Crown of Coral and Pearl by Mara Rutherford: I love when low expectations are exceeded

Publication Date: August 7th, 2019

Read: January 14th - 15th

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

goodreads

The story of why I read this book goes all the way back to like, one or two years ago, when I was tasked with writing a bullet point description of it for a blind book display. You know, those displays bookstores and sometimes libraries do where they wrap the book in brown paper and describe it with some bullet points, and then you buy the book without knowing exactly what it is? Yeah. So! For some reason, out of every book I wrote a description for, this is one of the ones that vaguely stuck in my mind, and when I saw it available on Libby, I was like "Why not?"

Why not! I had fun with this book, even if it wasn't the best book of all time. At this point, I don't feel like I'll continue on to the sequel, but I don't regret reading this one. It was pretty fun, if also flawed.

I thought it would be fun to evaluate the accuracy of the bullet point description I wrote now that I've read the book, so here's the original description, with my commentary in green parantheses:

• First in a Series (true, but more specifically it's the first in duology)
  
• Impoverished Seaside Village (kind of true, except it's not a seaside village it's like, a floating village on top of the sea. It wasn't really clear that that was the situation until I read the book, though)
  
• Prince Choosing a Princess (yeah. Arguably "elders choosing a princess for a prince" but yeah, basically)
  
• Competition (This is probably one of my more inaccurate bullet points. The most beautiful girl in the village [as decided by the elders] is the one who gets picked. It's not exactly a competition, even though it kind of is competitive)
  
• Twins (accurate! The main character is, in fact, a twin)
  
• Switching Identities (True!)
  
• Royal Court (True! But little did I know, it's a not a regular royal court, it's a creepy spooky royal court inside a mountain with basically no windows)
  
• Political Intrigue (kind of true, but also the intrigue was one of the weaker parts of the book, so eh. An attempt was made, and my bullet point acknowledges this)
  
• Royal Brothers (there sure are two brothers who are princes and therefore royal)
  
• Perfect for Fans of Red Queen and The Selection (maybe? I have actually never read The Selection, and I didn't like Red Queen, so I was guessing here based on the fact that all three of these books involve a normal/poor girl getting sort of whisked away to a life of royalty where there's also some degree of political maneuvering going on.)

 Now that we've gone over the bullet points, I guess we should go over the actual plot. Nor and Zadie are twin sisters who live on a floating village. Everyone from their village is forbidden to set foot on land, for reasons having to do with the history/mythology of their world. They do a lot of fishing and pearl diving, but the rare pearls their region is known for are becoming less common as the oysters are over fished, plus they're not fetching as much money as they used to. The only way for someone to legally leave this village is to be chosen as the next bride of the prince of Ilara. Nor knows she won't be chosen, because only the most beautiful girl can be chosen, and she has a small scar on her face that renders her imperfect.

As everyone expects, Nor's twin sister Zadie (who is perfectly beautiful, unlike Nor) is the one chosen to be the prince's bride. But! She doesn't want to go. She's in love with a childhood friend - the same exact childhood friend their parents decided to betroth Nor to as soon as Zadie was chosen as the new princess. Desperate to avert her fate, Zadie takes drastic steps and injures herself with a dangerous jellyfish, so that she'll have scars that will disqualify her from the whole princess thing. 

Only then, it turns out that sending a less-beautiful replacement princess-to-be will be seen as an insult and could result in the whole village's fresh water supply being cut off, so it's determined that Nor will assume Zadie's identity and role as the prince's bride (with the help of a special cosmetic "stain" that hides her scar) in order to keep up appearances.

But of course, once she gets to the Ilaran capital, things aren't how she expected. Nor thought being the prince's bride would give her more freedom than she had at home in Varenia, but she's actually even more restricted in the dark, mountainous palace. Also, the previous Varenian queen is dead (or is she?), and the prince she's betrothed to is sadistic, cruel, and so obsessed with finding a cure to the curse he thinks he's under that he's willing to let children die as collateral damage. Nor begins to realize that the power structures that are in place between Ilara and Varenia only exist to allow Ilara to exploit Varenia (we love a class consciousness slay), and looks for ways to prevent the prince from exploiting Varenia even more.

The prince she's engaged to also has a hot half-Varenian younger brother who's the real love interest of this book, but I don't feel like I need to talk about him much. Not much time is spent on developing his relationship with Nor, so I was not invested in them as a couple. It came off like Nor just thought he was hot and liked him better than his brother because he wasn't a sadist who lets children die for ~science. We need more to recommend love interests besides the fact that they aren't their evil brothers!

(Also, I've forgotten both of the princes' names already. Oops...)

I really enjoyed the first half of this book, where we're exploring Nor's life in Varenia. Nor's love for and protectiveness of Zadie felt real, and so did her frustration with her mother, who has spent their lives obsessing over their beauty, all so that one of them would eventually be chosen to be the next Ilaran princess. The childhood friend character whose name I don't remember was a nice change of pace from a lot of characters in his archetype, mainly because he has feelings for Zadie instead of having a doomed crush on Nor. Also, I liked the setting of the floating ocean village. 

