Not Jane Eyre, Not Magical, and Not Good: Lauren Blackwood – Within These Wicked Walls

Reading this right after a very, very good and a very, very bad book (The Poppy War and For the Wolf respectively) gave me a little perspective on how to review this attempt at a Jane Eyre retelling, supposedly Ethiopian-inspired. I even started out enjoying the book but when none of the promises made by the author and publisher were delivered, my rating dropped pretty drastically. Plus, I don’t have the patience for artificial romantic drama anymore.

WITHIN THESE WICKED WALLS
by Lauren Blackwood

Published: Wednesday Books, 2021
eBook: 352 pages
Standalone
My rating: 3/10

Opening line: Sweltering heat hit me like the sudden leap of the bonfire when I traded the protection of the mule-drawn cart’s tarp for urning sand.

What the heart desires, the house destroys…

Kiersten White meets Tomi Adeyemi in this Ethiopian-inspired debut fantasy retelling of Jane Eyre.

Andromeda is a debtera—an exorcist hired to cleanse households of the Evil Eye. When a handsome young heir named Magnus Rochester reaches out to hire her, Andromeda quickly realizes this is a job like no other, with horrifying manifestations at every turn, and that Magnus is hiding far more than she has been trained for. Death is the most likely outcome if she stays, but leaving Magnus to live out his curse alone isn’t an option. Evil may roam the castle’s halls, but so does a burning desire. 

I wish I could tell you something about this book but, unfortunately, if I say “lazy YA romance” you’ll know all there is to know. But wait, this is sold as a remix of Jane Eyre – one of my favorite classics – set in an Ethiopian-inspired world with magic and demons and stuff. So let’s look at that and unravel each of this book’s problems and all those broken promises.

It begins with the fact that have no idea where this story is set. To be fair, the setting doesn’t matter to the plot one bit. Because it begins with Andromeda arriving in the desert, on her way to the castle where she is going to work as a debetera (read: exorcist). There may be a few lines talking about a desert and hot weather and such, but once she’s at the castle, which is described pretty much like a castle in England, the setting stops mattering. Add to that the inhabitants of said castle. There are a few servants, none of whom we get to know properly, a couple of guests, and of course the master of the house, who happens to be a teenager. At least I think so because it’s never made really clear except when the he mentions he’s not 21 yet. He is English and he is called Magnus and Andi calls him “sir” although she also calls him by his first name. Which leads me to me not knowing when this is set either.
Many things could have been explained away if this had been a secondary world fantasy setting but it’s definitely not. Real-world cities are mentioned by name (London, Paris, Pargue). This being sold as a “Jane Eyre retelling” made my mind jump to the 19th century as I was struggling to grasp the power structure, the social status, and the customs of this story. That was an exercise in futility as nothing makes much sense in this book.

Added to the complete lack of world building, the characters are also bland with very little backtory. And what there is actually contracdicts itself over and over. Let’s take Andi who we learn very little about and most of it much too late in the novel, but let’s look at what we know: She was sold by her parents when she was very small. A highly skilled debtera named Jember bought her and raised her to fight the Evil Eye as well. He was far from loving and kind but she lived with him all her life, she has childhood memories, somegood, som enot good at all. They live in a cellar beneath the church (don’t know what kind of church, the author never elaborates) and they are paid by the church because exorcism is good I guess.
Despite this, Andi mentions over and over how she used to live “on the street” and that she has such brilliant “survival skills” – which paints a completely different picture of her childhood than the one we were told about before. It makes no sense. Either you lived on the street, had to steal food and fight for your life (literally) or Jember raised you, without love but with a roof over your head and lots of demon fighting lessons.
But even if we disregard Andi’s tale of two childhoods, what we see and what we are told of who she is now also doensn’t go together. She calls herself strong and stubborn and tough as nails, yet I swear she spends the entire second half of this book sobbing at the slightest provocation. And I’m not saying its bad for a protagonist to show emotion or to cry – not at all – but don’t paint he as this hard person who can take anything without flinching when that’s obviously not who she is.

What could have redeemed this was the fact that it’s a Jane Eyre remix. Oh boy, let me tell you about how that went. So the story is about Andi taking on the job to cleanse Magnus’ big ass mansion from the Evil Eye, which comes to possess buildings (and people apparently) when they commit a cardinal sin. Magnus si richer than anybody has a right to be so his sin is greed, thus the Evil Eye. (More on the use of Catholicism later).
The Evil Eye shows up as manifestations but every room has its own one that can’t leave – nobody explains why or how. So one room may have hands coming out fo the wallpaper, being all creepy and grabby. Another might be drenched in blood, also creepy and a bitch to clean up. The slightly more dangerous kind manifests as human-looking creatures, such as the librarian who mostly just hurls books at Andi which I’m sure is unpleasant but nowhere near the life-threatening situation it’s presented as… Now Andi’s job is to cleanse these rooms by going into them and, while the manifestation is present, making an amulet. Those are small silver disks which she welds – I guess to make a pattern or something, it’s never explained, sorry – and then she also has to use string to wrap around the amulet with a needle? But sometimes she also paints them? I don’t think I’m a particularly stupid or inattentive reader but you can probably tell I have no idea what exactly she is doing and the author didn’t take the time to explain it properly. Because wh have to rush through certain plot beats of Jane Eyre as quickly as possible instead!

So Andi meets Magnus and they have a bit of banter going, which I actually quite enjoyed. It was early times in the book and I still had hopes that all my burning questions (such as basic world building) would be answered later. But what follows is a series of out of the blue changes in behaviour between the two for no apparent reason other than that’s how it goes in Jane Eyre. But where the slowly budding romance is earned in Jane Eyre, here it just is. Instantly, just because. After what we’re told is a couple of weeks but what feels more like hours, Andi is head over heels in love with Magnus.
The same goes for the jealousy bit. Where Jane Eyre honestly believes she has no shot at Rochester because he’s her employer, flirts relentlessly with the gorgeous neighbor, and is far above her station socially, in Within These Wicked Walls, there was never a sense of how Andi and Magnus relate to each other socially or culturally. Sure, he’s rich and she’s poor, but they always speak like equals and there was just no sense of a power imbalance because Magnus is super cursed which doesn’t exactly give him the high ground. He doesn’t really flirt with Kelela “the rival”, either, but because it’s part of Jane Eyre, Lauren Blackwood conjured up a ridiculous reason for Andi to withdraw emotionally. She has a complete freak-out when she finds out that Magnus and Kelela promised to get married to each other when they were children and even though Magnus tells her they’re not really engaged because a kids’ promise isn’t binding. But Andi doesn’t care. That’s the only conflict the author could conjure up and so we have to take it. Even after Magnus has confessed his love for Andi, she still refuses to be wit him because “she can’t be with a man who is promised to another”. My god, how stupid can a story get?

Speaking of god. There was a very annoying undercurrent of Christian preaching in this novel. Andi mentions how god loves her so much (never mind her two terrible childhoods or the fact that the Evil Eye exists), she gets disgusted by people cursing yet barely flinches at somebody dying in front of her, and it all had a distasteful (to me) dash of Catholicism to it.

Wow, I have ranted a lot already so let me sum up the rest really quickly. The second half of the novel is pure manufactured drama. A second storyline is introduced about Andi dealing with Jember, her parental figure. It’s all incredibly superficial and I’d imagine pretty offensive to people who have actually lived through emotional or physical abuse. The magic system is never explained, the setting is never explained, the curse is of course broken, even though none of it was very exciting (it’s literally just making amulets), and Magnus and Andi spend most of that part crying alternately or exclaiming their undying love for each other in super embarrassing language.

A few things that made me laugh:

• Manifestations show up at 10 PM exactly. Why? I don’t know, I guess these demons are just super punctual. As is the clock in Magnus’ manor.
• You can revive people to make them live as a zombie, but they come back as their younger self and also are made of clay for some reason?
• Andi calls someone she’s known for a day “her dearest friend”
• Everyone is fine with people dying because romance and heroice sacrifice I guess

The one redeeming thing I can say about this book is that it’s a super fast read. It’s dialogue-heavy (albeit mostly bad dialogue) and the beginning had a lot of potential. If only the author had actually had anything to say, or spent a few hours building a world, or takenthe time to do a proper Jane Eyre remix… Also, I have no idea what this has to do with Ethiopia other than that an exorcist is called debtera. Seriously, one quick Google search yields more information than this entire book.

MY RATING: 3/10 – Bad!

How To Say Nothing in 500 Pages: Hannah Whitten – For the Wolf

Look, I had high hopes for this book. Really high hopes. I mean, I put it on my 5-star-prediction list, just to let you know that I went into this convinced I would love it. Unfortunately – and I’m very much not alone in that assessment – it ended up being a hot mess that should never have made it into print in its current form. This review will be more like a cathartic rant than anything else.

FOR THE WOLF
by Hannah Whitten

Published: Orbit, 2021
eBook: 488 pages
Series: Wilderwood #1
My rating: 2.5/10

Opening line: Two nights before she was sent to the Wolf, Red wore a dress the color of blood.

THE FIRST DAUGHTER IS FOR THE THRONE.
THE SECOND DAUGHTER IS FOR THE WOLF.

As the only Second Daughter born in centuries, Red has one purpose – to be sacrificed to the Wolf in the Wood in order to save her kingdom. Red is almost relieved to go. Plagued by a dangerous power she can’t control, at least she knows that in the Wilderwood, she can’t hurt those she loves. Again.

But the legends lie. The Wolf is a man, not a monster. Her magic is a calling, not a curse. And if she doesn’t learn how to use it, the Wilderwood – and her world – will be lost forever.

Hannah Whitten’s New York Times bestselling debut is a sweeping tale of love, legends and the secrets that hide beyond the trees.

There are so many things wrong with this book, I hardly know where to start. The most glaring plotholes? The flat self-insert characters? The obvious villain? The shoddy world-building? The inconsistencies? The melodramatic writing and dialogue? The complete and utter lack of story? You see, we’re spoiled for choice here. Oh well, I’ll just dive in and spill it all out in whatever way – that’s how the author did it as well, after all.

So Red – short for Redarys – and Neve – short for Neverah – are two royal sisters who live in Valleyda, a country that borders the Wilderwood. Many centuries ago, some dude fled into the wood with his girlfriend who was betrothed to a man she didn’t want to mary. They kind of ended up stuck in the forest and the dude, forthwith called the Wolf for no discernible reason whatsoever, lives in that forest. He brings his dead girlfriend to the border and demands “the next one” and from that day on, when two daughters are born to the ruling family, the first is for the throne, the second is “for the wolf” (roll credits). The reasons for this are unclear and – this isn’t a spoiler but a warning – are NEVER PROPERLY EXPLAINED! Neither does anyone ever explain why this magical dude whose name I have forgotten already is called a Wolf, what precisely he does with those second daughters and what the point of anything is, really.

