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Amber & Dusk

Amber & Dusk by Lyra Selene

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Unlikable heroine, cocktail of predictable YA tropes, and ‘broken glass’ dialogues.

Originally, I thought I would rate this book somewhat higher, because I had this idea that allowances should be made for the fact that this is a debut novel, and because I should be kinder… But then I experienced this profound sense of relief when I finally finished this book and was released from the feeling of nausea that had accompanied me all the time I was reading it, and realized that no… Sorry, but no.

Considering the fact that this book was actually picked for at least two book subscription boxes in December… it was an utter disappointment. The only positive thing I can say about this book is that the writing wasn’t bad.
But the subject…
Just before (previous month) I was watching people rage about the “bury your gays” trope in another recent YA novel, because everyone is so sick of it, … aaaand here we go again. And this is not even the biggest or worst ‘YA cookie-cutter’ trope of this book.
– A pretty heroine with some sort of gift, who is also ignorant about all and everything? Check.
– Lost princess who grew up hidden by others? Check.
– Court intrigues and beautiful nobles who torture the said heroine? Check.
– A cruel beautiful boy with tortured soul, who is mean to the heroine but they’ll kiss anyway? Check.
– A ‘kind of’ love triangle? Check.
– An ‘extra cruel’ monarch who gets off on torture and murder? Check.
We can go on and on.
I don’t know if we were supposed to dislike the heroine by design, but I got sick of her ‘I deserve better! I’m entitled to it! I’m worthy!’ whining after first few chapters. And she never shuts up about it. The first 70% of this book is her screaming at various people about how she ‘deserves’ all the things she imagined to exist in the court, literally everyone telling her that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that the reality is not like the world of her imagination, and her screaming back that they’re just trying to keep her from things that are hers by some kind of right. She was probably supposed to be fearless ans witty, but she appears to be no more that an arrogant brat who tries to mouth back to everyone in a nasty-ish way and beam with pride about it.
Speaking of which, most of dialogs felt unnatural and incomplete. I can’t even put my finger on it, but the dialogues just didn’t work, the lines didn’t fit seamlessly and didn’t convey enough.

Books like this make me seriously consider if I should just unsubscribe from all my book boxes and free myself from having to engage with this ‘YA fashion’ of same books about palace intrigues, cruel princes, and tortured heroines. At least I can perhaps hope that we’ll leave this fashion in 2018 and never come back to it again.





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Vision in Silver (The Others, #3)

Vision in Silver by Anne Bishop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Three books in and I’m still on about the same position on these series – there are elements, settings, and characters that appeal to me very strongly and pull me back in for more, but there are also a lot of elements I feel like I want to skip over or ignore to not spoil my experience.
And I’m constantly afraid that in the every next one the things I love will be replaced and disappear entirely.
If I was reading these series while they were still in the making I would chant ‘Less angsty politics and more wolfy humor!”
Alas, the further in we get the more large-scale the angsty politics are threatening to get.
And the relationship between the main characters is not as much slow-burn as it is barely smoking. Not that I mind that it took them 3 books to hold hands, I’m not reading this for the possible romance much, but some kind of tangible progress would be nice. Personally, I find it disappointing when the focus of the book turns completely away from characters’ interactions and into large-scale politics. It’s boring and impersonal, and we have enough of large-scale human stupidity, prejudice, and intolerance in our everyday life for it to be interesting or pleasant to read about. The only plus is that in these series the intolerable humans are very likely to get dead or at least mercilessly punished with hardly any delay.



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Soulless (Parasol Protectorate, #1)

Soulless by Gail Carriger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Unusual style, unexpected turns, not everyone’s cup of tea.

