Review: Red Sister

Title: Red Sister

Series: Book of the Ancestor #1

Author: Mark Lawrence

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood (severe), death (severe), death of children, injury, child abuse, abandonment, animal cruelty, animal death, gore, bullying, ableism

Back Cover:

I was born for killing – the gods made me to ruin.

At the Convent of Sweet Mercy young girls are raised to be killers. In a few the old bloods show, gifting talents rarely seen since the tribes beached their ships on Abeth. Sweet Mercy hones its novices’ skills to deadly effect: it takes ten years to educate a Red Sister in the ways of blade and fist.

But even the mistresses of sword and shadow don’t truly understand what they have purchased when Nona Grey is brought to their halls as a bloodstained child of eight, falsely accused of murder: guilty of worse.

Stolen from the shadow of the noose, Nona is sought by powerful enemies, and for good reason. Despite the security and isolation of the convent her secret and violent past will find her out. Beneath a dying sun that shines upon a crumbling empire, Nona Grey must come to terms with her demons and learn to become a deadly assassin if she is to survive…

Review:

I was trying to come up with a catchy introduction, maybe something about why I picked up this book or why there are so many books about nunneries training nuns to fight and/or kill. But I couldn’t think of anything really creative, so let’s just say this: I love this book.

Nona is angry. She is so full of rage – and honestly, she has every right to be. Everyone in her village hated her, her mother sold her into slavery, she was sentenced to death for trying to protect her friend, and the abbess who saved her from the gallows expects her to be grateful even though she didn’t bother to save her friend from hanging too. The book never condemns her for being angry, and in many places her rage is a gift that helps her, and I love that. She also gets some stellar character growth, learning what it means to have friends and be a friend. (Considering her struggles with understanding interpersonal relationships and how similar they are to mine, I headcanon her as autistic. The book itself never makes any such diagnosis, though, if autism even exists in this world.)

If I took time to discuss every single side character in this story, we’d be here all day, but each and every one of them was great. Every girl in Nona’s core friend group has her own personality without relying too heavily on tropes. Even the more minor characters felt like fully-realized people in their own right, with hopes and dreams and goals and fears, and (with the exception of two minor antagonists, one of which became less of an antagonist in the end) they were all likeable.

This world is fascinating, and the worldbuilding is done spectacularly. The entire world is almost entirely frozen, and the ice threatens constantly to take everything. The heat of the moon warms a narrow strip around the middle of the world – known as the Corridor – which is where most people live. Long ago there were four different tribes with different gifts, and when they migrated to the Corridor for safety they intermingled. Though rare, their gifts can show up with varying degrees of power in some people. There is so much more that I could talk about and even more that I have probably forgotten. This is a stunningly complex and fully-realized world.

You get no real idea about what the story is actually about from the back cover. The powerful people after Nona aren’t just the nobleman she hurt and his father, who have a grudge against her because she wasn’t hanged. There is a prophecy about a person with all four tribes’ gifts who will be able to do something important. There’s learning and training and facing challenges in the Sweet Mercy convent as Nona goes through her studies. There some politics happening outside the convent. And there is blood and violence and magic.

Nona’s magic helps her fight, and she is deadly. She was born to killing. If you like stories about protagonists who are supernaturally good at violence, who surprise everybody else with their sheer power to deal out death, and who are holding back their true power until the climax when they are forced to reveal it, you will love Nona and this story.

I am not getting across all the fantastic things about this book. It has action and violence and supernatural powers, yes, but it’s also about friendship and the uses of prophecy and how thinking differently can be the answer. I adored every single thing about this book, and I am absolutely going to read book two. I love this world, I adore Nona herself, it combines thrilling violence with poignant themes, the side characters are great, and I really, really want more.

The Book of the Ancestor series:

1. Red Sister
2. Grey Sister
3. Holy Sister

Review: Timekeeper

Title: Timekeeper

Series: Timekeeper #1

Author: Tara Sim

Genre: Historical Fantasy/Romance

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia, death of parent (kinda), trauma, explosions, death, violence, panic attacks, blood, grief

Back Cover:

An alternate Victorian world controlled by clock towers, where a damaged clock can fracture time—and a destroyed one can stop it completely.