Oh well, that’s only half-true. You see, Valleyda has a religion based on the “Five Kings” which are five random Kings from the time the Wolf went into the forest. They were apparently taken by evil Wolf guy and now people send the second daughters to the Wolf to get those five kings back. Why? Nobody knows. Who decided that the second daughters were supposed to be a trade for the five kings? Nobody knows. Who even were those kings, why would we want them to return and wouldn’t they be zombies after hundreds of years anyway? Nobody knows. Because Hannah Whitten hasn’t actually done any worldbuilding that isn’t absolutely necessary to tell us the kind of story she apparently wanted to tell.

Which is no story at all but rather throwing two bland characters together and having them be melodramatic at each other. Seriously, nothing about this book makes sense. So let’s ignore that there’s no reason for this ridiculous religion to exist and follow Red as she enters the Wilderwood as a sacrifice. She brings the clothes on her back and a BAG OF BOOKS! I mean, I feel you girl, I love reading too but come on, you were certain you were going straight to your death, why the fuck would you bring a heavy bag full of books??? Do you think the Wolf – who you’re convinced is going to kill you on sight – is going to let you finish that series you started before he offs you?
Either way, she arrives at the Beast’s castle, and who’d have thought, the Wolf/Beast turns out to be hot young man who, despite being hundreds of years old, looks like he’s twenty so it’s Twilight all over and we’re all okay with it because apparently that’s just the sort of thing some people find sexy. What follows is hundreds of pages of nothing. There is no fucking conflict because Red has it pretty sweet at that place, Eammon (the “Wolf”) is a bit distant because he’s emo and just wants to keep her safe and sacrifice himself for the world because he’s just that pure of heart. Red shows no initative, doesn’t do anything, basically just exists in a state of stubborn uselessness and moons over Eammon’s sexy dark hair.

Then there’s the whole magic “system”. None of that makes any sense, it always behaves in such a way as to be convenient to the author’s wishes. If she wants Red to be heroically saved by Eammon – who is super emo martyr guy and nothing else, by the way – then the forest is bad. If she wants Red to do something useful for once, the forest magic works completely differently and helps. A tiny point of interest was the event that happend on Red’s 16th birthday where apparently she had an adventure at the edge of the Wilderwood that ended in “carnage” and made her resign herself to her fate as a sacrifice. That carnage is explained in a few sentences and is actually super boring, doesn’t add anything to the plot, and explains absolutely nothing about how the magic here works. But whatever, afterwards, Red has some piece of Wilderwood inside of her? Plants go crazy when she feels that power, sometimes they want to kill her, sometimes not? It’s an evil power but also totally good because the Wilderwood and the Wolf actually protect the world from a bigger evil… Don’t ask me for details, there aren’t any and what little is explained makes no sense. And for the ending to be properly cheesy and disgustingly sweet, every single rule that has been sort of set up over this long, long novel, is just thrown overboard. Because we can’t have anything be complicated in this supposedly adult fantasy novel.

Which leads me to another gripe. The author herself was very adamant about this being “not YA”! First of all, YA is not an insult. Some of the most amazing books in the world are YA books and YA authors are not to be looked down upon – seriously, keeping a teenager interested in a book is a feat! Secondly, if you wanted to write an adult novel so badly, why the hell didn’t you? Apart from its plotlessness, this book doesn’t just read like YA, it reads like really, really bad YA. The kind where you know the author just wants to write about two pretty people making out but doesn’t actually have anything to say or a story to tell. I can see her Pinterest mood board in my mind, with all the foresty dark bookish aesthetics and the scarred hero with the sexy hair and the curvy blonde heroine (who just happens to look a lot like the author herself) – but none of that is a story.

What you get is the girl going in the forest, meeting a handful of nice people there. They protect the world from some evil that makes no sense using magic that makes no sense and being so fucking good it makes my teeth ache. Eammon is pure self-sacrifice, he would die rather than let Red get hurt because, after all, he’s known her for a whole week so that’s only natural. In bad YA trope land. Red herself is also a total Mary Sue who only wants to protect her sister – a relationship which isn’t shown on the page at all, by the way, we’re just supposed to feel this super deep love between two cardboard characters whose defining characteristic is their difference in hair color.
The biggest problem of this book (and that’s saying something) is its utter lack of conflict. Even the short scenes where Eammon saves Red or Red saves Eammon never feel like they’re in any real danger. That entire good forest/bad forest, Shadowlands (what even are those?!), Five Kings, fake mythology crap is just in no way interesting. Red isn’t in danger, Eammon is in pretend-danger but we know nothing’s going to happen to him because the entire point of this story is the mind-numbing romance between them. And calling it “slow burn” is insulting to the readers’ intelligence. Because “nothing happening” and the characters just not talking or interacting in any way does not equal slow burn. It equals boring. Then suddenly, they’re hot for each other, make out a couple of times and of course would DIE FOR EACH OTHER BECAUSE REASONS. Waaaah, it’s so infuriatingly bad.

Ooooh, and speaking of the sister. Neve is still in Valleyda and she wants her sister back. We don’t know why as their relationship was never really established, but hey, let’s just go with it. Neve meets the most obvious and ridiculous villain you can imagine – again, this is for adult adults who are so much smarter than stupid teenagers, let’s not forget it because women authors don’t automatically write YA – and then just lets herself be manipulated into stupid crap. She also watches uselessly as the manipulative evil priestess clearly kills off all the people standing in her way. Neve is so dumb, even if the sisterly relationship had felt in any way real, I couldn’t have rooted for her.

The writing is at least consistent with the quality of the book’s plot. Endless repetitions, wannabe poetic descriptions, but really very basic non-immersive language is what you get. Characters constantly shape their fingers into claws, move their hand over their faces, Red’s veins always turn green because forest magic, and even the many, many mentions of blood feel completly lifeless. I suppose that’s the author’s reasoning for this book being so very adult – because although our protagonists have fucking magic, what they do the entire middle part of the book is bleed on trees. Yep, you read that right. And as someone who is clumsy and has cut herself fairly frequently with kitchen knives, let me tell you, it’s no fun. It hurts, it stings, it bleeds like a pig, and it keeps burning long after the blood has stopped coming. The bleeding and cutting in this book felt like it’s nothing. Eammon’s hands are basically nothing but scars because he keeps cutting them and bleeding around like it’s a vampire party. And sure, if mentions of blood are a trigger for you, then definitely stay away from this book. But if you generally don’t have a problem with reading about blood and worry that this will be too gruesome – don’t. The descriptions are so lifeless, so throwaway, that you never, for a second, feel like you’re there or like anyone really got hurt. Plus, there’s convenient healing/taking away wounds magic.

You might wonder why I even finished this book and you have a very valid point! The first time I thought about DNFing was at 25% which was about when Red and Eammon met and the basic plot (or lack thereof) had been set up. At that point already, there was nothing I wanted to know. You know that feeling when you read a book or watch a movie or TV show – the need to know what happens next – that was missing here. I kept pushing because 25% is not much and it was a 5-star-prediction after all. Plus, Beauty and the Beast retelling, magical dark wood, comparisons to Naomi Novik and Katherine Arden (which are a fucking insult to both those brilliant authors, if you ask me). It only got worse from there but once I was past 50% I thought I might as well finish it, see if any of those world building “mysteries” get resolved, if anything is explained, if there is a point to this rather big book at all. Now that I’ve made it through this messy author wish fulfillment, I can safely say, it wasn’t worth it. Feel free to skip!

MY RATING: 2.5/10 – Really bad!

P.S.: I just started a re-read of The Poppy War and it is the most soothing experience to read something so good after something this embarrassing and amateurish!

Third Time’s The Same Old Boring Stuff: Isaac Asimov – Second Foundation

My opinion of Isaac Asimov, his writing abilities, and his position as one of the greats of science fiction, wasn’t that great to begin with. But reading the Foundation Trilogy (which was later turned into a longer series) pretty much makes me question earlier generations and their taste in fiction. I also don’t get how publishers let Asimov get away with writing the same story three times and publishing it as if it’s something new…

SECOND FOUNDATION
by Isaac Asimov

Published: Harper Voyager, 1953
eBook: 227 pages
Series: Foundation #3
My rating: 3.5/10

Opening line: The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years.

When the First Foundation was conquered by a force Seldon had not foreseen – the overwhelming power of a single individual, a mutant called the Mule – the second Foundation was forced to reveal its existence and, infinitely worse, a portion of its power. One man understood the shifting patterns of the inhabited cosmos. This was Hari Seldon, the last great scientist of the First Empire.

The mathematics of psychohistory enabled Seldon to predict the collapse of the Empire and the onset of an era of chaos and war. To restore civilization in the shortest possible time, Seldon set up two Foundations. The First was established on Terminus in the full daylight of publicity. But the Second, at the other end of the galaxy , took shape behind a veil of total silence.

Because the Second Foundation guards the laws of psychohistory, which are valid only so long as they remain secret. So far the second Foundation’s location, its most closely guarded secret of all, has been kept hidden. The Mule and the remnants of the First Foundation will do anything to discover it. This is the story of the Second Foundation.

Wow, I can’t believe this got published the way it did and that people actually ate that shit up… I have rarely read such an overhyped, totally undeserveing of its acclaim, classic as this.
Asimov spends pages upon pages re-explaining the same thing to us, over and over again. That thing is the Foundation, how it came to be, and its purpose. So basically the first chapter of the first book. You’ll get to read that crap in every single Foundation book and also have every character explain it to another character several times throughout that book. Which doesn’t leave all that many pages for, you know, an actual new story. And that’s because Asimov really doesn’t have a new story to tell, he just wanted to milk this idea he had for all it was worth.

This impression is only strenghtened by the fact that each book ends with a sort of cliffhanger. The follow-up book then adresses the rest of this story and only then starts a new larger story arc. Which, again, is finished only in the next book. So I guess Asimov wasn’t lying in his introduction, when he said he wanted to make sure they’d publish another book by him. He pulled the same trick (how very clever) several times to get book deals. Now if only he were a proper storyteller. Alas, all he can do is repeat himself.

