A Book Review: Bird Box by Josh Malerman

We have so much going on this week! Yay! Anna starts her dance classes at Diversity today. Unfortunately though, we all woke up super sick and sore. I think we may have finally caught what has been ailing Lon all last week. Bleh… We would have to walk to the dance studio this week, and with the way everyone is feeling, I think it would be too much. Which does suck, I really don't want Anna to miss out on her first day of dance class. :( But Alan starts preschool tomorrow and on Friday he turns five years old. Last weekend we had Aunt April's first cheer game and Aunt Natalie's in town wedding reception. It was a crazy weekend and now we are starting yet another crazy week lol. Plus, we have not found the right car for us yet so we are still a single car family. Which makes things difficult when we don't live together lol. But we are making things work!

I have just two more books to review, I will post this one this week and then the next one sometime next week. I am waiting until I have posted both reviews before I get too far in my new book lol, which I am keeping a secret from you all for now! :P

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

I just keep picking winners… I don't know if everyone knows how I produce my book reviews. Not only do I read the book chosen but I research the author, look at other reviews and even try to catch any movies or television adaptations before fully finishing my review. Well, surprisingly many people just loved this book, just ADORED it. I am a bit confused by this, the amount of literature errors and lack of detail in this story drives me completely bananas. This book was advertised as a horror story but I feel like it strayed far from that theme. Bird Box was written by the rockstar Josh Malerman, the lead singer for the band The High Strung. I have never heard of them or him, or this book for that matter. For good reasons. This book had some scary parts in it, yes, but the lack of proper literacy and book editing just killed me. I mean, you read the entire book and never find out who or what the antagonist is? No, no, no his editor should have gone back to school for allowing him to publish a halfway finished thought. I did not like it one bit. I am going to tell the story from the beginning in my summary, since I don't want anyone to be confused like I was. I am not sure why Malerman felt the need to write it so mixed up, but it sure didn't help make it more scary. The story veers back and forth between past and present so much, it made me nauseous. 

The theme of Bird Box is apocalypse. Let's all say it together now: A-P-O-C-A-L-Y-P-S-E. :)  

Something apocalyptic happens the same day our main character, Miss Malorie, finds out that she is pregnant out of wedlock. Convenient and oddly rockstar-ish, right? She is so consumed by the pregnancy, that she and her sister barely pay attention to all the death that starts happening around them. People are suddenly afraid to look outside. Why, you ask? Because there is something out there, no one knows what exactly this something is, because if you look at it you will probably go psycho and kill yourself and others around you. People board up their houses and start avoiding looking outside. Malorie and her sister are safe for sometime, until one day Malorie finds her sister dead in the bathtub. Did she see the creature, or did she just get tired of being in such a horridly written story? I am guessing the latter. After this happens, Malorie convinces herself to go find other survivors and drives several miles blindfolded until she discovers a group of people. Shortly after Malorie's arrival, another pregnant woman named Olympia joins the group. I struggled with the realism of this too, and felt like Malerman just liked the idea of lots of pregnant women freaking out in the apocalypse. Because going through pregnancy, labor and birth isn't enough.  Once again, oddly rockstar-ish. Malerman, are you trying to tell us something???

The group then begins to figure out how to successfully survive in a world for the blind. They board up the windows and have a specific way people enter the house, involving blindfolds and brooms. Everyone in the group is given a daily household chore. These become harder now, you know since you have to stay blindfolded for everything outside? They run the house somewhat efficiently despite living in the apocalypse. There is no power after a certain point and the phone lines follow shortly after. They attempt to make contact with any outsiders, hoping for more to join them but secretly also hoping they are the only ones left. Members of the group travel for supplies and find some dogs to help them see at one point, and then the namesake of the whole book is discovered. They find a box of birds, used for hunting purposes, that makes more noise the closer you get to them. This is beneficial as a door bell, in their eyes. I was confused at how a box of birds survived for weeks without owners feeding them and/or letting them out. I would think that realistically they would have found a box of dead birds, or more likely nothing at all because dead birds don't make any noise. 

More people join the group, including a man that Malorie doesn't trust named George. He claims to come from another survival group, where a man went mad and pulled down all their curtains exposing them to the horrible creature. Malorie feels like this man is the man that went mad but she struggles to tell her fellow survivors. Until the day that she and Olympia both conveniently go into labor at the same time…

Flash forward to the present, Malorie is now alone with her twin children, simply named Boy and Girl. They have been living the apocalypse life for over four years now. Everything is so automatic for them, so second nature, its ridiculous. The children are used to waking up with their eyes closed, so that a creature doesn't sneak up on them while they sleep. They don't ask many questions and have ears that can hear better then some predators. Malorie decides that after four years of raising them here, it is time to go. She prepares to take them on the river to another supposed sanctuary, that she was told about almost five years ago. She blindfolds the kids and they embark on the most dangerous journey two young children and their mother should ever have to take blind. 

I feel like I can relate with Malorie at certain points, but she just seems so robotic and planned out. Yes, in a survival situation, I would do many of the same things she did to her children. But no, I would not let anyone outside of my situation have such power to sway my decisions. If Malorie were a real person, I would say that she is quite fake. Fear has the ability to have a lot of power over a person, in saying that I am attempting to give Malerman the benefit of the doubt. But really?

I feel that the only people whom I recommend this book to are fans of The High Strung. Does he write his lyrics this badly? I wonder how many true fans he has. If you think that Malerman is amazing, please read this book. Compared to any literacy classics, this book is worse the Captain Underpants or Fifty Shades of Grey. Yuck!

"To know the ceiling of man's mind is to know the full power of these creatures. If it's a matter of comprehension, then surely the results of any encounter with them must differ greatly between two men. My ceiling is different from yours. Much different from the monkeys in this house. The others, engulfed as they are in hyperbolic hysteria, are more susceptible to the rules we've ascribed the creatures. In other words, these simpletons, with their childish intellects, will not survive. But someone like myself, well, I've already proven my point.

Malorie flips the page.

What kind of a man cowers when the end of the world comes? When his brothers are killings themselves, when the streets of suburban America are infested with murder… what kind of man hides behind blankets and blindfolds? The answer is most men. They were told they would go mad. So they go mad." (Page 187)

And I mean really??? Malorie and Malerman??? C'mon dude, get more creative! I should really post his acknowledgments too, they really offended me. If this idiot can write a book, why haven't I started trying to publish one myself? 

My Next Book Review: Parentology by Dalton Conely