Book 21: Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat

In soccer commentary, there is a classic terribly overused cliche that when one team is dominant for one half and the other is dominant the other, it's been a "game of two halves." Usually you can't divide books so neatly in half, but in this case I spent the first half of the book attempting to figure out how I would have restructured it to actually make it compelling and engaging, and then the second half I was hooting and hollering. So! A book of two halves it is. 

This is a story about Will, an orphan in early 19th century London whose mom died trying to protect him from evil doers and who discovers a secret magical underbelly to the whole society and blah blah blah you have probably read a YA fantasy before. That's part of the problem with the start of this story: it's extremely derivative and yet it also has pages and pages of exposition to get the reader through, but I can't say that I ever felt grounded in the setting. This is partly because the secret magic brings him to a hidden place that's out of time, since the Stewards (a secret society and a name I cannot keep in my head for longer than two minutes) has been training to prevent the rebirth of the Dark King for ages, so they feel much more King Arthurish than Regency, to say the least. The first two hundred pages has about ten pages of actually interesting stuff, and then it quickly shifts away to explain how good the good guys are, but when it's revealed that actually they've been doing some pretty questionable stuff in the name of being good, actually!, it's not really a surprise because we have no investment in the good guys. So up until this point: basically a C! Not something I'd want to read a second novel of!

However. We then arrive at the kidnapping of the most perfect and powerful and (most importantly) beautiful blond twink that Will has ever seen, for super honorable reasons we swear, and suddenly the whole thing kicks off and the second half of the book is a jam. I can't say that the book is particularly surprising--I started texting friends who had read it with predictions and I was pretty darn accurate--but I don't mind that at all, and certain scenes did make me honk like a goose. So! If you're willing to skim your way through 200 pages of setup to get to the actual emotional heart of a story at the beginning of a trilogy, I highly recommend this, and that especially goes if you've read the Captive Prince trilogy and know the kind of tropes this author is into. If you're wondering if that still applies to this, boy howdy does it. 

Grade: (C + A)/2 = B  

Book 26: A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer

This is one of the books that's been in my TBR pile since before 2016! Glad I finally got to it. 

There's a pull quote from Jane Yolen on the front of my copy of the book that compares it with Harry Potter, and I actually think that set me up poorly for what story this is telling. It's an older style of children's fantasy, and only the first third of the book are set at the college of magics, which doesn't resemble Hogwarts at all. The protagonist is a young woman named Faris who is heir to a kingdom and in a very complicated power struggle with her uncle the regent. She's sent there with two protectors, one of whom stays during her time there, and she befriends another student who becomes a dean before leaving with Faris to return to her kingdom, which is where the rest of the story is focused. 

The element of this story that really clicked for me is the relationship between Faris and her guard, which turns into the classic king and lionheart trope, and it goes into a really interesting and ultimately incredibly satisfying direction. The overall world building and focus of the book wasn't exactly what I was hoping it would be, but that aspect was so good it elevated the entire reading experience for me, and made me really love the overall arc. 

Grade: B  

Book 30: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

 A book club book! This is a fairly standard modern retelling/adaptation of a fairy tale, in this case Sleeping Beauty, in which the princess is a young woman named Zinnia who has a chronic, fatal illness. Her best friend sets up a birthday celebration for her that turns this into a portal fantasy, and she goes through a journey to potentially save both her life and the life of the princess she meets in that other universe. 

I enjoyed this novella, but I think I wanted/hoped for a bit more - there's an interaction in the portal section of the story that almost but not quite knocked my socks off, and it made me think that the story had gotten a bit held back in order to make it fit a more standard narrative. Basically I thought that this story could have been much weirder and broken more of the narrative expectations, and it would have felt both more cohesive to me and more interesting. But it was still a fun read. 

Grade: B

Book 8: Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

 The second book in this duology! This one was also great, even if it didn't quite have the delight of Assembling the Gang in Six of Crows. But overall I really enjoyed the story, and how the relationships deepened, and hey a gay romance! Don't mind if I do. The story suffered a tiny bit from the fact that there's an action event mid-book that COULD be the final heist of the story, but because of where it falls in the book, you know it can't be. Part of that is reading a YA novel as an adult who's read stories like this before and understand the narrative formula, but I thought some of the fakeouts could have been concealed slightly more. Overall though it was a delightful conclusion to the first book and I enjoyed it immensely!

Grade: A 

Book 4: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

 So I FINALLY read this duology and hey guess what: It's great!!! Honestly it is an ideal YA historical urban fantasy with found family and inexplicably young yet hardened by the world thieves. The first book is a perfect getting the gang together of misfits with secret pasts and desires all working together on a big heist that isn't entirely what they or the reader thinks it's going to be, and it ends on a double-cross and then another double-cross and oh no cliffhanger!!!