So Second Foundation begins with the finale to the Mule story arc which made me angry in so many ways, and only then begins a new story, which actually has to do with the Second Fondation that Hari Seldon said he would set up “at the other end of the galaxy”. At this point, it really wasn’t clear whether Second Foundation was good because its people are a safety net for the first Foundation working the way it should, or whether Second Foundation was the enemy and needed to be defeated by the first Foundation so the first Foundation can take over the galaxy. And ultimately, as the goal is always and exclusively world domination, I couldn’t care either way and I hated the premise. I don’t want to root for anyone in these books because the characters all have the same personality anyway and nothing they do makes any difference.

The problem is that Asimov was so in love with this trope one of his that he turned it up to eleven making anything that happens essentially worthless. You see, when every chapter is one person being secretly so much cleverer than the other person and then, in the end, explaining how they tricked the other person, that can be fun once or maybe twice. That’s all the first book was, chapter after chapter. But if every chapter works that way, it gets old fast. And if – like in Second Foundation – you do this Batman Gambit within a Batman Gambit three times in a row, it really loses all value. What was the point of reading this story if none of what happened, none of the character actions, mean anything?Because it turns out, everyone who outsmarted someone else was in turn outsmarted by yet another player in the endless game that doesn’t even have stakes. Because remind me what the point of all this is? Building a Galactic Empire again in 1000 instead of 30000 years. In the meantime, people are living on various planets, science and technology are evolving, politics are politicking, and so on… And because Hari Seldon’s plan is basically infallible, nothing any one person does can change the course of history anyway. So WHAT’S THE POINT of telling meaningless “stories” set in this world??

Speaking of the world. I had to think of a certain Sad Puppy argument from a few years ago that, back then, science fiction still used to be about science and epic space battles, and sense of wonder and ideas. And I can now definitely say that they can’t have meant Asimov with that. Because there is no world building whatsoever. People are said to live on different planets but there is neither any difference between these planets (other than the fucking weather), nor is there anything much to travelling between them. Who needs science, after all? Distances in the galaxy? Just say “parsec” and “lightyear” a lot and it will sound spacey and sciencey… And then the whole premise of this book is a group of magicians threatening the Foundations. I’m serious, the Second Foundation, which is supposed to consist of nothing but psychologists, can basically mind-control people… with “science”. Don’t make me laugh!
And that doesn’t even take into account the convenient ease with which new inventions are brought about just when needed. Any character either just has had a magical gimmick all along or just quickly invents it because he needs it to defeat the current bad guy. Who will turn out to have been a good guy after all, controlled by the real bad guy. Who then turns out to have been outwitted by someone else. Does it seem like I’m a bit tired of the trope? Because I really am.

Seriously, the more I think about this series, the stupider it is. Asimov’s one cool idea basically ruined any story told within that world because it preempts the outcome. Just for a moment, when he actually made a 14-year-old girl named Arcadia one of the main characters, a proper protagonist in her own right, I got interested again. But the casual mysogyny and ultimate meaninglessness of Arcadia’s cleverness destroyed all pleasure I might have felt.
Oh and it’s not just mysogyny here. There is a tremendous amount of hate directed at all sorts of people. Old people, young people, and especially people with physical deformities. Neurodiverse people are called names and completely disregarded as if they’re not even human. I mean, the whole idea behind the Mule is that he’s too skinny and has a large nose and that’s why he was bullied and now wants to take over the Galaxy… And it’s equally terrifying that being physically unattractive is apparently bad enough in Asimov’s world to make someone a “monster” and a “freak” in everyone’s eyes.

So yeah, I have very little to say about this that’s good. I did honestly enjoy a part in the middle of this book when Arcadia went on an adventure, but as all that happened to her, turned out to have been for nothing, that doesn’t really save the book. And as in his third book, Asimov still hasn’t learned how to write a story, how to create characters or an interesting world, I don’t see much reason to continue this series. That said, the next book did win a Best Novel Hugo Award and it was written 30 years later. So I have the tiniest glimmer of hope that even someone as full of himself as Asimov may have learned a thing or two in that time. The hope is slim, however, so if I ever do read that fourth book, it will be a long time until I find the motivation for that…

MY RATING: 3.5/10 – Bad

A Tropey Sci-Fi Romance: Alechia Dow – The Sound of Stars

I picked this up because I’ve seen it on a few recommendations lists and I haven’t read that many 2020 YA books yet. Plus, the premise sounded too good to pass up. A girl risking her life for books and an alien who secretly loves human music? How could I resist?

THE SOUND OF STARS
by Alechia Dow

Published: Inkyard Press, 2020
eBook: 432 pages
audiobook: 12 hours 23 minutes
Standalone
My rating: 3.5/10

Opening line: The invasion came when we were too distracted raging against our governments to notice. 

Can a girl who risks her life for books and an alien who loves forbidden pop music work together to save humanity?

Two years ago, a misunderstanding between the leaders of Earth and the invading Ilori resulted in the deaths of one-third of the world’s population.
Seventeen-year-old Janelle “Ellie” Baker survives in an Ilori-controlled center in New York City. Deemed dangerously volatile because of their initial reaction to the invasion, humanity’s emotional transgressions are now grounds for execution. All art, books and creative expression are illegal, but Ellie breaks the rules by keeping a secret library. When a book goes missing, Ellie is terrified that the Ilori will track it back to her and kill her.
Born in a lab, M0Rr1S (Morris) was raised to be emotionless. When he finds Ellie’s illegal library, he’s duty-bound to deliver her for execution. The trouble is, he finds himself drawn to human music and in desperate need of more. They’re both breaking the rules for love of art—and Ellie inspires the same feelings in him that music does.

Ellie’s—and humanity’s—fate rests in the hands of an alien she should fear. M0Rr1S has a lot of secrets, but also a potential solution—thousands of miles away. The two embark on a wild and dangerous road trip with a bag of books and their favorite albums, all the while making a story and a song of their own that just might save them both.

Oh well, might as well get my first bad book of the year out of the way right now. The Sound of Stars started out quite well. Janelle – Ellie – lives in an Ilori-controlled building where she and her family and friends are locked up and live under tough restrictions. They must not show emotions, all art is banned, and they are kept alive merely to be vaccinated with a strange vaccine as soon as it’s finished. Ellie’s father got an early test version of the vaccine which has left him like a shell of his former self. Her mother, in the meantime, deals with this situation by drinking (which is of course also illegal). 17-year-old Ellie keeps a secret library and loans out books to her patrons. If she is caught, she’ll probably be executed immediately…

M0Rr1s is an Ilori labmade commander who is working on perfecting the mysterious vaccine in order to be used on all humans. But he also has a secret: He loves human music and secretly listens to it. His fellow Ilori would decidedly not approve. When he finds out about Ellie’s library, he confronts her. Not to get her executed but to make her help him get his hands on more music! Naturally, a romance evolves…

In the reviews I’ve read, M0Rr1s is often described as a lovable softie and that’s not wrong. To me, he often felt more like a robot than an alien, to be honest. He’s a fish out of water, unknowing in the ways of humans or how to interact with them. His innocent and curious nature made him easy to like, yes, but I had a very hard time picturing him with a human body.
Which leads to my next issue. The aliens aren’t really all that alien. It’s a widespread problem in science fiction that alien species are just humanoids with maybe an extra limb or different facial features. In this case, the Ilori have a computer panel on their face that lets them communicate via their alien internet. To be more specific, there are two types of Ilori. The true ones (who are vaguely human-shaped blobs of some kind?) and the labmade ones like Morris who look almost completely human, with skin and blood all the usual body parts.
I get that it’s easier to write a romance between two human-shaped characters than it would be between two properly different species. But I was so hoping for the more complicated version of this Romeo and Juliet tale. Where are the books where people and aliens fall in love and the alien doesn’t happen too look like a cute, attractive human?

But my biggest problem with the Ilori was that are against emotions. That’s not a new idea in science fiction at all but I found it weird that a species that clearly feels emotions is so opposed to them. Why? And how would that even work? Feelings are a catalyst for so many things. Fear, anger, love, jealousy, greed – those keep a story going and the Ilori feel them as much as humans do. Pretending not to doesn’t change the fact that emotions inform their actions. So I just don’t see the point other than creating some bogus conflict that lets Ilori execute anyone who actually shows how angry they are instead of putting on a blank face while being angry…

This book is often praised for its inclusivity and I did like some but not all of it. Janelle is a young, fat Black girl who she suffers from anxiety attacks. None of those things felt in any way forced or used for a specific effect. They are just part of who Ellie is. When things get dangerous, and they do that a lot, her anxiety flares up and she uses her method of counting down from five for dealing with it. I don’t know how realistic that method is, but it certainly felt believable and made Ellie into more of a badass in my eyes. After all, who would run a forbidden library when being found out could mean execution? For someone with anxiety to take that risk takes even more courage.
She’s also demi-ace and explains to Morris what that means. In her words (paraphrased), it takes a long time for her to get to know and trust someone and then, maybe, she’ll develop romantic feelings for them. Gender doesn’t matter, but time does. This becomes important later and it’s also the part I didn’t like because… well, it stands in stark contrast to what actually happens in the book.

The bulk of the novel is about Ellie and Morris on a road trip to California (I had so hoped for a road trip in space, but we can’t always get what we want (song title reference totally intended)). They meet both people and aliens on the way, get into dangerous situations, and of course fall in love with each other in no time at all.
That would have been fine, honestly, if Ellie didn’t specifically make fun of this very trope and if it didn’t contradict who she says she is as a person! She snobbishly looks down on book heroines who fall in love after only one day while DOING THE VERY SAME THING HERSELF! What am I supposed to think about that? Look, I know it’s a stupid trope but I don’t mind it if I’m watching or reading a romance. If it makes for a good story, the trope can be forgiven. But using a trope and making fun of it at the same time just doesn’t make sense to me. Especially when it happens to a demi-ace girl who literally just explained how long it takes her to develop feelings!

As much as I liked Ellie at first, she does a complete 180 around the middle of the book and suddenly turns stupid. Morris and her get caught by some Ilori so Morris makes up a story on the spot about her being his prisoner – you know, to keep them both alive. While that is obviously a cover story, Ellie takes his suddenly changed demeanour at face value and starts instantly hating him. The girl who was so clever in the beginning and, by the way, reads books like others breathe air so who must have come across this trope before, can’t figure out that Morris isn’t really suddenly evil but just trying to save her ass from being executed or vaccinated? I just don’t understand that story decision. The plot would have worked just as well if Ellie had played along (and made her look much better), but I guess there had to be some “relationship conflict” that would lead to a fight, so the love birds could come back together dramatically.

