Books and Sensibility

We're an Open Book

★★★

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

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Rating: 3 out of 5.

  14 Hours 4 Mins | Margaret K. McElderry | Historical/Sci-Fi/Horror | 1/26/2021

These Violent Delights is a Historical (sci-fi ?. .horror ?) YA set in the dangerous and dazzling city of Shanghai during the roaring 20s. Shanghai. The novel is an homage (read: Not a retelling. Not even a little bit) to Romeo and Juliet and follows rival gang heirs Juliette the cutthroat fierce heir to the Scarlett Gang and Roma the stalworth Russian heir to the White Flowers, as they hunt down the source of a maddening disease sweeping the city

Going in I didn’t know much about Shanghai’s history as an international (read colonized) port. It’s the perfect setting for this dark and mysterious mystery the main characters find themselves in. I’m curious to read more book set during this time period.

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Bookish and The Beast by Ashley Poston

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

7 hours 21 minutes | Quirk Books | Contemporary YA | 8/4/2020

This was such a clever retelling of Beauty in the Beast.

Bookish high school senior Rosie Thorne inherited her love of the Starfield franchise from her mother. Little does she know Vance Reigns–the bad-boy star of the Starfield movie– has been banished to her backwoods North Carolina town until his 18th birthday.

When Rosie accidentally ruins a book in the library she agrees to catalog the house’s massive science fiction library. Vance brings the expected grumpy broodiness from the Beast archetype but he’s also just kind of full of regret -much like the Beast in the Disney movie. 

This is is the third book in the Once Upon A Con series but each book takes place a year apart so, while there are some cameos and references, I think it can be read as a standalone.

I did a lot of this on audio. Narrator Caitlin Kelly is one of my favorites and the main reason I picked this up. She has such a great YA voice and range of characters. This was my first time hearing Curry Whitmire–he does a great British teenager even though I think he’s American. However, I found it so odd that they pronounced Vance Reigns’ last name with a hard “G”. I have never heard of this pronunciation.

Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

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Rating: 3 out of 5.

16 hours | Macmillan Audio| Science Fiction | Release Date: 7/21/2020

I’ve been following Lindsay Ellis for a while. She creates incisive, deep-dive video essays on film theory that have been helpful for me when I get in a review rut. She’s more recently been involved in some bonkers omegaverse lawsuit drama–which I’m sure did great things for this book’s publicity. All that said I was rooting for this book to be good but it was kind of a disappointment. 

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Chainbreaker and Firestarter by Tara Sim

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When I reviewed the first book in this series last year, I enjoyed it but wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue the series. It didn’t seem like there was much more Sim could do without breaking the rules of her world. But then I got an Audible Plus trial and this was one of the few available titles that interested me.

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Audiobook Review: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

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320 pages | Titan Books | Historical Fantasy | 11 Hours 56 mins

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

What if instead of The South rising…the dead did? More than a decade after the zombies or “shamblers” began to roam, Black slaves and Native Americans have been forced from the fields and into battle schools to become protectors or Attendants for whites.

Justina Ireland’s re-imagined history is a unique concept that combines historical fiction with action, adventure and light horror as her battle-tested heroine Jane stops fighting to save white people and starts fighting to save herself. At first, I  had a hard time with this book because I went in expecting this to be a book about an alternate-universe antebellum zombie apocalypse, but really this is just the setting as the shamblers are the “new normal”. Once I was able to adjust my expectations and our main character is taken from the world she knows and dropped into the untamed wild west, I found this to be a solid read. …

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Audiobook Review: The House In The Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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Rating: 3 out of 5.

12 hours 12 minutes | Macmillian Audio | Fantasy | Release Date: 3/17/2020

I heard about this book on an episode of RomBkPod last year and ever since then I have seen it EVERYWHERE. Klune is prolific in the m/m indie romance space; his traditional publishing debut tells the story of Linus Baker, a middle-aged social worker for magical children who is given a special assignment at an unusual orphanage where he eventually falls for the orphanage’s master. This book has one of the highest Goodreads ratings I’ve ever seen and charmed both fantasy and romance readers alike. It’s ultimately a warm tale about acceptance, found family and finding home but…it didn’t work for me.