Kaz is a perfect ringleader, with a fairly ridiculous backstory that fits this sort of story precisely because of how ridiculous it is, and then the other five are all great, with enough unexpected elements to the dynamics that it keeps the standard drama interesting. So basically, if you want to read about teenage thieves in a magical, dark Amsterdam set vaguely during the Dutch Golden Age, do not wait. 

Grade: A

Book 73: The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

The second book in the Queen's Thief series, this one really threw me for a loop! Just. After the shock and disorientation of the unreliable narrator of the first book, the second book really doubled down on that for this one, and I genuinely was not expecting basically any of the twists or turns that got us anywhere. 

After the events of The Thief, Gen is now back with his Queen and in her kingdom, except he's also being sent out on missions constantly. And finally, the Queen of Attolia captures him, after he steals from her one too many times. Rather than executing him, she cuts off his hand, thereby destroying his identity, and things go from there. I am still not entirely sure how we got from that beginning to the ending, but I do know that it worked, which is part of what made it so compelling. I'm currently just getting to the end of the sequel to this book, and it's a trip attempting to put myself back into that mindset again. A great read!

Grade: A

Book 70: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

This is the sort of book that I initially started this blog four and a half years ago for - I have owned The Thief for so long that I can't even remember where I got it. I'm 90% sure that it was a Christmas present, but when and from whom is truly lost to time. But I always wanted to read it, I just...never got around to it. Well, I finally did, and just in time for the sixth and final book in the series to have been published!

So there's this thief, you see, and he's imprisoned in a king's prison, and then released under the conditions that he has to go help someone steal something that's impossible to steal: a mythical artifact. It becomes clear fairly early on that the narrator is extremely unreliable, both in terms of what the narrative omits and also how information is presented, and the reveals are extremely well done and satisfying. I think this is a book that will reward a reread a lot. The setting is very much a pseudo-Ancient Greece, with a mythology that is clearly inspired by the same region, and overall there's a vague Guy Gavriel Kay approach to history here, which to the probable surprise of no one works very well for me. It is also a wonderful first book to a series because while I was very enthusiastic about starting the next one in the series, it also stands alone extremely well, and I really enjoyed having it exist on its own. If you are also like me and have only been hearing abut this series referred to as The Queen's Thief but haven't read it yet, I really recommend it! 

Grade: A

Book 69: We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

This is one of those books that I took out from the library after hearing about it...somewhere, probably because it's gay and YA (or close) and well, that is how I roll. And it was both of those things, but it's also about grief and trying to figure out who you are when your link to your past is suddenly gone, and the space between what you've been told and what's the truth grows wider and wider. 

It's also a book about an unreliable narrator, and telling a story with tension so you keep reading it in order to find out what the Thing was, why we're in the place in the present that the story is about, and it's extremely well-done and effective, but also the structure felt stronger to me than the actual story at times. I did desperately want to know how Marin had ended up where she was (alone, a freshman in college with no family and nothing tethering her to anything), but the explanation felt both too big and also not big enough, somehow. It was hard for me to not poke holes in it, which isn't a great way to go into a story. 

Still, the language was beautiful, and the specificity of her college town and life in the Mission back in San Francisco both rang extremely true for me. I just wanted a bit more oomph from the eventual reveal. 

Grade: B

Book 64: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

This was a book I reserved from the library when I saw it on a newsletter of some kind, and it's the sort of YA book that I really wanted to like more than I did. The story centers on the Mozart children: Wolfgang, who everyone knows, and his older sister Maria Anna, who is know as Nannerl in the story, and their fictional world they told each other stories of, called The Kingdom of Back. In the novel (and in real life), Nannerl is also an accomplished musician, and there are indications that she was also a composer. The story of the book involves her going through quests in the portal world and then saving the real world and her brother by making the hard but right choices, and I don't dislike the story, but I found it so frustrating that even in a fictional, fantastical version of this girl child Mozart that I had known nothing about, the best she can be is a person who allowed her brother to become what he did. The metastory is clearly that girls can be anything, but the actual story reflects how untrue that often is in actual history, and that's what it feels like the primary lesson is for the reader, too. I had a hard time with it, and wanted it to be something other than it was, even when I enjoyed it. 

