★★

Audiobook Review: Someone We Know by Shari Lapena

October 21, 2020 Leave a Comment

7 hours 50 min. | Penguin Audio | Mystery| Release Date: 7/30/2019

An idyllic upstate New York neighborhood is shaken when a flirtatious young wife is found brutally murdered in the trunk of her car. Her shady husband is the number one subject but in this neighborhood, everyone has a secret worth killing for

And by secret I mean cheating. Like, there is a lot of mentions of cheating in this book.

This my first foray into domestic mystery/thriller after Big Little Lies--which was one of my favorite reading experiences–and this one just didn’t work for me. I didn’t get the racing to the end feeling I wanted and it may have had something to do with the fact that I figured out the killer at 60%.

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Protect The Prince by Jennifer Estep (Crown of Shards #2)

March 14, 2020 Leave a Comment

12 hrs. 40 min. | Adult Fantasy | Harper Voyage | Release Date: 07/2/2019

*Kill the Queen Spoilers*

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Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

December 22, 2019 Leave a Comment

9 hours 54 minutes| Fantasy YA | Henry Holt & Co| Release Date: 09/27/2016

If Six of Crows was like a Victorian heist movie then Crooked Kingdom reads like the follow-up television series. Apart from coming off as more episodic, the characters get kind of flanderized, the plot is a little bloated leaving this big finale with some hits and misses.

After narrowly escaping the ice court this band of thieves has to pull one last heist—well it’s actually a handful more cons and then a heist to set things right. Crooked Kingdom keeps its signature sardonic wit and rhythmic humor that makes the characters enduring while also taking a level in badass when necessary.

I’ve come down on being pretty “meh” on this book. I feel like the things that made Six of Crows unique weighed down this 500 plus page book, namely the flashbacks. The flashbacks in Six of Crows were a wonderful way of introducing readers to the characters by showing not telling (except for Wylan and Jesper who get their stories told in this book for some reason ? I felt like this should have been in the first book so we understood their motivations) but here it just felt like padding.

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The Cruel Prince By Holly Black

November 5, 2019 Leave a Comment

8 hours 39 minutes| Hachette Audio | Fantasy | 1/02/18

Here we go.

I’m a big fan of Holly Black’s Curse Workers’ series and I’ve always found it interesting that The Curse Workers series is SO unlike her other writings which feature witches, wizards and fae. Black has been writing YA about faerie for years and Curel Prince has been a big hit. I was intrigued because of the high review Kat gave it and was ready to dive in.

The book follows three sisters who are whisked away against their will to Faerie where they live among the gentry. But to truly earn a place among the Folk, they must make a way for themselves no matter the cost.

17-year-old Jude Durate is fierce and determined so when she has the opportunity to join the Court of Shadows, a group of royal spies, to ensure the next King of Faerie is crowned she takes her chance. I sort of wish the book was about this–but it wasn’t. Jude’s role as a spy in more of a side plot to make room for all the …cruelness.

Honestly, I found the first 30% of the book kind of unpleasant, I didn’t really enjoy watching the main character basically get tortured only to have her main tormentor, Prince Cardan, on the way to partially redemption at the end. It truly felt like we were supposed to look at the events that happened and understand he didn’t mean for it to be that way. Because he can’t stop thinking about her. Ugh.

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Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo

October 5, 2019 Leave a Comment

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A Curse So Dark and Lonely By Brigid Kremmerer

July 19, 2019 Leave a Comment

496 pages | Bloomsbury YA | Fantasy | Release Date: 01/29/2019

The big marketing push for this book in the blogosphere totally put this book on my radar. Brigid Kremmer is a veteran YA author and the premise of this book sounded pretty intriguing; Harper, a modern teen girl, teams up with Rhen a prince from another world, to end a curse. While the ending is quite the cliffhanger I generally found that this book wasn’t for me

I want to preface this all by saying I’m sort of fascinated by YA Fantasy and the tropes it often inhabits. Tropes that I think are so prevalent that the YA Fantasy novel Damsel purposefully turns them on their head. Some things I keep an eye out for are :

No Boys …. Unless Thier Cute

YA Fantasy has no shortage of brooding cute boys. Usually royalty. If there isn’t one just wait until book 2

Capitan of The Guard

In a YA fantasy world, you can usually count on a high ranking bodyguard or royal protector. 9 times out of 10 this character is secretly in love with their charge. I feel like this character’s existence is an easy way to create an emotional bond between the main (usually royal) protagonist and the secondary character. Kremmer turns this concept on its head during the last few chapters which was pretty interesting.

Rebel

There is always a rebellion. A lot of YA fantasy has a fight-against-the-machine-tear-it-down mentality. This is one of my favorites tropes in YA fantasy because whether or not I will read the second book in a series depends on how much the rebellion has changed the status quo.

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