First, I would like to say that I did enjoy this book, or at least 80-90% of it. It’s one of those reads that allowed me to get far enough away from my usual outside world. It has its own style, it has humor, it has some interesting characters, and a heroine that at least has some brains.
I wanted to say that I enjoyed this book first, because I tend to focus on the elements that did bother me about it so much it might send the wrong impression.
But there are some things that bothered me that I can’t really let go of:
First and foremost, the ‘everfloating POV’ style. I think it’s also called ‘head-hopping’. When every next paragraph you have to wonder from whose perspective it’s going to be. Or feel like it’s trying to be from everyone’s perspective at the same time. I know that there are many debates on whether this should be considered acceptable or not, and I would not say I had placed myself firmly in either camp before (and had to made myself edit it out of my own writing a couple of times), but I must say that reading a whole book full of did nothing to persuade me in favor of it. It’s a bit too confusing, and feels ‘unprofessional’.
I also found the beginning of this book to be rather misleading. It lulls you in this sense ‘oh, I’m going to read something light and flimsy, with some fun style’, and, while I don’t want to spoil much by saying in which ways this impression was wrong, I can say that I found some unexpected elements dumped on me hard and fast. Let’s just say that there’s enough angst in it to warn people before they mistakenly pick this book seeking to read something light and worry-free. Or ‘adult’ elements free.
I’m not sure how I feel about the personality of the heroine yet. I just don’t really enjoy people who like to yell and act with their temper before thinking, or enjoy power.
There were also a couple of points at the very end that I was not really a fan of. Such as the location and the way the very last ‘event’ took place in the Epilogue, and also the new ‘post’ (the professional one) of our heroine that I assume she will assume in the next book. While I am sure I’m going to read the next book in the series, I’m currently feeling very apprehensive about the possible amount of politics that might be involved. And politics just might be that something that will turn me away from these series.



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Murder of Crows (The Others, #2)

Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A promising sequel.

I did enjoy this book more than the first one.
Though the amount of chapters with POV of random characters (villains) did still bother me, it does feel like there were fewer of those than in the first one.
Although, unfortunately, I still can’t shake the feeling that I would prefer these series without the whole ‘blood prophets’ concept a little bit more… which is maybe a strange thing to say, since it’s literally the central idea around the main character. It’s just the whole idea of girls kept as property, bred, raped, used, treated as things… doesn’t sit with me and I wish I didn’t have to read about it.
I do, however, enjoy the world of terra indigene and the way they interact among each other and with humans quiet a lot.
I feel like the next book has a potential to either go somewhere I will like a lot, or go some other completely unexpected place I won’t really want to follow it to… I sincerely hope it’s the former.



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My Lady Mage (Warriors of the Mist, #1)

My Lady Mage by Alexis Morgan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Remarkably simple fantasy romance with knights, horses, animal companions, disgusting villains, and mleh ending

I couldn’t stop thinking that this book held striking resemblance to something I would write when I was about 13-15 y.o. It ticked all those points – a heroine with magic power related to horses, a handsome knight on a black horse, an instant romance with the aforementioned knight, a group of overly protective and honorable warriors with animal companions, etc.
Unfortunately though, the villains in this book were a bit too villain-y and disgusting in the beginning, and then were thrown away in a mangled and abrupt ending in a rather disappointing way. For an ending like this, I really don’t see a point for building up the resentment towards them as much as it was built up.
Another point would be that the heroine could do with a bit more brains (as usual). I literally couldn’t stand the way she behaved and acted in last few chapters.
I think, that even for a silly fairy tale (with sex) for girls this book had some promise, until about 70% in, when it suddenly flew off the hinges and the plot was washed down the toilet.



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Touch of Power (Healer, #1)

Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


A fantasy adventure that had a promising start, but got lost, and lost all of its appeal half way through.