Grade: B

Book 62: Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

 A retelling of Cinderella where the fairy tale is all a lie and the kingdom has been suffering as a result for two hundred years. There's still an annual ball where young ladies are paraded out so they can be chosen, and it's all very bad, and there's one girl named Sophie who wants to escape (and bring her girlfriend with her), but she can't! At least not until she meets a girl named Constance who is also determined to bring the king down, along with the whole kingdom. 

I wanted to like this book more than I did; it's a fairy tale retelling with a queer protagonist about overthrowing patriarchal authoritarianism. But the telling itself never really grabbed me, and the shift from her relationship with Erin to her new relationship with Constance didn't really work for me. The overall world and final reveal was pretty interesting, so I was glad I finished it to find that out, but overall it's more of a miss for me. 

Grade: C 

Book 61: Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo

 The final book of the Grisha trilogy! And I think my favorite of the three, in a lot of ways, both because so many of the threads that had been set up in the first two books did in fact pay off, and because the payoffs were both fitting and sometimes surprising! 

The book begins with Alina having lost her power after the events at the end of book two and imprisoned by the priest, and the ragtag group of resisters conspire to free her and harness her magic again. They have to go on another adventure to find the third and final amplifier, and we learn the truth behind them and the entire system and history of magic, and it all holds together quite well. The ending is satisfying and gives Alina and Mal the happy ending you want them to have without breaking the rules of the universe too much, and it's very effective, even if I never did feel as strongly about the two of them as I would have liked to. All in all, a very pleasant trilogy to read, and I'm looking forward to Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom. 

Grade: B

Book 60: Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo

 The second Grisha book! Alina and Mal start the story on the run, but they get brought back into the narrative of the trilogy quickly enough, with the Darkling forcing Mal to find the second amplifier, a sea serpent. Helping them find it is a privateer with a big secret, who double-crosses the Darkling and allows Alina to acquire the second amplifier, which makes her even more powerful. 

They then join forces (sort of) with a priest who has been calling her a saint, and now she has a whole following, and the privateer is revealed to be something more significant than he is, and Alina has a mindmeld connection with the Darkling now, and a whole bunch of middle book of the trilogy stuff happens where everything becomes more complicated. Things are afoot! And it continues along as the first one did for me, where there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, but I wanted a slightly deeper connection to the characters, and to the love story (or stories). Still a really enjoyable read! But it never fully dug its claws into me. 

Grade: B

Book 59: Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

 I finally manged to start this series! I have been meaning to for many years, and haven't read the Six of Crows books yet because I wanted to read these first, and now I have! 

This is the story of a girl named Alina, who lives in a fantasy Russia, and who is an orphan without magical powers...until she discovers she's wrong. Her best friend and secret crush Mal is a soldier, and she saves him while they're attempting to cross the Unsea, which is what it sounds like it is. It's in her saving him that her powers manifest. 

She gets sent to go develop her powers with the Darkling, who is supposedly the good guy, but you'll be shocked to discover that in fact he's the big bad! So she runs away and Mal, who's a great tracker, finds her and helps her, and then they go on a hunt to find the mythical creature whose antlers are an amplifier for her magic, only the Darkling gets there too and manages to bind her to him with the magic. But then it turns out she can resist him, and she and Mal escape at the end of the first book. 

This is a pretty classic YA fantasy setup: girl thinks she's normal but is actually super special, along with the boy she's been in love with since she was a kid and the new hot but bad villain that she's drawn to but also knows how wrong it is. I enjoyed it, but I would have liked more from Mal; we know that she loves him, and he eventually falls for her too, but I didn't find the romance particularly convincing or engaging, which was a shame. But on the whole I enjoyed it! 

Grade: B

Book 55: You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson

What a charming book! This is for me pretty much the platonic ideal of a contemporary YA story about a young queer Black girl just trying to make it through high school and find enough money to go to her dream college. In this particular case, Liz goes to school in Indiana, where the prom every spring is the biggest event in town, and being crowned King or Queen is worth a ten thousand dollar scholarship. And so she has to enter, even though she's a bit of a wallflower and this means she'll have to spend time with her former best friend Jordan, the most popular kid on the football team.

There's a great friends group with constant teenage angst, and a fantastic queer love interest named Mack who loves the same band she does, and a really interesting and complicated family life, and it's just a really nice read where you never worry too much about whether it'll all turn out okay, and the stakes are real and mistakes and choices matter, but nothing is life-ending. I really enjoyed it and can't wait to buy it for a GSA library.

