I have so much thoughts right now. So I will ask myself questions and then answer them. (This is a good way to trick yourself into writing things when you don’t know what to write about.) First, is this a worthy successor to the original Abhorsen trilogy (which is one of my favorite fantasy series)? Yes. Is it everything I wanted from a sequel? No. Did I even know what I wanted from it? Weeeeelll, yes and no. Is it a perfect book? No. Ultimately, […]
Beware the dark witch clique
3.5 stars. I needed a palate cleanser after going from unbearably grim with Out to sickly sweet with Romancing the Duke. I was in the market for something less polarizing and more neutral in tone. That palate cleanser was Hex Hall and it did the trick. YA fiction to the rescue! After trying to help out a classmate with a love spell that went very, very wrong, Sophie Mercer is sent to Hex Hall, a private boarding school for magical teenagers that have lost their […]
And so, lesbian Macbeth.
K, so first if you haven’t read Macbeth, um, why? Go do that. Second, this book is a pretty good adaptation of it, though not perfect. Talley translates the Scottish kings, lords, and various witches into the haunted setting of a boarding school that used to be a plantation in the antebellum south. Kings become teenage girls, witches become spirits, and what was straightforward murder in the original play becomes something more complicated here. Ultimately, this book was enjoyable, but I thought the first half […]
Indescribably mediocre YA steampunk.
I don’t know what happened here. How a book about an alternate history steampunk WWI where one side has Clankers, and the other genetically engineered flying beasts that double as airships could be so exceptionally uninteresting and generic, I really don’t know. Also one of the MC’s is the son of the murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And the other is a girl who dresses as a boy! Also, also it was narrated by Alan Cumming! And yet, my mind wandered constantly while listening, and I […]
Strangeness with Magic, Dragons, and a Quarkbeast
I read Jasper Fford’s Tuesday Next series, and I liked it for a while. I got bored after about book 4. So when I saw a YA fantasy novel by the same author, I wanted to try it out. The Last Dragonslayer was mostly what I expected, and also a little not. What defines Fford’s writing for me is a sense of slightly off-kilter in an otherwise normal story, and that is totally here. The normal is as follows: 15 year old indentured servant Jennifer […]
A Fun Holmes Version
I like the story and the characters in A Study in Charlotte. What does irritate me a little bit is how in this version of the Conan Doyle universe, the Watson and Holmes families are expected to keep their famous characteristics and relationships through each generation. Jamie Watson can’t wait to meet his Holmes counterpart Charlotte, because he hopes they will develop a close relationship like their ancestors Sherlock and John. When you try to break away from that established characterization, things will go horribly […]
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