Briar Rose

I was really looking forward to this one, so it's sad that I ended up not liking it. The worldbuilding was interesting, if sometimes confusing, and seeing a far-future high-tech society based on Vietnamese culture was so cool, but this book features...

-A really weird case of insta-love

-One of the main characters insisting over and over (and over and over and over) that her people's evil practices are fair and fine, actually, because they're slightly less evil than the empire's

-A purportedly 6-year-old child who alternates between being a toddler, a marriage counselor, and a professor

-Aspec characters only existing to be villains

-Some words that maybe should have gone untranslated (Characters calling each other ‘big sister' and ‘little sister' during sex just feels wrong to me)

One of my all-time favorites, “Till We Have Faces” is unique among Lewis's works. It is a dark, complex retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, focusing not on the beautiful Psyche, but rather on her ugly older sister Orual.

Lewis creates a beautifully realized world, a gritty land in which threads of truth are woven into the tapestry of myth. Like his world-building, Lewis's characters have great depth, all being capable of both good and evil. Orual in particular is one of my favorite characters ever: ugly, strong, loving, selfish, courageous... A warrior and a leader, in defiance of the physical unattractiveness that caused her to be deemed “worthless” as a child. She makes big mistakes, and she does great things, and in the end her life is defined by love in ways she didn't even realize. Anyone who doubts Lewis's ability to write well-rounded female characters should meet Orual.

I devoured this book. I can't even place my finger on why it gripped me so much, but it did. I could barely drag myself away to fulfill responsibilities, like cooking and eating supper. The main character is so smart and broken and brave, and her prospects so bleak, that I couldn't imagine a happy ending for her, but desperately wanted it nonetheless. And then there's the mystery: what happened to Judith's friend Lottie? Why would someone kidnap Judith for two years, then cut out half her tongue?

All the way through, I felt vaguely uneasy, expecting to be let down by the ending. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that I definitely wasn't. The story was rapidly-paced, the world was well-built, and the ending was a satisfying conclusion that drew all the pieces together.

The unusual writing style (the book is written in choppy pieces, to Judith's longtime love, referring to him in second person) might not work for everyone, but it did for me.

Highly recommended.

I must confess: I am a bit obsessed with dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA fiction. For me, as with most people, it probably started with [b:The Hunger Games 2767052 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1) Suzanne Collins https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1586722975l/2767052.SX50.jpg 2792775], and grew from there. Soon after reading [b:The Hunger Games 2767052 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1) Suzanne Collins https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1586722975l/2767052.SX50.jpg 2792775], I found Carrie Ryan's haunting, claustrophobic [b:The Forest of Hands and Teeth 3432478 The Forest of Hands and Teeth (The Forest of Hands and Teeth, #1) Carrie Ryan https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320633297l/3432478.SY75.jpg 3473471], and I was hooked. Though those two series are very different, they share a kind of raw desperation that I found beautiful, and I've been searching for more of it ever since.I started “Empty” with high hopes. The cover is well-done, and the premise sounded timely in a compelling way. I think we're all aware that our connected modern lives are powered by a non-renewable resource, and I was excited to find a YA book addressing what might happen once that resource starts running out.Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I tried to like the book, but its flaws were numerous and glaring enough to keep me from getting absorbed in the story. The writing seems stilted and amateurish, and the characters frequently spout awkward, paragraph-long info-dumps. So many anvils are dropped that I'm surprised I finished the book without a concussion. I love books in which the message is a organic part of the story; in “Empty” the message has been shoe-horned in as frequently and loudly as possible.Then there were the characters, all too often flat and cliché. The worst offender was the stereotypical cheerleader, whose “character growth” moment was deciding it was okay to wear glasses instead of contacts. (Not even because she had come to understand that appearance didn't matter much in a world gripped by crisis—more because she realized she still looked pretty in glasses.) A few of the second-tier characters had the potential to be interesting, but they got sadly little attention.To my total lack of surprise, the ending was incongruous, bordering on deus ex machina. The main female character finds a random abandoned house in the woods, complete with garden and self-sustaining energy source. Hallelujah, we're saved!I still think the premise of the book is good, but the execution leaves much to be desired. My advice: read Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent [b:Ship Breaker 7095831 Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker, #1) Paolo Bacigalupi https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327874074l/7095831.SY75.jpg 7352929] instead.

This book was wonderful, and that's not a word I use lightly. It was quick, compelling, and so funny that I am pretty sure I woke up my housemates with some late-night laughing. I kept texting quotes to my sister, and now she wants to read it too.

