Briar Rose

I'm not surprised to see that this book has stellar reviews and that it has won multiple awards. This kind of story seems to be wildly popular and to get great acclaim.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the story at all. It was relentlessly dark and depressing (to the point that it sometimes felt contrived), with a side order of confusing. It didn't help that I strongly disagreed with some of the moral and philosophical opinions expressed (especially in the monster's stories). This is one of those unfortunate cases where a book is relatively well-written, but just did not work for me as an individual reader.

A rollicking historical tale, headed up by a truly wonderful young female character.

The storyline occasionally moved a bit slowly, but ultimately I think that only added to my enjoyment of the rich setting and characters. Particularly Fin Button, the tough, headstrong, sometimes ruthless tomboy who did what she needed to survive–even if that meant leaving everything she'd ever known to become a pirate.

Also, Fin's relationship with her love interest was a fun gender-swapped twist on the “young man leaves behind faithful girlfriend to go on a quest” trope.

Fiction categorized as “Christian” is all too often preachy, shallow, and about as subtle as an anvil. This book was a refreshing change. The tale was built on bones of faith, but there was little preaching, and no trite easy answers. More like this, please.

I'm having a hard time deciding exactly how to review this book, because the prose is lovely and I enjoyed the worldbuilding and some of the characters. Ultimately, I think there were two major factors preventing me from liking it as much as I might have:

1. The plot being driven by the dreaded Idiot Ball. Not once but twice, terrible, pivotal hardships happened because a major character just blurted out huge, dangerous secrets without first checking if there was anyone around to overhear. In one case the character actually knew there was someone hostile nearby and still had a loud discussion about the dangerous subject!

2. The love interest. You know back in the peak Bad Boy days of YA romance, when there was a plethora of male love interests who were the absolute worst but got a pass because they were Conflicted and Tormented and Hot? The love interest in this story is pretty much that, but a girl. She is, in my humble opinion, one of the least interesting kinds of asshole: a cowardly one who does horrific things because there lies the path of least resistance. I wanted to drop-kick her into the sun.

That's not to say there's nothing redeemable in this book! I genuinely enjoyed some of it, and there's a nonzero chance I'll grit my teeth and at least start the next book just to see where it goes. If you don't mind love interests who do heinous things but it's okay because they're Sad and Beautiful, and if you're willing to overlook the plot sometimes being driven by sheer stupidity, you might love this book.

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

How have I not heard more buzz about this book? I loved it. Nuanced, well-drawn characters, families of choice, strong platonic bonds, and a lovely queer romance that wasn't overdone? Right up my alley. When I go into a book marketed as M/M romance I'm never sure what kind of female characters I might find therein, but the women in here were fantastic, a whole host of them with a wide range of personalities and strengths and motivations. Zagiri in particular is my baby and I adore her.

I liked the pacing, the balance of action with exposition and quieter moments, and also the worldbuilding; this just isn't a book that holds your hand at all, so it's up to you to figure out what unfamiliar terms mean, Locked Tomb style. I much prefer that to the “As you know, Bob” type of exposition, so I rolled with it and was able to get my bearings before long.

Also, I just really enjoyed the flow of the prose:

The demon court was a congregation of nightmare and menace, bristling with horns and talons and tusks, rustling with scales and weaponry and speculation.

The world was so thick. Like a soup made of hallucinations and hangover.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley.

On paper, ‘Shard' seemed like a good option or me as a reader. After finishing several consecutive complex adult fantasy series, I was looking for a quicker, lighter read, so a short YA dystopian seemed to fit the bill. There's also the fact that I'm not a stickler for originality. Sure, I get tired of the same old cliches after seeing them a thousand times, especially if I wasn't crazy about them in the first place, but if a story built on the bones of old tropes has good characters or a refreshing twist, I will usually enjoy it.

Additionally, I'm old enough to remember 9/11, and to have a fairly good memory of what the world was like before and the ways in which it changed afterward: the fear, the paranoia, the xenophobia, and the things they were used to justify. The question What if it had just kept escalating? was something I immediately found chilling, and an interesting premise upon which to base a dystopian story. Unfortunately, it turned out to just feel like a pretext for a pretty standard-issue YA dystopian world, without the true implications being explored with much depth. (In particular, the book seemed to skip over the fact that Muslim and Middle Eastern communities, and other ethnic/religious groups commonly confused with them by uninformed outsiders, bore the brunt of the post-9/11 fear and xenophobia.)

On a surface level, the characters in this book were quite diverse, but I felt that the story would have benefited from a sensitivity reader. While I'm white, and therefore have zero firsthand understanding of what it's like to interact with law enforcement as a Black child, I felt that Kaia's history of growing up as a Black girl in foster care in a more authoritarian version of America than we live in today should have at least somewhat informed her thoughts and reactions when she was arrested in the airport, but didn't seem to at all. I even went back to reread that section to make sure I hadn't missed something, but there was nothing. I did a double-take when her skin color was first mentioned - and then I did another double-take at how it was mentioned. Comparing a Black girl's skin to “mocha or hot chocolate” feels like another thing a sensitivity reader might have picked up on.

There were some funny moments, the editing was generally good, and I liked that there were a number of different viewpoint characters, but this one just wasn't for me. Around the time the girl hate showed up - Kaia had unkind thoughts about the other girls pretty much right away, including the requisite ‘mean girl' stereotyping - I realized there was no way I was going to like it. This felt very much like a novel that might have come out in 2011, and even then I don't think I would have found it fresh or genuine enough to hold my attention.

