This book has definitely soured on me since I finished it in May, which is a shame since I am quite literally about to start the third book tonight. This series for me has turned out so far to be a shoddily written, cliché-packed, predictable behemoth with an uninteresting not-as-smart-or-talented-as-she-or-the-author-thinks-she-is protagonist. It’s very much a yo-yo book for me. One minute I’ll be rolling my eyes so hard I’m about to sprain my optical nerve, the next Maas writes something genuinely interesting. Also, both books […]
A Twisted Trip Down the Yellow Brick Road
I should start this review by saying that I am a huge Oz nerd. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was the Wizard of Oz and I went on to read most of the sequels. I have seen the movie so many times because I was born in the 70s and it was always on TV at least once a year. Plus I’ve seen the Wiz, read Wicked, and probably think about how awesome life would be in Oz. But since […]
brb, reading this again
Laini. LAINI. What are you doing to me? I want to cry, right now, writing this review, thinking about Strange the Dreamer. It’s too much. It’s too beautiful, too peculiar, too visceral, too magical. What is in your imagination? How do you do this? Fantasy is such a stalwart genre for me because of how it truly takes me out of the every day and into a new place, sometimes a completely different place. Good fantasy has that quality of evoking wonder and provoking the […]
Dragonopolis Sounds like Every Fantasy Nerd’s Idea of Heaven
I could almost swear that I’ve read this book before, except that I haven’t according to Goodreads. It is entirely possible that I read a hardcover copy of the book and simply forgot to mark that down, but I’m still not really sure. Even though the book feels very familiar, as if I’ve read it before, nothing in it really triggered the certainty that I actually have and so I’m left with this uncomfortable feeling of uncertain déjà vu. The book, and its follow up, […]
The Book of Three: the best of old-fashioned YA fantasy
The first book I read (well, finished reading) in 2017 was one I have read countless times before. Perhaps, in that sense, it should not count. But this time was special. This time, I read it to my little sister, who was around the same age (9) I read it for the first time almost twenty years ago. She loved it, and I–who have always found a beautiful magic in this book–loved it more than I ever had before. (That’s saying something, as it was […]
The end of the Sequence
Silver on the Tree is the final book in The Dark is Rising Sequence. Here, all the important characters from the Light and the Dark come together for the final battle. I’m not sure if it was because both times I listened to this, it was too late to give it my best attention, or if it was the story itself, but this was my least favourite of the series. Alex Jennings returns as narrator, along with the other characters adding a sense of unity […]