A prodigy mechanic who can repair not only clockwork but time itself, determined to rescue his father from a Stopped town.

A series of mysterious bombings that could jeopardize all of England.

A boy who would give anything to relive his past, and one who would give anything to live at all.

A romance that will shake the very foundations of time.

Review:

I took this back cover copy off The StoryGraph. The one I read put much more emphasis on the steampunk/fantasy elements and the mystery of who’s setting the bombs and played it like the romance was going to be a side thing. If this is the back cover I’d read, this book wouldn’t have ended up on my To Read list, because even though I’ve discovered some romances are fine, it’s usually not what I gravitate towards. So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t, because this was a perfectly enjoyable book.

Our protagonist is Danny, the youngest clock mechanic to pass the mechanic test. He loves his job repairing and maintaining the clocks that keep time running smoothly, and secretly hoping he can find a way to save his dad, who was a mechanic when something went wrong and the clock broke, trapping him in an area where time completely stopped. He also has lingering trauma from a bomb that tried to destroy another tower while he was working, and conflict with his mother who partially blames him for his father going to the clock tower that broke and trapped him. He wasn’t an incredibly compelling character, but he was likeable enough.

His love interest and the romance between the two was probably my favorite part of the story. Danny meets Colton in the clock tower in the town of Enfield, where he first mistakes him for the apprentice helping him for the day and only later discovers the truth: Colton is a clock spirit, the personification of the clock tower and the force that keeps time running. Colton doesn’t know much about love or the world outside of Enfield, but it was delightful watching his and Danny’s relationship grow.

The romance is not the main plot, though. There’s also Danny trying to rescue his father, protests and counter-protests about a new clock tower being built, a series of bombs targeting clock towers, and internal politics and rivalries in the clock mechanic’s union. None of these were particularly uninteresting, but I definitely cared about the romance the most.

This book does have some problems, mainly in the secondary character department. The reveal of the unexpected antagonist was supposed to feel like a big betrayal, but Danny’s relationship with that character was never built in the book – I was just told that he and this character were close instead of actually seeing it. The reveal that this character was behind so many bad things was definitely surprising, but lacked the emotional impact it wanted to have.

I’m also going to criticize the worldbuilding, but as someone who has read a fair bit of steampunk-type books. I found it limited and lackluster, a basic 1800s London with cars and clock towers that control time slapped on top. It didn’t detract from the story, but knowing what great steampunk/alternate history worldbuilding looks like, I found it uninspired. If those aren’t genres you typically read you probably won’t have an issue with it.

There was only one moment (that could have been cut without problem) that set a hook for book two. Without that one moment, this would have been a perfectly self-contained story with a satisfying ending. It very much felt like a case of “my agent sold this as a trilogy” than the story actually needing to continue. Personally I think there’s enough to explore in this world that a second book could be reasonably interesting, but I was also happy with the ending and I didn’t love this book enough to want to read the rest of the series. It is a perfectly enjoyable book – I just have no desire for more of it.

The Timekeeper series:

1. Timekeeper
2. Chainbreaker
3. Firestarter

Review: Little Thieves

Title: Little Thieves

Author: Margaret Owen

Genre: Fairy Tale

Trigger Warnings: Body horror, child abuse, physical abuse, sexual assault, abandonment, adult/minor relationship, sexual harassment, animal death, vomit, fatphobia (mentions), murder, death, blood

Back Cover:

The little thief steals gold, but the great one steals kingdoms;
And only one goes to the gallows…

Vanja Schmidt knows no gift is freely given, not even a mother’s love. Abandoned to Death and Fortune as a child, she has scraped by as a lowly maidservant with her quick wits and the ability to see her god-mothers’ hands at work in the world. But when they demand her lifelong servitude in exchange, Vanja decides that gifts not given freely…can always be stolen.

