Entangled - Cat Clarke

Entangled by Cat Clarke will be published on 6th January 2011 by Quercus and it is 256 pages long. I was lucky enough to win a proof copy in a giveaway!

Plot

17 year old Grace wakes up in a completely white room. White bedding, white walls, white furniture. Completely white. The only other things in the room are the pens and paper on the desk. Grace has no idea where she is or even how she got there, all she knows is that Ethan is behind it and there is no way out.

With nothing else to do, Grace begins to write, pouring out the details of her tangled life. A life that she so desperately wanted to forget. She had a perfect boyfriend in Nat and an amazing best friend in Sal but where did it all go wrong and what was so bad about it that she cant remember? As Grace pours her heart out on a page, she tries to figure out what’s happening with her life and how she can get herself out of this massive mess and answer one simple question. Why is she stuck in the white room?

What I thought
I don’t think anything could have prepared me for just how amazing Entangled is. Ok, so many people had said how much they liked it but you never really know for sure until you pick it up yourself. Cat Clarke had me hooked from the very first line. She really doesn’t mess around when it comes to starting a story and I loved how strong and intense the impact of this opening was.

When I started to get into the story, I was feeling a little bit like I was reading a different book than what the synopsis said. My friend at university saw me reading the book and asked what it was about but when I tried to tell her, it ended up sounding nothing like what she was reading on the back of the book. It wasn’t until the story really got going that I realised what was going on and I was actually reading the story that I thought I was.

I wanted to hate Grace so, so much but I just couldn’t do it. She is loud and brash and quite full of herself sometimes but honestly, she reminded me of myself, not just as a teenager but also from only a couple of years ago. There was so much about her character that I could relate to and I was quite shocked at just how similar we were (I have never been locked up in a white room, just so you all don’t think I’m completely mental). I instantly *got* Grace, which is something I have never had happen in a YA book before. I have had that boyfriend that I would have died for, the one that I didn’t think I could ever live without and the one that I thought I was going to be with forever. I was also a pretty self destructive teenager, drinking all of the time to try to get rid of my problems, amongst a whole load of other stuff that I shouldn’t have been doing. Hell, I even had red hair like the girl on the cover of the book!

Something else that I really liked about Grace was the fact that she was so real. Cat Clarke has got a real knack for writing realistic teenage girls, which is something a lot of authors don’t get right most of the time (in my opinion anyway). Because of the way that she was writing everything down, her voice really spoke to me. She had nothing to hide and really poured her heart out on the page. The way that she told her story was consistent throughout and it never felt like someone else jumped in half way through. Grace must have had a firm voice in Cat’s head too for her to jump out of the page like she did. I can imagine Grace sitting in Cat’s head screaming ‘Let me out! Let me out!’.

Entangled is quite an intense read but also beautifully written. I felt so many emotions while reading this one. It made me laugh out loud so many times, due to Grace and her outspoken ways, but it also made me cry…a lot. I could truly feel everything that Grace was going through and experiencing as I turned each page. I felt happy when she was writing about times that she remembered were good ones and I was extremely sad when she began to remember what had really happened. It takes a lot for my to cry at a book but Cat Clarke really touched something in me with this one.

Something that really stood out to me and got me thinking was the fact that the smallest little change or piece of information could change everything that you thought you knew. It isn’t something you really think about on an everyday basis, or even at all sometimes but it made me realise how your actions could have such a big impact on someone else’s life and the decisions they make. Entangled really gave me a lot to think about in many different ways.

You would think that having Grace locked up in a white room would mean the story moving along at a quite steady pace but you would be wrong. There is so much happening throughout the story and moves well from Grace writing about the past to writing about how bored she is in her stupid room. Although I saw some of the plot twists coming, there were some big ones that I wasn’t prepared for at all. Entangled has mystery and dark times but there are also some quite happy times too. I loved the mix of different feelings Grace had because they added different elements to the story all of the time.

Entangled has got to be one of the best books I have read all year and there have been some pretty amazing ones to compete with. To start with all it said was ‘Amazing. Read this book’ because I just couldn’t find the words to say how much I loved it. I really don’t think my review has done it justice at all but I’m no writer so I did my best! Seriously though, Entangled is amazing. Read this book!!