Bula, friends. Welcome to my channel BiblioNyan. My name is Neko Neha.
If this is your first time on my channel, then I welcome you.
I talk about bookish content, usually of the diverse nature, and otaku content as well.
I'm actually going to be using my cell phone to record the next few videos that I do.
The microphone I was originally using with my camera, ended up dying.
And the microphone on my camera isn't that great.
So, I'm waiting for a new microphone to ship in.
Until that comes in, I'm going to be using my handy-dandy little cell phone to do these videos.
Today I'm going to go ahead and do two very quick book reviews for you guys for two particular books,
the first one is P.S. I Still Love You,
and the second one is Always and Forever, Lara Jean.
These are both written by Jenny Han and these are book two and book three
in the To All the Boys I've Loved Before young adult contemporary trilogy.
Before I do my reviews, I want to go ahead and offer a disclaimer.
The first disclaimer is that all of the opinions that I have about these books
are mine. They're individual opinions and they, in no way, reflect or relate to
opinions of other readers, or anything like that.
My opinions about these books are not meant to insult or offend anyone.
These are just the experiences that I had as an individual reader myself.
The second disclaimer that I want to offer is that
that any opinions that I have about these books themselves are not about the author.
Or the publisher, or anything like that.
I guess I also have a third disclaimer and that
is that this review is going to be inherently negative,
because I had a negative experience with these books.
So, if you're a huge fan of the trilogy and you don't necessarily want to watch a negative book review,
about these two books, then you might not want to watch this video
as because it's going to be quite negative.
To the All the Boys I've Loved Before is the first book in this trilogy and I have already done
already done a review for it. I'll link it in a white box thingymajiggy above my head somewhere.
I actually really liked the first book. I thought it was a really good contemporary.
It was fun. It was sweet. It was very cute.
I really enjoyed the first one.
So if you're interested in checking out my thoughts on that, I'll have the link for you.
Moving right into the book review...
I'm going to start with book two, P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han.
This book picks up exactly where the first one left off.
In regards to Lara Jean and who she has feelings with.
Plot things happen in this book and she ends up formulating a relationship with the boy she originally had feelings with.
I'm going to go ahead and state right off the bat that I really did not like her boy choice.
I think he is possessive and manipulative, and
I just think that he contributes to an overall abusive relationship.
Because of the fact that she ends up with him
the book promotes abusive relationships and problematic relationships.
And that is one of the biggest issues that I had with this book.
The boy that she ends up choosing, lies to her constantly.
Manipulates her whenever he is caught red-handed,
in trouble from either lying or doing something really deceptive.
And always turns the tables and makes Lara Jean feel like the villain and
apologising to him, which he should in fact be the one apologising to her.
He knows that his lies hurt her. He knows that him lying
and treating her the way that he treats her,
really makes her feel shitty because she basically tells him that.
Yet he continues to do it for his own stupid justifications.
He has insecurities and other things like that
and he believes that treating her like shit pretty much justifies that because
he has these insecurities, which I think is total crap.
Another thing that I really didn't like about this book, aside from the fact that I really didn't like the boy,
Was Lara Jean and her interactions with this boy.
She has a lot of monologues as well as chats with other characters in the book
about how the behaviour of her boyfriend is really starting to bother her.
It's creating a lot of suspicion and doubt in her relationship
and she doesn't know if she can trust him, and she doesn't know if he's a good match for her in the long term.
Because he's very "cute" and very handsome, and
because he does little sweet things here and there
she feels that it makes up for it, and I think that is a very big issue.
It's not the kind of relationships that I think needs to be exposed to young adults.
Because then we're teaching them that it's okay to stay in an abusive and problematic relationship.
As long as the boy is cute, or he buys you things, or he does a couple of nice things
but those nice gestures DO NOT, in any shape or form, justify
douchebaggery in a relationship.
I also think how Lara Jean engages with him, and how she keeps running back to him
even though she's having these issues and these senses of doubt
and because his behaviour is enabling at a lot of insecurities that she has;
making her doubt herself and her self-worth
and just herself as an individual,
I feel like it fetishises problematic relationships.