When an opportunity rises to steal a string of enchanted pearls, Vanja seizes it, transforming herself into Gisele, the princess she’s served for years. As the glamorous princess, Vanja leads a double life, charming the nobility while ransacking their coffers as a jewel thief. Then, one heist away from funding an escape from her god-mothers, Vanja crosses the wrong god, and is cursed to turn into jewels herself. The only way to save herself is to make up for what she’s taken—starting with her first victim, Princess Gisele.

A wicked retelling of “The Goose Girl,” Little Thieves is a delightfully witty YA fantasy about the fickle hands of fate, and changing the cards we’re dealt.

Review:

This seems like a fairly straightforward plot, right? A thief steals the wrong thing, gets cursed, and has to return everything she’s stolen to get un-cursed. It sounds straightforward and doable, if personally difficult for our protagonist.

Except that there are so many complicating factors that this simple-sounding plot becomes a 14-hour audiobook of surprises, magic, unexpected friendships, and one of the most thoroughly evil antagonists I’ve encountered in a long time. The true purposes behind Vanja’s curse aren’t even revealed until the climax. The back cover leaves out the villain entirely, along with two of the three major characters helping Vanja.

There is a lot of plot in this story, but there are also very strong character arcs. Giselle got an obvious one of learning how the other 99% lives and how to not be a spoiled rich girl, and I wasn’t sure if I would like her but she turned out pretty decent in the end. Ragne, the half-human shapeshifter daughter of the goddess who cursed Vanja who is attempting to help Vanja undo her curse, learns how to act like a human and how to fall in love. Emeric, the investigator trying to find the culprit behind Vanja’s jewel thefts, learns to deal with loss and discovers some things about his sexuality.

I saved Vanja for last because, as the main protagonist, she has the most going on character-wise. She has a metric ton of trauma, and her character is one of the best-written descriptions of trauma I’ve ever seen. There’s no “saved by the power of love” or torture porn or anything, she just feels and reacts in a way that had me thinking, “Yeah, that’s just How Trauma Is.” Her path has some steps forward and some steps back (like dealing with trauma in real life), and she gets some stunning character growth as she learns to start trusting people again.

I love that everybody in this book is just allowed to feel things. These characters have suffered a lot of pain, Vanja especially, and there aren’t any easy answers but the story doesn’t try to give them any. There are a lot of big emotions but the book makes space for those and they’re handled with respect and care.

Since so much of the story is not mentioned in the back cover, I’m going to limit my discussion of it. That said, I did thoroughly enjoy it. It’s absolutely full of shenanigans, from delightful jewel heists to playacting as a ditzy princess to get out of trouble to the natural hilariousness that comes from pretending to be both the princess and her maid at the same time. This book doesn’t explore the world much, and in many ways it relies on “generic vaguely-18th-century-Europe fantasy” tropes, but it has a distinct German flavor and an interesting pantheon and religious system that elevated the setting far above pure trope for me.

I’m also going to mention the antagonist, who doesn’t even show up until a quarter of the way through the book but whose threat level rapidly increases as the story goes on. He is the worst, most hateable kind of enemy, the nobleman who sees everyone else as beneath him and those beneath him as less than human, and who thinks his feeling entitled to rule everything is exactly the same as Vanja feeling like she deserves to be treated like a human. He’s an abuser and a sexual predator and so very powerful and I can’t express how much I hate him but from a story perspective he did make a good antagonist.

I’m leaving a ton out of this review just for space considerations, but I could talk about this book for a long time. There’s so much in this book. Not only was it a stellar story, reading it was incredibly cathartic. I got to see some fantastic hijinks, solve a couple magical mysteries, encounter several gods, tell off some self-centered nobles, enjoy some hilarious one-liners, and fight a seemingly-unstoppable antagonist armed with little more than quick thinking and thievery skills, and I also got to wrestle with some complicated feelings about mothers, face lingering trauma, stand up to past abusers, seize control over my own destiny, and start learning to be happy.

If you want a fantasy adventure mystery that will make you laugh, this is your book; if you want a cathartic emotional read that might make you cry, this is also your book. Basically, just read this book.

(Also go to the author’s website and look at the character profiles at the bottom of the page, they are the BEST.)

