Book #59 of 2024: Extra Normal | DNF: The Pride of Chanur

[thistlechaser]

Extra Normal by Kate Alice Marshall.

Quick synopsis: Set in a world where supernatural stuff is real and commonplace, a girl who is nothing special at all needs to defeat something bad and save her family.

Brief opinion: The writing, characters, nearly everything was excellent. Unfortunately the book is meant for young readers (8-12) and there were no surprises at all in the plot for me, which robbed the story of nearly all of the fun.

Plot: In a world where even the most average person has at least a spark of magic, Charlie has nothing. She's completely normal. She does however have a psychic brother, a werewolf brother, and a ghost sister. Plus her parents both work for a government agency that deals with supernatural problems (or "extranormal" problems, as the book calls them).

One day a new family moves into the neighborhood. The Weavers. And weird spiders start appearing everywhere. And when anyone goes into the Weavers' house, they come out drained and sick. And what's with all these spiderwebs?!

Charlie, who is basically a third parent to her siblings but is too young for so much responsibility, figures out the truth of the Weavers and so she has to help her siblings get over their insecurities and other issues to defeat the Weavers and save their parents, town, and everything else.

Writing/editing: On a technical level, both were outstanding. The writing was really good, the editing was perfect. On a story-level, I had a few issues, but all of them come down to this book wasn't written for adult readers.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: I don't know how many times I've said that a good MG/YA can be enjoyed by any age, but you can't fault one of them for not being enjoyable to an adult reader -- that very much applies here as well. I never want to guess where the plot is going, I'd rather the story just pulled me along, but at the 10% point of this book I knew every twist and turn that would happen. It's just no fun if you know ahead of time how a book will turn out.

There was a lot of phone texting in the book, and even though the characters were aged 8-12, their grammar was perfect in it. Capitalization, punctuation. When one character was in a really bad situation she dropped the punctuation off the end of her sentences, but otherwise perfect spelling, etc. (But again, young readers probably wouldn't even notice.)

The characters were all great though and the writing was very good. I'd like to read something else by this author (she's written books for all ages), but it looks like she mostly writes horror.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ - 3 stars, okay. If I were a young reader, I probably would have given it all the stars in the sky.

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DNF #54: The Pride of Chanur by C. J. Cherryh. I last read this book in 2012, and I know I read it as a teenager as well (at the time it was one of my favorite book covers ever!). I loved it both times. I wasn't doing real reviews back in 2012, but I did say "Pride of Chanur was exciting from the first page, I looked forward to reading it every day.", so it's funny that I felt the opposite this time.

I didn't hate it, but it just focused on the wrong thing for me. I really wanted to know more about how the Hani (lion-like aliens) dealt with the "alien" (human man) on their ship. How they got to know him, learned cultures and all that. But instead the book was one big space battle. I made it beyond the 50% point, but I really wasn't interested in how spaceships worked, how flying worked, cleaning/fixing the ship, all that. I wanted more of a story about the characters.

In 2012 I had said "I'd really, really love to read the rest of the Chanur series, but they're not available in ebook form.", so I'm happy to say that all five books are available as ebooks now; however, they must be scans of the physical books and the editing in them is pretty rough. Frequent wrong words or missing words ("There was a silence at table.").