The castle-carved-into-a-mountain setting was cool too, but I just felt like the plot got a lot weaker once we got to Ilara. Most of the book after that point felt like it was Nor trying to figure out what to do about the evil prince and how to get in contact with her childhood friend. Just not super compelling, given the interesting set up.

Right after finishing this book, I felt like I might read the sequel, but that impulse has largely faded. I'm content to leave this book as it is, especially after looking through some of the sequel's reviews to get a sense of the vibe. The vibe is: either we're glad this was only a duology and didn't have a filler middle installment, or we think this should have been a trilogy because we didn't have enough time to develop all the ideas. Either way, it sounds like people were a bit whelmed by the sequel, and I don't have time for books I know will whelm me...except maybe Reached by Ally Condie.

Crossed by Ally Condie: Yeah, Too Many Canyons

Don't ask why this is the paperback cover and my other review was the hardback cover...I don't have answers

Publication Date:

Read: January 7th - 8th

Rating: 3/5 stars

goodreads

I think it's fascinating how all three books in this series have such similar average ratings on Goodreads. But Crossed has the lowest average, because we all agree it's the worst Matched book.

Honestly, Crossed started off surprisingly strongly. I was like, "Maybe I was wrong about this book being boring, and all about the characters wandering around a canyon?" But then we got to the canyon and started wandering around, and...well...

There are spoilers for Matched and Crossed ahead, if you're still trying to avoid spoilers for either of these books that have been out for over a decade!

Never a Hero by Vanessa Len

 

Publication Date: August 29th, 2023

Read: August 29th - 30th, 2023

Rating: 4/5 stars

Goodreads synopsis

Never a Hero is the sequel to Only a Monster and the second book of the Monsters trilogy by Vanessa Len. As I mentioned in my August wrap-up, I tried really hard to get an ARC of Never a Hero, because I liked Only a Monster so much, but it proved impossible. It turned out that Harpercollins wasn’t doing any ARCs at all for Never a Hero, even digital ones. This was a tragedy of epic proportions. But they sent me a finished copy, which was nice!

There are big spoilers for Only a Monster and mild spoilers for Never a Hero ahead, so…watch out!

In Only a Monster, we saw Joan try to save her family from a massacre, which culminated in her “unmaking” a fabled monster hunter in order to change the timeline and make it so the massacre never happened. We also found out that said monster hunter (Nick) just might have been Joan’s true love in another timeline – the original timeline. So that makes this timeline #3, and it lets us look at what happens…if there was Never a Hero. 

Sorry, sorry, that was a little cheesy.

What the River Knows by Isabel Ibanez

Good title, pretty cover, meh book

Expected publication date: October 31st, 2023

Read: August 18th - 24th, 2023

Rating: 3/5 stars

Did I like it? No. Did I hate it? No. Is it bad? Yes, I think so. 

This book sort of glided by with very little emotional investment from me. For the record, I was trying pretty hard to give this book a fair shake. I had just had my expectations way exceeded by The Scarlet Alchemist, a book from an author whose work I had previously disliked, so I was like hey, maybe this trend will keep up. Maybe I'll like this way more than I liked Isabel Ibanez's debut.

Everyone is wrong sometimes.

What the River Knows is the story of Inez, an Bolivian-Argentinian girl whose parents are obsessed with Egypt and spend many months out of every year in Egypt, assisting Inez’s mother’s brother on archaeological digs. Despite how much Inez begs her parents to be brought along, they have never taken her to Egypt. But then they die suddenly, and Inez decides to disguise herself as a young widow and finally go to Egypt in order to find out what really happened to her parents. Through a lot of stubbornness and arguably bad decisions, she manages to convince her uncle to let her come along on an expedition, where she uses her artistic talents to help record their findings. There’s sort of a brewing conspiracy relating to Cleopatra’s tomb, and while she’s trying to figure out what’s going on, Inez is gradually growing closer to her uncle’s Hot Young British Assistant, Whitford Hayes.

Also, this is a historical setting - specifically, we’re in the 1880s - but it’s kind of an alternate history where objects imbued with magic exist and that’s more or less normal.

Maybe it’s because I kept my expectations as neutral as possible, but I didn’t dislike this book as strongly as I disliked Woven in Moonlight when I read it. So that might be a positive. However, I think this book is pretty bad. I think it’s a type of bad that a lot of people could have a lot of fun with, and I don’t want to discount that! But overall I simply think it was bad. I was only barely invested enough to wanted to know what would happen at the end, and when I did know what happened, I was just like, "Okay."