Review: House of Salt and Sorrows (DNF)

Title: House of Salt and Sorrows

Author: Erin A. Craig

Genre: Fairy Tale/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent, death of children, grief (severe), injury details (severe), terminal illness (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 32%

Back Cover:

Annaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor with her sisters and their father and stepmother. Once there were twelve, but loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls’ lives have been cut short. Each death was more tragic than the last–the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge–and there are whispers throughout the surrounding villages that the family is cursed by the gods.

Disturbed by a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that her sister’s deaths were no accidents. The girls have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, dancing until dawn in silk gowns and shimmering slippers, and Annaleigh isn’t sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts. Because who–or what–are they really dancing with?

When Annaleigh’s involvement with a mysterious stranger who has secrets of his own intensifies, it’s a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family–before it claims her next.

Review:

I hadn’t actually intended to review this one. I had planned to make it just another book that I wasn’t very into but didn’t have strong enough opinions to write a review about – this book isn’t bad, it just wasn’t grabbing me. But then I realized why I DNF books just when I’m getting to the part where the story should be picking up and getting good, so this is part review and part reflection post about why I stop reading just when the book gets good.

This is a retelling of the fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which I only know about because I had a Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses coloring book as a kid. I am absolutely down for retellings of less-known fairy tales, and a horror retelling sounded especially promising.

It didn’t grab me from the beginning, but that happens and I wanted to give it a chance. When the book opens, the fourth sister had just died and the remaining sisters had not yet started sneaking off to dance all night, so I knew eventually they would find their way to sneak away and go dancing with the people the back cover hints may not be human. And I didn’t hate it, so I kept reading.

And then they found their way to sneak off their island home and go dancing. I was reading this at work and at that point I paused the story to go on break, and after break I queued up a different book and started reading something else. When I actually took a moment to think about it I wasn’t exactly sure why. It wasn’t stunningly fascinating, but I didn’t hate it, and I’d stopped right when it was promising to get into the meat of the story. And it’s not the first time I’ve stopped reading a book right when it should have been getting good (see here and here, for example). But with this book, I’ve finally figured out why I do that.

This is not a horrible book, and there’s nothing egregious to make me hate it. I just didn’t find the plot, characters, or what-have-you particularly compelling. But the back cover had promised me a Major Incident where something dramatic would happen to propel the story into more interesting dimensions. Without even consciously making the decision to do so, I kept reading despite being ambivalent about the book because I had the anticipation of the Major Incident. Once the Major Incident happened, though, the anticipation compelling me to read on was gone and I realized I was ambivalent about the book and had no desire to keep reading, even though I was at the point where it should be getting good.

This isn’t a bad book. I didn’t hate it, it just didn’t grab me, and I’m sure there are people out there who will like it better. It did help me figure out why I tend to stop reading books just when they’re “getting good,” though, so it was worth the read just for that.

Review: The Last Graduate

Title: The Last Graduate

Series: Scholomance #2

Author: Naomi Novik

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Violence, death, death of children, blood, gore, sexual content (brief), vomit, bullying, animal death (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and this review contains spoilers of book one, A Deadly Education.

Back Cover:

At the Scholomance, El, Orion, and the other students are faced with their final year–and the looming specter of graduation, a deadly ritual that leaves few students alive in its wake. El is determined that her chosen group will survive, but it is a prospect that is looking harder by the day as the savagery of the school ramps up. Until El realizes that sometimes winning the game means throwing out all the rules . . .

Review:

This book has so many problems. I have read several of Naomi Novik’s books so far, and compared to the meticulously-plotted and deftly told previous books that I’ve read, this one is definitely a weaker story. But … Well, I’ll get there.

I like lists, so let’s have a list of the most glaring problems I can remember off the top of my head.

• El is even more absurdly powerful than she was in the last book, but doesn’t seem to be surprised by or even notice it, and it doesn’t even cross her mind to question why. I don’t even know if the story wants that question asked, but I want to know why she’s so powerful.
• There’s apparently a whole enchanted gymnasium where many students exercise that somehow never got brought up in book one.
• Neither did a bunch of framed news articles that are apparently all over the school and are critical to the plot now.
• I never got the sense in book one that the school was fantastically big and yet there’s apparently a thousand graduating seniors.
• There’s supposed to be a thing about lingering trauma from El’s experience with the mormouth last book, but the climactic moment of that plot thread ended up very anti-climactic.
• Several threads from book one that either get dropped entirely or get shoved to the background with no warning or mention.

