After reading the first book of the Captive Prince series, I was not exactly sold on it, and considered just stopping there. But after a little commenting back and forth with Narfna (aaayooo!) who had indeed read the rest of the series, I was convinced to keep going. And you know what, it has definitely improved and peaked more of my interest. There are still some things that I’m a little unsure of or uneasy about, but I am beginning to see a bigger picture […]
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 […]
This Parabatai Thing Got Me Feeling Some Kind of Way
Listen… Listen… Okay, just listen… I’m weak. I should know not to get myself into this cheesy nonsense, but good grief I do every time. Let’s follow the path that led me down this rabbit hole: It all started in high school when my friends told me to read The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare, and boy howdy I really enjoyed them! Well, I never got around to reading the last two, but I really liked them. Then that HORRIBLE City of Bones movie came […]
Not as transformative as its predecessor, but beautiful nonetheless
About a year ago, I picked up a stunning book that quickly became my go-to book recommendation. Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead was about an elderly, dying pastor. Desperate to leave something of himself behind to his young son, Reverend John Ames composed letter after letter to the boy, talking about his life, his insecurities, his love of family, his faith in God, and his unshakable belief that the world was a beautiful gift. Astonishingly written, Gilead was a meditation on what it meant […]
The End is the Beginning
Whoa boy. I’ve read all three books of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and I still don’t know how to describe them. I heard about them after they won some fantasy award, but they’re not quite fantasy. They’re in part sci-fi, dystopian and mystery, but those labels don’t really mean much to the book. The people tasked with solving the puzzle of the mysterious Area X know that they’re never going actually solve the mystery. They’re just hacking away at what they can. And we […]
Not a very shiny star…
Nora can usually be counted on for a halfway decent trilogy. Sure, it’s predictable. Sure, the timeline of true love is sped up. Sure, there’s always some Horrible Danger. Sometimes it’s an otherworldly type of danger, just to mix things up, like a werewolf or a witch or something. Sure, the men are always perfect physical specimens, tall and lanky, funny, totally at ease with women in distress, and not at all freaked out at the thought of marrying what amounts to a total stranger. […]
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