Love, Death, and Tea offers a humorous, irreverent look at zombies and the apocalypse, with a different flavor from anything else I've read. If you're looking for deep, complex, twisty plotting and a huge cast of characters, look elsewhere: this book is light with crisp pacing, but the characters it does have are deftly-drawn. During a difficult time, it was exactly the light-hearted escape I needed.

Children in the Night is a story set in total darkness. The Askirit people live in an underground world that has no sun, moon, or stars, and is too damp for fire. The only light they have ever seen is the light of sparks and luminous sea creatures. Within this world, we follow two major characters: Yosha, a tormented boy who is caught between his desire to seek light and his desire to avenge his father's death; and Asel, a strong-minded young female warrior who challenges her people's isolationism and fear of the “barbarians” who live outside their lands.

This is a tale that spans many years, and takes place against an intricately constructed background. Harold Myra spent ten years on this story, and the detail of the world he created makes it clear why. It cannot be easy to write a story in which every character is functionally blind, but Myra succeeds in creating a setting that is detailed and vivid enough to be engaging. The book starts off a bit slow, but once I got into it, I was quickly caught up in the details, the characters, and the overarching story. Yosha and Asel fascinated me, as did the trio of orphan children Asel rescued from the “barbarian” lands–and, of course, Auret, the battered, disabled boy who changes every life he touches.

Children in the Night is a Christian allegory, but I never felt beaten over the head by it, and I found it enjoyable as a stand-alone story. I read it first as a young teenager, and I strongly identified with the tale of two young people seeking the truth, challenging what they had been told, and fighting for their freedom and that of their people.

Really enjoyed this one. Fast-paced, well-edited, gloriously creepy. (And on a shallow note: GORGEOUS cover.) The book has a lot of action, but there is enough time spent on character development to allow readers to connect with the protagonists. The characters, and their interactions with each other, rang true to me; for example, though Abe and Anne obviously care about one another, there is no forced sudden romance.

Great quick read: nothing incredibly dense or mind-bending, just a fun story with intriguing characters and sufficient body horror to make you squirm for days after you've finished the book.

And now that I've lavished the book with praise, I'm going to address the one thing that drove me nuts:

A town of 30,000 people is not a tiny town. It's not even particularly small.

I grew up in the country and the closest town of any size was about 15,000 people. It has a movie theater, grocery store, Wal-Mart Supercenter, Walgreens, two hardware stores, two auto parts stores, five or six motels, one nice hotel with actual suites, and about fifteen restaurants. A town twice that size would not be a “small town” with just a run-down diner and one cheap motel. For that you want a population more like 800 or 1,000.

Small detail that probably wouldn't bother most people at all, but for me it was a glaring case of Did Not Do the Research.

One of my favorite books of all time. Moseley's prose is gorgeous and evocative (the landscape is a character in itself), and there are no stereotypes here, no caricatures; the characters are complex and interesting. The main ones are Miranda, widow, mother of 6, struggling to escape from her oppressive, legalistic, cult-like church; and Jack, divorced college professor, a man of both faith and reason, who is equal parts angry and sad to see the life in which Miranda and her children are trapped. Both characters are intelligent, capable of great kindess and love, and like most people, struggling with their own kinds of damage.

This book isn't just exceptionally well-written. (I'm normally not a fan of romance, but the one in this book was so well-done that I didn't mind it one bit.) This book is important. It addresses a world that needs to be better known: the world of Quiverfull fundamentalist homeschooling separatists. Now, Moseley is not implying that all homeschoolers are like this. Obviously not; she herself homeschooled her 3 children. But she is shining a light on a homeschooling subculture that exists, and is a prison to everyone within it. I know. I have a number of friends who grew up in it. Some are still struggling years later.

The Quiverfull movement at its most extreme gives all women, regardless of temperament or gifting or ability, exactly one role in life: to have as many babies as possible, homeschool them all, cook and clean and practice extreme submission. Men are the ultimate, unquestionable authority. (Which many of them feel trapped into, as well–imagine being a sensitive, indecisive guy in a system like this!) Children are harshly forced into unqualified, unquestioning obedience, rather than being taught how to think for themselves and make good choices. Performance and conformity are valued far above grace and courage.

Moseley does a tremendous job of writing a vivid story set against the backdrop of that world, without infodumps and without reducing the characters to bland, powerless stereotypes. Miranda and her children are all so believable that I felt like I knew them, by the end; and despite being trapped in such a stifling world, none of them are without agency. Miranda in particular is done with being controlled; when Jack tries to give her orders, though they come from the opposite of the Quiverfull mentality, she lets him know that her life will no longer be run by men. She will be making her own decisions. She is discovering grace and freedom, the way we all must: not at anyone else's behest, but between herself and God.

