YA Fantasy

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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Crier’s War by Nina Vareela

December 15, 2019 Leave a Comment

320 pages | HaperTeen | Fantasy| 10/01/2019

Automae are alchemically created “Made” humans designed to serve as humanoid companions and servants. They were not supposed to rise up, they were not supposed to conquer humanity…but they did. It’s been nearly fifty years and The Age of Automae is still on the rise, but a human rebellion is on the horizon.

The world created in Nin Vareela’s Crier’s War is a twist on the uncanny valley and robot apocalypse. The highly detailed world-building and the mythology was one of the best parts of the book, but this book hinges so hard on what felt like a lukewarm forbidden romance between Crier, an Automae noble and Ayla a vengeful human girl working in secret for the resistance and motivated only by her need to kill Crier.

Crier’s War has a promising start as Ayla and Crier have an accidental run-in where Ayla witnesses Crier…cry, something Automae are not supposed to do. As Crier finds herself experiencing new emotions she decides to keep Ayla close by making her her handmaid. But the more time Crier spends with Ayla the more she begins to feel the one thing Automae aren’t supposed to have; passion.

This could have been so compelling, but in a book that is about forbidden emotions ALL of the emotions felt a little muted.

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Six Of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

November 6, 2019 Leave a Comment

Rating: ★★★+.5 | 15 hrs 14 mins | Brilliance Audio | YA Fantasy | 09/29/2015

I’m on a mission to read the Grishaverse series before the Netflix show comes out and right now I have Crooked Kingdom and King of Scars left.

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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 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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