Speaking of the relationship. This book is HEAVY on the romance and spends most of its middle part repeating the same pattern over and over. Morris and Ellie are on their road trip, they meet humans and/or Ilori, get in trouble, get out of trouble, sit in the car and talk, and the same thing happens again and again with slight variations. Not only does that get boring pretty quickly, but I also didn’t find their relationship development in the least interesting or believable. As I mentioned, Ellie falls in love way too quickly but there’s also never any real chemistry between the two. Their shared love for books and music only goes so far that she drops book titles and he talks about the artists he likes, and they agree on them being great.
Actually, the worst part of their shared love for the arts is how Ellie SUMS UP some of the best books out there for Morris. What self-respecting book lover would sum up Jane Eyre in their own world?! Don’t you want Morris to experience the pure beauty of that story for himself? And sure, you’re in a tight spot now but it’s all super hopeful and you’re saving the world so WHY SPOIL THE BOOK FOR HIM?

Oh and about those road trip stops. They always work by the same pattern but some of them are definitely more stupid then others. One time, Morris and Ellie are imprisoned (separately) and a human toddler comes along and sings “If you’re happy and you know it” with Morris. The mother, when she finds them, is naturally shocked. After all, her son is standing very close to one of the aliens who are suppressing her entire planet and are killing people left and right. However, because Morris and that kid had a nice little song together, the very same mother then decides to help Morris. I mean, just imagine for one second that Morris wasn’t a good guy but a different Ilori who actually means humans harm. What mother would be stupid enough to trust a complete stranger just because he sang a children’s song with her son?
But all the dangerous situations are like that. Ellie and Morris aren’t completely useless but they always end up being saved by a third party.

Oh and let’s not even start about that deus ex machina ending. It was sooooo ridiculous. The last third of the book is mostly “I love you more” “No, I love you more” “You are the highlight of my day” “I never want to be parted from you” but in between cheesy and way over the top declarations of undying love, the author must have remembered that novels also need a plot. In order to resolve hers, she throws in something that solves all the problems easily and at no cost to the protagonists. And for Ellie and Morris’ further adventures (please don’t write a sequel), Ellie’s parents stay conveniently out of the way and her best friend is suddenly not that important anymore. Because Morris is the center of her universe and that’s really all this book is about.

Audiobook specific thoughts:
It drove me absolutely up the walls that the male narrator (who is doing a brilliant job narrating as such) kept pronouncing M0Rr1s’ name as Em-zero-one-is. Like, I get that that’s his alien name but there’s a reason the author made it look like a name that humans can pronounce. The same goes for most other alien names and titles which mostly just switch out the letter “o” for a zero and the letter “i” for a one. That said, I did love Christian Barillas’ reading in general, and the way he did different voices and accents. He did a great job and I would absolutely listen to more audiobooks narrated by him.
Joy Sunday, who reads Janelle’s parts of the story, didn’t work so well for me. Her tone always sounded annoyed and kind of aloof. She made Janelle sound like she felt she was better than everyone else, although that doesn’t fit the way her character is described at all. I also wasn’t a fan of Sunday’s intonation or the way she pronounces the “g” at the end of every word ending in -ing. It sounded like she said “I was thinkink” or “what are you doink“. I don’t know if that’s something they teach you in narrator school but it annoyed me. A lot.

Look, it always pains me when I pick up a book by a Black debut author and then don’t like it. But this book, honest to god, reminds me of my own first (and very unreadable) book that I wrote when I was 12 years old. This read like a first draft and I cannot understand how it went through the entire editing process without anyone mentioning the flimsy world building, the lack of excitement, or the discrepancies between how the characters describe themselves and how they act.
Every author whose first book I dislike gets a second chance. But much like Kalynn Bayron last year, Alechia Dow will really have to blow me away with her next book. Otherwise I’ll just have to admit that her writing is not for me. I expect more from the books I read, especially in a time when YA has grown so much and can do way more than tell a cheesy plot-less romance.

MY RATING: 3.5/10 – Quite bad

P.S.: This was on my list of five star predictions which goes to show that synopses and blurbs can only go so far… I’m a little bummed out right now and hope my next prediction turns out more accurate.

Evan Winter – The Rage of Dragons

Why is it that negative reviews are so much easier to write than positive ones? I guess I’ve spoiled my own review now but yes, you can expect some ranting, lots of head shaking and bafflement at how this got published and marketed the way it was. Even if it’s not all bad, it is, unfortunately, mostly bad. The hype monster has struck again…

THE RAGE OF DRAGONS
by Evan Winter

Published: Orbit, 2019
eBook: 544 pages
Audiobook: 16 hours 15 minutes
Series: The Burning #1
My rating: 3.5/10

Opening line: Queen Taifa stood at the bow o Targon, her beached warship, and looked out at the massacre on the sands.

The Omehi people have been fighting an unwinnable fight for almost two hundred years. Their society has been built around war and only war. The lucky ones are born gifted. One in every two thousand women has the power to call down dragons. One in every hundred men is able to magically transform himself into a bigger, stronger, faster killing machine.

Everyone else is fodder, destined to fight and die in the endless war. Young, gift-less Tau knows all this, but he has a plan of escape. He’s going to get himself injured, get out early, and settle down to marriage, children, and land. Only, he doesn’t get the chance. Those closest to him are brutally murdered, and his grief swiftly turns to anger. Fixated on revenge, Tau dedicates himself to an unthinkable path. He’ll become the greatest swordsman to ever live, a man willing to die a hundred thousand times for the chance to kill the three who betrayed him.

This book has many, many problems but the beginning isn’t one of them. In fact, the prologue is quite interesting. A fleeing people is looking for a new home and decides to settle on a peninsula by driving the natives away. So far, so questionable but also quite intriguing. Many years later, Tau is a young man of these people called the Omehi. They live by a strict caste system and their entire lives revolve aruond war – mainly the war fought against the natives who would like their land back, please. Every man has to join the military but Tau has other plans. He dreams of a quiet life with Zuri, the girl he loves. That is, until his father is killed by a Noble. Thus starts Tau’s revenge quest, complete with a kill list like Arya Stark’s (although with fewer people on it).

So Tau joins the military and then comes 400 pages’ worth of training, fighting, battles, melees, duels, and all other types of sword fight you can think of. I’m not exaggerating. It’s all fights, all the time. There is very little plot in this chonker of a novel and also – to my great surprise – very few dragons. We see dragons in the prologue and then again quite late into the book. And when they do show up, the dragons are… kind of lame? I’m not a dragon fanatic and I honestly wouldn’t have minded their absence but if you title your book The Rage of Dragons, that raises certain expectations which were certainly not met.

Another large problem was the world building which, again, ties to the marketing of the book. It is sold as “Game of Thrones meets Gladiator in an African-inspired world”. I mean, what’s not to like about that? You’d expect political intrigue, factions conniving against each other, backstabbing, epic battles, and an African-inspired setting and culture, right? What you get is… none of that. The world could be any world, really, as the only African-inspired thing in this book is the characters’ names and titles. There is no culture, no descriptions of landscapes, no folklore – in short, nothing that sets this apart from any other military fantasy in a world with dragons. It also has none of the emotional impact the movie Gladiator has and absolutely no political intrigue because there’s not even a proper political system set up to play around with.

By far the worst thing was the long, boring stretch in the middle – and I’m using the word “middle” generously here, it’s really everything except for a couple of chapters at the beginning and the end – which consists entirely of fight scenes. Now these were written well enough but once you’ve read about seven duels or training battles, you kind of get the idea.
There is one moment that got me interested again, somewhere in the middle of this book. The magic system, which is also rudimentary at best, uses trips to the underworld as a source of power. The Gifted, the only females who appear in this book (a lot more on that later), can send their spirit, and the spirits of the men, into the underworld to either give them superstrenght, confuse them, or draw magic power from this place to summon and control dragons. In this underworld, hordes of demons attack you (or rather your spirit) and cause you immense pain. That was one of the few things that I found really cool, especially because Tau uses this knowledge in interesting ways.

Which leads me to the character of Tau and the way information is conveyed in this book. Tau is an idiot.

There was amazing potential at the beginning and so many cool themes that could have been explored. Tau’s relationship with his best friend Jabari who is his superior in caste comes into question right at the start when Jabari doesn’t stand up for Tau although a friend really should have. I had hoped we’d see this betrayal lead to something but the truth is, late in the book Jabari shows up again and although Tau is a bit grumpy, it’s like nothing ever happened between them. The same goes for the very basis  of this story – the war between the Omehi and the native Xideen. The Omehi are essentially stealing the natives’ land and then killing them for trying to get it back. I mean it doesn’t take a genius to see that our protagonist is not on the right side of this war. The Omehi had to flee their own home, so it’s understandable that they are desperate and just want a place to settle down. Wouldn’t it have been so amazing if this conflict had been discussed in any meaningful way? Yes, yes it would. Unfortunately, Evan Winter spent the entire novel telling us about Tao’s growing skills with a sword and just how much he wants the people dead who killed his father. Seriously, he does not let you forget!

Although both world building and magic system remain superficion throughout the entire story, there are little tidbits here and there that give us a slightly better picture of How Things Work. Some of them are presented as plot twists (those only really work when you’re emotionally invested, so they fell flat for me) and sadly, all of the information Tao learns over the course of this story is simply given to him by people much smarter and more interesting than him. Zuri, Tao’s Gifted girlfriend, is the one who shows up after ten battles to tell Tao something she has figured out. It is her who pieces everything together and it is her who questions how their society works. Her character would have made such a great protagonist, but sadly she exists solely to give Tao information and be his object of lust. The one sex scene was rather cringe-worthy.

The Omehi may be ruled by a queen but there is only one proper female character in this entire book – Zuri. The Queen gets to speak a little bit, one or two other women are mentioned but usually only as their function: the Gifted who fights with Tao’s team during battle training, that  other Gifted who dies on the battlefield, Tao’s team leader’s daughter… They don’t get a presonality, they certainly don’t get agency, and most of them don’t even get a name. I am baffled that in 2019, a fantasy novel like this can be published and receive mostly positive reviews. Is it me? I’m not usually one who counts female characters and looks at ratios so when I notice a lack of women in a book, it means there’s really something wrong!

So most of the cast is male, which doesn’t keep them from being absolutely flat, just like Tao himself. His only driving force is revenge. Others at least show signs of seeing the bigger picture. They want betterment for their fellow people in the lower castes, yet even when they tell Tao that their Scale (their team) has a chance to show the world that Lowers are just as worthy as Nobles, Tao remains selfish and stubborn and doesn’t really care about the men who consider him a friend. There’s really not much to like about him.

