Twenty-one days to read this. This effer. That’s not a great sign. I will admit to being vastly distracted by real life happenings right now, but if a book is good, I will make time to read it, and I never did for this. The opposite, in fact. I had to make myself sit down and work on this, and until about the last 250 pages, it did feel like work. And I’m not just talking about the by now normal Robert Jordan writing quirks […]
This book ensorcelled me, but I want to talk about the end.
This is going to be a short review. Mostly because I don’t know how to convey how much I sunk into this book while reading it. Everything about it–the language, the characters, the mythology–wrapped little story claws around my mind and didn’t let me go until I finished it. Laini Taylor is just so good at creating atmosphere in her stories. It’s one of the reasons I will read anything she decides to write. The other reason this is going to be short is that […]
Deserving of Its Newberry Honor
Last year my daughter read and did an oral presentation on The Book of Three, first volume of The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. To help her with the project I re-read it and reviewed it for Cannonball 8. I read aloud to her at bedtime and her most recent choice was book two of The Prydain Chronicles, The Black Cauldron. Re-reading these books as an adult has been an eye opener to the craft of Alexander’s writing. Previously unnoticed seeds are planted in this book that don’t […]
“Beautiful and full of monsters?” “All the best stories are.”
From Goodreads: The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around – and Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, has always feared that his dream chose poorly. Since he was five years old he’s been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than he to cross half the world in search of it. Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the person of a hero called the Godslayer and a band of legendary warriors, and he […]
A very satisfying ending, for now. I hope there will be more books
Spoiler warning! This is the third book in a series, and the review will contain spoilers for the previous two books. If you haven’t read any of the books yet, start with Burn for Me. If you aren’t caught up with the series, maybe come back for this review later. Instead of being able to spend Christmas with her new boyfriend, Connor Rogan, one of the most powerful and magically gifted men in the United States, Nevada Baylor has to rush back to her family once they discover […]
What Did I Just Read?
The Changeling by Victor Lavalle
This wasn’t a bad book. The writing was good enough that I blew through it in about 3 sittings and I wanted to keep reading, so there’s that. But I was disappointed. And I feel guilty that I was disappointed, especially since Lavalle is a talented writer and a lot of things in this story worked really, really well. But there was also a lot that didn’t, at least for me. I can’t appropriately talk about this book without spoilers, so stop reading here if […]