Anyway. I haven't written a review of Seraphina yet (it was one of the books I read in December; if we're lucky maybe I'll do some kind of wrap-up but I'm considering kind of abandoning wrap-ups since they're not the most fun for me to write? I already haven't written one in yay these many moons) but I finished Shadow Scale a few days ago and I've been thinking about it ever since. So here we go: my first review of the year shall be the first book I read in 2025.
Publication Date: March 12th, 2024
Read: February 2th - March 2nd
Rating: 3/5 stars
Maybe this book and I just have different priorities.
A Feather So Black is the story of Fia, a changeling who was left in the human realm as a child, with no memories of her past. At first, her eerie resemblance to the princess she replaced made people fear and shun her, but over time...Well, they still actually shun her, but the high queen eventually warmed up to her.
Fia has been trained in various skills by her adoptive mother's druid advisor, and we meet her when she's trying to steal a captured faerie creature from a prince. This does not go incredibly well (which is foreshadowing for my experience with this book, I suppose) but she does end up running into ROGAN, childhood friend to lover to ESTRANGED AND ANGSTY CHILDHOOD FRIEND. They have a "let's kiss in a dark corner to throw off the people who are chasing us" moment in like, chapter 2. This, perhaps more than anything, sets the tone.
Publication Date: July 19th, 2001
Read: March 31st - April 4th
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
This book was...very weird. And I truly wish I could say that with more enthusiasm.
Publication Date: October 17th, 2023
Read: February 8th - 9th
Rating: 3/5 stars
There’s so much to say about this book, but I’ve already talked about it so much that it almost feels like I’ve already written a review…even though I very much have not.
Here's another cross-posted review of a book I read this month. I think this review has the dubious honor of being the first one star review of this book posted to Goodreads. So...that's fun!
I read an e-arc of Lady Macbeth through Edelweiss pretty much as soon as it was available for me to download, because I was very curious as to how a retelling of Macbeth that makes Lady Macbeth a 17-year-old girl was going to work. And I'm now forced to conclude that it...doesn't work, actually!
Full review below. I feel like there are at least a few spoilers, so proceed with caution if you care about that sort of thing.
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| At least the cover's pretty |
Publication Date: August 7th, 2019
Read: January 14th - 15th
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
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:
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.
After I read Iron Flame, I spent some time trying to unpack my thoughts about it and deciding what I wanted to say about it. I started by trying to write a quick summary of the plot so I could talk about all of the things I thought were kind of stupid. Unfortunately, what I ended up writing wasn't a quick summary at all. It's actually over 2000 words.
Anyway, here's my plot summary of Iron Flame. There are a lot of spoilers, but if you don't want to read Iron Flame and do want to know what happens in it, I humbly think reading this summary will be more fun for you than subjecting yourself to the book. I'm planning to write a proper review with more actual analysis soon, but I'm not sure when. So consider this supplementary reading for the review, whenever I actually finish it.
Here we go!
Publication Date: August 29th, 2023
Read: August 29th - 30th, 2023
Rating: 4/5 stars
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.
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| 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.
Expected publication date: September 14th, 2023
Read: August 13th-15th, 2023
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
Objectively, perhaps this book deserves a solid 3 stars. But after a month of mostly mediocre reads, I'm feeling a little harsher towards its flaws. (I don't think it helps that I read this book right after The Scarlet Alchemist, which I really enjoyed).
If I Have to Be Haunted is the story of Cara, a girl who can see ghosts, and Zach, her childhood nemesis. Zach gets bitten by a legendary snake, and one of the things about this snake is that there's a chance to resurrect him, but only within the 7 days after his death. Thus, Cara extracts a promise of money from Zach (whose family is loaded) and they go on a quest through the liminal world to find the antidote to his death.
One of the big issues I had with this story throughout was that the world felt poorly-defined, and the plot felt like Stuff Happening more than a connected series of events. Initially I thought that the liminal world was a whole other dimension, kind of like the spirit world in Avatar: the Last Airbender. But apparently that's not what it is, because at one point Cara and Zach call the regular, normal police on someone and that's expected to work. So it is...the real world...but there are also giant plant monsters and glades full of extinct creatures...Okay. I guess. I needed a little more explanation to really understand how that works.
Most of the book is spent in the liminal world (?), with the characters traveling through various "thresholds" that take them to different places. Along the way, Cara and Zach acquire a ghost hunter, Brittany, and we get some very obvious hints that maybe all three of them have grandparents who did a journey very similar to this a long time ago. Outside of that, one of the functions that Brittany serves is to point out that Cara and Zach are into each other, despite their protestations.
Anyways, the way the plot progresses from point to point in the liminal world without an organic ramping up of tension and stakes is one of the things that bothered me about this book. The conflicts mostly felt disconnected and of similar stakes to each other, which made me feel kind of bored. At the same time, there are some tone shifts that feel kind of weird. In one part of the liminal world, they have to face off against a wacky old man cannibal. In another part, there are ghosts whose whole thing is being super creepy and racist. The tone just didn't feel consistent.
There were some interesting ideas in the liminal world, but I think they could have been executed better and interwoven more successfully. It doesn't help that at the beginning of the story, there's some set-up for some kind of conflict involving ghosts that was apparently all sequel tease. I would have liked to see that conflict come to a head in this book, instead of being left for a sequel, but that's not what happens.
As for the romance. Hm. The romance. The set-up was fine. Cara and Zach have hated each other since kindergarten. Okay, cool, we can work with that. But the problem is...there's very little actual development of the dynamic between them until really far into the book. Like, their dynamic remains almost the same throughout. Something happens. Maybe Zach saves Cara or helps her in some way. They share a Moment of physical closeness or emotional intimacy or something. But then, inevitably, the potential emotional intimacy gets shut down and Cara makes an aloof, acerbic comment. Zach responds in kind. Repeat almost ad nauseam.
I got really frustrated with the romance and the lack of progression, honestly. If I had liked the way the romance was developing, that could have been a lifeline for me as far as liking this book. But the way that we kept getting the same kinds of moments and the same sequences of moments over and over just got annoying. Cara is convinced Zach doesn't care about her, only the fact that she can maybe resurrect him. Zach thinks Cara is only here for the money, which is not helped by the fact that Cara is verbally insisting that she's only here for the money. It's one type of miscommunication spun out over 70% of the story. Even when we broke out of that cycle and got the eventual fight (and later, the eventual confession), I just didn't care.
What I would have wanted for the romance would be for Cara and Zach to have to re-evaluate their opinions of each other over the course of their quest. I would have liked more moments where they start to genuinely like and respect each other, moments where they re-evaluate their opinions and realize maybe they were wrong about each other. If we had actual progress in the relationship, followed by some kind of set-back, maybe things like Cara pulling back emotionally and saying “I’m resurrecting you for the money,” at a key point would feel more emotionally impactful. But as it is...I really just did not vibe with their relationship, and every time a supporting character was like "You guys obviously like each other!" I stared into space and questioned my decision to finish this book.
(One a writing note, I thought that we did not need quite so much figurative language referencing snakes. Maybe we could have killed some of those darlings. It felt a bit melodramatic).
That was a lot of negatives. I'm not trying to be overly negative, I just really didn't have a good experience with this book. But even though I think there are some objective flaws here, I think this is a book that some people could really enjoy. A more generous reader than I currently am could certainly have fun with this, and I'm interested to see what Miranda Sun writes in the future.
