These Silent Woods (Book Review)

Back in December, my sister was in a production of A Christmas Carol. She lives about three hours away, so my mom and I drove up together every weekend to catch as many showings as we can. We often listen to audiobooks together, but between the road trip weekends and the insanity that is Christmas season in retail I’d been exhausted. On at least one of the trips, I slept while she drove and listened to her next book club book, which was These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant. I drifted in and out of sleep, so I heard a few scenes wildly out of context (including, unfortunately, the epilogue). What I heard sounded interesting and my mom enjoyed the book so later, on my own time and fully awake, I listened to it for myself.

What’s it about?

Cooper and his young daughter Finch are living off the land in a cabin deep in the woods. Those aren’t their real names, and they’re as much hiding as living in the middle of nowhere; years ago, Cooper did something bad enough that he had to flee with Finch and change their names lest his past come back to bite him and take Finch away from him. After several years of relative peace—occasional visits from their odd and unsettling neighbor Scotland notwithstanding—things start to go wrong, throwing new people into their small world and threatening the closed but safe life Cooper built for them. 

How’s the narration?

These Silent Woods has two narrators. Bronson Pinchot, reading as Cooper, does the vast majority of the novel, with Stephanie Willis taking the sole chapter that is not from Cooper’s first person perspective. Both narrators do a good job: engaging but calm, just what the story needs. This novel is sort of a thriller, but it’s mostly about the careful atmosphere that Cooper creates, and Pinchot creates that with his voice.

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I have slightly mixed feelings about These Silent Woods, and it’s all due to the end. There’s the slightest disconnect between the setup and the payoff, and even though I could kind of see the end coming I still found it a little underwhelming.

Other Birds (Book Review)

Like most quote-unquote “literary” books that I read, I read Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen for book club. I haven’t liked a lot of the book club books; personally, I think whomever choses the books for Barnes and Noble could do a loooooot better. I’ve actively liked maybe three of their picks in the last three/three-and-a-half years. Every time I start a new one, I’m trepidatious. Is this going to be something great like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or The Vanishing Half, or is it going to be torturous experience like Florence Adler Swims Forever or Matrix? Other Birds landed somewhere in the middle. It was fine. I was a little bored at times, but on the whole it was a nice book. If I’d picked it for myself, I might have been disappointed. Right off the heels of Mercury Pictures Presents, however, Other Birds is a relief. 

What’s it about?

After Zoey is rushed out of the house by her father and step-mother, she moves into a room her late mother left for her on a small island. The Dellawisp is an unusual residence, home to a number of unusual people who have been handpicked by the mysterious author Roscoe Avanger, whose novel put this island on the map. In addition to Zoey there’s Charlotte (an unemployed henna artist running from her past), Mac (a chef perpetually covered in cornmeal), Frasier (who has a strange obsession with the unusual birds that run amok on the premises), Lizbeth (a busybody and a hoarder), Lucy (Lizbeth’s sister who never leaves her room), and Oliver (who ran away from the Dellawisp first chance he got). When one of the occupants dies the night Zoey arrives, she becomes convinced that there’s more to this little community than first meets the eye.

What’d I think?

I generally love magical realism, and I once saw Other Birds described as Only Murders in the Building meets [something else that I haven’t read and don’t remember]. I went in very optimistic, and at first it seemed like this was going to be a win for me. Unfortunately, that Only Murders comparison fits the description of the novel better than the novel itself. Other Birds is not a murder mystery. It teases that for a bit, but discards that idea fairly quickly for neighborly bonding. It is also decidedly not a comedy. It’s not that it tries to be and fails: it’s a very sincere novel that makes no attempt at humor. Not everything has to be funny, but it’s a very odd choice to compare an earnest novel to a famously hilarious murder mystery comedy. Comparisons to well-known and well-liked stories is always a boost, but I think it does a disservice to the novel being comp’d if the comparison titles prime the reader to expect something that won’t be delivered. 

Unseelie (Book Review)

Unseelie by Ivelisse Housman is a debut novel with massive potential but enough plotting and pacing missteps that it never truly soars.

I was lucky enough to get an ARC of Unseelie through work, and I was immediately excited. I love a good cover, and I could tell immediately that this was a great one: interesting, attractive, and—most importantly—an accurate representation of what I’d find inside the covers. Seriously! Look at Isolde and Seelie. They look so good! I was already interested upon seeing the book, but reading the blurb clinched it. A faerie story with a pair of sisters at its heart? A fantasy novel about an autistic changeling living alongside her human counterpart written by an autistic author? Plus, the official blurb uses the word “heist,” and I’m onboard any and all heists ever since Six of Crows. I could almost sense the five-star rating. 

What’s it about?

Seelie—an unfortunate childhood nickname for Iselia—is a changeling who has been raised alongside her human counterpart, Isolde. After an unfortunate incident, the two girls left their much beloved parents and hit the road to make their own way until it is safe to return home. When a robbery goes wrong, they find themselves mixed up with another pair of thieves who recruit them on a quest to find a treasure.

What’d I think?

