This book is really sort of goofy. It’s The Hunger Games plus The Amazing Race plus Pokemon. The main character, Tella, gets an invitation to participate in the Brimstone Bleed. It’s a race through four environments. All of the contestants have a loved one who is terribly sick, all of them have the same horrible illness. Whichever contestant wins gets the cure. The competitors are aided in the race by animals that hatched from eggs, animals that have special abilities. In the first book, we […]
Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
This story is about two cups of Beauty and the Beast, a dash of Rumpelstiltskin, and a pinch of Bluebeard. The mixture is then blended with a heaping tablespoon of fantasy (I don’t know, there’s this weird touch magic thing). A teenage girl named Nyx is forced to marry a horrible beast. Her future is to kill him, though she will also die in the process. I had some major issues with the main character at times. There are some inexcusable moments of stupidity. Overall, […]
Some kind of pun about not being cold on this book
Goodreads summary, for the lazy (me): “Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave. One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible […]
Love is madness. And a joy.
About two weeks ago, The Chancellor and I went book hunting at a thrift store–those and used book stores can be the *best* place to find great or out-of-print books for very teacher-friendly prices. While The Chancellor snapped up a bunch of the Redwall series, I found two books in Madeleine L’Engle’s series that take place after the Time quartet (or quintet, if you count An Acceptable Time, which the publishers of the books I own clearly do). That sent me on a Wikipedia hunt to […]
Like an old familiar nightmare you’d forgotten you used to have.
I think probably the best way to describe what it’s like to read the Abhorsen trilogy is to compare it to a snowball rolling down a very, very large hill. We are all familiar with this metaphor–it basically implies that the thing being compared metaphorically moves faster and becomes MORE on the way down, whether that thing is the plot or your emotions as a reader, or both. Abhorsen is like this, but also THE SNOWBALL IS ON FIRE. Sabriel introduced the world, the characters (most of them), […]
Is this secretly a parable about student loans?
Back in the late 2000s, vampires were all.the.rage. I’m glad that tide has turned, even if The Hunger Games has spawned a lot of dystopic fiction that depresses you and makes you feel that the earth’s doom is imminent. I’ve read Divergent, hated Insurgent, and never finished Allegiant. So I am curious to see how Joelle Charbonneau’s trilogy will stack up overall. As a first book in a trilogy, The Testing is fairly engaging. Cia Vale has graduated from her formal high school education in […]
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