The third installment of John Flanagan’s The Ranger’s Apprentice series, The Icebound Land continues the story of Evelyn and Will’s journey to Skandia. Along the way, they are forced to hunker down on an island outpost with their Skandian captors. While they are treated fairly well, they know that they face life as a slave unless someone comes to rescue them. Of course, this being a coming-of-age story, there is someone who is coming to rescue them. Halt and Horace are fighting their way through […]
I accept that I am a writing-craft snob
If I hadn’t read “The Night Circus”, I would probably be giving this book a higher rating, but I think many of the things this book does well, “The Night Circus” did better. “Cruel Beauty” is also a YA, and I habitually have issues loving YA as much as I love adult books with similar themes. I had serious issues with the craft, and I realize after looking back through my other reviews, that I’ve become kind of a writing-craft snob, but this book was all tell […]
Magic & Manners
The Cecelia and Kate books, set in an alternate-history Regency England where magic is commonplace, chronicle the lives of two cousins as they find love and foil a dastardly plot (Sorcery and Cecelia), travel the Continent while foiling an even more dastardly plot (The Grand Tour), and wrangle a number of children and dogs while foiling a slightly less dastardly plot (The Mislaid Magician). I adore the first book in this series. It’s an epistolary delight. Wrede and Stevermer wrote the story via “The Letter […]
FFS WHYYYYYYYYY
Who’s ready for some kvetching? Plot-wise, all you really need to know is that Heartless is the origin story of the Queen of Hearts, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. So although you know how it’s going to end, here is a general SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this review, because I don’t want to dance around the details of what bugged me. The very biggest problem is that the heroine, Catherine Pinkteron, is an absolute mess of a character. To a certain extent, […]
When a Monster Knocks at the Door of Your Soul
Okay, someone else really needs to start picking out books for me to read. First, I started reading The Mandibles shortly after the last election and had to set it aside because the dystopian view of the United States being reduced to a Third-World Nation was hitting a little to close to home at the time. And now, on one of the most depressing days that I can remember*, other than the days my mother and father died, I finished reading A Monster Calls. I’ve mentioned before that […]
This review is about the books you should read instead. But also maybe read this one too.
tl;dr: Stick with the first three books in this series: Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen. I don’t know what Nix is doing with these later ones, but he’s not doing it super great and it’s a total bummer. Goldenhand isn’t a waste of time, but it does not hold up to the originals, especially the first two. The Back Story For five years I was a seventh grade English teacher. One of the best parts of the job was hearing my students’ book reports and reading […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 515
- 516
- 517
- 518
- 519
- …
- 565
- Next Page »