The first half of this book looked like an ‘okay’ fantasy adventure, with a promise of some romance, and admittedly less-than-average writing. The world-building was not bad, if not very deep; there was a lot of phrasing that felt too modernistic to fit with the setting, and characters did not really feel very interesting or developed… but most of it felt more or less passable.
Unfortunately, from around the middle of the book, it then all went down the drain. The time progression, events sequences, felt random and mangled. More and more things felt unnatural, like the way they kept getting captured and released, and the reasons for both. It became tiring to follow. It was already increasingly difficult to keep myself interested in reading on, and then a character of a type I practically hate the most got introduced (a nasty manipulative egomaniac), and I found myself skimming pages just to get it over with.
Also, the whole idea of people having sex for the first time, and more, while one of them is dying form a plague (and due to die in few days) actually made me uncomfortable. I don’t find it romantic, don’t like how it was done, or how romance was done in this story in general.
I though there were some promising ideas at first, but overall it turned out to be very disappointing.



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Moon Called (Mercy Thompson, #1)

Moon Called by Patricia Briggs

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Tightly-packed and fast-paced urban fantasy.

Finally got to these series, one could say.
I enjoyed it, but it felt a bit too tightly packed for my tastes. In fact, it was so action-packed I feel like it just flew by too quickly for me to form a full opinion on this. (Maybe I shouldn’t have read it in less than 2 days)
But for such a short book, not only the action feels to be happening non-stop, with no time to breathe, we get introduced one after another to various wolves, witches, gremlins, vampires, gay lawyers… There are all these people in their stories and politics and concepts that keep piling and piling on top of each other, and it gets a little overwhelming. I like that there are so many thought-through details and branches, but I feel like this book would be a bit more enjoyable if we could slow down and linger on some things. Let the world-building settle in. Develop relationships some more. Get a better feel for some characters.
Feels a bit too much like a drama episode made after a novel, where all the extra story ‘juice’ that makes novel a novel was sucked out and only the indispensableness bones and meat were left to make sure no action-movie lover could have a chance to feel bored even for a second.
It’s hard to find a specific flaw in this, but there’s this feeling of ‘under-satisfaction’, of something missing, that leaves me with this cautious feeling of ‘I’ll get the next one and we’ll see’, instead of ‘I want the whole series right now!’ I was hoping for.




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I want to escape from my thoughts into reading,

but I’m also already stressing out about the fact that I only brought 4 books with me to last me 2 weeks, none of them of the same series, and I’ve already almost finished one of them on the day 0 (on the plane).

And this is not a country where I could just go online and get the books I want delivered next day. They don’t even have Amazon here…

I also, apparently, choose stressing out and suffering without the books I want, to just buing them on my kindle. I just can’t make myself do it, even though I could just buy all the books of the series I want to continue reading right now, and it would be like 3 times cheaper than waiting before I return to Japan and order paper copies. This is so irrational I kind of want to smack myself, but feel like it still wouldn’t help.

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Phoenix Unbound (Fallen Empire, #1)

Phoenix Unbound by Grace Draven

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book kept me apprehensive for a good half of it. Chiefly because there’s hardly anything I really really hate to read about more than people who get off on torturing and humiliating others. And in the beginning of this book, there is enough of that for a few. There’s torture, slavery, rape, humiliation, murder, people being burned alive and generally treated like worthless dirt left and right. It was pretty difficult to get through, to be honest. Since I was going into this blind (I got this book through a subscription box and have never read anything by this author before), and with a beginning like that, I sat ready to throw this book as far as I can at any signs of more gruesome rape and gore following.
And while the gore is still there, I was pleasantly surprised by many choices the author made going forward. This book reminded me that I must be still a girl deep inside, because it is, let us be honest, chiefly a romance before all else, and it got into my head like I never expected it to. It gave me a lot of anxiety, and got into my dreams. I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The main characters are very easy to like. I can hardly remember the last I found main characters as easy to like and understand as these two. They are not stupid, they are not annoying, they are not arrogant, or closed-minded, and, while they do make questionable decisions, they don’t act like self-centered idiots who constantly need to establish dominance over each other, and I really can’t stress enough how much I appreciate this.
I do think the writing has a few issues. The switching between POVs was sometimes hard to follow, and time was swallowed in strange ways. And I also wish there was a bit more to this book. The second half especially, felt a little rushed. I think this book could do with some more substance around its middle, definitely, because the world is there and it is interesting enough to be spread out a bit more around the romance and the main struggles of the main characters.
I was planning to give this book 4 stars, even if mostly because first chapters were really unpleasant and I can’t in any honesty say I loved it while those chapters are still in this book, but I’m actually going to be sappy and add an extra star just for the ending. Because thank you for not crashing us.