I will be leaping to buy any further books by this author.

The premise of this book sounded so fascinating, but I ended up being really disappointed by the execution.

I found the plot nonsensical, the prose overwrought and littered with unconvincing, overly-emotional reactions, and the narrator inconsistent and ultimately not very believable. The road trip seemed to drag on forever, and the main character's endless digressive rants frequently talked and talked and talked without actually saying much of anything.

One of my biggest YA disappointments of the year, unfortunately.

Aimee Hyndman's HOUR OF MISCHIEF was a fun, fast-paced romp through an original steampunk setting, and despite a few pesky editing problems, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In a clockwork world where time itself relies on a pantheon of clockwork gods, 17-year-old Janet pulls heists with her little found-family of thieves. A job gone bad lands them in prison, where the irreverent trickster God of Mischief, Itazura, offers Janet a chance to save her friends by working with him to avert the apocalypse.

Janet was a great MC: tough, funny, haunted, utterly loyal to her team, and completely in over her head. Itazura served as a good foil–charming, witty, alien, and never quite trustworthy. The supporting cast was mostly well-developed, too. As a person with anxiety, I especially liked the character of Sylvia, Janet's teammate and dear friend, who was smart, observant, had a great head for strategy, and suffered anxiety attacks. I wished Sylvia had gotten more focus.

The world-building unfolded naturally, and drew me in until I was completely absorbed. By the end, I dearly wanted to know more about Janet's world, its characters and creatures, and its eventual fate.

There were a few drawbacks: Despite the good storytelling, HOUR OF MISCHIEF could have used further editing to clear up its occasional grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Also, I had expected a stand-alone novel, and was caught by surprise when the storyline was not wrapped up. But despite the rough edges, I liked Janet and her world well enough that I will be picking up the sequel, whenever it arrives.

*I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

After how much I loved Will Once's Love, Death and Tea, of course I was going to seek out his other books. So far, I haven't been disappointed.

Global Domination for Beginners is funny, tongue-in-cheek, and occasionally surprisingly insightful. If you enjoy lovable megalomaniacs, volcano lairs, uncooperative minions, deadly hats, drooling kitties, and negotiation via hugging, this book has it all. In addition to a lot of heart.

Initially, I wasn't really sure what to think of If I Die Before I Wake. This Sleeping Beauty-influenced fairy tale obviously had a unique spin, but it started out a bit slowly, with some backstory and setting info-dumps being provided through long conversations. I did like several of the characters right away, and the premise was interesting enough for me to keep reading. I'm glad I did, as the action really started picking up about a third of the way through.

From then on, I was very much hooked. The main character, Vreni, had a compelling journey; she struggled with doubt, but found the courage to fulfill her mission by trusting herself and her friends. The climax of the story was fast-paced and interesting, with a small twist I didn't see coming. The landscapes and settings were generally lush, vivid and beautifully described, making it easy to become immersed in the story.

I felt this was a tale that might have benefited from starting a bit later in the storyline, and perhaps from some editing and rewriting to tighten up certain sections and better flesh out others, but I still found it well worth reading and would recommend to those who enjoy fresh fairy tale retellings populated by likable, relatable characters.

Many thanks to the author for providing a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Jumbled mess of a fairy tale retelling, in which Sleeping Beauty is inexplicably a cruel sociopath. I think we are meant to care about her. Somehow. Though she tortures small animals for fun.

There is also an incomprehensible backstory about her aunts' dead brother who was gay, or under a spell, or both maybe? (I felt sad for him, but he was given very little character development.)

What there isn't, sadly, are many sympathetic characters, or a plot that makes any sense, or a comprehensible ending. Seriously, I still have no idea what happened.

This was so cute! I read a lot of dark fantasy, and it was refreshing to find a story that focused more on hope and rebuilding in the aftermath of the Dark One's defeat. This was a charming tale featuring farming, reconciliation, parenting, figuring out how to be your own kind of leader, and an adorable queer romance. I noticed a few editing lapses, but nothing serious enough to significantly impact my enjoyment.

I had high hopes for this book; the cover is lovely, the blurb sounded interesting, and it's in a genre I usually enjoy. Unfortunately it turned out to not be quite my thing, though it does have its good aspects (I particularly enjoyed some of the details around how the druids' magic worked). The world seemed unfocused and overstuffed to me, with not enough time to truly explore all of its threads and storylines. The prose was wordy and sometimes a bit overwrought, and often told the audience information when showing might work better.