The audiobook is narrated by Prentice Onayemi, who not only has the most soothing voice I can think of but also does his best to keep the listener engaged, despite the endless repetition of fight scene upon fight scene. I wasn’t a big fan of the way he read female characters but as mentioned above, there are only two who get to speak anyway, so that wasn’t a big problem. I didn’t enjoy this book but the audiobook definitely made me interested in more books read by Onayemi. It’s not his fault, after all, that he had so little to work with.

One last thing about the ending: What little plot there is doesn’t even get resolved by the end. Tao does have a moment of character growth which felt like it came out of nowhere because he previously refused to vehemently to behaving like a decent human being. But the actual plot – Tao’s revenge quest – is left mostly open. It came as no surpise to me that the larger story about the war also leads nowhere because this book is a series starter. And since I didn’t care about any of the characters except for Zuri, I wasn’t a fan of the ending either. That little last-minute conflict that was thrown in had no impact because we weren’t even properly introduced to the characters involved to care about who betrayed whom and why and what consequences this would have for the Omehi as a people. It felt quickly thrown together so the story could reach some sort of conclusion, not an organic ending at all.

Okay, I thought I was done but there’s more. Even with the terrible characters, the lack of women and plot, the shoddy world building and the messed-up ending, one thing could have saved this novel at least a little, and that is writing style. Winter definitely loves writing fight scenes and some of them were exciting enough. But other than that, he does a lot of telling instead of showing (mostly via Zuri because Tao doesn’t think for himself) and the prose in general is quite simple. I’d say a professional author (or his copy editor) should know the difference between “hanged” and “hung” and manage to describe more of the world than swords and demons, but maybe that’s just me.

Needless to say, I  won’t continue this series. I picked up this book because it sounded good and because I am trying to discover more new-to-me Black  writers. If you’re looking for that African-inspired GoT, look elsewhere. If you like reading about men bashing each other over the head with swords A LOT, then why not give this book a try? It certainly has found its audience and even though I’m not among them, I wish Evan Winter all the best in his writing career.

MY RATING: 3.5/10 – Really rather bad!

Good Idea, Amateurish Execution: Kalynn Bayron – Cinderella is Dead

A book based on the fairy tale of Cinderella with a queer Black protagonist and a cover this beautiful? Of course, I couldn’t resist. But it teaches me the lesson – yet again – that books can’t be judged by their cover or even by what the synopsis promises. I was all aflame for this story, I wanted to like it so very much, so my disappointment is even greater. Because it’s just not very good.

CINDERELLA IS DEAD
by Kalynn Bayron

Published: Bloomsbury YA, 2020
eBook: 400 pages
Standalone
My rating: 3.5/10

Opening line: Cinderella has been dead for two hundred years.

It’s 200 years since Cinderella found her prince, but the fairytale is over.
Sophia knows the story though, off by heart. Because every girl has to recite it daily, from when she’s tiny until the night she’s sent to the royal ball for choosing. And every girl knows that she has only one chance. For the lives of those not chosen by a man at the ball are forfeited.
But Sophia doesn’t want to be chosen – she’s in love with her best friend, Erin, and hates the idea of being traded like cattle. And when Sophia’s night at the ball goes horribly wrong, she must run for her life. Alone and terrified, she finds herself hiding in Cinderella’s tomb. And there she meets someone who will show her that she has the power to remake her world.

This book starts out so well. 16-year-old Sophia lives in Lille, the capital of the kingdom of Mersailles which is ruled by the King and his ironclad laws. There aren’t many but they are serious. Based on the tale of Cinderella, which happened some 200 years ago, women have no rights, the husband or designated man of the household makes all decisions and can “discipline” his wife and children however he sees fit. How that horrorshow came out of the Cinderella fairytale? I don’t know and neither does anyone in this book, so just accept it and move on. The law also states that, starting at age 16, every young woman has to present herself at the royal ball where she can hope to be chosen by one of the men currently seeking a wife. Men aren’t obliged to go to the ball, they can go if they want and they can choose a 16-year-old wife even if they themselves are much older. If a girl doesn’t get chosen on her first ball, she shames her family. Every girl gets three tries, otherwise she is a forfeit and essentially turned into a slave. Yup, that’s the setup.

Look, everything about this world is already ridiculous but for the sake of the fairy tale I was willing to let it slide. This book, however, has very little in common with any fairy tale as it reads more like the exact cliché YA dystopian novel you’d expect from its world buliding. Sophia is not like other girls (ugh) but at least she has a good reason. Because she is in love with her best friend Erin and they’ve even had somewhat of a secret relationship. You can imagine that this woman-hating totalitarian world does not look kindly on the LGBTQIA+ community. Sophie wants to just run away but Erin is too scared and just wants to do what is expected of her, even if that means denying who she really is and living her entire life under the control of whichever man chooses to marry her.

At the ball, Sophia’s temper (or should I say stupidity) runs away with her and, shortly after, she runs away from the ball and is now on the run from the King and his guards. If they find her, they’ll execute her. Thankfully, she immediately meets another girl and continues her story with her. Secrets about the past are revealed, plans for revolution are made, allies are found, and romance abounds. I honestly cared so little about this book by the end that I feel tempted to just spoil the twists but in the hopes that other people find more joy in this, I’ll leave it at that.

There were so many problems with this novel and they became more and more glaring the further I got. I already mentioned the world building and how it makes absolutely no sense. But even with a huge amount of suspension of desbelief, I couldn’t overlook the book’s many other flaws.
Let’s start with the writing style. I had read on several places on the internet that this was supposed to be a debut novel (which would have made things a little better) but apparently it is not at all. Kalynn Bayron has published several other full-length novels and shorter works. I wouldn’t have guessed it judging from this book. Starting from recapping events from the previous chapter through dialogue, over super cringy conversations, overly dramatic descriptions, and a predictable plot, I would have bet my kidney that this was a first try at writing a novel. It honestly reads like my own very first book which I wrote at the age of 12 – part wish-fulfillment with the super beautiful girl protagonist who saves the world without actually doing much herself, part dramatic, impactful scenes but without the necessary build-up to make them dramatic.

The characters were actually the best part because, first of all, they are distinct and they’re not all perfect. Sophia, of course, is the best of the best and only sees the good in people and never does anything wrong and just wants to save the world and everyone from the evil king. Constance, her love interest, was my favorite. She is feisty and impulsive, sometimes even funny, but definitely her own kind of person. She was the one thing I kept holding on to while reading this. Other than that, we don’t get to know many characters too well. There’s mysterious Amina, there’s Sophia’s best friend and (ex-)lover Erin who conveniently turns into a bitch once Sophia has found a new love interest. Oh, and there was Luke, the young gay man Sophia meets at the very beginning of the book and whom we don’t see again until the very end because even though he was the most interesting person to me as a reader, in this story his only value seemed to have been that he is another gay person in Lille. Once that was established, he was no longer useful for Sophia’s story.

If I’m talking characters, I also have to talk about the villain, King Manford. He is the kind of villain who’s evil just for the sake of being evil. There is a super weaksauce attempt to explain his actions at the end, but it was neither convincing nor even tried to be. I can’t take a character like that serious and I certainly want more from a YA novel than a Bad Guy who’s just bad because reasons. It’s a writer’s job to come up with compelling characters with agency and that includes the antagonist. Manford executes people on a whim, he’s the one enforcing the crazy laws of his kingdom and making sure women don’t have any rights whatsoever. So of course it’s easy for Sophia to fight him. Her plan to kill him won’t haunt her because he is so purely evil that taking a life – even the life of a despicable man – would come with no psychological consequences. That is a sad thing, especially in a book that uses a fairy tale as its basis and pretends to subvert it.

The author generally doesn’t appear to have a lot of confidence in her readers. I can’t imagine why else she’d explain the events of the previous chapter to us, why her characters would have “As you know, Bob” conversations, or why we are told at least one million times how this society works, how bad it is, and how much everyone is suffering. WE GET IT!!! We got it after the first two chapters where you showed us this world. There’s no need to explain it to us again and again in every chapter after that! The writing got worse and worse later in the book. Once Sophia and Constance are together, they turn from young women with a plan to cheesy idiots, exclaiming their love in the most sappy words imaginable. Mind you, the entire story takes place over the course of maybe two weeks.

A good plot can still save a badly written novel. Give me the subversion of the original fairy tale, give me twists and high stake moments, give me battle scenes, and difficult decisions for our protagonist. I wants them! Oh… there’s none of that available in Cinderella is Dead? Well, that’s a bummer.
It starts with Sophia never actually figuring anything out for herself or doing anything of consequence of her own volition. Every situation where she doesn’t follow the rules is forced by someone else’s actions, be they the king’s or someone else’s. When she needs new information, it conveniently is delivered to her. By Constance, by a friendly townsperson, by the super ridiculously convenient fact that she finds something that has been stuck behind a drawer for the last 200 years that NOBODY ELSE HAS FOUND IN ALL THAT TIME!!!!! She can open locks with a hairpin when it’s convenient to the plot, the king’s guards are terrifying but also really dumb when it’s convenient to the plot, and the characters are only in real danger when it’s convenient to the plot. Do you see a pattern here?
I was never, for one second, worried that anything could happen to the protagonists because the potentially dangerous scenes are over so quickly that I didn’t have time to get worked up about them. And the style of this book is just not the kind where you have to fear for anyone. You know evil wil be defeated somehow. In fact, you know pretty early on how it will be defeated, even if Sophia takes ages to finally catch up and get it, too.

Another thing I found a bit strange was how much this world relied on the Disney movie version of Cinderella. That felt so cheap and jarring, especially since it gets mixed up with other versions of the fairy tale. When did Cinderella wear an “iconic blue dress” in the actual fairy tale? Depending on which version you read, her dresses are usually silver or gold. Bayron chose to implement elements such as birds picking out the stepsisters’ eyes and the fairy godmother but then she made a character ask someone else to “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” something which is just so weird. I’m aware that there is no one original version of any fairy tale but using the Disney movie so heavily just didn’t feel right, especially for this secondary medieval-ish world where Cinderella was an actual person and movies definitely aren’t a thing.