Like I said, I was predisposed to like this one. Literally everything about it appealed to me from the outside looking in, so it’s hardly surprising that I liked it as soon as I started reading. Seelie and Isolde are immediately wonderful in their contrast. Seelie, the primary hero and our narrator, is cautious and repressed, always glancing over her shoulder, expecting the worst, and denying herself by quashing and ignoring her faerie magic. Isolde is more physical, fully inhabiting her body as Seelie inhabits her mind: Isolde is always in action, fighting or fidgeting, stealing or drinking. I’m somewhat bewildered that I’ve never come across a story before that presents a faerie changeling and the human she was meant to replace together. Instead of accepting the switch or swapping the children back, Seelie and Isolde’s mother went into a faerie realm for her daughter and returned with both the original and swapped child, and raised them as twins. I absolutely adore that idea, and it’s immediately very fun because the very situation gives so much character to both the girls as individuals and as a duo. 

Unfortunately, it isn’t all smooth sailing for Unseelie. The novel hits its first snag when the girls meet Raze and Olani, a pair of magicians, while trying to rob a powerful home. There’s no problem with the new characters and, in fact, I really enjoyed them as well and the dynamics between Raze and Olani, between Seelie and Raze, between Olani and Isolde, and between the four as a complete group are all very compelling. No, the problem is not with the new characters; it is with the plot that they bring with them. Or, rather, the plot that they don’t bring with them. 

See, Raze and Olani are looking for a treasure. They’re very desperate to get to it, but they don’t seem to have much of an idea of what the treasure actually is or what they’re going to do with it once they get it. They want it because they’re in conflict with Leira Wildfall, a cruel and powerful shapeshifter, and Leira has been searching for it for years. That’s it. Leira wants the treasure, so Raze and Olani decide to go all out to find it before she does. There are a lot of action sequences as the two duos merge that add some drama and tension to the proceedings, but on the whole Raze and Olani’s stake in the treasure feels largely unmotivated, and Leira herself—despite chasing our heroes—is an odd villain as, until about the last third or so, there’s no real indication as to why everyone hates her so much except that maybe she’s a little too smug about the parties she throws. 

The reasons, when we finally get them, are good, but we don’t hear them until it’s too late to truly internalize them; as a result I got the impression I was being told how to feel, what to find important, rather than coming to it organically. I was told the heroes need to find that treasure. I was told that Leira sucks. I went along with it because I liked everything else going on, but it makes it very difficult to say what this book is about. It almost feels like the ‘we need this treasure’ plot was slapped in because a reason was needed for these four great characters to come together and do stuff.

To be honest, that doesn’t bother me all that much. Characters are way more important to me that plot, and if I had to pick only one element of the book to be good, I would pick character. Housman gave me excellent characters, an exciting family dynamic, and some cute romantic tension. I wish the impetus for giving me those things had been a little better, but hey. This is a debut, and you can’t always have everything in a debut. 

One quick gripe about the romance, though. Yes, I know I just said I liked it, and I did overall. The gripe I have is in the meet-cute. When Seelie first meets Raze, she describes him as “my age, maybe a little older” and then gets a bit meta to clarify that he isn’t handsome and she isn’t attracted to him, so it was just an age description, not an indicator of romance. I’m not gonna lie: I was so freaking hyped by that. I’m famously not a big fan of most major romance tropes, and as a general rule I really hate it when you can tell within one sentence of a new character’s introduction if they’re the love interest or not, so I was absolutely delighted that Housman was lampshading and subverting that. Except she wasn’t, because Raze is Seelie’s love interest. “My age, maybe a little older” isn’t a sign that the characters are falling in love in the very moment; it’s a sign that the new character is the right age to romance the hero, and therefore will. I’m still onboard with Seelie/Raze—some of their bickering was a little forced, but I’m inclined to forgive that because Seelie, who is autistic, indicates that she sometimes struggles to read social cues, and therefore mistakes Raze’s flirting as actual antagonism—but I wish I hadn’t been promised a subversion before getting the romance played exactly straight.

I love the autistic representation, though. Seelie’s autism is both a large part of her character and no big deal to the larger story. The word is never used in the novel itself, intentionally, but as we are in Seelie’s mind through her POV, we experience her world the way that she does. I hadn’t realized that changeling stories have historically often been leveraged against autistic children, but I love that Housman has reclaimed that and made a really compelling heroine out of it. 

I probably would have given Unseelie four or four and a half stars if it had not been for the very end. I’m not going to get into it too deeply as my intent is to keep this review spoiler-free, but suffice it to say that when Seelie and the others find the treasure, Seelie does something with unintended but hardly unforeseeable consequences. The traditional storytelling structure would end the novel there, or at least thereabouts. Instead, it goes on for another hundred pages or so during which the story changes drastically and Seelie has a series of adventures that both seem to draw out an ending that should have happened already and flies by too fast to fully deal with all the repercussions of what’s happening. It honestly feels like this is material that was originally meant to be in the second book, but was tacked onto the end because Unseelie might have been too short without it. This is meant to be a duology, but based on this book I wonder if it might’ve been served better as a trilogy. Unseelie could have fleshed out Leira and the treasure a bit more at the forefront, given the beginning of the story a little more space to breathe, and then ended with a banger of a cliffhanger. Book two could have used what happens post-treasure. It would need to be slowed down and expanded, with subplots for other characters, but it feels like its own major conflict that needs significantly more time and attention that it gets here. Then book three could take care of whatever Housman has planned for the original book two. Or maybe a duology works perfectly, but book two would need to be a bit longer to absorb some of what is currently in Unseelie.

There’s nothing wrong with the content here. It’s interesting, and I enjoyed it, but it feels out of place. The plot shouldn’t take off at the end of the book when the reader is expecting the denouement. There’s something to be said for playing with traditional story structure, but that doesn’t feel like it’s what’s happening here. It just feels like yet another plot and pacing misstep in a book that, although it does everything else right, makes a lot of plot and pacing missteps. 