P.S. I also not sure I actually want to read a sequel to this… Because, wile I definitely would want more of this book, I definitely don’t want any more shit to happen to these two. And I also really didn’t want that thing who we all know shouldn’t have survived this book to survive… and since it did, it’s easy to predict that if there will be a sequel, it most likely will feature its revenge and… I really don’t want to read about any more things that thing might do to make the lives of these characters (and all beings in general) miserable. Let’s just leave them with the ending we’ve got… (If we could have a book that was about these characters without any more disturbing terrible things happening to them and around them, now I would read the shit out of that.)





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These Rebel Waves (Stream Raiders, #1)

These Rebel Waves by Sara Raasch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Skillfully written heart gripping story of faith, politics, and prejudice

This was a very surprising read for me, because I did not expect to like it this much. First of all, I hardly ever like YA. Second of all, I don’t enjoy reading about politics and intrigues. And yet this book held me interested all the way through to the very end.
The writing is very good. The world is interesting and comprehensively built, even if small. And more importantly, characters feel true, their emotions and motivations clear and compelling. It was very easy to feel with them and for them, and never once I felt like they’ve been stupified, as I so often do with YA.
This is not a light story, it is full of blood, intrigues and betrayal. There are fanatics, religious or political, there’s torture, death, child soldiers, and the main characters have to fight for things that are so much larger than them, and against things that are so much larger the them. I liked that the ideas of right and wrong, of learning to see things from different sides, of reacting to changing circumstances no matter how painful the situation is to believe in, are in the heart of this book. This book kept me tense a lot of time, and even when I didn’t really want to be reading something that made me feel so tense, I still couldn’t put it down.
I’ll be looking forward to and dreading the sequel.

Although, I don’t know who decided to market it as a book about ‘gay pirates’ (which I learned after skimming through the first page of goodreads reviews), but it was clearly a mistake. This is not in any way ‘a book about gay pirates’.
It is worth a read though, regardless.




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I lived my life entirely unaware of YA and its trends, but after this year of subscribing to boxes there’s now a whole list of YA book series I vehemently don’t want to have anything to do with, even without reading them myself, even though they appear on my instagram feed every single day. It is because they seem so popular that I had to open goodreads pages to see if I would want to read them too, and after reading reviews and seeing what they were about… all I got was ‘I don’t understand humans and I’m not sure I want to’ whiplash, which sent me looking for boxes that would focus on something else.

Unfortunately, they were not easy to find. Most of those that do exist don’t ship outside US. Or don’t even include bookish items, which does take out half the fun. The Bookish Box seemed like a great choice at first, because they have an adult option, but soon enough I found out that not only the adult books are unrelated to monthly themes of their boxes, they are more often than not contemporary fiction paperbacks (and all those I received were by female authors, and at least one of the books I received was actually YA disguised as an adult novel). I just couldn’t see the reason to create an adult option if the book included would be completely unrelated, and all of the items and t-shirts would still be focused on YA fandoms.

