Rae Carson is without a doubt my favorite author discovery of 2016. I went gaga over Walk the Earth a Stranger (still not over that terrible title) and The Girl of Fire and Thorns did not disappoint. (Many thanks to Malin for the rec!) This is a coming of age story about a smart and timid girl becoming a wise and powerful woman. She’s the second born daughter of a king and was chosen for greatness at her birth. The problem is that she doesn’t […]
I read book 1 of this series on vacation, so book 2 is giving me beach flashbacks. It’s so not about the beach.
OK! This book is all about the super scary Variants. Good news / bad news… When Dr. Kate Lovato tried to “save the human race” from the hemorrhagic virus with a bioweapon she designed in book 1, it killed billions of people. That’s actually the good news. They all had this terrible Ebola-esque zombie hemorrhagic fever. So they really needed to be killed. The bad new is that 10% of the people hit with Dr. Kate’s bioweapon survived. You’d think this was the good new, […]
Am I going to have to wait another four years for the next one?
Welp, this series is catnip for me. I don’t even know where to start a review for Stiletto, because despite any faults (and there were a few,) I loved the crap out of it. It’s imaginative, hilarious, creepy, witty, and thrilling. While I at first shed a tear over the loss of Rook Myfanwy Thomas as the primary protagonist, I was shortly mollified by how quickly I took to loving the two additional stellar women who drive the story. Felicity Clements, Pawn of the Checquy, […]
Going Outside is Highly Overrated
This book has been reviewed by other, more eloquent, cannonballers but I really enjoyed the book so I will take a whack at it. Another YA dystopian novel, but so much more. I have had this sitting on my to be read pile for a long time. Stranger Things sent me on an 80s nostalgia trip and finally got this novel moved up to the top of the list. Set in 2044, the world has become a terrible place. People escape the horror of everyday life […]
I Feel Like I’m Not Liking the Things Other People are Liking
I found reading this book frustrating. I enjoyed it, and then I’d slam into a sentence or phrase that reminded me the author is a man. I have no inherent problem with male authors and I know men can write women, but this author seems to have had a hard time letting go of the male gaze. It did impact my enjoyment and lowered my star rating. Also lowering my rating were the endless letter/info dumps. I’ve read some other CBR reviews of The Rook, […]
“The fact is, the contest has always been invulnerability, and even when you win, you still lose.”
Paper Valentine started off promisingly, an intriguing cross-genre YA story that explores loss and the fine line between challenging and enabling your personal demons. Hannah Wagnor is an almost uncomfortably silent protagonist, whose mind is always going a thousand miles a minute but who lets precious little of those thoughts slip through her lips. Part of that is self preservation — she’s (actually) haunted by the ghost of her recently deceased best friend, Lillian, and she isn’t in a hurry to make that fact known […]