What’s the verdict?

If you’re someone who reads for a well-structured plot and technically proficient writing, this maybe isn’t the first novel I would recommend. It has some significant pacing issues, with the plot motivation for half of the main characters coming way too late to inform much of anything, and a major chunk of plot that inexplicably takes off in a different direction right when it feels like the existing action should have been slowing down. That being said, everything else about this book is excellent, particularly for a debut. Ivelisse Housman plays with different parts of faerie and changeling lore than I’ve seen in fiction before, and does so with aplomb. The twin sisters at the heart of the novel are delightful as individuals and even more compelling in contrast with each other, making for a very grounded emotional storyline. Add to that authentic autism representation from an autistic writer and an absolutely gorgeous cover and you have a great fantasy adventure that you should probably have on your shelf. 

What’s next?

I’ve unfortunately read very few novels with autistic characters that are written by autistic authors, and none of them are fantasy. That said, both The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang and Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde have Autistic heroines and writers, and are excellent. Heads up, though; The Kiss Quotient is an adult romance book, not YA, and isn’t necessarily appropriate for everyone who may have read and loved Unseelie.

If your favorite part of Unseelie was the faeries, you should read The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black. Black is more famous for her Cruel Prince series, which is also faeries, but the former is way better if you ask me. It’s more about the faeries and less about the romance, and it’s one of my favorites. It also focuses on a strong sibling bond between one sibling who is more action-oriented and one who’s a little more sensitive.

Cassandra Clare does some good work with faeries as well, particularly in Lady Midnight and its sequels. Mark, one of the main characters, is a changeling and that is a major storyline throughout the trilogy. 

I also adored Laini Taylor’s Faeries of Dreamdark series as a kid. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it as Taylor heartlessly abandoned it without finishing it, leaving it on a deadly cliffhanger that seems doomed to remain unresolved, but I still love it so much.

Gail Carson Levine also has some great fairy tales. They’re more traditionally princessy than Unseelie or most of my other recommendations, but still a blast. 

If you liked the idea of a heist, read Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. That’s probably my favorite book. If you’re on this blog and you still haven’t read it yet… how? Why?

Want more pairs of siblings in fantasy? Reckless by Cornelia Funke is amazing. Mackenzi Lee’s Montague Siblings series is a hoot. The Spiderwick Chronicles by Toni DiTerlizzi and Holly Black is also really fun. 

Greywaren (Book Review)

I spent a long time eagerly anticipating Greywaren, the final book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamer Trilogy. I discovered the Raven Cycle two years ago and quickly became obsessed. Everything in that series was to my taste: the interesting magic, the immensely lovable characters, and particularly the unbreakable love between the main core of characters. That squad—Gansey, Ronan, Adam, Blue, and Noah (or Henry)—was one that any reader would love to join, and I was overjoyed upon finishing The Raven King to find out that Stiefvater was working on a sequel series, and not just any sequel series, but one centered on my favorite individual character.

I devoured each book as it came out, and the wait between Mister Impossible and Greywaren was particularly painful as Ronan, who has been prone to disastrously bad decision making for as long as he’s been around, was in a particularly bad spot. I so stressed and exited to get this last book so I could see him get his life back in some sort of order and make amends for the somehow-even-worse-than-usual decisions he’d made all throughout Mister Impossible. I flew through Greywaren and enjoyed it immensely as I was reading. Now that I’m finished, though, I’m not sure that I loved it; there are more than a few things about it that irk me, some a little and some a lot, and on the whole I feel that it doesn’t stack up particularly well against either the two books that preceded it or against the wonderful Raven Cycle that came before. Let’s get into it:

What’s it about?

After Hennessy shut down the ley line, the world has been thrown into confusion. Dreams have fallen asleep, and in so doing have proven that significantly more of the world is dreamed than anyone had previously known. As a result, sweetmetals—bits of art that have the ability to keep dreams awake without their dreamer, albeit temporarily—have become a valuable commodity, particularly to Declan, who needs one to keep Matthew awake and, surprisingly, to wake Ronan, who has slept since the line went down. Elsewhere, an upsetting reveal puts Farooq-Lane back on the path to thwarting the dreamed apocalypse.

What’d I think? 

I’ll start with the good stuff, because there is good stuff. Greywaren is indisputably hard to put down. I was hideously sick when I read it, and it was pretty much the only thing keeping me going. I spent a full day just writhing in pain and I was only able to forget that when I was reading. It also gave me a lot of sympathy for Hennessy! Only being able to sleep for twenty minute bursts is absolutely miserable and it is absolute no wonder she was in such a terminably bad mood. For all its other faults, Greywaren is compellingly readable and I care so much about Ronan, Adam, and Hennessy that this book was all I could think about. When Maggie Stiefvater nails it with a character, she really nails it. 

The writing, too, is as good as ever. There’s a lyrical, hypnotic quality to Stiefvater’s writing that is perfectly atmospheric. It didn’t work for me quite as well in Greywaren as it did in previous books, but that is less a fault of the technical writing than of the rest of the novel; the style emphasizes the content, so there were places where the repetition irritated me because I wanted more development or different development than what I was actually getting, but however you slice it Stiefvater has a very distinctive style that marries very well with the stories she tells, for better or for worse. 

