4.5 stars In the UF/PNR realm, I can’t think of a more reliable author team than Ilona Andrews. They consistently tell witty, exciting, and inventive stories that also manage to keep my crabby inner feminist satisfied by their refreshing lack of misogyny and even casual sexism. They manage this with their (seemingly, through it shouldn’t be) astonishing ability to create female protagonists and side characters who are complex, compelling, and above all, distinguishable from each other. Just like real people! I am pretty sure I […]
An Adventure Amongst the Bones
I hate to say it, but William Ritter seems to have hit a sophomore slump with 2015’s Beastly Bones. I loved my experience reading Jackaby last year: it had so much of all the things that I love about books of the type. Much of that remains in book two, Abigail is still independent and self-assured, Jackaby is still his off-kilter self without being off-putting, we still have a live in ghost, and a shape shifter, and a relatively tightly paced mystery. But… book two […]
A Book is a Door and the Door leads Home
Portal fantasies are pretty common in middle grade and YA literature, but it isn’t often asked what happens to the children who come back. Seanan McGuire attempts to answer that with her latest novel but I’m not sure the book, and its answers, works for me completely. Eleanor West runs a school for children who have returned from their otherlands/Fairylands. These are children who no longer feel at home in the mundane world and long, more then anything, to return to the world that kicked […]
Nostalgia is a Powerful Thing
Before Twilight, there was another overdramatic tale of love between a teenage girl and a vampire. I speak, of course, of The Vampire Diaries. And lo, the drama and angst is strong with this one. Lets get this out of the way first, this is not a good book however it is a super fun walk down memory lane for me, and so I’m a bit biased. It is extremely enjoyable, and much like the Sweet Valley High books, so long as you don’t expect anything from it the book […]
As good as gold
I think this book was on several best of YA lists last year and it ended up on my TBR list without me knowing much about it. When I got it from the library and realized it was a pioneer story, I honestly didn’t expect much. My parents were mormons and therefore obsessed with tales of pioneers, so my childhood was inundated with it. I was definitely not into it. Anyway, all this to say that I wasn’t really excited for this book, but decided […]
I’m on a Horse!
I picked up this book because I saw it on a list of books you should read despite the terrible cover. This cover is terrible, there’s a woman kneeling at the feet of a man on a horse doing his best “I am a noble hero pose” and she’s reaching up to polish his boots with a look that says “Tada!, here’s this douche.” I found this book…meh, I guess. I suppose it is a sign that I bought it and read it in January […]