Now that I’ve got most of the bad stuff out of the way, let met tell you what this book does well or how it at least earned a couple of brownie points. It’s not for the Black queer protagonist – that’s great for representation but it doesn’t make the story the tiniest bit better. But this was an absolutely readable book, probably because the language was so dialogue-heavy and otherwise kept things really simple. There are no big words, no long sentences, no flowery language or heavy descriptions. This was one of the fastest 400 pages I’ve read in a long time.
The far more important bit is that Bayron actually acknowledges that killing the king doesn’t immediately change the world. The rules he’s put into place have been with people for 200 years and they are very well fixed in their minds. Why would men, who currently hold all the power, willingly give that up just because their ruler is gone? It is mentioned several times in the book that killing the king is just the beginning and that there is a lot of work to be done afterwards. I loved that because it made this crazy world just a little bit more believable and it acknowledged that you can’t just start a quick rebellion, kill a ruler, and then live in a utopia where everyone’s happy and accepting of each other. That is important and I’m glad I got to read it in a YA book.
But then, in the very last chapter, there is this one little line that is such a big fat “Fuck you, democracy” to make me re-think my opinion of the protagonists and their motives… I can’t say more without spoiling but I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes.

This entire book felt like a badly thrown together mash of ideas that weren’t thought out properly  at all. Our perfect heroine needs a villain to fight – fine, here’s a cardboard  uber-villain. But there has to be a shocking twist, right? Have you seen The Empire Strikes Back? Why not use something like that, that could be fun. And then evil has to be defeated, of course. Let’s just fill that final “battle” with lots of clichéd dialogue to hide the fact that there’s very little to it, after all.
No matter how I look at it, this just wasn’t a good book. It needed some serious work, some honest editing, and it just needed a better story. If the Cinderella aspect has so little actual impact on anything, why use it at all? Why not make up your own dystopian world and have it make sense? I started out quite liking the ideas and the characters. But the more I read, the more frustrated I got and the less I cared. I don’t know if I’ll give Kalynn Bayron another chance. If this is how she writes her fifth (or whatever) book, then I have little hope for improvement on the next one.

MY RATING: 3.5/10 – Pretty bad

Buffy and Ballroom: Seanan McGuire – Discount Armageddon (DNF)

I’d been looking forward to reading the next book in McGuire’s October Daye series but after this, I think I’ve had my share of McGuire books for the year. Toby Daye can wait until 2021 because I have McGuire burnout!
The only (!) reason I picked up this book with the horrible cover, the generic title, and the boring premise is because the series is nominated for a Best Series Hugo Award and I want to give everything a chance. McGuire has surprised me in the past, even within the same series (Wayward Children, I’m looking at you) so I jumped over my shadow and read this gave this a fair shot. Things did not go well…

DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON
by Seanan McGuire

Published: DAW, 2012
Ebook: 368 pages
Series: InCryptid #1
My rating: DNF

Opening line: Verity danced circles around the living room, her amateurish pirouettes and unsteady leaps accompanied by cheers and exultations from the horde of Aeslin mice perched on the back of the couch.

Cryptid, noun: Any creature whose existence has not yet been proven by science. See also “Monster.”
Crytozoologist, noun: Any person who thinks hunting for cryptids is a good idea. See also “idiot.”

Ghoulies. Ghosties. Long-legged beasties. Things that go bump in the night…
The Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity—and humanity from them.
Enter Verity Price. Despite being trained from birth as a cryptozoologist, she’d rather dance a tango than tangle with a demon, and is spending a year in Manhattan while she pursues her career in professional ballroom dance. Sounds pretty simple, right?
It would be, if it weren’t for the talking mice, the telepathic mathematicians, the asbestos supermodels, and the trained monster-hunter sent by the Price family’s old enemies, the Covenant of St. George. When a Price girl meets a Covenant boy, high stakes, high heels, and a lot of collateral damage are almost guaranteed.
To complicate matters further, local cryptids are disappearing, strange lizard-men are appearing in the sewers, and someone’s spreading rumors about a dragon sleeping underneath the city…

I don’t usually write reviews about books I didn’t finish because… well, I can’t judge the whole book when I’ve only read a part of it. But I can judge the bits I’ve read. In this case, they were not good. Actually, they were pretty terrible. We follow Verity Price’s first person narration as she lives in New York where she works with cryptids – supernatural beings – and protects them, but also makes sure that the wilder ones among them don’t start eating people. Otherwise, it’s exile or, you know, death. I have read 34% of this book (so sayeth my Kobo) and I could not bear a single page more. Let me elaborate.

Verity Price is good at everything. Scratch that – she’s perfect at everything. Blonde, lithe-bodied, athletic, and of course super smart. She’s everything I hate in a protagonist. Through rigorous training – NOT superpowers or magic or something else more believable – she is basically a pro in a dozen martial arts, knows how to use all sorts of weapons, she free runs through New York City, and generally just excels at everything she touches. Oh yeah, she’s also really into ballroom dancing, a fact with which she keeps bombarding the reader in every paragraph. That’s all we learn during the first five chapters or so, so this book was off to a very bad start.
I want my heroines flawed and if they have to be really good at something, at least give them something else that they sucks at. Or if the protagonist has to be supernaturally amazing at everything, give me an explanation that is somewhat believable. Even a handwavey explanation would have helped. But, alas, we are supposed to believe that one person can be this great just because she applied herself. Way to go for creating unrealistic expectations of women.

I’m probably one of the few people in the world who doesn’t have a problem showering while standing on one leg and pointing the toes of my other leg toward the ceiling.

Oh yes, Verity, you are so super special. But I’ll let you in on a secret. Even without a super special and unrealistic ballroom career next to your other job of full-time monster protecting, there are people who can do the splits… I’m one of them. We’re not that special. Being flexible shouldn’t be anyone’s best (or only) quality.

So what’s this mess of a novel even about? The Price family used to work with an organization called the Covenant – essentially a monster-hunting secret society that has sworn to find and kill all the cryptids living on Earth. Except the Prices realized that not all monsters are bad, some just want to live their life in peace and don’t eat people on a regular basis. So why not coexist? They left the Covenant and have been in hiding ever since. That’s important for the plot, which takes a whopping 15% of the book to even show the slightest hint of starting (but, spoiler, doesn’t even really start until 31%).
Because when Verity encounters an agent of the Covenant, she just straight up tells him who she is, that her family is alive and well, and then she lets him go… Remember, this is the super smart protagonist who paints herself as Miss Perfect and sleeps cuddling her many, many guns. I cannot BEAR stupid protagonists, especially when that supidity stands in stark contrast to what we’ve been told about them. There was absolutely no reason for Verity to tell that guy who she was. She just did it. Her explanation afterwards? She lost her temper. Which wasn’t there on the page at all. In fact, because she’s such an uber-badass, she remained pretty calm during the entire encounter. And then she proceded to spill her family’s secret. Because reasons, I guess.

“Hi,” I said brightly. “Ever been shot in the head? Because I don’t think you’d enjoy it much. Most people don’t.”

What little dialogue there is, was super cringe-worthy. It’s like Seanan McGuire tried to write her own Buffy (without the superpowers that give Buffy all her strength etc.) but couldn’t reach anywhere near Joss Whedon’s witty dialogue and snappy one liners.

The actual plot – cryptids gong missing and a certain creature existint that people thought didn’t exist  – only begins at about 31%. That means you get over 100 pages of info dumping, repetitions about how wonderful Verity is and how she is great at everything, ESPECIALLY BALLROOM DANCING!
At that point, I decided I would give the book a limited number of pages to get me hooked and if it failed, I’d just DNF it. The more I read, the more annoyed I got. Because apart from the really dumb protagonist who we are repeatedly told is amazing, the pacing and plot are also really bad. If nothing of interest to the story happens during the first 100 pages, something went wrong during the editing stage. It’s great that we get to learn about all these cryptids and their quirks but I didn’t pick this up because I wanted a list of supernatural beings. I want plot and interesting characters. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
And when we’re not getting endless paragraphs about the make up habits of gorgons, we instead have to work several pages filled with the rules of ballroom competitions. And of course many mentions of Verity’s brilliance and awesomeness and general perfection.

Side note: I did a search on my Kobo and the word “dance” appears 145 times in this book. “Ballroom” is only used 30 times. But you get the picture. Verity doesn’t actually do much ballroom dancing, she just likes to let us know in every paragraph that she’s great at it.

Another thing that didn’t help was the humor. It may very well work for you – we all know humor is absolutely divisive and something one person hates can make another one giggle for hours. Generally, I do like Seanan McGuire’s humor, especially in interviews (her personal, real sense of humor works for me and I usually laugh at her jokes) but I was disappointed that, apparently, that’s the only type we ever get from her. The October Daye series – which I’ve started last year and enjoy a lot – doesn’t try as hard to be funny but Toby also likes being a bit snarky at times. Verity, however, lays it on pretty thick. Her “funny” one-liners left me frowning rather than smiling, her oh-so-clever descriptions of cryptid species all sound the same. I wish that these two urban fantasy series did more to stand apart when it comes to writing style as well as characters/plot.

The part where I finally decided I’d had enough was when Verity, out of nowhere, kisses a guy she had previously shown no interest in kissing. But of course, the only human male that we’ve met so far has to be the love interest because them’s the rules, I guess.

I know that this series, as well as McGuire’s other books and series, has quite a fan following and I wish I could have joined them. But to me, this felt like a carelessly thrown together mess without a point. If you’ve finished this book or even read more of this series, please let me know in the comments if things get better. At this moment I have no desire of ever touching another InCryptid novel, but who knows what the future might bring.

MY RATING: Did Not Finish (but I’d give the first third of this book 2/10)

 

The Mid-Year Book Freak Out Tag

It’s that time of the year again. On the one hand, it feels like 2020 has just started and like every year, I wonder where all that time went. On the other hand, I could swear 2020 has been going on for at least three years what with all the things that have happened. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, although it’s fairly under control here in Austria by now. We have about 450 cases at the moment, most restrictions have been lifted, and life is slowly returning to something resembling normal.

But I won’t lie. Current events had quite an impact on my reading. Not only because I suddenly hat a lot more time to read books but also because they made me seek out different types of books than I might have otherwise. I’m the kind of person who reads books about pandemics during an actual pandemic (if that’s not your jam, I totally understand. I don’t know why I’m like this.) and the Black Lives Matter protests definitely pushed some of my books by Black authors higher up on the TBR but they also made me read a lot more news, non-fiction, and pieces written by Black people about systemic racism and what’s going in the US right now.

How Much Have You Read

Total books read: 67
By Authors of Color: 17

I’ve been doing pretty well this year although I lost a lot of motivation for my reading challenges. When the world is falling apart, reaching a reading goal doesn’t seem all that important anymore and reading becomes more of a comfort, a self-care ritual. The current protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter also made me reexamine my reading habits and I changed my TBR priorities because of that. I have tons of books by Black authors anyway but now they’re going to get read a little sooner. My reading habits have changed quite a bit since I started this blog (from basically only reading white men and a handful of women to reading mostly women and a lot more Authors of Color) but I can do so much better! During the first half of the year, only about 25% of my books were by Authors of Color.  So for the rest of the year, I’m setting myself a little challenge not only to continue reading books by the Black authors I already know and love but to discover at least 10 new ones. That’s how favorites happen, after all.