There are spoilers throughout this review. Big ones. I don’t necessarily spell out exactly what the spoilers are, but I do discuss them all, so if you haven’t read Greywaren yet and want to go in unspoiled maybe bookmark this and come back.

A Lesson in Vengeance (Mini Book Review)

Recently, a friend and I swapped books. I told her to read All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman, and she recommended A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee. I was pretty excited to read it; we have similar taste in books, and if you’ve read any of my reviews you probably already know that I’m eternally questing for a great fantasy novel with sapphic characters.

What’s it about?

After the traumatic, violent death of her secret girlfriend Alex, Felicity took some time off of school to recover emotionally and to put distance between herself and the rumors that she killed Alex. Now she is back at Dalloway School to finish her senior year; she wants to make a new start, but she is haunted by memories of Alex… and possibly by Alex herself. Felicity believes in magic—how could she not, after what happened that fated semester?—but Ellis, a new classmate and an award-winning method novelist, is committed to demonstrating to her that all of the deaths at Dalloway—both Alex’s and the historic, witchy ones that are an intrinsic part of Dalloway’s legacy—have a rational and entirely nonmagical explanation. 

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

If you’d asked me what I thought about A Lesson in Vengeance at about two-thirds of the way through, my answer would be entirely different than what it is now that I’ve read the whole thing. The ending is very disappointing: it falls into a couple of iffy tropes, it feels a bit rushed, and it lacks the emotional urgency that I was hoping for. I’ll get into that a bit more at the end of the review, under a spoiler heading. For now, I’ll focus on what worked in the rest of the book.

 I haven’t gotten particularly deep into the dark academia, but if A Lesson in Vengeance is any indication I can see the appeal. The atmosphere is creepy and slightly suffocating. Everything feels just slightly wrong, even in the scenes that aren’t obviously wrong; of course it’s creepy when Felicity finds dried blood left over from a cryptic midnight ritual. The impressive bit is that the moments where Felicity is innocently reading in the common room often have just as much menace. The juxtaposition between Felicity and Ellis is also very atmospherically interesting: Felicity is fragile, a shell of her former self, fascinated and scared of the magic she’s increasingly certain is real; Ellis is a dominating force, the center of gravity at which everyone congregates, and almost disturbingly focused on her goals. Ellis’ ruthless practicality next to Felicity’s hesitant, ambiguous quasi-supernatural violence makes for a foreboding combination. The push and pull of them interestingly both serves as the novel’s romantic storyline and as the driving pulse that makes A Lesson in Vengeance a thriller.

Dark and Shallow Lies (Book Review)

To be totally honest, the premise of Dark and Shallow Lies by Ginny Myers Sain didn’t really catch me. Setting-heavy fiction isn’t something that particularly appeals to me, and the witchy small-town Louisiana setting is a major selling point of this one. Still, I had to read it for work so I did. Considering that the last two books I had to read for work were All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Dark and Shallow Lies had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it did. It’s fine, but it’s nothing to write home about.

What’s it about?

Grey was born in La Cachette, Louisiana, a town full of psychics and secrets, but after her mother’s death she lives with her father and returns to La Cachette only in the summertime. This summer is different, however; her best friend (and “twin flame”) Elora has disappeared and is presumed dead even though no body has been found. Grey, spurred on by what are possibly psychic visions of the night Elora disappeared, becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Elora’s disappearance… and, with it, the drownings of two other children a decade before. 

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

I liked the setting. As I said above, I don’t personally care all that much about setting. I’m not a visual person and I’ve moved often enough that to me, one place is pretty much like another. Even with that in mind, I can see that Sain did a good job with La Cachette. The town’s closeness and culture absolutely inform the story, and give it a distinct feeling. The mysteries could not occur in the same way anywhere else, because they are tied inextricably to both the magic of the town and the tight-knit, claustrophobic community. The thin lines between truth and fiction further feed the confusion, and Sain’s brief inclusion of Cajun culture and Louisiana dialect are welcome.

I liked the pacing. I expected Dark and Shallow Lies to be a fantasy novel, but it reads like a thriller. I thought the magical powers were going to play a bigger part, and while they’re important they contribute more to the overall vibe than the plot. As Grey investigates Elora’s disappearance, she uncovers secret after unsettling secret, many of which ask her to reevaluate the things she knew best: the intentions of people she loves, the lore of her town, even her relationship with Elora. The story builds bigger with each chapter, and there’s never long between twists, meaning that this is a novel that keeps you reading. I wanted to read through this quickly because book club was looming and I hadn’t even started that book yet, but I was able to make it through this one in a day and a half because it is so fast-moving and exciting.

I didn’t like the obviousness of some of the false leads. This point doesn’t need much farther elaboration, but I’m going to give some anyway. Grey chases down some leads that I could tell immediately were red herrings. I always like when the author lays a track that the reader can follow if they’re paying attention, but this was a little too easy. One of the biggest *gasp here* moments was something I’d predicted in the first few chapters, and I was unshakably onto the most suspicious players long before Grey turned any attention towards them. I narrowly missed predicting the actual murderer, but I’ll get into that in the marked spoiler section.

The Inheritance Games (Book Review)

After hearing The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes repeatedly compared to Knives Out and The Westing Game, I knew I had to read it. But while those comps got me to pick it up, they ultimately doomed The Inheritance Games because, while entertaining, it is nowhere near their level.

What’s it about?

