Dust Spells by Andrea Lynn is a young adult historical fantasy novel that I think is best described as 12 Dancing Princesses meets The Diviners by Libba Bray. It’s set in the 1930s in the Dust Bowl and tells the story of three sisters and one vagrant who discover a magical world where not all […]
There were many things I enjoyed about this book: I loved how in the first book, we saw Iris falling in love with Roman. In this book, Roman had his mind wiped, and we saw him falling back in love with Iris. I thought that was a very nice twist. I really enjoyed the action […]
Let me preface this by saying that if you can get over the staggeringly slow start, past the shockingly bad worldbuilding, and through the molasses of a character whose life is so bland and boring she makes Auren from the Plated Prisoner series almost look like she’s actually doing something with her life (besides wandering […]
So I kind of missed the hype on this book (as I so often do). It was published in 2020 and it has, as of March 2024, over a quarter of a million ratings on Goodreads, which means more than that many have read the book. I actually wasn’t even that interested in reading this […]
There was a lot to enjoy in The Broken Elf King. It had a couple of tropes I was really looking forward to exploring: namely marriage of convenience and fake dating to a king. I also liked that this was Book 2 in a series of stand-alones: it meant that I didn’t have to read […]
I had seen this book around and dismissed it, not because I didn’t like the author, because I do (I quite enjoyed her debut novel The Queen’s Rising), but because I have zero interest in stories set in World War I and II. It wasn’t until the book won the Goodreads Choice Award Winner for […]
My first DNF of 2024. I find this novel incredibly unengaging. I like Schwab as a writer. I enjoyed both The Near Witch and The Invisible Life of Addie Larou. Schwab has a lyrical, whimsical, old-fashioned style of writing where every word is a masterpiece carefully woven together. The worldbuilding is lush and I feel […]
I really enjoyed this tale, a revisit to Levenseller’s popular Pirate Queen series starring said queen’s misanthropic pirate assassin Sorinda accidentally unleashing a threat to the world while on a rescue mission. Sorinda’s characterisation was top tier. She was deadly without being one of those stuck up entitled fake assassins we see so often in […]
I was initially drawn to this book because it was about forbidden elemental-based magic. By all accounts, Bree was a normal child brought up by her father, having been told that her mother died in childbirth, and she was kept ignorant of her father’s complicated past. Bree and her father ran a pub or a […]
So this was a hyped book. Allegedly. OK truth be told, I didn’t see ANY hype for this book outside of the Australian publishers doing an ARC call out (thank you SO MUCH to Penguin Random House Australia for sending me a copy of the book for review!) and of course, the adorable author’s own […]
