Another Half-Priced-Books buy that I'm really glad I grabbed! Ember 1 was a page-turner that sent me running to get #2 and #3 before I ever finished. While at first I found the chapter-by-chapter POV flips disorienting, I gradually grew more accustomed to them and hardly noticed them by the end.
This is a fairly simple story that is well-streamlined. Regardless, I enjoyed it, even if Laia wasn't my favorite. She has a level balance of weakness, fear, hope, and courage, but somehow I just didn't click with her. Elias, on the other hand... His chapters were definitely my favorite. Tormented by a mother who hates him, confused about his grown-up feelings for his best friend, guilt-ridden for all the things he's had to do to survive his upbringing at Blackcliff, he somehow manages to be broody without being edgy. Good on Sabaa for pulling that off! The romance feels a bit forced and superficial to me, with Laia bouncing back and forth between a certain rebel operative and Elias (I'm on book #2 and this aspect only gets more obnoxious, but I'll save that for the next review). Laia and Elias definitely have a convincing chemistry, but every time she goes back to swooning over rebel boy, it just makes me dislike her more and then I can't bring myself to root for a real L+E hookup. Aside from that speedbump, I really enjoyed this book! Plenty of action, internal and external conflict, character development, and interesting dialogue. I'll be reading through this series, so stay tuned for reviews for books #2 and #3. I've heard the manuscript for #4 is in editing now, so maybe by the end of this year? Fingers crossed!
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Let's start with the good. Ngan's prose is absolutely magical. I was constantly stunned by her poetic voice and masterful wordcraft from the first page to the last. Her descriptions of the world around Lei are so engrossing, I could almost feel the rain on my skin. Really really fantastic. She also tackles some major issues in this book, first being the caste system and the debilitating prejudices that keep Paper (humans) trapped in lives of squalor and fear. After that, Lei is brought face-to-face with the reality of slavery, having been kidnapped and gifted into servitude herself. Not only that, but the nature of her indenture is equally repulsive, made all the more horrible by the fact that so many people around her keep telling her how lucky she is to be a Paper Girl. All of these are big ideas to tackle, and Ngan does a reasonable job of it. She also brushes up against the gray morality of taking life to save life, but doesn't really invest.
The good is also somewhat aligned with the bad in this case for me. While elegant and lush, the prose began to bore me after about 100 pages. I stopped caring about the scenery and started hoping something would happen. This book dragged for me. The physical styling of the demons was too 'furry'-esque for my liking. Lei also felt a bit one-dimensional, as did the rest of the characters, and I couldn't quite get attached to any of them. The romance was sweet and understated, just about right for a young-adult novel in my opinion. In the end, though, I won't be reading the sequel to this. I just don't care what happens to Lei next.
Crooked Kingdom picks up shortly after the first book, starting with another scene with Retvenko. Honestly, having not read the rest of the Grishaverse books (I assume he's important in one of them?), I found his inclusion in these books irrelevant and distracting. It was only one chapter, so I guess I shouldn't complain, but I think he could have been removed and just let the contextual clues do the talking.
We pick back up with Kaz and his crew (and all of the romantic entanglements that began in the first book) as they attempt to bring down Wylan's father and claim the reward they were promised. Jan VanEck really shows his despicable colors in this one and made for a fantastically hate-able villain. Ketterdam came alive for me in this book, and I loved Inej's chapters the most. Getting to see and feel the city from her perspective, racing along familiar rooftops and leaping through shadows, was a lot of fun. Her fight with Dunyasha was one of the best parts of the entire duology, and you can read my favorite few lines from it at the top of this review. Jesper and Wylan are always good for a bit of flirty banter or a laugh. This sequel fleshed out a lot of their characters, adding depth and history to both. Kaz's genius really shone in these pages and the final scheme was well laid-out and full of 'aha!' moments. Kaz's relationship with Inej is one of the strongest and most unique things about these books. Kaz is a bitter, broken, merciless young man who is a protagonist I loved to hate. An anti-hero. Inej has plenty of her own shadows, clinging to her faith while compromising her morals to survive. They are both capable, courageous, fiercely loyal, and ruthless when the situation calls for it. But Kaz's past makes him unreachable. Despite her feelings for him, Inej has enough self-worth to walk away rather than waste her life trying to fix him. This is a rare jewel of a female character that puts herself and her goals above all else, and was incredibly empowering to read. (SPOILERS FOLLOW, BEWARE!) But guys, I gotta talk about Nina and Matthias. I love a good enemies-to-lovers trope and was drawn to their relationship the most in the first book. There was a lot of potential there, and even though the backstory was a bit thin I still really enjoyed it. Crooked Kingdom gave me those sweet little new-romance moments that I craved (along with the same for the other two main matches) and I had such hopes. But then Leigh had to tear out my heart and spit on it and shove it into a blender. I didn't so much mind that Matthias died. It was...unnecessary, yes. But I'm not one to shrink from killing off a few beloved characters. The way he died would even have been acceptable to me if Nina had been believably effected by it. Instead, I closed this book disliking her quite a lot. Her grief was so utterly unconvincing. When Kaz suggested the money didn't matter in the face of her loss, she immediately cut him off and insisted it mattered. While she was never my favorite character to begin with, she went out looking like a cold-hearted, shallow, money-grubbing cliche. I get that she was a soldier and saw plenty of death in her time fighting for Ravka, but for fuck's sake, it's the man you love! (Or not?) Her story apparently continues in King of Scars, so I hope to see her redeemed there. In the end, I felt like Matthias was killed off just to have a major character die and check some box for the publisher. That being said, I had a great time reading these books and will gladly recommend them to others.
