Books I Wanted to Throw Across the Room

During my exploration of the teen writer blogoshpere, I discovered a monthly blog chain run by Teens Can Write Too!.  Unfortunately, I found it too late to be part of this month's chain, but this month's topic sounded fun, so I decided to do a post even though I'm not part of the chain.  The topic is: What are examples of books you've thrown across the room with force.
WARNING: this post contains spoilers!

1.  The Giver by Lois Lowry.  I hated this book with a passion.  It's a futuristic dystopia novel set in a community where there is no war, no racism, no free will, no color, and total governmental control. Here's how your life would go if you lived there in a nutshell:  You are born to a woman whose only job in life is to have three children before she's sent to work in a factory forever.  You are immediately taken away from her and are taken care of by some people until you are given to the family that will raise you.  Each family can only have two children, a boy and a girl, neither of which are the actual children of the parents. When you turn twelve, you are given a job by the Elders (the government).  You can reject their choice, but you will most likely be "released" (murdered). You live your life doing your job.  You can apply for a spouse, and the will Elders find someone for you to marry who THEY think will suit you. You can apply for children, and at the giant Ceremony at the end of the year the Elders will give you a baby.  Eventually, you will be placed in the retirement home, where you will live until you are released.  Oh, and did I mention that the Elders keep all the memories of what our civilization is like in the head of someone called the Receiver? Yeah, they do.  So only one person in the entire community has an idea of what love and happiness and independence and music and duty and friendship and loyalty and mercy and any emotions are like. Yes, the people who live there have no real emotions; they just have the shadow of emotions.  So the main plot is this kid called Jonas getting the job of becoming the new Receiver and discovering how awful their community is.  At the very end of the book Jonas and a baby he rescues from being released (the poor baby wasn't sleeping through the night like the other babies, so he was going to be killed) run away, and on the last page there's this horrible scene where Jonas makes it to our society, but you don't know if he's dead, hallucinating, or if he actually made it.  He's in another one of Lois Lowry's books, so they made it, but you can't tell at the end of this one.
Wow, that felt good.  That's all the stuff my mom wouldn't let me put in the book report I had to write after reading the Giver. That society is so twisted it makes me sick. At one point Jonas's dad (who's a doctor) kills a baby just because it was a twin. There has to be an exact number of babies every year, so if you're the smaller of a pair of twins, you die.
Okay, rant over.  Promise.

2.  Billy Baker's Dog Won't Stay Buried by M. T. Coffin.  I was so disappointed in this book.  It sounded funny.  But in the end, all the ghosts of all the pets buried in the local pet cemetery go and attack their former owners.  It's really scary.  The main character, his mom, and the vet (who is in love with the mom) end up leaving town and running away from all the ghosts, but every now and then they still see the stupid ghost dog again.  And of course there was a nutty church that predicted the comeback of the ghost pets.  It was just disturbing.  So much so that I actually burned the book.  I didn't want to give it to Goodwill and have it disturb someone else.

3. The last hundred pages of Inheritance by Christopher Paolini.  I LOVED the Inheritance Cycle.  Then he has to go ruin it by [spoilers spoilers spoilers]. (I won't spoil the actually happenings of the story)  Everyone is SO unhappy!  I cried.  Both because a series of books I'd loved for years was ending, and because all the characters were crying.  I felt so betrayed.  Irrationally so, but still.  After all the energy I put into loving (and hating) the characters and cheering in the battles, and waiting three years for the last book, I would have liked an ending that left me feeling like there was some closure. This ending only ripped a wider whole in my sadness.   It took me two days to completely recover from it.

4. A Kiss in Time by Alex Flinn.  Sleeping Beauty falls asleep and wakes up now, sounds great right? Wrong.  I should have stopped reading the moment I met the "prince".  Or when "Prince" took Sleepy-head to a party where there was alcohol (they were no older than 18).   The end was not worth slogging through all the inappropriate yichk, which was quite plentiful.  I might have been able to forgive the end had all the boys not been so girl-crazed.

I had no idea how satisfying it was to blog about this stuff.  I'll have to remember that.  I may start doing book reviews, but that might be too much like homework.  I don't know, we'll both see.