I’d also like to confess that I find it difficult to keep my negative opinions on the fandoms to myself. Almost every subscription box is having a ‘special box’ for the sequel of The Cruel Prince that is coming out, and they keep showing up in my feed talking about how much they loved it, and I feel like I need to clench my teeth to not write them ‘But I kind of thought it was disgusting and I don’t understand why are you acting like everyone should be hyped about it.’ (And this one was actually one of those I did read, because it was in a box last year.) On one hand, I know in my head that commenting on someone’s post to say ‘But I hate this thing you like’ is a stupid thing to do, but on the other… I kind of wish people who provide a ‘service’ like these boxes would consider opposing opinions as well. As in, as a subscriber, I would like to be able to kindly ask for them to stop only including items related to a small selection of fandoms (ACOTAR, Raven Cycle, Six of Crows, Shatter Me, etc.) and focus on something else. But as usual, I have to come to terms with the fact that my opinion will be a minority no one would care about. The clear answer would be to look for different people and services, but the selection is just not there… If you want to get pretty special editions of newly released books with goods – you’ll have to deal with people hyping out about and pushing to you a lot of fandoms you dislike. You want to have more freedom of genre selection – resign to choosing book-only subscriptions and likely older paperbacks.

Another subscription box just announced an adult fantasy option, and I for sure will try it out, but the first box is yet to arrive, so I can’t really say anything.

Also, sadly enough, 2 out of 4 of the boxes I subscribe to right now have announced their November themes and after reading the descriptions of the books to be included I was torn between skipping a month for both or giving it a shot even though both of them sounded like something I’d clearly hate to spend my time on…

In the end, I made a choice to save some money and skip… (Just to forget about my reasoning and order 2 new boxes to try out instead the next week.)

Honestly, it feels like a waste of money in more ways than one, because I clearly can’t read this fast to actually read all the books I receive and not add them to a quickly growing TBR pile, and also because I don’t even feel healthy enough to read anything but fluffy fanfiction most of the days anyway… Not to mention that YA subscription boxes more often than not focus on fandoms I have no real use for. I put away the books I don’t feel like reading, but also can’t get rid of them before I even try, and they just pile and pile… And then there’s also the fact that shipping costs as much as box itself.

But this state of my mind is also the exact reason I keep ordering them because it’s kind of like receiving a small present every time and it feels like I need that feeling to keep myself afloat every month. And the more I receive something I can’t really feel any positive emotions about, the more it makes me to look for more of boxes to order… (I know it sounds pathetic and not exactly effective, but beggars with chronic depression can’t exactly be chooser of what we use to keep ourself from the very rock bottom.)

So next month (or more like the beginning of December, considering the shipping time) I will receive 3 new boxes and will have to choose which ones I want to keep, and whether or not I want to cancel those I put on hold this month… And how to stop myself from wasting money on things I don’t need just because I’m getting brainwashed by pretty instagram pictures.

 

 

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SadieSadie by Courtney Summers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beautifully written heart-crashing experience

This is considered YA? Really?
There are several reasons why I doubt it. Firstly, is that that while it shares the ‘reads like a movie’ aspect with most of YA novels, its writing goes at least one lever deeper and better than any YA I have read (and yeah, maybe this is the exact reason I haven’t read enough to know otherwise). It reminded me somewhere of reading Dorothy Allison, and not only because of the obvious topics, but because of the vivid images and excellent attention to details, and especially emotional ones.
Secondly, I, at least, would consider the topic to be a bit too heavy for YA.
While I can’t call this story exactly unique or say that is shows something shocking we’ve never seen before, (it says it itself – girls go missing all the time; and again, people like Dorothy Allison immediately come to mind), especially since most people probably watch shows like Criminal Minds and LAO SVU, it is an artfully created experience.
It is not a long book, and it feels shorter still because of the podcast format most of it takes, and maybe that is why it is considered YA. But I don’t think it loses any depth because of its format, and I haven’t once felt like there were holes left in it. Its characters all come alive in front of your eyes, and you can feel every single one of them as if you are looking right at them. As does the scenery, and every town, even if you’ve never been to the States.
What I also appreciated about it, is that this was a story about love.
It would be easy to pull it apart, picking up at every human flaw and misguided decision, but… This book is written well enough to stop me from wanting to do it, and that is the most important point for me personally.

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