BEST BOOKS YOU’VE READ SO FAR IN 2020

• N. K. Jemisin – The City We Became
• Frances Hardinge – Deeplight
• Ted Chiang – Exhalation: Stories
• Ursula K. LeGuin – The Tombs of Atuan
• Connie Willis – Doomsday Book
• Joan He – Descendant of the Crane
• Brandon Sanderson – Starsight

The City We Became is now a more timely book than ever. I read it before the protests that are currently happening all over the world and I honestly thought Jemisin painted her racist characters a little too racist. My opinion on that has changed. What I’ve seen in during the last weeks – videos, twitter exchanges, posts on social media sites – show that Jemisin knew exactly what she was writing and her characters are sadly realistic.
Deeplight totally swept me away. It is everything a YA novel should be and I’m still not over how phenomenal those characters were.
Doomsday Book turned me into a sobbing mess and I haven’t stopped thinking about that book since I read it. It is also very fitting for our current times as it’s about the plague as well as an epidemic so you can guess why it hit me so hard.
You can read more about my thoughts in my reviews (linked above).

BEST SEQUELS OF 2020 SO FAR

• Ursula K. LeGuin – The Tombs of Atuan
• Brandon Sanderson – Starsight

I’m finally reading the Earthsea Cycle this year! Three books in, The Tombs of Atuan is definitely my favorite. It’s a sneaky book that makes you care about the characters without letting you notice. And suddenly, you’re all emotions.
Sanderson continues to produce thrilling stories set in highly original worlds and this sequel to Skyward delivered just the kind of exciting YA adventure I wanted.

NEW RELEASE YOU HAVEN’T READ YET, BUT YOU WANT TO

There are many, but these are the ones I’m looking forward to the most:

• Martha Wells – Network Effect
• Tochi Onyebuchi – Riot Baby
• Ilze Hugo – The Down Days

MOST ANTICIPATED RELEASE OF THE SECOND HALF OF 2020

A lot! Here’s a few of them, although my actual wishlist is much longer.

• Susanna Clarke – Piranesi
• Jordan Ifueko – Raybearer
• Julia Ember – Ruinsong
• Brandon Sanderson – Rhythm of War
• Naomi Novik – A Deadly Education
• Nnedi Okorafor – Ikenga
• Romina Garber – Lobizona
• Lauren Beukes – Afterland
• Alaya Dawn Johnson – Trouble the Saints
• Kalynn Bayron – Cinderella is Dead
• Alix E. Harrow – The Once and Future Witches

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT

• Kiersten White – The Guinevere Deception
• Blake Crouch – Recursion

It’s been a long time since I’ve been that bored with a book that sounded so good. The Guinevere Deception has flat characters, almost no plot, a lame climax and the constant feeling that this is just the opening chapter to the real story. I want the real story right now, thank you very much!
I picked up Blake Crouch because BookTube was hyping him like crazy. And while I can’t deny that Recursion was a page turner with a twist in every other chapter, it left no lasting impression. I felt very much like I was reading a science fiction thriller version of a Dan Brown book.

BIGGEST SURPRISE

• Joan He – Descendant of the Crane
• Andrzej Sapkowski – The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny

Descendant of the Crane just completely blew me away. I had no particular expectations so I was all the more happy to get a well thought-out story where young characters have to make tough decisions and are faced with difficult situations.
And of course I finally had to try The Witcher, which also exceeded all my expectations. I didn’t think I would get such a character driven story. I expected action and swordfighting and manly Witcher man being manly (which is totally okay) and instead I got something that resonated much more deeply with me. Fairy tales, characters in all shades of grey, and a protagonist who deals as much with ethics as he does with monsters.

FAVORITE NEW AUTHOR (DEBUT OR AUTHOR TO YOU)

She’s not new to me but finally picking up a second book by this author turned Frances Hardinge into a new favorite. Ted Chiang impressed me deeply with his story collection and I will definitely read more by him. Jessica Townsend has potential to become a favorite. I had so much fun with her book Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow. And Rivers Solomon continues to impress me. I’ve only read shorter works by them so far but I’m already itching to pick up their novel An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Newest fictional crush 

Geralt of Rivia of course.
I’m kidding. I don’t really get fictional crushes anymore but I won’t deny that I imagined Henry Cavill while reading The Witcher. And he is one beautiful man!

Newest favorite character

• Kivrin from Doomsday Book
• Hark from Deeplight
• Future from LaGuardia (review to come)

BOOK THAT MADE YOU CRY

Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book.
I mean… it’s a book that deals with time travel where a young historian visits the time of the plague. And there’s also an epidemic going on in the present. So it’s not like I didn’t expect some character deaths to happen. But Willis had me sobbing by the end in a way that I did not see coming.

A BOOK THAT MADE YOU HAPPY

Jessica Towsnend – Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow

It helped that I read this while on holiday on a beach in Myanmar but I think even rainy, cloudy days could have been brightened by this lovely book. I’m keeping the rest of the series for a time when I need to just feel good.

MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK YOU’VE BOUGHT OR RECEIVED THIS YEAR

Although this book has not technically arrived yet, it is beautiful to me both because first of all, I think it’s really pretty but also because I’ve been looking for a copy for years and finally found one that was in my price range. I did pay 50€ for it, so it was still pretty expensive. But now my Catherynne M. Valente collection is complete and I couldn’t be happier. The book is called Under in the Mere and it is illustrated by James and Jeremy Owen. I can’t wait to see it in person (be faster, post people!).

WHAT BOOKS DO YOU NEED TO READ BY THE END OF THE YEAR?

So many. Like I mentioned above, my regular reading challenges, including the Retellings Challenge, aren’t a priority anymore. Here’s a selection of what I hope to read this year not already covered in my most anticipated releases:

• Bram Stoker – Dracula
• N. K. Jemisin – The Stone Sky
• Rivers Solomon – An Unkindness of Ghosts
• Octavia E. Butler – Parable of the Sower
• Tade Thompson – The Rosewater Insurrection
• Evan Winter – The Rage of Dragons
• Helen Oyeyemi – White is for Witching
• Emma Newman – Planetfall

Nothing to offer: Kiersten White – The Guinevere Deception

I had read one of Kiersten White’s books last year for the Retellings Challenge and, while I thought it missed the point of being about Egyptian myths, it was a nice enough teen romance. So I thought why not see what White does with Arthurian legends. The setup – Guinevere is dead and our protagonist is an impostor taking over her place – sounded exciting enough. Sadly, pretty much everything about this book ended up being lame and left me feeling very “meh”.

THE GUINEVERE DECEPTION
by Kiersten White

Published: Delacorte Press, 2019
Ebook: 352 pages
Series: Camelot Rising #1
My rating: 2/10

Opening line: There was nothing in the world as magical and terrifying as a girl on the cusp of womanhood.

Princess Guinevere has come to Camelot to wed a stranger: the charismatic King Arthur. With magic clawing at the kingdom’s borders, the great wizard Merlin conjured a solution–send in Guinevere to be Arthur’s wife . . . and his protector from those who want to see the young king’s idyllic city fail. The catch? Guinevere’s real name–and her true identity–is a secret. She is a changeling, a girl who has given up everything to protect Camelot.
To keep Arthur safe, Guinevere must navigate a court in which the old–including Arthur’s own family–demand things continue as they have been, and the new–those drawn by the dream of Camelot–fight for a better way to live. And always, in the green hearts of forests and the black depths of lakes, magic lies in wait to reclaim the land. Arthur’s knights believe they are strong enough to face any threat, but Guinevere knows it will take more than swords to keep Camelot free.
Deadly jousts, duplicitous knights, and forbidden romances are nothing compared to the greatest threat of all: the girl with the long black hair, riding on horseback through the dark woods toward Arthur. Because when your whole existence is a lie, how can you trust even yourself?

We follow a young girl impersonating Guinevere on her way to marry King Arthur. She has been sent there by her father, Merlin, to protect the king from a mysterious threat. What that threat is – we don’t know and neither does Guinevere. But she’ll just have to go to Camelot, marry the king (who is in on the whole thing by the way), and protect him from evil magic. By doing magic herself. Which is outlawed… but the king knows about it and lets her do magic in secret. Because reasons. Don’t ask too many questions, this book doesn’t make sense. It’s 350 pages of Guinevere making magical knots, thinking how hard it is to be queen (even though she never really does any queen stuff). Seriously, that’s it.

There is never a feeling of an actual threat. And because Arthur knows of Guinevere’s secret, this isn’t a source of excitement either. Guinevere doesn’t really have to pretend that much, she only has to convince people of being the real Guinevere who don’t get that close to her. There’s never any tension, there’s never the feeling that she has to watch out or risk being caught… any potential for thrilling plot points was taken right out of the book at the very beginning. Who does that?? Why not make Arthur unaware and Guinevere actually having the difficult job of convincing her new husband that she is who she says he is? I’ll tell you why. Because then you can’t have her fall in love with three separate people in one book.

The only, and I mean only, thing that made this book bearable was the magic used by Guinevere. She makes knots. I know, doesn’t sound that great, does it? But it was the only original idea that kept me vaguely interested in finishing this book. Guinevere knots her hair for protection, uses metal knots to keep the castle safe, and so on. This kind of magic always takes a toll, so either she has to use her blood to make a spell work, or she loses her eyesight for a while, etc. I love magic that comes with a price and while nothing is explained about this magic system, at least it was something that made me continue reading because I was hoping to learn more about it. Spoiler: no such luck.

The other thing that is probably supposed to hook readers is Guinevere’s real identity. I suspect this question will remain open until the end of this series, so I will never find out (and I don’t much care, to be honest). But unlike the three (!) potential romances, at least the question of who she is and why Merlin sent her to Camelot was mildly interesting.
Guinevere is missing a lot of memories yet she never seems to question this. It’s like “oh hey, I barely remember how I grew up, who my mother was, how I spent my childhood, or much of anything else about myself, but let’s just go with it because I HAVE TO PROTECT ARTHUR FROM SOME UNKNOWN THREAT THAT I’VE ALSO NEVER QUESTIONED!” While this might have been explained pretty easily – just invent something, author, that’s what you do for a living! – it never is and that makes Guinevere not only seem boring but also pretty damn stupid. Why should I care about someone who is presented as an intelligent and somewhat powerful character yet behaves like an idiot all of the time?