Avery lives in her car and all her plans revolve around practicality: what colleges are affordable, what career fields are the most lucrative, what can she do to get her sister away from an abusive boyfriend, etc. Everything changes when a billionaire she’s never met leaves her nearly his entire fortune. This stroke of fortune comes with with a caveat: Avery has to live a year in the late billionaire’s mansion with his family, who is convinced that she scammed her way into their money and is desperate to prove her a fraud.

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

On surface level, it’s obvious why people talk about The Inheritance Games in the same sentence as Knives Out or The Westing Game. All three are stories about incredibly wealthy men leaving their fortunes to unexpected beneficiaries, and in all three cases this leads to unscrupulous behavior on the behalf of those who feel entitled to more than their share. But the other two are absolutely brilliant. They’re entertaining, sure, but they’re deeper than just ‘entertaining.’ They’re full of riddles and red herrings and clues that the readers can try to solve alongside the characters. They’re also layered with interesting social commentary, particularly in regards to class hierarchy, racial discrimination, sexism, and other societal inequities. Would you ever read The Westing Game and say, “Ah, yes, this is a novel about sexism?” No, probably not, but it’s impossible to read it and not see how Angela’s womanhood has affected her and dictated many of her decisions. It’s impossible to be unaware of how Judge Ford’s Blackness has shaped her, or how Christopher’s neurological disorder and wheelchair use change how people respond to him. Likewise, Knives Out is a fun and twisty mystery, but when you look beyond that it’s impossible to miss the implications of Marta’s race, age, and social class, not to mention her family’s immigration status.

The Inheritance Games doesn’t have that same significant subtext. I think Barnes did try to put some in there, as there is one brown-skinned character in the white Hawthorne family and there is a hidden queer relationship that plays indirectly into final reveals, but these aren’t integral to the story and they don’t even seem to shape the characters particularly. In of itself, there’s no issue with that. I don’t think that diversity has to do anything. Books can and should have POC and queer characters just for the sake of having them (we’d never ask an author to justify why a character is white, after all, or straight), but in The Inheritance Games, the inclusion feels like it’s meant to be more meaningful than it actually is.

Even the class elements of the novel are understated, which is odd considering that this is the story of a homeless orphan who inherits an unfathomable fortune. She’s thrown into a situation in which she is surrounded by people who have only ever known spectacular wealth, but the differences between them are superficial at most. They don’t really approach the world in different ways, and in fact the Hawthorne boys are surprised by how unexpectedly suitable Avery is; she falls in with them without much fanfare, and her only faux pas is calculated to take the heat off her sister. Most of Avery’s transition from poverty to wealth is focused on a makeover. Once she glows up, she’s all but indistinguishable from the Hawthornes.

Warcross #2: Wildcard (Book Review)

Wildcard, the sequel to Marie Lu’s excellent Warcross, has been on my to-read list for an embarrassingly long time. I’m really bad about reading the first book of a series when it first comes out and then not actually following through with the rest of the series. A lot of time passes between publications and I forget specifics, so I always intend to reread before diving into the new material, but I add new books to my TBR constantly, so it often takes time for me to get to the point where I’m committed to a reread. It has been a few years, but I finally made Wildcard my priority.

And I was hugely disappointed.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

(SPOILERS)

It’s not a bad book, per se, but it pulled the focus away from the elements I loved most in Warcross and instead introduced a set of new characters who dominated the narrative at the expense of those I already knew and loved. I loved Warcross. I think I actually loved it more the second time around. Warcross is The Hunger Games meets Ready Player One. It’s fast paced and dynamic and the protagonist Emika is incredible. She’s tough and independent, just rough enough around the edges that she prickles, but no so much that she cuts. What I loved most about Emika, though, is that she goes it alone but she is not aggressively antisocial. She is slow to trust, but watching her friendship bloom with her Warcross team is really lovely. Even before she trusts the team to help her outside of the game, she has an obvious affection for them—and them for her—and I loved the moments when she would relax and let herself enjoy their company. It helps that they’re such a fun bunch. One of the things I was most excited for in Wildcard was the prospect of Roshan, Hammie, and Asher being more central.

Tremaine, also, I was excited to see more from. He was an interesting peripheral character in Warcross, and he was poised to step up and take on a starring role. The way book one ends, I was sure that Tremaine was going to take on a narrative role the size of Hideo’s. Lu did such a great job with Tremaine. She somehow managed to make him intriguing; we don’t know much about him, and his few interactions with Emika are antagonistic, but for some reason I still wanted more time with him to get to know him.

My other favorite thing in the first novel is Emika’s relationship with Hideo, and Hideo’s relationship with morality. I’m fascinated by love interests who turn out to be the villain. There aren’t many of them (the Darkling from Shadow and Bone is really the only other one who comes to mind), but they’re absolutely fascinating when they show up. There are few things I love more than YA literature, but even I can admit that there are an awful lot of toxic boyfriends found there. Any time a book really leans into that and lets warning signs be warning signs, I’m impressed. I’m not saying that Hideo is evil or that I wanted Lu to make him evil. All I’m saying is that Hideo is far more interesting as a mega-powerful tech genius who has invented something that gives him unethical power over millions of people than he is as a boyfriend. Hideo is inspired and fueled by the grief of losing his brother, but an explanation is not an excuse. Emika, in Warcross, has the right response to Hideo’s megalomaniacal leanings: she understands Hideo but works to stop him. Her sympathy and love for Hideo do not blind her to the harm he is doing, so when he ignores her pleas to stop and presses on with his plan, she breaks everything off with him and places herself in opposition.