Ultimately, I would describe this as a first offering by an author who shows a lot of promise, but may need more experience and editing to better polish future works.

(I received a free ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)

I very much enjoyed We of the Between from the very first page. The story alternates between two characters, Trin and Rilla, both of whom live in fascinating and well-realized settings. Trin lives on a future Earth that has been badly affected by climate change, yet still contains beauty and wonder. Her strange affinity with the sea hints at her possible connection to Rilla and her people, who live deep in the ocean and stay away from humans except during a Rumspringa period of sorts, when they are allowed to make a choice between staying in the sea or leaving to walk among those on land.

Overall, I enjoyed the worldbuilding and character development alike. At its heart, I felt that this was a lovely coming-of-age story; both main characters were young people trying to discover their true natures and their places in the worlds they inhabit. Their stories twined together in a way that I found natural and satisfying. Perhaps my only complaint was that the ending made me want a sequel, and I'm sadly not sure I will be getting one.

Many thanks to the author for providing a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This is just a really, really lovely book. I found myself fascinated by the unique, well-drawn worldbuilding and caught up in the mystery that slowly got unraveled across the course of the book. Atmospheres and environments felt immersive, and I thought the prose was fluid and flowed very well; descriptive, but graceful enough to avoid being too much. There was a good balance of action, exposition, plot, and exploration of relationships. (Platonic as well as romantic; I'll come back to that.)

I loved that the main romantic pairing experienced very serious adversity (that isn't really a spoiler; it's obvious in the prologue) without either of them being villainized. Yes, they did make mistakes, but ones that I found totally understandable in the circumstances they were facing. It made it so much easier to cheer for them to find their way back to each other, and by the end of the book I was racing along because I wanted to know how things would turn out for them. Plot threads were tied up in a satisfying way—no unexpected cliffhangers here!—but I am still excited to see where the series goes in the future. This universe offers so much potential for exploration.

Finally, as someone who is asexual and probably also somewhere on the aromantic spectrum, I really loved that one main character had a long-term, profoundly important platonic relationship that was given almost as much weight as the romance was. Fantastic book all around.

(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)

This is the second Nerezia book I've read, and both times my only complaint has been that I can't immediately binge-read the entire rest of the series. This is such a lovely, clever world, full of interesting settings, games I want to play and characters I want to befriend, and with just enough danger and mystery to spice things up. (The fragments fascinate me; I don't recall having encountered another worldbuilding element quite like them, and I'm interested to know where they came from and exactly what they are).

While I like everyone, Horace is my favorite; e is so sweet and earnest. I wasn't sure at first how I would feel about this book's new character, Keza, but I ended up really caring about her too by the end. Cannot wait to read the next one!

(Many thanks to the author, who gave me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.)

I wanted to love this book.

I am a child of the West, daughter of generations of pioneers (raised, as you might expect, on Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey). My grandmother's father, born in 1887, lived to be 101, dying just after I was born. Though I don't remember him, my childhood was filled with the rhythm of the stories he passed down, among those from many other close relatives–mountain men and trappers; children who grew up in covered wagons; farmers and ranchers and one great-uncle who broke out of the Texas Rangers' jail (mostly to say he'd done it).

I'm excited that Westerns are coming back into fashion. I was especially excited about VENGEANCE ROAD, because it sounded good–and, well, look at that cover. I'm shallow about beautiful covers.

I could not love it, sadly, though it had some positives. The first and foremost reason I could not love it was because the dialect is very wrong. The Western dialect, which I grew up speaking as a “first language,” may sound uneducated to outsiders, but it has its own consistent internal grammatical rules. It also has a powerful and beautiful storytelling tradition–which does no good unless you understand it.

Dear authors: Please do not write in a dialect with which you are unfamiliar unless you are going to make a SERIOUS effort to familiarize yourself with it.

Read books written by people who either speak the dialect natively, or who did their research well (ideally the former). Watch movies for which the same rules apply. Listen to stories being told by people who speak the dialect. (This website is a great resource for that.) While you are doing those things, pay attention. Then, once your book is written, get beta readers who speak the dialect. They will tell you what you've done wrong so you can try to fix it.

The Western dialect does not consist of misspellings and incorrect grammar. No one in real life has ever said, and I quote: “I's gonna said rude.” We might say, “He done it” or “I seen him leave” or (in the older, pioneer generation) “He taked a bath.” We would never say “I's gonna said rude.” It makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

Beyond the dialect issues–which, I'm sure, bothered me more than most–was the lack of real consequences. I enjoy some ruthlessness–TRUE GRIT is a classic, of course–but early in the book, Kate's quest for revenge leads her to kill an innocent person. Though it is technically in self-defense, due to a misunderstanding, the man is no less dead.This is mentioned a few more times throughout the book, but it has no real consequences, and Kate still gets her happy ending--unlike the dead man. It's that lack of consequences, rather than the ruthlessness itself, that bothered me about that particular plot point. If a heroine is going to essentially mow down bystanders in her quest for revenge, I like to see that followed through.

