The Raven Boys was a good start, but Stiefvater really hit her stride in The Dream Thieves. I was unsure if I was going to like it at first. Dream scenes in novels are a huge pet peeve of mine and unsurprisingly, a book with the title The Dream Thieves has its fair share of them. Luckily, these dreams are mostly like entering a different world instead of wallowing in subconscious symbolism that nobody, least of all me, wants to read. They further the plot […]
A shaky start to a great series.
ETA 4/21/16: Due to a boo-boo that I made (marking two reviews in a row as #46), this review is my actual Cannonball, even though I thought it was this one. Whoops! I have sooooooo many thoughts about this series. I don’t even know where to start! If you haven’t heard of it yet, this series is making the rounds as The Next Big Thing (I think, with good reason). It was originally published on LiveJournal user freece’s blog as an ongoing serial and gained a […]
It’s Not a Name, It’s a Title
Known as the wicked witch of Russian fairy tales, Baba Yaga is not one woman, but rather a title carried by a chosen few. They keep the balance of nature and guard the borders of our world, but don’t make the mistake of crossing one of them… I admit I haven’t read a paranormal romance in quite some time, but I picked up this book at the library and the premise sounded interesting. In Russian folklore, the Baba Yaga is a supernatural being who often […]
But what do the Faeries DO all day?
I would have loved this book so hard as a twelve-year-old….sadly, I’m no longer twelve, and that means I’m no longer the intended audience for this book. One of the folklore professors at school recommended “The Perilous Gard” to me as one of her favorite, nostalgic, go-to books on Fairies. Maybe I went into it with the wrong expectations. Maybe I should’ve schooled my disappointed “oh, it’s YA” when I found it at the library. Maybe I should have walked away slowly from this book….but […]
Exploring a sprawling, new world
I’ve never read anything quite like Ken Liu’s debut novel The Grace of Kings.I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain it for a week now and the closest I can come to is this: Chinese history meets The Iliad meets Game of Thrones. Sometimes it reads like a history book…and then our heroes wage their wars on the backs of whales or from steampunk-inspired hot air balloons. Sprawling and ambitious, I couldn’t help but cheer for this book, even when I didn’t love […]
Will the real good guy please stand up? Or not.
Righteous Fury is a prequel to a series I have not read (a 4 book series Dwarves). In some ways this is classic fantasy. The cast includes a variety of magical beings, including some elves, dwarves, but mostly the alfar. Humans also come into the story, but are mostly slaves. This race is “cruel and surpassingly beautiful artist-warriors”. Two alfar in particular command the majority of the story: Calphalor and Sinthoras. At the beginning they hate each other and belong to opposing political parties. Calphalor […]