Oh my goodness gang, I haven’t even started the book club selection for fantasy, but it should have been this one. It’s a little long, but it’s Oh. So. Good. I’ve heard of N.K. Jemisin for a few years, and have been wanting to give her fantasy a try as that’s a genre I’m trying to give a chance right now. Enter an audible sale, a holiday break, and then not wanting it to end so I slowed down my listening. The Fifth Season begins […]
FFS WHYYYYYYYYY
Who’s ready for some kvetching? Plot-wise, all you really need to know is that Heartless is the origin story of the Queen of Hearts, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. So although you know how it’s going to end, here is a general SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this review, because I don’t want to dance around the details of what bugged me. The very biggest problem is that the heroine, Catherine Pinkteron, is an absolute mess of a character. To a certain extent, […]
Everfair – Using steampunk to reimagine history
At some point this fall when visiting the bookstore, the cover of “Everfair” caught my eye. It went on my book wanted list based on the cover art and quote, “A book with gorgeous sweep, spanning years and continents, loves and hates, histories and fantasies… Everfair is sometimes sad, often luminous, and always original. A wonderful achievement. – Karen Joy Fowler”. The pairing of the mechanical and human hand with an intricate metal globed lamp between them suggested to me that this would be steampunk. […]
“Oh, aye, Sassenach. I am your master . . . and you’re mine. Seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own.”
So one of my goals for CBR this year is to go through the Outlander series again (which I’ve read through several times over the last decade), this time exclusively on audiobook. The first book is the shortest, and clocks in at 32 hours — so I have a feeling this is going to take a good amount of time. It’s a wonderful listening experience though, especially if you enjoy the accents, which I do! So if you’re not familiar with the story of Outlander: our hero […]
Why Do I Keep Reading These?
Despite my lukewarm feelings about the first book, I read the next two volumes in Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mystery series, A Cast-Off Coven and Hexes and Hemlines. I know that people hate-watch TV shows, but do they hate-read? It takes a fair amount of time and energy to read a full-length novel (even if you sort of skim parts of it), so why do I keep coming back these books when they aren’t particularly good? Is it because I realized that Lily Ivory (why not […]
This review is about the books you should read instead. But also maybe read this one too.
tl;dr: Stick with the first three books in this series: Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen. I don’t know what Nix is doing with these later ones, but he’s not doing it super great and it’s a total bummer. Goldenhand isn’t a waste of time, but it does not hold up to the originals, especially the first two. The Back Story For five years I was a seventh grade English teacher. One of the best parts of the job was hearing my students’ book reports and reading […]