE LOVE LOVE the cover of this book. The pose, the hair color - that's actually what initially attracted me to the book (as well as the synopsis). When I started the book, it kind of just throws you into the story, so I felt a bit lost and disoriented for a few chapters, but then things were clicking and it then became easy to catch onto the pattern of how the story is told -- flashes of Grace and Ethan in the white room "prison" and Grace's life and activities around the time she met a fine young chap named Nat. 

I thought Grace's character was rather dense as from very early on in the story, you could tell there was something funky going on (red flags everywhere) between her new boyfriend Nat and her best friend Sal -- all the body language described, the awkward looks and conversations -- yet Grace totally does not take notice of this at all... that is until she writes her story and at Ethan's urging slowly realizes the big truths of her story. 

I really did not understand Ethan's character, nor why she thought she knew him, when they never mentioned why she thought that - was it someone from her past, some stranger she came across at one point in time in her life - it just never really addresses him, other than his ultimate role in Grace's story.

While this is listed as a YA, I would have to say it's for the older YA crowd - lots of swear words (though the British ones hehe), LOTS of talk and descriptions of sex and sexual experiences, and the behavioral issue of cutting. 

Cutting. The theme of cutting in this book reminded me a lot of "Hunger" and "Winter Girls," where the lead characters in that book are OCD/ obsessed with their body image and starving themselves. In Entangled, Grace releases her stress and depression by cutting. Having known real-life people who have had issues with cutting, it was interesting to get Grace's perspective of her fascination and compulsion with it. I don't recall her ever mentioning pain and its association to her cutting, which I thought was odd. Odd in the sense that, from what I know of cutters' behavior, the big reason they cut is to FEEL IT, in order to overwhelm their other feelings of anxiety, stress, depression, etc...and sometimes for self-punishment. 

It was an ok, a lil' sub-par, read overall. The pace was ok, once the rhythm of flipping back and forth between Grace's memories and Grace's experience in the white room was established. I also did not like the ending. I do not like that it left Grace's story ... unfinished; I would have rather had a sad ending or a happy ending. Instead, it just kind of ends with "blah ........"

Rating: 2 / 5 Stars

2 comments:

  1. I think I gave this one 2.5! LOL

    The synopsis of the book was totally misleading!!! That is what got me, like if I would have been EXPECTING what I got, then I may not have disliked it so much!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah. Very misleading - kind of a shame. Alas :-/

    ReplyDelete

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