Emika is a character with a conscience, much as she tries to hide it. She’s a bounty hunter, but she has never harmed anyone and balks at the thought of doing so. She cares for and finances a deadbeat roommate even when she can barely sustain herself. Yes, she’s a hacker and a thief but there are ethical lines she won’t cross. This conflict between who she is and who she appears to do makes her a wonderfully dynamic character.

It’s too bad that’s missing in Wildcard. I can hardly believe how passive Emika is in this sequel. She’s a go-getter. She’s a doer. She is directly responsible for most of the action in Warcross. In Wildcard, she’s a pawn. Both sides want to use her, and she is useful more for her romantic connection to Hideo than for any of her numerous skills. She is in the middle of everything, but she doesn’t cause anything. She switches allegiance when Jax or Hideo or Taylor provides her with a new piece of information or a fresh lie, but she rarely uncovers anything for herself. She fails at the only major hacking problem that comes her way; she passes the problem to Tremaine, who passes it to a new character called Jesse, who—as we learn near the end of the novel—was fed the information by Jax.

If you only read Warcross, you might be wondering who Jax is. She’s a new character in Wildcard. She’s an immensely important character in Wildcard. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with introducing a significant new character in a sequel. Look at Nikolai Lantsov from the Grisha trilogy. Alucard Emery from the Darker Shade series. Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter. Rachel Elizabeth Dare from Percy Jackson. Finnick Odair from the Hunger Games. Maia Roberts from the Mortal Instruments. There’s no shortage of great characters who miss out on the first installment of a series. The thing about these characters, though, is that they fill out a universe. They occupy empty spaces or open up new potential. They don’t muscle in and shove the original characters out of the way.

Supernatural 15×20 Reaction (Carry On)

Sometimes (often), I read tumblr posts about Supernatural episodes before I watch the episode myself. I’m impatient, and while I can’t watch the episodes as they air live, I can read people’s liveblogs. I don’t really mind spoilers, and Supernatural episodes are so uneven that I like to know what I’m getting into before I get into it. Over the years, I’ve found some bloggers whose opinions I agree with 95% of the time. Based on those bloggers’ reactions to the finale… I don’t want to watch it.

Which is nuts, because I’ve been EAGERLY waiting for tonight’s episode for two weeks. I loved 15×18 when it aired, but in retrospect I’d love to delete it because it set my expectations way too high, much higher than they ever should have been.

I’m a completionist, so I’m sure I’ll watch “Carry On” in a couple of weeks (you can’t really watch 326/327 episodes), but for now… nope.

I’ve been watching for Cas this whole time. Even before I’d seen a single episode with Cas, I was mentally counting down episodes until “Lazarus Rising,” because it was tumblr posts about him that first piqued my interest about the show, and my understanding was that the show is pretty good for three seasons and then becomes epic. For the most part, that was true. I never, ever would have stuck with Supernatural if it weren’t for Cas. He is Supernatural‘s greatest triumph/asset, and all they did was waste him.

Nevernight (Book Review)

I got Nevernight by Jay Kristoff from the library because I picked a few books from my goodreads to-read list at random. I don’t know how Nevernight ended up on that list in the first place, as I don’t generally read dark or adult fantasy and while I have read Kristoff’s work in the past (specifically, I read Illuminae), his name on the cover of a book is not necessarily an incentive to pick it up. I think I must have seen Nevernight on an online list somewhere, probably one with small pictures, because I suspect I wouldn’t have read it if I’d seen the cover artwork up close and personal. It’s intriguing, certainly, but nightmarish. They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but if the cover is well done, there’s no reason not to. Nevernight’s cover is well done: both the image and the novel itself are interesting, compelling, creepy, and violent.

What’s it about?

Long ago, Mia swore to revenge herself on the important men who executed her father and sent her mother and brother to a miserable prison. In order to obtain the skills necessary to kill these men, though, Mia must become a Blade, a sanctified assassin for the Red Church and its deity, the Lady of Blessed Murder (the blasphemous sister of the officially recognized sun god). She joins a group of thirty-some hardened acolytes at the church and is informed that only four of them will achieve their goal to become Blades.

What’d I think?

I have a strict rule about reading: I have to read 100 pages of a book before I decide whether or not I’m going to finish it. Usually at that point I’ll finish it regardless because once I’ve sunk 100 pages into a book, I’d rather finish it and be able to claim I’ve read it (I’ve actually only DNF’d one book that I can remember). Maybe it’s not the best rule, but it’s how I operate. But let me tell you: Nevernight needed those one hundred freebie pages. If I’ve read another book that starts as badly, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember it. The opening chapter has some interesting things going on, stylistically, but after that… yikes. Mia and Tric, another important character, make their way across a dangerous desert to the Red Church, chased by monsters. You’d think running from monsters towards a murder church might be at least kind of interesting, but you would be wrong. It’s mind-numbingly boring. At that point in the novel, neither Mia nor Tric had done anything to get me to care about them as characters, and their repartee is not nearly as witty and charming as it’s evidently meant to be. The monster fights go on way too long and the narration doesn’t help it at all. More on the narration in a bit.

