The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde - UPDATED REVIEW

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde  Genre : Classics Blurb (on back of book) : Oscar Wilde’s only novel is the dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty. In this celebrated work Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England. Combining elements of the Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world. For over a century, this mesmerizing tale of horror and suspense has enjoyed wide popularity. It ranks as one of Wilde's most important creations and among the classic achievements of its kind. UPDATED REVIEW MY OPINION : ****** I would like to start out this review by stating that this is undoubtedly m
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My Beating Teenage Heart - C. K. Kelly Martin

My Beating Teenage Heart by C.K. Kelly Martin
Genre: YA Fiction

Image result for my beating teenage heart
Blurb (on back of book): Ashlyn Baptiste is falling. One moment she was nothing—no memories, no self—and then suddenly, she's plummeting through a sea of stars. Is she in a coma? She doesn't remember dying, and she has no memories of the life she left behind. All she knows is that she's trapped in a consciousness without a body and she's spending every moment watching a stranger.
Breckon Cody's on the edge. He's being ripped apart by grief so intense it literally hurts to breathe. On the surface, Breckon is trying to hold it together for his family and his girlfriend, but underneath he's barely hanging on.
Even though she didn't know him in life, Ashlyn sees Breckon's pain, and she's determined to find a way help him. As her own distressing memories emerge from the darkness, she struggles to communicate with the boy who can't see her, but whose life is suddenly intertwined with hers. In alternating voices of the main characters, My Beating Teenage Heart paints a devastatingly vivid picture of both the heartbreak and the promise of teenage life—a life Ashlyn would do anything to recover and Breckon seems desperate to destroy—and will appeal to fans of Sarah Dessen, John Green, and David Levithan. 

MY OPINION: ***

I had a hard time deciding what to rate this book and how to sort my feelings through to find the things I liked and the things I didn't. I think that I ultimately found a neutral rating that conveyed my feelings of the book: it wasn't extraordinary but it also wasn't horrible.

Let me start off by saying that this book was depressing in the highest form. There was literally nothing happy about this book. It was also very serious and it had a lot more in it than I thought it would.

Ashlyn was a spirit or a ghost or something that was "assigned" to watch over this boy Breckon who also has a depressing life. Ashlyn died and now she's stuck in this "void" or something and is forced to oversee this boy. As the book progresses, she gets some of the memories of her own life back and wow, are they deep.

We learn that she was almost sixteen. She was close friends with her cousin Callum and she learned through him that people change. At eight, a random boy named Dylan molested her and this ends up becoming a big thing later on in the story. There were just a lot of things that happened in her life that contributed to her history but didn't have too much to do with the actual story.

The boy she's watching over is named Breckon and we learn that he is totally consumed by grief and guilt and he's so deep into this horrible place that he even ends up hurting himself. His little sister died in an accident and Breckon blames himself.

This book was written in a way that at some points was almost slow. I think that there was an overload of paragraphs full of rambling words that I sometimes couldn't get through. The writing itself was very pretty and illustrious and I liked it but at some points, it was just too much.

I can't say that I loved it to no end but it did make me feel some emotion and was fairly sad. I would recommend this book to readers looking for a more serious book.

Main Character: Ashlyn, Breckon
Sidekick(s): Skylar, Jules, Ty, etc
Villain(s): Death, guilt, accidents, grief, etc
Fiction Elements: This book was all fictional.

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