A few days ago I finished reading
Venomous by Chrisotpher Krovatin so I wanted to share my review of this book here on my blog. I heard about this book from someone doing a review on Youtube. It sounded really interesting so I wanted to read it. It's different from any book that I've read before, and I truly did enjoy the book and gave it 4/5 stars on goodreads, however I do have some mixed feelings about the book. Let's get started with my review so I can tell you the things that I did and did not like about this book. :)
Locke Vinetti is a high school junior, disenchanted and more than a little hostile. In fact, for years he’s had a lousy social life because of a problem he has with his anger—a force he calls “the venom.” Ever since he was eight years old and bit off a piece of a classmate’s nose, he’s been something of a loner.
But all that is about to change when he goes out with his one friend, Randall, to meet some of Randall’s crew hanging out at Riverside Park. Because in addition to meeting his kindred spirit, Casey—who has his own problems with his own kind of venom—Locke meets the spikey blue fairy-haircut Goth girl of his dreams. And if their relationship is going to work, he knows he has to rid himself of the venom once and for all.
Interspersed with comic book adventures of the fantasy anti-hero alter-ego Locke has invented for himself, Venomous is a fast-paced, funny, and ferocious read about one teenage boy’s struggle with his inner demons.
So as you can see from the summary, this book is about a boy named Locke who has a lot of anger issues that he calls "Venom". He has been dealing with this constant present anger for almost his whole life and he struggles with controlling it. He doesn't have many friends at school except for Randall, but he meets some of his friends at a party and becomes friends with them as well. He also meets Renee, his dream girl finds himself falling in love with her. Renee has a really dark past as well, and she is a little screwed up herself, but she is one of the reasons Locke wants to try to control his Venom so they can make their relationship work. He also meets a guy named Casey, who also has anger issues, so Locke finds some one else he can relate to like he can't with his other friends.
Now this book was pretty well written, but sometimes I didn't like the characters. I liked Locke's character the best because even though I don't usually read books with a Male lead character, it was nice to see a male character written so well and in depth. I was really pleased with the way the author wrote Locke's character because we get to see a male character with such real emotion here in this book. Locke deal with anger issues, but he also shares a lot of his emotion in the book with saying how he feels, he talks about crying, etc. I felt like he was a real person because real people feel real emotions like Locke did and I don't feel like that is usually written and portrayed in books, especially with a male character.
I also liked Randall and Casey in the book, but we didn't get as close to them as we do Locke and Renee. I feel like Casey could have had a little but more depth to him as well, but it wasn't too much of an issues because he wasn't much of a main character. Renee's character however bugged me a little but sometimes. I liked her well enough, but sometimes I felt like her character was just all over the place and there was something missing to her. I can't exactly put my finger on what was missing, but it was definitely something.
In between character of this book, there was a sort of comic book type story of the 'Venom'. Locke said at one part of the story that he use to pretend his Venom was a super hero or something and make up stories about it. (or maybe it was his little brother, Lon, I can't remember >.< ). So I read the first two or so in-between comic book chapters of the book but I wasn't really a fan of them. I didn't really understand why they were there or what purpose the had. It wasn't really explained, so I usually just skipped over them because I thought they were kind of annoying and unnecessary.
Overall this was a fast read and I enjoyed the book. I wish the story would have went a little further and in-depth with the plot. Like I sad before I still gave this a 4/5 stars on good reads. Even though this is a young adult book, I would recommend it to older teens because it has a lot of mature content in it.
Thank you all for reading and I hope you enjoyed this book review! If you have read this book, please leave a comment below and let me know what you thought of it!
