YA Fantasy

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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Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

April 30, 2019 Leave a Comment

18 hours 20 minutes| Fantasy | Hachette Audio | Release Date: 3/18/2017

We’ve been talking about Laini Taylor on this blog since Daughter of Smoke and Bone was featured in this Wall Street Journal article about new books reaching the Harry Potter generation. The Daughter of Smoke and Bone series blew me away and Taylor is back at it again in Strange The Dreamer.

In this book, we meet Lazlo Strange, an orphaned librarian who finds himself the center of a story beyond his wildest dreams. Taylor is one of the best storytellers in YA right now and this book reflects that. The worlds and magic systems she creates are so detailed and creative.

At over 500 pages and 18 hours on audio, there were times where you could feel the page count. In the acknowledgments, Taylor says this was originally one book that got made into two and I think with a little less backstory it probably would have worked as one book but there seems to be no room for standalones in YA

At its heart, Strange The Dreamer is as a unique and original tale of trauma and survival.

….I’m not really a fan of YA duologies. They always feel like one story that has been stretched and padded to become two books instead of a story that needed to be told with two books.

Damsel by Elana K. Arnold

December 28, 2018 Leave a Comment

unrated | 7 hrs. 42 min. | Balzer + Bray | YA Fantasy | Release Date: 10/2/2018

So about this book. I’m not really sure what to think of it. I like that it’s not trying to be what you expect in a YA fantasy. It’s not a story about rebellions, handsome princes, faithful sidekicks, and adventure–instead, it manages to be…I’m going to go ahead and say viscerally transgressive.

I can see Damsel being used to that introduce teens the concept of how to do a feminist reading of a text or apply feminist literary theory (which is totally a class I took in college, okay) It’s chock-full of allegory and symbolism in a way that is raw and at times a bit heavy handed but it’s the kind of strangeness and unease that you can’t look away from.

And whooo, boy…that ending. Like I get what Arnold was doing but I was not expecting that. . .

Check out the audiobook review on AudioFile !