Kerensa, what was bad about it? Well, one thing that made it bad for me, personally, was the main character, Inez. One thing that this book and Ibanez’s debut have in common is that they both have very brash, headstrong, impulsive main characters. Inez is slightly less prone to super-cringy banter than what I remember of WiM’s protagonist, but she sure does love to rush into situations by herself, with absolutely no back-up! If there’s one thing Inez is good at, it’s snap decisions and trusting the wrong people. If there’s one thing she’s bad at, it’s critical thinking. It’s hard to like a character when you feel like she’s impulsive, naïve, and just kind of stupid, without much in the way of endearing or redeeming qualities. I didn’t particularly like Inez.

As for the setting, while it felt like Ibanez had done research into the history of Egypt in the 1880s and other details of the setting, her characters ultimately did not feel grounded in that history. This is true even when she gave them backstories where they had personal emotional connections to real historical figures. The way that they talk and act, and even some of the beliefs that they espouse, just didn’t make me feel like these were characters from the 1880s. 

Obviously, there are always questions with historical fiction of how much writers should try to be “historically accurate” versus how much they should modernize, because every modern writer will modernize to some extent. Here, it just felt like the wrong balance was struck. But since I’m admittedly very nitpicky about historical fiction in general, I admit that many readers probably wouldn’t be as thrown by I was by Inez’s uncle declaring that he believes in a fair living wage (I was 2 seconds from google searching if fair living wages were a common subject of debate in the 1880s, but then I restrained myself). And to be fair, I do think that there's leeway for young adult fiction especially to use historical fiction as a way to discuss current social issues instead of perfectly replicating period ones. If that was what was being attempted here, I just found it a little distracting.

More annoying were the ways that the characters would invoke the idea of restrictive social mores, and then simply ignore them. Inez will observe that it’s improper for her to be going around un-chaperoned, but then she keeps doing it, and there are virtually no consequences, outside of other characters being kind of annoyed at her for being improper. There’s no real sense that Inez’s reputation or social standing will suffer from all the scandalous things she does, and she kind of shrugs off the possibility as if it doesn’t really matter. She spends a good chunk of the book calling Whit “Mr. Hayes,” and then decides of her own accord that they’re friends, and she gets to call him “Whit,” now. He doesn't even want her to call him Whit! 

I guess my real issue here is, don't bring up the possibility of social disgrace if it's not something you're actually interested in exploring or worrying about. This is already an alternate history, so in theory it could be a version of the 19th century where it's fine for a young woman to do all the things Inez does. If you're going to say, "Oh no, I'm unchaperoned!" then maybe that should actually feel like there are tangible consequences to it? Even if they're acknowledged as being unfair consequences? I don't know, man.

Moving on. In general, I did not love the dynamic between Inez and Whit. I was sort of interested in the beginning, and I felt like they actually had pretty good banter and an interesting dynamic. But for so much of the middle of the book, it feels like that dynamic stagnates. There’s a lot of back and forth from Inez where she’s wondering if Whit likes her, worrying about him apparently being engaged, telling the reader that they’re getting closer without showing us much, and then wondering again if he likes her. This was not enough to sustain my already very mild interest. I got to a point where I was very ready for some real progression on either the relationship or the plot, and then nothing happened on either front. For like, a good chunk of the middle of this story, it felt like nothing was happening.

The conclusion was fine. I mean, it was very silly, but not much sillier than everything that preceded it, I guess. The twist at the very end was, as previously mentioned, a little bit interesting. But I won't be reading the next book.

Ultimately, I think a lot of people will probably have fun with this. Unfortunately, I wasn't one of them. I didn't hate it, but I'm left very...whelmed. Like her bestie Rebecca Ross, I think Isabel Ibanez just isn't for me.

The Shadows Between Us Review

 Hi. This review consists of upwards of 3000 words of me roasting The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller. If you liked this book and would prefer not to read a critical review of it, I strongly suggest you scroll onwards. If you disliked this book, or just enjoy negativity, maybe we can be best friends for the next 3000 words. Also, there are a lot of spoilers, because I don't think I can do spoiler tags on here?

Also also, I drew a picture.

This is how I picture Alessandra going about life at court in her various pants-iful outfits. Would you put this drawing on your fridge? Be honest.

Anyway, here we go!

The Other Side of Perfect Review

Rating: ★★★★★

Seeing as I am both a former ballet dancer and a former theatre kid (though I'm not much for musicals), I think it was inevitable that this book would grab my attention.

The premise is as follows: Alina was a pre-professional ballet dancer with dreams of joining ABT until she broke her leg. Since she can no longer dance on pointe, she can no longer pursue her ballet dreams, and she's not coping with this very well. She resigns herself to trying out for the school musical to appease her parents and ends up with a new perspective.

August Wrap-Up

 I don't actually know what people usually say for monthly wrap-ups, but I read 11 books in August and liked most of them. My favorites were probably The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and my least favorite has got to be The Infinity Courts by Akemi Bowman.

Let's get started!