We don't need to fetishise problematic relationships.
There's nothing romantic or sexy about a guy who's being an asshole to you.
Who's lying to you and treating you like shit.
It shows that he has no respect for you. And if you stay in a relationship with a guy
who's disrespectful towards you, then you're basically just
losing your self-worth. You're sacrificing your self-worth and your integrity
for a person who doesn't even deserve it.
I found the book to be extremely anti-feminist as well.
There's something happens very early on in the book, at the very beginning of the book,
that basically involves sex and social media.
The way that it was handled was very poor, in my opinion.
I didn't like the way it was handled at all.
Lara Jean goes ahead and defaults on relying on her boyfriend to fix her problem for her,
which again, he lies to her her. He betrays her. He turns out to be very unreliable.
The principal and her father end up interfering to deal with the issue at hand.
She doesn't realise it's a big issue and she's always running to him to be her rescuer.
And I don't like that because it's very anti-feminist.
It shows that women are very weak and we need men to be there for us. To hold us up. To fix
our problems.
I don't think that's a very good message to send, especially because Lara Jean is a very intellectual person.
She's very good at her studies. She gets straight As.
She usually makes very good decisions.
She's very selfless and compassionate.
She has the capability to makes these decisions on a very independent level.
But she keeps defaulting to her boyfriend.
I don't think that's right.
I think a lot of it has to do with her insecurities in the relationship.
She's so scared of pushing him away.
As well as maybe on some level she just doesn't want to deal with the stress
of something of this calibre.
I ended up giving this book 2 stars outta 5 stars, just because I really didn't like it.
I thought it was very problematic.
The only thing that I found to be redeeming was basically her family.
I love Kitty, her younger sister.
I find her to be very interesting. She has a way of whipping out words of wisdom
out of nowhere and really gets you thinking, "Hey this 9-year-old has a lot of insight."
So I gave this 2 out of 5 stars. I was really disappointed with it.
I knew going into the third boo that I wasn't going to enjoy it just because of
her relationship.
Like I said, going into the third book I knew I wasn't going to like it because
of her relationship.
And that brings me to Always and Forevever, Lara Jean.
In this one we get to see her relationship continue onwards, as well as
dealing with getting ready to go off to college, and choosing what college she wants to go to, and
dealing with those kinds of things that teenagers deal with when
high school comes to an end.
The one thing that this book had that book #2 did not have was a plot.
There was a plot. It was a small plot, but there was a plot.
Book two didn't have any kind of plot whatsoever.
My biggest issue with this book was the fact that Lara Jean
started to take on the qualities that I hated about her boyfriend
in the book.
In the first two books, she's very selfless. She's very compassionate.
She's very cautious of other people's emotions and feelings.
But in this book it's all about Lara Jean.
Lara Jean's feelings. Her emotions. Her opinions and all of her bullshit.
There is a wedding that happens in the book and she
gets to participate in helping to prepare the wedding.
She gets very offended when the bride tells her that these are specific things that
she actually does not want for her wedding.
It's like: Lara Jean, this isn't your wedding. You have no right to get offended.
She gets offended when her sisters want to dress differently rather than how she wants to dress.
And go against the plans that she has.
It's just very much about her opinions and her emotions.
She's very selfish and callous and I don't like that.
I found that to be a symbol of character regression versus character growth.
She was mature and level-headed; she had a good head on her shoulders.
But now she's become to self-absorbed
very much like her boyfriend.
She even took on traits of being slightly emotionally manipulative, which I didn't appreciate.
Her boyfriend, on the other hand, for the first three-quarters of the book
looks like he's actually made a lot of changes.
He's a lot more positive. He's a lot more caring.
He's a lot more aware of his feelings and tries to open with what he's thinking and things like that.
But then you reach the last quarters of the book where the conflict reaches its climax
and he turns into the same douchebag that he was in book two.
He manipulates her emotions. Makes her feel bad for wanting something that she's genuinely allowed to want,
for thinking things that she's genuinely allowed to think.
Especially in regards to her future.
Which makes it seem like she doesn't care about him, and
I don't like those kind of mind games and that kind of manipulation.
