I was super excited to read a book about a magical healer facing a plague – even if they call alchemy ‘science’ in this book, it’s totally magic – and this one definitely delivered. It’s about a girl called Nedra (narrated beautifully by Mhairi Morrison with a lovely soft Scottish accent) from a small northern […]
Heather Dixon Wallwork is one of my absolute favourite authors of all time. She wrote Entwined, a 12 Dancing Princesses retelling which I have never reviewed here on the blog because the book is just too precious and the review would basically consist of my screaming for ten minutes. She also wrote Illusionarium, which was […]
I’m enjoying this series more as it goes on, I think. I feel as if every novel adds a twist or two, solves a riddle or two, and amps up the intensity. I’d love to see Blake’s notes on the history of the queens. I know the losing queens are basically erased from history, but […]
There were some things I liked about this book and some things I didn’t, so I’m trying to go middle of the road and rate this a solid 3 stars. I’ll start with the things I didn’t like: Lei had super special pretty beautiful eyes that made her super special and she was treated differently […]
I love an anti-heroine. I love characters who know what they want and steamroll over everyone else to get it. Xifeng’s manipulation of other characters, from her lover Wei to almost the entire royal family was a pleasure to read. She was smart and driven, and I liked that. So I don’t have a problem […]
Some people will see this as a loving homage to Narnia, with similar elements easily identified: Lucy, Susan and Peter are obviously Evelyn, Philippa, and Jamie, with Aslan recreated in Cervus the stag, and the Woodlands creatures shadows of Narnia natives. Others will see it as a Narnia rip off. For me, I like to […]
I’m really sad this is over. I can’t believe how much I fell in love with this world and Speth and all the characters and just everything. I mean, it’s horrific. It’s awful. But I was just wondering yesterday if it was weird that we pay for phone calls, we pay to send letters to […]
My friend Emily May called this an ‘’ugly, awful little book” and she’s absolutely right, it is ugly, it is awful, and it is absolutely awesome. I found Damsel to be highly readable once I figured out it was quirky and whimsical (it took me about two pages). I also found it to be serious […]
I don’t remember the last time I read a dystopian and thought from page one, “This is where we are heading, this is totally plausible.” The basic premise in All Rights Reserved is that in the future, copyright is used as a weapon, everyone has to pay the rights holders to use words and gestures, […]
I really knew nothing about this book before getting into it. I’d only read the blurb, which although it had interested me because HELLO NECROMANCY (I hate zombies though, I know right?) and I hadn’t read any reviews, so I didn’t know: That it was framed from a bard’s point of view. That it was […]