Grade: B

Book 29: A Heart So Fierce and Broken by Brigid Kemmerer

This is the sequel to A Curse So Dark and Lonely, only I didn't realize it was a direct sequel - I thought this was the sort of book series where each book was a take on a different classic fairy tale. But no! This book focuses on the former guardsman Grey, who has a Secret, and then a new character named Lia Mara, who is the firstborn and yet not heir to the rival kingdom, basically. And for Reasons they all unite and are sort of acting against Prince Rhen and Harper, but sort of not, and Harper's brother and his boyfriend are still sort of trying to get back to the real world, and I'm kind of mad about how much I enjoyed this book and how much I want the next book in the series, because the cliffhanger at the end of this one was extremely effective. I also think the storytelling and worldbuilding was a lot better in this book, especially once we got past the beauty and the beast direct parallels and the narrative became more of its own thing. I find YA fantasy series that have no set number of books in them to be a frustrating experience, but on the other hand this one got me, so well done.

Grade: B

Book 24: Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer

This is a delightful YA about a chatroom community where one of the members is in fact the internet, and is the best kind of benevolent friend version of an all-seeing AI. It's just a really nice story of what humans would like our robot overlords to actually be like: a friend who knows everything, who cares for us, who learns and acts in our best interests as well. I really liked it, but a couple of months later it hasn't really stuck with me past that. CheshireCat is the ultimate chatroom admin who just really likes cat photos, and also happens to live inside our computers, literally. An excellent romp.

Grade: B

Book 21: Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim

I finally managed to read this! It was a new book that I had taken out from the library and renewed so many times, and then the pandemic hit and I've had it at home for even longer. And I'm really glad I finally read it.

This is a classic YA set up: a young girl has to pose as a boy in order to gain entry at court. In this particular situation, Maia is a tailor who learned her trade from her father, and when the emperor commands that all the best tailors in the land come to compete to become his imperial tailor, she goes in her sick father's place. Once there, she goes through a Project Runway sort of gauntlet, and is aided by the court sorcerer Edan. He knows her secret, and when her reward is creating three impossible gowns for the emperor's wife-to-be, he accompanies her on her journey to make them, somehow.

There's a magical pair of scissors left to her by a relative and jealous rivals and the secrets of both an emperor and the princess warrior he's intending to marry, and it's just a really lovely read. The only thing I didn't love is that it's the first in a duology, but the second book comes out in July of this year, so hopefully I'll manage to read it sooner that I got to this one.

Grade: A

Book 15: A Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer

This is a YA fantasy that has a premise designed for an elevator pitch: it's a modern portal fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, where the beauty in question is pulled from our reality and brought back to a vaguely European-based fantasy world and imprisoned by a prince who turns into a monster. But only her love can release him from his curse.

From the jump the book is clear on which various tropes the novel is intending to upend: Harper, the beauty, has cerebral palsy and was kidnapped while trying to rescue the stereotypically beautiful woman the prince's right hand man was trying to bring back to break the curse. This of course upends everything, and she begins to work to break the curse in a different way than assumed. There's a tension between her, the Prince Rhen, his guardsman Grey and the enchantress at the root of it all, and it's an interesting retelling, although not one that fully drew me into the world. That may in part have been because Harper had a complicated home life the likes of which is only ever found in this kind of YA novel, and until the very end of the book I didn't care about that subplot at all. It's a good first book to a series, though, and I liked the second one a lot.

Grade: B

Book 13: The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh

I borrowed this book from the library after seeing a description of it somewhere, because I am an easy sell for a book about vampires in late nineteenth century New Orleans. But man, I gotta say that I was pretty bored by this book. It's hard to know for sure what I would have thought of it had I read it when I was a teenager, something I always try to keep in mind when I read paranormal YA romance - it is entirely plausible that I would have been swept up by the tropes and setting and all that. But at least as an adult, nothing in the book stuck with me long enough to leave a lasting impression.

Grade: C

Book 4: The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

In most ways, this final book of the trilogy ticks all the boxes: it ties up the loose ends that were introduced in the first book and complicated in the second one, it gives the reader the reveals they were hoping for/expecting, and the romance that was the clear endgame since the beginning gets its happy ending in a way that feels earned.

I just wish that it had been somewhat more surprising. Part of me feels like that reaction is unfair; I'm an adult reading a YA fantasy trilogy, which means that there are a lot of tropes I'm much more familiar with than the target audience will be. But part of why I loved the first book of the trilogy so much was because it did surprise me at times, and I didn't always know how what I was anticipating would actually happen. Jude felt too unsuspecting at times in this book; the 'twist' felt like something that she could have at least considered at some point, even if she refused to believe it because of trust issues or whatever, and it meant that there was a weaker payoff for me when it was confirmed that the narrative was in fact going where I thought it would. Still enjoyable! A really good read for a winter day! But not quite what the first book of the trilogy had promised, at least for me.

Grade: B