October Tune

Read this review, and many more on my blog October Tune!

Lately, I have read so much first-person narrated stories, that anything else looks weird to me. When I started reading The Declaration, it was in first-person, but after a while it changed into third-person (she, he, etc), because ‘Surplus Anna’ was writing in a diary, which was something she wasn’t even allowed to do. Surplusses, or to put it in ‘our’ words: slaves, aren’t allowed to do anything, they’re basically not even allowed to be alive, but there they are.

Anna lives in Grange Hall, a place where a lot of Surplusses live, and where they are being trained to become slaves. They are taught how to cook, how to clean, how to wash clothes, they are taught how useless they are, how they should hate their parents for having them, etc, etc.

There were a couple of parts in the story that were being written from someone else’s point of view, at first it made me a bit confused, because it was so sudden in the middle of a chapter, that I thought it was still Anna ‘speaking’. After a while, I got used to it, though I would have liked some ‘warning’ (for example, a new chapter or something like that). I honestly don’t like it when the POV changes in the middle of a chapter. The book ended a bit too abruptly in my opinion, and a bit too predictable, I had wanted a bit more action at the end of the book, but hey, that’s me. I like action-stories.

Just like with Percy Jackson, I had watched the movie (which is one of my favourite movies ever) before I started reading the book. (To be honest, I had no idea there was a book, until I accidentally found it on here when I was randomly typing in movie names, because I wanted to see which ones had been based on books). And just like with PJ, the movie was quite different from the book, of course. The thing that bothered me the most, was that in the movie, Coraline had a 'friend', Wyborne (whose grandmother owned the 'pink house' as they called it int he movie) and in the books, he wasn't there. I did like the fact that, in the book, all animals (the rats, and the dogs) could talk in the other world, not just the cat. But still, the book was really nice, and I am going to try to read more books that have been made into movies. Though I'll probably get annoyed if there's a huge difference between the book and the movie, but I think I'm not the only one. (Allthough I quite understand that they've left a lot out of this movie, since it's a stopmotion movie, which takes really long to make, I believe).

I will tell you right now, I am rubbish at writing reviews, but I am going to try my best to make it into a 'proper' review. Here we go. At first, I was a bit sceptical about this book, because when I watched the movie, last month, I both liked and disliked it. The movie felt a bit rushed, and I was afraid that the book might be the same too. But it surprised me a lot. I did miss a couple of important things sometimes, but I guess that's just me - reading way too fast, missing the important pieces of the story. I finished this book within two days, because I really wanted to know what would happen at the end - even though I had already watched the movie (and I found out that the movie was changed in SO many ways). While I read, I started to dislike the movie even more. I am going to start Sea of Monsters soon, when I've read the books that are on my 'Currently Reading' list. So yeah. Rubbish review, sorry.