He does that.
I also didn't care for the book's ending. I felt like the ending should have been done a lot differently.
I thought it was the perfect opportunity to show Lara Jean
as a character who has grown and matured.
And learned from her first romance and her first experience
with having her first real boyfriend.
In the end that's not what happened.
She just came right back to square one.
That really disappointed me because I thought that she had reached a pivotal point in her life
where she had realised that there are certain things that are more important
than just boys and romance, at least at a particular age.
And how you have this doorway to experience new kinds of things
in regards to love and all of that kind of stuff.
She closed the door on that very quickly.
And she kind of just stayed... kept leaning against the door, so to speak.
So she wouldn't have to face it. I didn't like that. I honestly felt that
if the story would have taken a little bit of a different turn at the end
it would have made up for a lot of the crap that Lara Jean had been doing in the second and third book.
I ended up giving this book 2.75 stars because there are some redeeming qualities in this book.
That the second one didn't have.
There's a lot of tender moments between Lara Jean and her dad, and her sisters.
Her elder sister, Margot, brings home her college boyfriend who's a British-Indian.
He's so cool and I love his humour. But there's still that
awkwardness of bringing home your first college boyfriend to meet the family.
All of that was done very, very well.
Unfortunately, that doesn't encapsulate the vast majority of the book.
The vast majority of the book defaults to her relationship.
Another issue I had with the books as a whole was the lack of examination or exploration of Korean culture.
I read a lot of reviews and about how a lot of people enjoyed how the book really focuses on
Korean culture. I'm going to be really blunt with you.
I had a hard time remembering that Lara Jean was actually Korean-American.
In the first book it mentions that she's Korean-American, her mother was a Korean.
There's some very light references to Christmas with her grandmother.
How on Halloween she doesn't like dressing up because people automatically assume she's cosplaying
because she's Asian. So she's "cosplaying" from anime or manga, something like that.
In the second book, there were a few more references.
In this book, the third book in particular, her dad purchases tickets for her and her sisters to go
to Korea in between college and high school
trust me that's not a spoiler.
They're really excited about going and trying on clothes, experiencing the culture, and meeting their family.
There just very brief snippets that mention little tiny things about her
being Korean.
There's little tiny references to food with no explanation as to what the food is,
or how they have a Korean Thanksgiving or Christmas, but no
actual explanation to really tell the audience what these things are.
The only thing that was really explained was the outfits that they wore in book three
for a particular even that happened in the third book
and all of the girls dressed up in really pretty Korean outfits. That was the only thing
thing that was described in details: how their outfits looked.
It didn't really describe anything else.
There is an inherent lack of Korean culture, or examination of Korean culture, in these books.
So, I highly disagree with people who say this trilogy is a wonderful examination of Korean culture because
I've read a lot of books that are Korean culture focused, or
even books that aren't focused on Korean culture, but
explore it one way or another lightly in the background to go with the plot.
This book SERIES* does not do that.
At all.
This is not a good representation of Korean culture.
And I don't believe this series is good to read if you're interested in learning more about Korean culture,
in a YA setting.
It touches on it here and there, but for the most part, like I said...
I forgot that Lara Jean was actually Korean.
There were a lot of times that I didn't even realise that she was Korean because
it's so in the background. It's so vague.
It's so kind of like something you'd brush off your shoulders.
It's not an inherent part of her character or the stories being told.
So 2 out of 5 stars for this one, 2.75 stars out of 5 stars for this one.
Overall, for the series, I would give 2.75 out of 5 stars.
For the series as a whole.
If you are interested in reading To All the Boys I've Loved Before,
I highly recommend that you read the first book and only the first book.
It is a great stand-alone YA contemporary romance.
It has a lot of really good feelings to it. I actually really loved the ending. The ending
does not end on a cliffhanger.
So if you read it to its finale, it's just the perfect satisfying ending.
So I highly recommend that you read the first one and I highly recommend that you ditch the other two.
Anyways, thank you for sticking with me for my review.
For these two books. I hope that I can bring you more books... reviews...
in the future.
I hope you guys keep reading and I'll see you guys again soon! Bula.
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