My wish for half-star ratings becomes ever more pronounced with my review of Siege and Storm, because where I gave its series predecessor, Shadow and Bone, 4 stars, it was probably more like 3.5 (I liked it a lot, but there were issues.) Here, I also give Siege and Storm 4 stars, but I’d just as soon bump it up to 4.5 (One minor irritation, but otherwise amazing!) As this is a review for a second book in a series, spoilers for the first book […]
Light and dark are exactly what they seem
When Leigh Bardugo’s first novel from a new series dropped in 2015 and started getting all kinds of raves, I knew I’d have to go back post haste to the ever-growing TBR and pick up the first series, which I had been intending to read for some time. The Grisha Trilogy imagines a fantasy world based out of a Russian analog country, where those possessed of magical abilities are called the Grisha, and anyone who is not Grisha is probably either a peasant or a […]
Does a mix of The Matrix and Supernatural sound interesting to you? If so, maybe you should write that book better than this one.
Have you ever started a review of a book you rated three stars (as I did) thinking “Meh,” but by the end realized you spent most of the review trashing the book and wondered if you shouldn’t downgrade your official rating? Come with me as I overthink Darkness Brutal, a book I picked up because I was determined to get something out of my Kindle Unlimited trial, and I noticed that this book with an incredibly silly title actually had pretty good reviews. Here’s the […]
To sleep, perchance to dream
Night Beach (4.5 stars) is about a one very simple thing. A girl surfer-slash-artist has a crush on a boy surfer who sees her — sometimes. But it’s also about a few other very complicated, possibly unreal things, which make this book overall very hard to define. Abbie likes Kane; this much is clear. In fact, she’s obsessed with him, in that painfully teenage way that grovels for the tiniest morsel of acknowledgement and acceptance. This kid, Kane, is a few years older, stays in […]
Beware the Evil that Lives in the Wood…
All her life, Agnieszka has known two things: that she must stay away from the Wood at all costs, and that every ten years, the Dragon emerges from his tower to select a girl to serve him for the next ten years. (He’s not the fire-breathing sort of dragon, but rather the wizard tasked with protecting their valley.) She knows all too well the horrors inflicted when the Wood claims a victim, but she’s not terribly concerned about the Dragon. After all, everyone has known all […]
Pretty great YA fantasy
I was so pleasantly surprised by this YA trilogy, an example of a series that, in my opinion, actually gets better as it progresses rather than buckling under its own weight. This is partly achieved by Rae Carson’s sound vision, giving each book its own arc (which is no less important for being contained within the scope of one installment) within the larger narrative, but also by having that larger narrative be the product of genuine character and plot development rather than a series of […]