Outlander starts out like a sweet Sunday afternoon, introducing the MC Claire via a charming holiday in the Scottish highlands with her husband Frank shortly after the end of WWII. Things quickly get interesting when Claire is accidentally transported back through time 200 years by touching the ancient standing stones at Craigh na Dun. There, she meets a number of colorful characters from the era just prior to the rebellion of Bonny Prince Charlie, including the handsome young highlander Jamie Fraser. Claire struggles to survive in a world she doesn't fully understand and plots to find her way back to the stones and (hopefully) her own time.
I love a good romance-rich fantasy and this one certainly delivers. The relationship between Jamie and Claire grows naturally, with none of the instant-love or flawless-partner cliches that set my eyes to rolling. Jamie and Claire are both extremely human, with all the shortcomings that entails, and Gabaldon confronts those flaws head-on. Her brutal honesty about the nature of attraction and the complexities of both love and life are what I enjoyed most about this book. She doesn't hide the main characters inside a pretty romance, she exposes their weaknesses through it, and it makes this one of the richest reads I've had the pleasure of tackling in a long while.
Martin paints a vivid picture of late 1850s life on the Mississippi, with all the luxury and bitter competition inherent to the times. However, Abner is just not an engaging protagonist to me. Squat, grizzled, stubborn, cranky, and not particularly open-minded or bright, his lack of sufficiently redeeming qualities left me not particularly inclined to root for him. He's brave and chivalrous a time or two, but it didn't quite make up for the rest. Joshua and the other vampires are interesting, but there are too few revelations to allow the reader to get invested in them. In all, their representation felt stale and unoriginal.
All-in-all, this felt like a vanity project for Martin, with Abner being his own fictional (albeit deliberately unflattering) self-representation. I'm sure this book will appeal to others, but it didn't strike the right notes for me.
Inej was the most interesting to me, given her dark history, but I enjoyed every last one of the characters. Jesper's sarcasm, Wylan's hidden strength, Nina and Mathias' smoldering tension... All of it kept the pages turning, and I immediately added the sequel to my holiday wish-list, along with Ninth House and the Shadow and Bone trilogy. Can't wait to read more of Leigh's captivating work!
The ending fell a little flat for me. I was hoping for a more powerful moment of reconciliation between the main characters, and it just wasn't there. Instead, the final few chapters felt a bit disjointed and rushed. That being said, I will definitely be picking up the second book in hopes of more of that fantastic romance!
I had such high hopes for this book, and (to be fair) it did deliver to some extent. The first half dragged a bit, but it started to pick up and Kristoff's prose never disappoints. Equal parts poetry, grit, and sass, he manages to blend it all into a unique voice that is entirely his own. After the first half, the story starts to gain steam and a bit of the divine hand that influences Mia's life is finally revealed in more detail. Mercurio's predicament at the Red Church offers a number of intriguing details into the histories of the other characters. The pirate subplot was the most entertaining part of the book. The descriptions of the Crown of the Moon were elegant and pleasantly surprising. But...you can't build your entire series on the concept of "this is not a fairy tale, there are no heroes, everyone dies" and then not deliver. From the first page of book #1, the narrator grooms the reader for a sad-but-epic finale that ultimately ends with the main character's death. He strays a bit, shining some light into Mia's life along the way, but always yanks the chain and hurls a fresh bucket of cruel reality into her face. This is what keeps us coming back. A gritty, dark, blood-and-tears fantasy that few authors have the stones to deliver...but then it doesn't. It doesn't deliver. You know that story that doesn't have a happy ending? It has a happy ending. "She died but now she's not dead anymore! See? I didn't lie, I just didn't tell you the whole of it! Now you get your Disney ending and everyone's happy!" Ugh. But even in that reversal, he kind of half-asses it. In Godsgrave, he starts challenging Mia with these moral dilemmas of poverty and slavery in the Itreyan republic, starting to set her up for one of those "maybe there are bigger things in life than my revenge" enlightenment turnarounds. Big potential for Mia to maybe reevaluate her motives a little, and add some depth to her vendetta and her character. But it gets dropped entirely in Darkdawn. Okay, okay, you've been promising the readers that Mia's not a nice person and will never be a hero, so she can't exactly have a come-to-Jesus moment. I get it. So let's get down and dark and dirty and see this thing through to the end. Let's ride this hell-coaster into the grave and watch this magnificent bitch go out in a blaze of glory. Which she sort of does. But then she doesn't. Which kind of makes it all not so impressive. If he had committed fully to one or the other (either down in flames, a bad bitch to the end, or moral enlightenment that earns her that resurrection) this would probably have been a rave review. One last point (and probably my biggest issue with this book) before I stop my ranting and move on with my life. You can't build up three books' worth of lore and then ignore that very straight-forward structure to avoid killing a character for the sake of making the conclusion more palatable to the masses. Why is Jonnen still alive? The previous books said very clearly that all darkin have to be killed/claimed/devoured until there is only one left, and then that one has to willingly sacrifice themselves to resurrect the Moon. Mia is darkin. Jonnen is darkin. 1+1 does not equal 1. Needless to say, this felt like a total cop-out that ruined this series for me.
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