A Good Neighborhood (Book Review)

For obvious reasons, book club has not been meeting for the past few months. I run the book club for work, which reads adult books, and while I very much enjoy doing so, left to my own devices I usually read YA. I meant to read the book club selections anyway, but then I kind of… forgot. We were scheduled to read A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler a while back. April, I think, although I’m not sure, and I finally got around to reading it.

What’s it about?

When Brad Whitman—local celebrity due to his HVAC commercials—moves his white, upper-class family to Oak Knell he sets off a chain of events that culminate in a tragedy. The Whitman family moves right next door to Valerie Aston-Holt and her son Xavier. Valerie, a Black ecologist, immediately takes a dislike to Brad, because in building his luxury home, Brad bent rules and has disrupted the root system of the fantastic tree in Valerie’s yard; also, his home is the first step in neighborhood-wide gentrification. The friction between the two, already intense, escalates when Xavier and Juniper, Brad’s step-daughter, fall in love.

What’d I think?

A Good Neighborhood hooked me immediately. The story is told from the perspective of the neighborhood collectively, looking back from some unspecified future date. I love creative POVs, and this one is particularly interesting because it provides a perspective that is both impartial and biased, personal and detached. It also starts the story with a heavy dose of foreshadowing that immediately interested me, but slipped my mind before I got to the end, so I was surprised despite the forewarning.

The way that Fowler braids issues of class, race, gender, and environmentalism together is masterful. I try to seek out diverse fiction, so I’ve read lots of books that focus on one or two of those themes and nail them, but I don’t think I’ve read anything that combines them the way A Good Neighborhood does, with all these different biases baked into a person because of their privilege. Little moments—like when it doesn’t occur to Juniper that her expensive new car is beyond what most people could dream of, or when Brad assumes that Xavier is the help—demonstrate just how deeply these ingrained convictions and behaviors go; for most of the book, the reader dislikes Brad and his family not because of anything that he’s actively done maliciously, but because of his socialized blindness. For the first half of the book, Brad isn’t an irredeemable bastard. He can be charming and, at times, genuinely helpful but the reader, like Valerie, is perpetually on edge when he’s around because his power–when combined with his privileged thoughtlessness–makes him dangerous.

I was 100% on board with A Good Neighborhood, but the second half disappointed me, but making subtleties too overt and cranking the pace up until things were moving far too quickly. For most of the book, the conflicts are subtle. Valerie and Brad fight over a tree that Brad unknowingly but flippantly destroyed when he built his expensive home and swimming pool. The conflict is about the tree, but it’s also about all the issues underneath it, how Brad is rich and white and male and powerful while Valerie, who is poorer and Black and female, is essentially powerless. In my opinion, this is plenty of conflict, especially since it is so well written. Everything unwinds slowly and carefully.

And then the second half happens. It’s like someone looked at the book and said, “okay, where’s the action?” and Fowler overcompensated.

I have to talk about the end now! Sorry! Skip to the end if you don’t want to be spoiled.

I Care Too Much About Fictional Relationships (Erin + Andy)

A while back, I posted a supremely nerdy essay about my love for the relationship between Pippin and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings because I hadn’t posted anything in a long time. I seriously didn’t expect anyone to read it, because it was very long and very nerdy. Weirdly, though, people actually do read it. Or at least they click on it. Since I’m in the middle of a very long book and it has therefore been a long time since I posted a book review, I thought now might be a good time for another essay in the same vein.

This time, I’m going to defend the best romantic couple from The Office (US).

I Care Too Much About Fictional Relationships

I’m talking about Andy and Erin. Sadly, they’re the only core couple on the show that didn’t work out. I don’t know why it didn’t, but I have a lot to say on why it should have.

Seriously. I can’t be alone in thinking that Andy/Erin was a far better couple than Jim/Pam, Michael/Holly, or Angela/Dwight.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Book Review)

I don’t remember when I first heard about Erika L. Sánchez’s novel I Am Not Your Mexican Daughter, but it’s been on my to-read list for a long time. I considered buying it almost every time I went into a bookstore for the past year, but I never did and eventually got it from the library instead. Thank goodness I did, because I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter is not nearly as good as I expected it to be.

 What’s it about?

After her perfect sister Olga is mowed down by a semi and killed, Julia finds herself in a precarious position in her family. She is not the well-behaved girl that Olga was, and now that Olga is gone, that is causing even more problems with her parents, whose heartbreak is exacerbated by frustration with Julia. But then Julia finds something in Olga’s room that suggests that, maybe, Olga wasn’t the perfect Mexican daughter everyone thought she was, either.

What’d I think?

If I had to summarize the problems with I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter in one sentence, I’d go with it tries to do too much. The first half is more or less coherent. Julia is a loudmouthed troublemaker who clashes with her mother; when Olga dies, Julia feels guilty because she is partially responsible for Olga being where she was when she was killed. I was invested. I wanted to know what secrets Olga was keeping, and I felt for Julia (even though Julia can be extremely judgy and obnoxious) because her mom is hard on her. Then the second half of the book hits, and it’s almost like Sánchez made a bet with someone about how many topical issues she could cram into I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter without addressing them in any real, significant way. Aside from dealing with grief, loss, death, and the pressure of familial obligations (all of which are done more or less well), the novel tries to juggle, to varying degrees and with limited success, all of the following:

• Race/racism
• Classism
• Immigration
• Mexican gang violence
• Anxiety and depression
• Suicide
• Teen pregnancy
• Abandoned dreams
• Abortion
• Sexism
• Religious homophobia
• Rape
• Parental abuse
• Dating across racial and socioeconomic lines
• Virginity
• Extramarital affairs
• The plight of undocumented immigrants
• Fat shaming
• Self-harm
• Eating disorders

It’s too much. No book has to tackle every single topic, and in my opinion it’s better to ignore something than to handle it badly. A lot of the things listed above are dipped into only briefly (for example, Julia’s friend has a pregnancy scare, goes to an abortion clinic, gets yelled at by pro-life protestors, and finds out she isn’t pregnant. This storyline takes up about one page, which is simply not enough for any sort of difficult topic). Other items on the list are just done really badly.