As for the romances and the “plot twist” about Lancelot… It was all so obvious and so lame. I would try to use a better word to describe it but lame actually encapsulates it perfectly. So Guinevere is married to Arthur and mostly has friendly feelings toward him. However, there are many scenes in which her heart starts racing or she wants to touch his hair or whatever, so a potential romance is implied. Then of course there’s Mordred who flirts with Guinevere pretty often and she reacts like a giggling teenage girl, not like a young woman on a mission to protect her husband and king. Aaaaand let’s not forget Lancelot because we all know how the legend goes. Apart from being just too much, there was also no distinction between Guinevere’s feelings for these three people. I had to roll my eyes so hard, you guys…

After three quarters of the book passed without any plot to speak of, apparently someone (author, editor, whoever) realized that something should probably happen. So we get a last minute threat which was presented as some kind of twist. But if you retell King Arthur’s story and use what everyone knows about that story, by no stretch of the imagination can you call it a plot twist. The shocking reveals weren’t shocking, the moment just fell completely flat. Just as flat as the characters whose only distinguishing qualities are their looks.

I did kind of like how Tristan and Isolde was incorporated into the story, even though the author drops that side plot pretty quickly, making it feel like token name dropping. This entire book was just a string of nothings held together by cardboard characters behaving like morons. Anything that could have been interested was immediately shut down by the author, leaving an empty husk of a book. No matter how many Sir Whatshisnames you mention, if you don’t show who the characters are, if you don’t show the world they live in, if all you do is tell me how Guinevere’s breathing quickens when lover A/B/C is nearby, then you’ll lose my interest pretty fast. The only brownie points go to the magic system and that’s being generous.

All things considered, this book had nothing to offer. I don’t know why I should continue reading this series. Even if we do eventually get more information about Guinevere’s origin, why would I read another 300 pages of her sitting around, thinking half-finished thoughts about some threat and making knots? The way Kiersten White churns out books, I probably shouldn’t be surprised. This was so bad, in fact, that it will probably be my last foray into her work.

MY RATING: 2/10 – Bad!

P.S.: It probably didn’t help this book that I read The Mists of Avalon only a few months ago…

Mid-Year Book Freak Out Tag!

This tag has been floating around the internet for about a week now and although nobody has tagged me (so far), I really want to join in the fun. I love the idea, I love the questions, and it’s always nice to check in on one’s own reading. After all, the year is already halfway over, so priorities should be made about what to read next.

❥ Reading Challenges 2019

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 45/60

I’m doing surprisingly well on my Goodreads challenge. I used to read 100 books a year with no problem, but the last two years, that seemed like an impossible task. But life changes, things quiet down, and I managed to find more reading time. I have no doubt I’m going to smash my Goodreads goal this year. Maybe I’ll even get close to 100 books. That would be amazing!

2019 Retellings Challenge: 9/10

Tracy’s Retellings Challenge still makes me as excited as I was at the beginning of the year. I have discovered wonderful new books, some I didn’t like so much, but the challenge definitely pushes me to finally pick up books I’ve been meaning to read forever. Or it makes me go out of my comfort zone and try something new. Either way, it has been very rewarding so far. My plan is to fill the bingo card until the end of the year. And if Tracy doesn’t create a follow-up challenge for next year, I’ll start the whole bingo card over again. Because it’s that much fun!

❥ Best Book You’ve Read so Far in 2019

This is so tough! I can’t go with just one, so here’s my favorite reads of the year so far with a link to my review in case you want to learn more about these amazeballs books.

• Maggie Stiefvater – The Scorpio Races
• Rachel Hartman – Tess of the Road
• Leigh Bardugo – The Language of Thorns
• Madeline Miller – Circe
• Sam J. Miller – Blackfish City
• S. A. Chakraborty – The City of Brass
• Sarah Gailey – Magic for Liars

❥ Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2019

Leigh Bardugo – Ruin and Rising
I didn’t believe any author could possibly write a worthy and satisfying ending to such a great series but Leigh Bardugo did and I cried and it made me feel all the things and now she’s one of my favorite authors.

Nnedi Okorafor – Akata Warrior
I haven’t reviewed this book yet because there is so much to say about it that I don’t know where to start. It had all the magic and atmosphere from the first book but bigger, better, and more terrifying.

❥ New release you haven’t read yet, but want to

SO! MANY!!!

• Charlie Jane Anders – The City in the Middle of the Night
• Ann Leckie – The Raven Tower
• Chuck Wendig – Wanderers
• Samantha Shannon – The Priory of the Orange Tree
• Kameron Hurley – The Light Brigade
• Marlon James – Black Leopard, Red Wolf
• Leigh Bardugo – King of Scars
• Arkady Martine – A Memory Called Empire
• Holly Black – The Wicked King
• S. A. Chakraborty – The Kingdom of Copper
• Margaret Rogerson – Sorcery of Thorns
• Karen Lord – Unraveling
• Helen Oyeyemi – Gingerbread
• Sam J. Miller – Destroy All Monsters
• C. A. Fletcher – A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

❥ Most anticipated release for the second half of the year

• Brandon Sanderson – Starsight
• Holly Black – The Queen of Nothing
• Maggie Stiefvater – Call Down the Hawk
• T. Kingfisher – The Twisted Ones
• Laura Ruby – Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All
• Alix E. Harrow – The Ten Thousand Doors of January
• Tamsyn Muir – Gideon the Ninth
• Erin A. Craig – House of Salt and Sorrows
• C. S. E. Cooney – Desdemona and the Deep

❥ Biggest disappointment

Without a doubt, Girls of Paper and Fire by Natahsa Ngan and Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire. I didn’t write a review for McGuire’s third Wayward Children novella because it made me so angry. There is very little plot (as usual) and there is only one interesting side character. The protagonist was the most self-pitying, hypocritical, whiny moron I have ever read about. The thing is, she would say I dislike her because she’s fat (but I really, really don’t care how big her thighs are) because that’s all she does. Suspect people of disliking her for being fat when everybody is actually very nice to her. But because she has a problem with her own size, she assumes everyone else does too. I just can’t root for a character who constantly puts herself in a victim role, imagining and inventing reasons why she’s supposedly treated unfairly when SHE OBVIOUSLY ISN’T AND NOBODY CARES IF SHE’S FAT. Whew. So yeah… I liked the beginning of that story but the protagonist made it unbearable. I’m surprised my eyes didn’t get stuck from how much I rolled them while reading this.

❥ Biggest surprise

Mary Robinette Kowal – The Calculating Stars

I had read two of Kowal’s fantasy books (Jane Austen with magic is the elevator pitch) and while they featured great ideas, they were both quite boring. That series lacked all excitement and the style is painfully technical. Like, the words are all in the correct place and I can see what the author is trying to do, but there’s no emotion there.
All the more surprise when Kowal’s alternate history/science fiction novel hooked me from the first page and didn’t let up until the end. Although this too is a quiet sort of book, especially for a sci fi novel, there was so much to love about it.

❥ Favourite new author (Debut or new to you)

• S. A. Chakraborty
• G. Willow Wilson
• Sarah Gailey

Each of these women impressed me with only one of their novels. I had technically read G. Willow Wilson’s Miss Marvel before, but this was my first novel by her.
S. A. Chakraborty’s City of Brass was magical and lush and filled with complex politics.
G. Willow Wilson convinced me with her new novel The Bird King, which was full of atmosphere and mythology and very, very human characters.
And Sarah Gailey just threw the perfect debut novel out there with Magic for Liars. I loved the characters, I was completely in for the murder mystery, and I can’t wait to read more by her.

❥ Newest fictional crush

I’m a little too old for fictional crushes but if you made me pick one that I think my younger self would have loved, I’d go with Sean Kendrick from The Scorpio Races.

❥ Newest favourite character

Hm… I already mentioned Sean Kendrick, so I’ll go with a different one here. Although the book itself wasn’t perfect, A Curse so Dark and Lonely featured one of the best, proactive heroines I’ve encountered in YA in a long time. Harper Lacy may have cerebral palsy, but she doesn’t let that hold her back from saving kingdoms, breaking curses, or generally taking matters into her own hands. She doesn’t wait to be saved, she gets up and saves herself!

❥ Book that made you cry

• Leigh Bardugo – Ruin and Rising
• Maggie Stiefvater – The Scorpio Races

The ending of the Grisha Trilogy was just too well done not to cry a little. But Stiefvater really wrecked me with The Scorpio Races. I was close to tears for the entire last third of the book. But you know when I really did start crying? On the very last page, reading that very last line! I don’t think that’s ever happened to me and I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with an ending this perfect.

❥ Book that made you happy

It’s a little concerning how long I had to think about this. But while I’ve read a lot of depressing, dark, sad books this year, there were some that ended up making me glow with joy.

• Madeline Miller – Circe
• L. M. Montgomery – Anne of Green Gables

Circe may have started out depressing, what with the titular Circe being unloved and unwanted most of the time. But as she grows as a character and as her world changes and new people enter into it, her story becomes more joyful. By the end, I caught myself smiling more and more often.
I also finally read Anne of Green Gables after watching the first episode of its adaptation on Netflix. And I’ve come to the conclusion that if Anne’s optimistic outlook and pure joy for life doesn’t make you happy, nothing will.

❥ Most beautiful book you’ve bought so far this year (or received)

I have bought some seriously pretty books this year!

• Margaret Rogerson – Sorcery of Thorns
• Leigh Bardugo – King of Scars
• Joanna Ruth Meyer – Echo North
• Rachel Hartman – Tess of the Road

❥ Books you need to read by the end of the year

Well, there’s a lot of those. But because endless lists are no fun for anyone, I’m going to narrow it down to my top 15 books that I absolutely need to read before the year is over.

• Joanne M. Harris – The Gospel of Loki
• Katherine Arden – The Winter of the Witch
• Helene Wecker – The Golem and the Jinni
• Peadar O’Guilin – The Call
• Peadar O’Guilin – The Invasion
• Helen Oyeyemi – Gingerbread
• Joanna Ruth Meyer – Echo North
• Garth Nix – Frogkisser
• Diana Peterfreund – For Darkness Shows the Stars
• Margaret Rogerson – Sorcery of Thorns
• Marlon James – Black Leopard, Red Wolf
• C. A. Fletcher – A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World
• Charlie Jane Anders – The City in the Middle of the Night
• Karen Lord – Unraveling
• Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Giant

I’m not going to tag anyone specifically because I know many, many people have done it already. If you want to join in and do this tag, consider yourselves tagged and maybe leave me a link to your post. I love reading other people’s freak out tag answers and discovering even more books I have to read. 🙂