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★★
A Curse So Dark and Lonely By Brigid Kremmerer
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 They’re 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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Sam and Ilsa’s Last Hurrah
211 pages | Knopf Books For Young Readers | Contemporary | 4/10/2018
*sigh*
I’m sad to say this book was a huge disappointment. I’ve read and enjoyed nearly everything this duo has put out and I was so ready to like this but it was a hot mess.
18-year-old twins Sam and Ilsa are known for the dinner parties they host in their grandmother’s luxury rent-controlled Manhattan apartment. When their grandmother decides to finally sell, the twins host one last dinner party before everything changes.
I honestly don’t want to spend too much time trashing this book. There are multiple Goodreads reviewsfor that. This book has one of the lowest Goodreads ratings I’ve ever seen and while I noticed that going in I also liked Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List--which most people hate.
Reading this felt like someone put Cohn and Levithan’s previous books through an algorithm and had a computer write this book.
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Vox by Christina Dalcher
Release Date: 08/21/18 | Speculative Fiction | 9 hours 27 minutes | Penguin
Vox takes place in the near, near, near future where the government has limited women to 100 spoken words a day in an effort to Make America Great Again reinforce traditional gender roles. Dr. Jean McClellan is a cognitive linguist who has never quite adjusted to the new rules of society and brings the entire system down–which by the way isn’t a spoiler. It’s literally the first line of the book.
I added this book to my to-reads shelf the minute I heard about it on the What Should I Read Next podcast and was so excited to get into it…but this book really disappointed me. I think it’s because I went into this book thinking it was supposed to be this feminist dystopia but when you read Dalcher’s interviews you find out she’s a linguist who just wanted to write a book about her passion.
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Audiobook Review: Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake
Release Date: 09/20/16 | Fantasy| 9 hours 52 minutes
I’m slowly learning fantasy just may not be my genre, I read a couple a year and have always been lukewarm on most of them but this book came through on my holds the same week the sequel hit the bestseller’s list so I decided to check it out.
Now, I do remember this book being talked about during BEA 2016 and Three Dark Crowns is pretty much What You See Is What You Get; Three sisters; Mirabella, Arsinoe and Katharine must kill their sisters in order to take the crown and become Queen of their island nation.
What I wasn’t expecting is just how much of a prequel this book is to that major plot point. For most of the book we follow the sisters, who were separated and raised on separate parts of the island territories, as they prepare for Belltane– the official event that means they can start trying to kill each other. I liked getting backstories on all of the sisters but it was just a lot. We have to learn the customs, magical abilities, culture and a host of side characters for three different areas. It felt like reading three books at once.
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Audiobook Review: #famous by Jilly Gagnon
- Release Date: February 14th 2017
- Audiobook Hours: 7 hrs 53 minutes
- Genre: Contemporary Romance
- Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books (HarperCollins)
Did I pick up this book because the cover reminded me of Fangirl ? Maybe. Yes, yes I did.
When high school junior Rachel Ettinger secretly snaps a photo of Kyle Bonham and tweets, ahem, I mean flits it it to her best friend she thinks nothing of it.
Until the pic goes viral.
While Kyle becomes an overnight internet sensation Rachel becomes a target for harassment and cyberbullying.
So, in case you aren’t familiar, this book was inspired by the phenomenon that is Alex from Target.
#famous had a strong start, we see a lot of the rampant sexism online and I really thought Gagnon was going to flesh out Rachel’s story through this lens, but the online abuse gets dropped pretty early to focus on a tedious plot where Kyle recruits Rachel to repeatedly appear with him on an Ellen type talk show.
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