We Told Six Lies (Book Review)

Even though I read it pretty quickly, I was ultimately very disappointed by We Told Six Lies by Victoria Scott. Thrillers, in my opinion, tend to be either very good or very bad and while We Told Six Lies straddled the line up until the end, it ultimately careened off onto the “very bad” side with an exceptionally ill-conceived twist.

⭐

What’s it about?

When his girlfriend, Molly, disappears, eighteen-year-old Cobain is made a person of interest. Cobain is a loner with violent and possessive streaks and a history of mental breakdowns, so he is a natural suspect, especially when Molly’s friends come forward to say that Molly had broken up with him shortly before her disappearance. But Cobain insists that he loved Molly, would do nothing to hurt her, and had in fact been planning to run away with her before everything went down.

A quick side note about the nature of mysteries/thrillers.

Thrillers/mysteries are genres dependent on their endings. An amazing mystery that ends sloppily is a sloppy mystery. An otherwise mediocre mystery with a phenomenal, mind-blowing conclusion is likely going to be remembered as great. That’s just how it is. For that reason, it’s very difficult to talk about a mystery/thriller without spoiling the ending at least in general terms. I’m going to put that off as long as possible, but there is going to be a spoilery section at the end of this, and it’s going to contain 99% of why I rated We Told Six Lies so poorly.

What’d I think?

There are a lot of issues with We Told Six Lies. There are minor ones, like the fact that nearly every character has a stupid, artsy name (“Cobain,” “Nixon,” “Jet,” etc.). One or two odd names is fine, but when everyone has one, it’s obvious that they were all named by the same person. But there are also more significant issues, like the fact that the story’s “hero” is disturbingly controlling and toxic. And no, I’m not talking about Molly. Well, I am, because Molly is manipulative and toxic but at least her tendencies are clearly character flaws. But I’m talking about Cobain, because it’s his behavior that keeps me from liking We Told Six Lies.

Make a mental list of every controlling, borderline abusive behavior a guy could have in a relationship.

Cobain gets 100%

Chances are, Cobain does everything on your list.

Queen of Air and Darkness (Book Review)

I’m going to pretend that my absence from blogging for the past month or so was a planned hiatus rather than a pause caused by moving, starting a new job, getting sick, having family over, and reading slowly. This will most likely be the last regular book review of the year, though I’m hoping to get my annual top and bottom ten lists out sooner rather than later.

I wish I could close out the year with a book that I liked more, but it is what it is. I had been looking forward to Cassandra Clare’s Queen of Air and Darkness for a very, very long time, so the fact that I ended up being disappointed with it is just… a major bummer. There are, frankly, a lot of flaws in this book and it coasts a lot off the goodwill that comes from the many other novels that came before it.

Specifically, these ones

Summary: What’s it about?

Queen of Air and Darkness is the final book in the Dark Artifices trilogy (Lady Midnight and Lord of Shadows are books one and two, respectively), and it follows Emma, Julian, Cristina, Mark, and the rest of the crew as they continue to combat the risen Annabel, a conflict that is even more personal after the death that occurred at the climax of Lord of Shadows. Grief exacerbates the Blackthorns’ problems, as Ty starts down a dark path—and brings Kit with him—and Julian makes a drastic decision that he believes will save him from pain and from the still-looming threat of the terrible parabatai curse that looms over him and Emma. Plus, the bigoted Cohort is still around, and faeries from both the Seelie and Unseelie courts pose threats.

Review: What’d I think?

 

I love Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters, and I’ll continue reading about them for as long as she keeps writing, but after finishing Queen of Air and Darkness I’ve come to the conclusion that she simply does not finish well. Instead of focusing on giving one story a satisfying conclusion, Clare gets distracted by starting the next one. I was incredibly disappointed in City of Heavenly Fire (the final book of the Mortal Instruments) when I first read it because of the long sections about Emma and the Blackthorn children. I remember thinking, “I hate these stupid kids. They’re so pointless. Why do Jace and Clary care about them so much?” At the time, I was convinced that I wouldn’t read the Dark Artifices because of the awkward way Clare shoehorned its beginning into her first series. Lady Midnight convinced me that I was mistaken and that this new series was worth reading, but it was hard work undoing that terrible, terrible first impression. Unfortunately, Queen of Air and Darkness makes the same mistake, but it is even worse.

The excruciatingly long middle section of the novel, during which Julian and Emma visit Thule, the alternate dimension in which Sebastian killed Clary and kept Jace enslaved, and discover the power of Ash—the powerful son of Sebastian and the Seelie Queen—is agonizingly painful. I barely made it through it. I flipped ahead to see how much longer of it I had to endure before returning to the actual story. I thought Ash at least would be important now, but nope. He’s just a plant for the next series, a plant who gets entirely too much pagetime in a novel that loses itself by having too much going on.