The Book Club: Graceling

The big news: my school has an 8^th grade book club. How cool is this?! I was dead excited that we get to talk about books over lunch once Friday a month with some great muffins. The past month we read Graceling. The book choice disappointed me a bit since I had previously read the book and detested it.

One of the downsides of blogging is that you hardly ever, if ever, get to have a live discussion about a book. What I love about our book discussion is that we got to talk with my friends over a YA book in a facilitated discussion.

SPOILER ALERT for Graceling

Some points we came up for after all reading Graceling

•          The characters are pretty shallow, but may be developed better throughout the series. You can tell because it is very simple to predict Katsa and Po’s reactions. There was also the classic romance formula of “boy loves; girl has resistance or anger, but gives in at the end.”

•          Romance didn’t exactly help the book, but without there would be no plot otherwise. The romance was also a bit rushed for the fact they had sex the first they kissed.

•          The idea and setting were very original in terms of high fantasy.  Yet, we almost always see jealous kings and several kingdoms.

•          We all wanted to be graced though. I was, of course, the only person grace with killing, though according to the quiz in the book you could be grace with relationship, intellect, fighting, and calming.

•          Bitterblue would’ve been a complex character to know with her trauma and recent events. Without the influence of Katsa and Po we could’ve seen a little more of the girl, and what it was like to save her. (There is a companion book called Bitterblue)