Innocence

Rating:
Summary: Haunting and Brilliant....Gave me chills
Review: This book is truly brilliant. I enjoyed every moment of it. The lack of punctuation and quotation marks make is seem like one flowing poem. Innocence is a dark story, one that is so believable in its own horrific way, I could not put the book down. I'm sorry so many people cannot see through to the beauty of this incredible novel. I hope to see many more like this from JAne Mendelsohn.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: This book really appealed to me as a 15 year old. I was never interested in reading until I sat down and opened this book. It took me a day to read the whole thing! I couldn't put it down! In a way it showed what life is like for teenagers! It did a good job explaining what teenagers have to go through, with losing a parent, moving to a new city and a new school and having your dad fall in love with someone that is trying to harm you! It is just awesome! I recommend this book to anyone, people of all ages, would enjoy this book!

Rating:
Summary: Risky, unconventional writing.
Review: This book reminded me of Lauren Slater's memoir, LYING. You don't know what is true or false; fact or fiction; reality or fantasy and yet you are asked to trust the narrator along the journey. I trusted her for the entire ride ... through poetic forests and metaphorical oceans, and though I almost got lost, almost drowned, I hung on till the end and am glad I did.

Rating:
Summary: A little too deep?
Review: This book thoroughly confused me. Call me shallow...but I just did not understand. The characters didn't seem to be developed enough for me to understand anyone but Beckett. I am a big fan of contemporary poetry and this book just didn't have that spark with my imagination. It's just too vague for my tastes. I can't tell if it was all just a dream, or if certain parts even happened...If anyone would like to explain it to me...you can email me @ [e-mail] To people who haven't read this book yet....I don't recommend it, unless you're a big fan of bloody things and vagueness...

Rating:
Summary: Our Own "Innocence"
Review: This is a one-sitting read. The intriguing and nearly lyrical style of Mendelsohn will keep you reading and guessing until the last page. Unique writing, vivid imagery, exciting characters and more. Once you finish this book, you'll never look at the world the same way again.

Rating:
Summary: God, that was awful
Review: This is maybe the worst book I've ever read. It was horrible, trite, and totally unredeeming. Please don't make the same mistake I did by wasting money and time on this book.

If the author was trying to make some impossibly deep statement on young girls in society today, she should have picked some other vehicle than this silly, stupid tale of vampires. I don't care if they're real, or in the head of the protagonist. It all ends up with the same conclusion - this book is awful and so silly in the worst way.

Every page found me stunned that it could get worse. But get worse it did. If I have to read the phrase "menstrual blood" that many times again in a book, then ...

And for the love of Pete, stop comparing this book and Beckett to Holden Caulfield. To compare this writing "style", and this book to J.D. Salinger's masterpiece of how it feels to be adolescent and alone is incredibly far off base. Sure, they're both written in English, but any similarity ends there.

Rating:
Summary: Dull, trite, maudlin & cliched
Review: This is probably one of the worst books ever published. 1st of all,it is trying to be allegorical when it really isn't. Kafka is great allegory. Innocence is not. Her ramblings read like bad confessional poems- like Sharon Olds- she had every cliche- being trapped underwater, blood, melodrama, etc... The ironic thing is that this book is SO bad you won't forget it. So I do recommend it so people can see how bad it really is. The sad thing is that there was a review written by a young girl who liked this crap & said how it has "inspired" her to be a writer. Sheesh. This is why bad writing does us no good. This book is easy to write and easy to read, and it gives hopefuls who can't see Jane's lack of talent hope, just as Sharon Olds gives bad women poets hope. UGH!

Rating:
Summary: Worst book I've ever read; what a waste of time
Review: This was the absolute worst book I ever read. I forced myself to keep reading, hoping at some point that it would redeem itself. Never happened. I cannot believe it's from the same author who wrote "I Was Amelia Earhart".

... Almost no character development, not even of the main character. You never come to care for any of the characters, especially not Beckett. Completely and totally unbelievable. Not well written. Rambles. The non-use of punctuation makes it difficult to tell who is speaking to whom and when. Rambling writing with no real point. The only teenage girls who think like this in real life are locked in little white rooms. The reader is treated as if he/she is completely unintelligent and whole-heartedly gullible.

I kept expecting Beckett to wake up in a mental ward (it would have made more sense and would have been a thousand times more satisfying than the useless dribble that was actually written). It's as if Jane Mendelsohn had a dream one night and wrote down the fragments she remembered after she woke up. I really cannot say anything good about this book. It says nothing (ABSOLUTELY NOTHING) about the "innocence" (or loss of innocence) of today's young girls. Beckett was a mental case from the first sentence to the last and the book reads more like a mental patient's diary. Save your money. Buy anything other than this book. As a matter of fact, save your time and don't even bother to read the book jacket/description.

Rating:
Summary: Reads like it's targetted at 12 year olds...
Review: When i was reading this book i kept looking back at the cover to check to see that it really didn't say Young Adult. This books was very similar to teen-level horror novels. I'd compare it to Christopher Pike, but it wasn't that good. The plot was simple, the characters were transparent, and i think the person who wrote the summary on the dust jacket must have been thinking of another book.

The disjointed style of narration seems very calculated. I suppose the author was trying to underline the terror her poor main character suffered, the trauma of her various life experiences, but it didn't seem very authentic.

The reason i'm giving this book 3 stars instead of 1 is because the author does have some fantastic descriptions. There are moments in the book when the wording is just fantastic, and a person or a moment is perfectly explained.

As for the other 95% of the book, it seems like the author is trying very hard to convince us that either the main character can make incredible and accurate leaps of logic based on very very little evidence, or that she's just had her first psychotic break, and will probably spend the rest of her life in an institution. And based on the implication at the end of the book, i'm assuming we're just supposed to credit her with astounding cognitive abilities. That, or they editted out the half of the book where she figures all of the problems out based on coherant thoughts or real evidence.

If you're looking for an easy read with no plot and fake characters, go ahead and pick this up. Short of that though, i'd suggest you look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Imaginative - But Not Enough
Review: When Jane Mendelsohn's newest novel begins, its narrator Beckett, a teenage girl, faces major life changes: her mother has recently died, her father has uprooted them to live in a new apartment, and she is about to get her period for the first time. When three girls she has met at her new school turn up dead in an alley, apparent suicides, she begins to lose her innocence, red drop by drop. At first Beckett seems a normal enough girl but as the novel progresses, she begins to hallucinate, seeing blood and bats everywhere. The novel takes a desperate turn as paranoia (or is it legitimate fear? and does it matter?) drives Beckett to suspect a conspiracy among women she knows of wanting to kill her.

I wanted to be able to rave about this novel, but can't. Although Mendelsohn is a talented writer, I found this book, particularly the first half, self-conscious and flat, overly concerned with effect while neglecting the kind of depth that could have made this book unforgettable. To Mendelsohn's credit, she did not try to recreate her first novel, I WAS AMELIA EARHART, in different form and instead wrote a stylistically similar but radically different tale.

Jane Mendelsohn watchers should read this book, if for no other reason than to see where this imaginative author is headed.