There were some odd and unexpected choices made in the writing of this book. When I got to about 90% of the way through, I panicked a bit internally, thinking to myself, “There's not enough time to wrap everything up!”, and that thought ... wasn't entirely wrong. The storyline I cared about the most did get wrapped up, though, and the writing was beautiful and impossibly gripping as always, and El remained a spiteful furious hope-gremlin, so I deem it a four-star read despite the sometimes questionable bits.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

I'm sure other people will mention this, but there's a weird cheating? possibly cheating? thing going on in this book. It's not really clear exactly how El and Orion defined the thing between them or how exclusive it was supposed to be, but does seem strange that she never even mentions the other relationship to him.El and Orion are separated for a lot of this book. Like, a lot. He kind of falls out of the narrative, and it's weird, and that's part of the reason why I panicked a little when I made it to 90%. Once he finally showed back up, that storyline did get more or less resolved, so I'm willing to let it go. Still an odd choice, since El and Orion and their relationship and the way they mirror and change and save each other seems pretty firmly the foundation of this series to me.Final quibble, SPOILERY FOR THE ENDING: I'm not sure I can buy that Orion would forgive his mom quite that easily. If he had been her only victim, sure! Except she murdered an entire Scholomance class. She slaughtered a large group of children, on purpose. Orion, self-sacrificing hero Orion, nobody's-dying-on-my-watch Orion? He's supposed to forgive that, literally the instant she shrugs and goes “Sorry or whatever,” and then refuse to hear another word about it? Bleh.Now for the thing I loved:Once there was a dark sorceress designed to destroy, and instead she shrieked “FUCK YOU, EVERYBODY LIVES” into the face of the void while flipping the bird with both hands. Once there was a boy crushed and shattered and then revived with an insatiable monster at his core howling its eternal hunger, and he gritted his teeth and bent that hunger toward protecting others and chose to be kind without asking anything in return.Fantastic, unforgettable characters.

I absolutely loved this book. Found it to be a fascinating look at the era leading up to a historical giant's last days: the people, pressures, disputes and dynamics that transitioned the Roman Republic into an Empire, normalized political violence, and set the stage for one of history's greatest falls.

I really liked All the Birds in the Sky, so I was excited to read Charlie Jane Anders's YA debut, but unfortunately it ended up being a huge disappointment to me. Everything about it, from the writing style to the dialogue to the character interactions, was strangely childish, far below the actual ages of the characters. The action often jumped around like a drunken grasshopper. Things happened just to happen, without moving the story or character arcs forward. There was plenty of diversity, but it seemed mostly one-dimensional and felt shallow and perfunctory to me, like filling a quota, a la '80s and '90s kids' shows. Definitely won't be picking up the sequel.

DNF at around 30%.

Comedian/psychologist who states upfront that he has no tendency toward anxiety writes a book telling people not to be anxious, with the apparent assumption that physiological stress responses are entirely controllable via conscious thoughts and decisions. (Spoiler alert: For some of us, they aren't. At all. I have panic attacks in my sleep.)

Book turns out to be neither especially funny nor especially insightful. Maybe it got better eventually, but I was teetering between boredom and annoyance, and stopped torturing myself.

I vastly preferred the first half of this book to the second half; felt like it got repetitive, and . . . less plausible and nuanced, I suppose? I do believe the term ‘Mary Sue' often gets overused, especially when angry men are applying it to female characters, but I think by the end Cliopher was very nearly a male example of that trope. He was the best at everything, and everyone who criticized him was wrong, and even his flaws were actually strengths! Also the Emperor mostly vanished from the story, and I love him roughly a million times more than any other character. I don't regret reading the book, but it didn't get the five stars I once expected to give it.

I am not entirely sure WTAF I just read, but whatever it was, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Why does 2022 have to be so far away?

(Side note: I'm guessing these books will eventually age like milk, given the meme references that are often almost completely nonsensical in context, but I don't even care because they're so much fun right now.)

I hated this book. Hated hated hated. Yes, there was cheesiness, and the characters were not terribly well-drawn, but that wouldn't have garnered a one-star review for me if not for the ending. I haven't read all the other reviews–there are many–but among those I have read, almost no one has mentioned the thing that bothered me the most about this story.

Keturah gives up everything she's ever wanted–all her dreams, all her plans, all her aspirations–to be with emo, dark-cloak-wearing Lord Death. The story presents this as noble on her part, as right, as the only good decision.

Lord Death gives up nothing for Keturah.

If I ever have daughters, this is not what I want their fairy tales to tell them.

That is all.

I didn't quite love this book as much as I'd hoped. The worldbuilding was interesting and I really enjoyed some of the characters, but the entire middle part of the book felt futile, as though the plot were circling round and round rather than moving forward. Some sections also seemed confusing and a bit disconnected.

Ultimately, despite its considerable flaws, I did still like the book enough that I will likely read its sequel.

This book was beautiful and shattered my heart. I found it to be a satisfying, fitting conclusion that pulled all of the threads together and stayed true to the characters, and I would take that any day over a ‘shocking twist ending' that undermines all that came before.

As much as I wanted Holden to survive and have a chance to heal, in the end he went out as the purest distillation of himself: a reckless, brilliant idiot who saved the whole damn human race. I think I felt sadder for Naomi than anyone else; her wanting the chance to fall asleep next to the man she loved just one last time, and then having to pick up the pieces after his self-sacrifice, just like always.Also, it was so perfectly fitting to have Amos as the last man standing a thousand years later. If anyone could roll with the punches and stand steady through the churn of millennia, it would be him.

My one small complaint was that I wanted to know what happened to Drummer and never understood why she just disappeared from the narrative after book seven, but maybe she will turn up in a novella sometime. I also would love to see more of Teresa; I was so invested in her by the end, and wanted her to have a good life with a found family of her own.

God, what an incredible series. I hope the rest of it somehow, someday makes its way onscreen.