Books and Sensibility

We're an Open Book

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

     3 Comments

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I did the thing. I saw a fantasy written by a female author and assumed it was YA. I am not proud of how long it took me to realize this wasn’t YA. I t convinced I was calculating the character ages wrong.  *sigh*. Anyway…

Black Sun is an immersive pre-Columbian-inspired fantasy with intrigue, danger, and magic. The countdown is on as we follow an ensemble of characters to the day of a prophetic solar eclipse, where a vengeful god is set to claim his rightful place from the Sun Priest. The characters and plot completely pulled me into the story and left me wanting more.

…

Read this Post

Bookish and The Beast by Ashley Poston

     2 Comments

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

     Leave a Comment

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. 

…

Read this Post

Kat’s 2021 Book-ish Resolutions

     5 Comments

…

Read this Post

Skyhunter by Marie Lu

     Leave a Comment

Rating: 4 out of 5.

11 hours 58 minutes| Macmillan Audio| Dystopian| Release Date: 9/29/2020

Skyhunter feels like a follow-up to Legend (which is almost a decade old at this point). It has all of the things that made Legend such an enticing read; betrayal, biological warfare, experimentation, and coats. Lu loves to write characters in sweeping coats…though there are noticeable fewer epaulets in this one.

…

Read this Post

Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takaoka

     Leave a Comment

320 pages | Candlewick Press| Contemporary | Release Date: 10/13/2020

On the blog, Kat and I sometimes refer to slice-of-life books that don’t make it into the hype rotation as “the quietest YA to ever quiet” and that’s how I feel about Everything I Thought I Knew. It’s the low-stakes story of Chloe, whose senior year is thrown off balance when she discovers she needs a heart transplant. Soon someone else’s tragedy becomes her miracle and after the transplant, Chole begins to see flashes of her donor’s life and begins a journey to give them closure.

…

Read this Post