Most of these problems are continuity issues from the previous book, and none of these are “you only notice if you think about it too hard” issues – they were all glaringly obvious to me while reading. And yet with all those obvious issues, I’m going to come back and say that I loved this book.

The main reason for this is that I absolutely adore the trope of the protagonist being so much more powerful than everyone else and all the people around them being repeatedly astonished as they discover bit-by-bit how absurdly powerful the protagonist is. The Last Graduate is that trope incarnate. In book one El by herself kills a monster that previously had only been killed by a group of ten of the world’s top magicians. In this book she is stronger. I cannot put into words how much fun it was to watch her go from being an overlooked non-Enclave kid to the absolute most powerful kid in school and probably the only way most of them are getting out alive.

I can’t say I entirely enjoyed El’s kinda-romance thing with Orion Lake, but I didn’t hate it and it was brief enough that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story. There were also some interesting questions raised about Orion and how his magic works. I’m wondering if there’s some underlying reason that there are two absurdly powerful magical teenagers the same age that will get explained in book three.

Yeah, the book has problems. I won’t deny that, and those will probably be detrimental to your enjoyment if you don’t love the overpowered character trope. But I do love that trope and so I still thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I’m very much looking forward to book three.

The Scholomance series:

1. A Deadly Education
2. The Last Graduate
3. The Golden Enclaves (September 27, 2022)

Review: Spellslinger

Title: Spellslinger

Series: Spellslinger #1

Author: Sebastien de Castell

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Kidnapping, torture, death, animal cruelty, animal death, child abuse, slavery, classism, body horror, violence, medical trauma, vomit (mentions), sexism, genocide (mentions)

Back Cover:

Kellen is moments away from facing his first duel and proving his worth as a spellcaster. There’s just one problem: his magic is fading.

Facing exile unless he can pass the mage trials, Kellen is willing to risk everything – even his own life – in search of a way to restore his magic. But when the enigmatic Ferius Parfax arrives in town, she challenges him to take a different path.

One of the elusive Argosi, Ferius is a traveller who lives by her wits and the cards she carries. Daring, unpredictable, and wielding magic Kellen has never seen before, she may be his only hope.

Review:

This review is hard to write because is the kind of book I call a Perfectly Enjoyable Reading Experience. It was entertaining, I very much enjoyed it while reading, but it’s not particularly memorable and I don’t feel much of a need to continue the series.

Which is a bit amusing, because this book was trying to have big things to say. This society is stratified into an upper class of people who can do magic and an underclass of people who can’t. The “exile” Kellen is facing is not being thrown out of the city and whatnot, it’s being relegated to second-class citizen and having no options but menial labor or being a servant, probably to his definitely-magical sister. Considering some events that I can’t mention because spoilers, there was definitely an anti-classism message here. It just didn’t come up until almost the very end and thus got overshadowed by Kellen’s magic struggles.

I am still not sure what the setting was supposed to be. The title of the book, which made me think of a play on “gunslinger,” and Ferius Parfax’s entire character had a very strong Wild West vibe. But the rest of the setting seemed to be Generic Magical City with that roughly-1800s-but-magic-instead-of-tech thing that I think of as generic fantasy. There were interesting details, but I was very confused about what the big picture was supposed to look like.

And you know, after all that criticism, I’m going to come back and say that I really enjoyed the read. Kellen had definite character growth, putting together all the puzzle pieces of information he discovered was fun, and I loved his efforts to succeed with brains and wit since magic didn’t seem to be coming to his rescue. If you’re at all trope-savvy you’ll see the reason for his magic issues coming from a long way off, but I was pleasantly surprised to be surprised by some of the details.

