Dominika's Reading Challenge

I can't believe it's already week 30! I don't have much time this week, so I decided to read something short and easy: Provincial Daughter by R.M. Dashwood I read and loved "Diary of a Provincial Lady", which was written by the mother of R.M. Dashwood. I hope I'll like this book as well!

I enjoyed this book immensely and I was sure I would give it five stars - right until the ending, which was, I'm sorry to say, quite horrible. It was like one of those crazy, silly comedies and I hated it, so finally I gave this book only four stars. The story was simple and cute: Esme, a very poor girl from Vietnam, goes to the USA to meet and marry Khai. Khai is autistic and it's his mother who chose Esme as his future wife. He's not very happy about it at first, but soon he discovers that maybe it's not such a bad idea. I really liked Khai, he was a sweetheart. He always tried to make people happy and he was so  clumsy with people and kept saying and doing the wrong things. And the first sex scene was hilarious. I didn't like Esme. She was dishonest, she didn't tell neither Khai nor his mother about her daughter, which was a huge lie. She kept hiding her thoughts from Khai, although both he and his mother asked her not to do this. She kept taking...

This week it's a book published this year and it's a very easy challenge for me, as I just bought a book I'm dying to read! It's: The Bride Test by Helen Hoang Last year I read this author's first book, The Kiss Quotient, and I simply fell in love with it, so I couldn't wait for the book number two. It's finally here, it's beautiful and I'm very excited!

I'm very disappointed. I didn't like this book at all. It was really boring and slow, much too much talking and not enough action. Everything seemed so theatrical and crazy, there were so many coincidences and lucky breaks, that I just kept rolling my eyes and couldn't wait to finish reading this book. I didn't like any of the characters - to tell you the truth, to the very end I couldn't distinguishing two main heroes and even a so-called romance of one of them didn't help me. All those bad guys jumping from every corner were simply ridiculous. Generally, there were definitely too many people in this book, both bad and good, some of them appeared suddenly only to be shot and forgotten a second later. It was messy, annoying and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

It's hot and I feel tired, so I want something easy and quick this week. It's going to be a book with a one-world title, so I chose Athabasca by Alistair MacLean. Alistair MacLean wrote some of my favourite books, but there are also some I didn;t enjoy at all. It seems that I always either love or hate his books, we'll see what I think about this one :) It looks very short, so it shouldn't take me long to read it.

I'm so happy that I decided to read this book, because it was simply incredible! I still can't believe it was written in 1930, because it is extremely modern; it describes the world that doesn't exist yet, but we may almost see it. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, Bernard and Lenina and their almost love story were great - but I have to admit that I was not a huge fan of John the Savage. We saw London and the new society through his eyes, but John is like us, so it seemed a bit boring. I don't know what to think about the ending, I have a few theories what the author wanted to show us, but I'm not sure. I would be much happier if it ended on the discussion between John and Mustafa.  I loved this book, it really made me think. In my opinion everybody should read it.

I didn't hate this book - I just really didn't like it. At least it was short and I read it quickly. Cassie is very poor, but very intelligent - we can guess, because she won this prestigeous scholarship, although her behaviour and choices do not seem very intelligent. She goes to Paris, to study at Darke Academy, she meets two fascinating boys, a friendly roommate and a group of enemies - nothing new here, except maybe The Few, because I still don't know for sure what kind of creatures they are.  Generally, I think this book was rather boring and I'm definitely not going to read the rest of this series.