Then there was the treatment of Native Americans. It could have been worse–Liluye, the Apache girl, had little interest in helping the white people, and was definitely the lead of her own story in her own mind–but it was stereotypical overall. “Indians” were presented as the violent, faceless bogeyman for much of the story, and once they appeared as individuals, Liluye and her people fit the shallow “at one with Mother Earth” stereotype you see in movies like Pocahontas.

This isn't to say there weren't positives. Kate's brutal, ruthless pursuit of “justice” (actually revenge) was sometimes compelling, and might have been more so had her actions been followed by real, permanent consequences. Kate's act of saving Liluye's life would usually have led to the tired, ugly old trope of a person of color who is blindly devoted to serving the white main character, and though the treatment of the Apache characters was tired and trope-y in nearly every other way, it was refreshing to have Liluye go, “Forget this, I owe you people pretty much nothing.” There's one moment, between Kate and her love interest, that demonstrates consent in a very healthy way. And toward the end of the book, there was a twist I very much didn't see coming.

What killed the story for me was: The lack of consequences (for Kate), the stereotypical Natives, and the clumsy attempt at Western dialect, which at its best absolutely glows in storytelling.

William Ritter's JACKABY is advertised as “Sherlock” meets “Doctor Who,” and it doesn't disappoint on that count. For me, that was mostly a good thing.

Occasionally it was a little too on-the-nose–I could hear Sherlock's or the Doctor's voice in the brilliant, eccentric Jackaby's–but mostly I thought the author succeeded in creating a distinct character and world despite the influence of those two powerhouse British properties.

Intelligent, headstrong Abigail, daughter of a famous paleontologist and a proper Englishwoman, determines to forge her own path in the world and quickly finds herself assistant to Jackaby, a man of science who believes only in what he can see. He just so happens to be able to see the mystical world beyond our own. The two dive into pursuit of a Ripper-like serial killer who may or may not be supernatural, their mission both helped and hindered by a series of mystical encounters.

In addition to the main cast, I enjoyed the setting, and the minor characters–the brave but sad ghost, Jenny, who serves as Jackaby's housekeeper; the handsome policeman with a secret, upon whom Abigail develops a crush; and the near-madwoman whose Sight is as likely to show her a jumble of horrifying nonsense as anything helpful, but to whom all dangers are equally real.

Though JACKABY was not necessarily the most original book I have ever read, all the components were solid, and the plot threads wove together to a satisfying–and surprisingly action-packed–conclusion. I will definitely be picking up the sequel when it comes out later this fall.

There's a gap in the cornfields, and if you fall through, you'll find yourself Somewhere Else.

Laura Ruby's BONE GAP was one of the most original books I've read recently, twining together the eerie and the mundane, the past and the present, in a truly haunting medley.

Finn knows beautiful Roza was taken, but he can't tell by whom. His brother Sean, who loved her, can't forgive him for that. Finn determines to find Roza, even as he falls for Petey, the local Bee Girl–called that both for the fact that she raises bees, and for her strange face which entrances Finn, even as others call it ugly.

In the past, Roza leaves her homeland for America, where she encounters a man who will do anything to own her–even pull her out of our world, through the gaps into Somewhere Else.

Weird and dusty and beautiful, BONE GAP was packed with original characters, in an ordinary little town that was anything but, beneath a looming threat as inexorable as a summer storm.

The greatest power of magical realism, in my opinion, is its plausibility: we've all had those moments where we could almost sense something more, just beyond the edges of the known world. This book made excellent use of that, weaving a story out of the ordinary otherworldly magic of cornfields, silvered and rustling in the moonlight... and the all-too-common, terrifying menace of men who would go to any length to possess women they find beautiful.

This book made me sad, because I really liked Reena. She was well-developed and kind of awesome. Except when she was around Sawyer. As Reena's best friend Shelby said: Whenever Sawyer was around, Reena forgot how responsible and smart she was. I think the title of this book should be “How to Have a Destructive, Dysfunctional Relationship”. Has a ring to it, right?

And Sawyer was a jerk. Just an epic a-hole. I wanted to kick him in the crotch. Hard.

Very disappointing story from a writer who obviously has a lot of skill.