The ending wrapped up well enough, and I’m not enamored with this story enough to keep going. There was some wasted potential, especially in regards to magic-less people being a societal underclass, but for as much as I love absurdly powerful characters I also love characters with no power who succeed by cunning and trickery, and so I thoroughly enjoyed Kellen. Though it’s not particularly memorable after I finished it and it’s definitely not making any top books lists for me, it was a perfectly enjoyable read.

The Spellslinger series:

1. Spellslinger
2. Shadowblack
3. Charmcaster
4. Souldbinder
5. Queenslayer
6. Crownbreaker

Review: The Cerulean

Title: The Cerulean

Series: Cerulean Duology #1

Author: Amy Ewing

Genre: Science Fantasy (my best guess – this is one that’s hard to categorize, because it does have space travel but it’s otherwise fantasy)

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), murder (mentions), suicide, sexism, animal death (mentions), blood (brief)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 18%

Back Cover:

Sera has always felt as if she didn’t belong among her people, the Cerulean. She is curious about everything and can’t stop questioning her three mothers, her best friend, Leela, and even the High Priestess. Sera has longed for the day when the tether that connects her City Above the Sky to the earthly world below finally severs and sends the Cerulean to a new planet.

But when Sera is chosen as the sacrifice to break the tether, she doesn’t know what to feel. To save her City, Sera must throw herself from its edge and end her own life. But something goes wrong and she survives the fall, landing in a place called Kaolin. She has heard tales about the humans there, and soon learns that the dangers her mothers warned her of are real. If Sera has any hope to return to her City, she’ll have to find the magic within herself to survive.

Review:

This book did not grip me from the start. It was very heavy on the YA Heroine tropes and moved very slowly. But I liked some things, so I kept giving it a chance.

Sera is our YA Heroine. She feels like she doesn’t fit in, partially because she doesn’t have any aptitude for her society’s career options even though she’s almost of age. Everyone else views her as weird and agrees she doesn’t fit in, but the only thing actually weird about her is that her favorite thinking spot is at the very top of the temple spire. She has one friend who is perfectly normal and could fit in with the rest of society but chooses to be her friend because she is a kind and gentle person. Her archenemy is a mean girl in her age cohort who is prettier and more talented at the societal career options and is mean to her about it. If you’re keeping track, that description has seven YA Heroine tropes. I’ve read this same situation across so many YA books in high school that it almost completely prevented me from connecting with or caring about Sera.

Sera’s world, however, was fascinating. It’s mostly explained through exposition, which probably would have gotten annoying if it wasn’t the main thing I cared about in the book. Sera’s people are all women, have blue hair and blue blood, they possess magic to heal and to share thoughts and feelings through touch, they live in a migrating city that tethers itself to different planets, and marriages are between three people instead of two. There was a lot of world building and I was really interested in this society.

Plus I knew that things would change drastically once Sera jumped off the city. The story moved slowly and I didn’t really care about Sera, but the Cerulean society kept me interested enough to stick it out under Sera jumped, and I hoped the story would change for the better after that.

Then Sera jumped, and the story changed to a whole new story. Now we’re following a set of twins on the planet, who seem to be living in a fictional version of the 1800s – sexism, railroads, corsets, etc. The twins are a boy whose name I cannot remember who wants to impress his father so he’ll let him be part of the family business (which may be producing plays?), the other is a girl who wants to be a scientist despite girls not being allowed to do that. There’s also some sort of racial/political/religious ideological conflict between their country and another one. I had very little idea what was going on, no idea who these people were, and no incentive to care. If this was who Sera was going to end up dealing with after she survived her fall, I really wasn’t interested.

What really killed my enjoyment of this book was a lack of caring about the characters. Sera hit every female YA Protagonist trope and that immediately distanced me from her despite all the opportunity for connection her situation offered. And just when I was ready for the book to speed up and finally get into the meat of the story – and maybe for the changing situation to give me more reason to care about Sera – it switched to a whole new set of characters who I did not know or care about in a much less interesting world.

I’m actually a little angry because I wanted this to be good. The idea behind the Cerulean and their floating city was what really interested me. There was a lot of potential there and I want to stay there and explore that world. Perhaps if Sera had hit fewer of the tropes (or this had been published years ago when I was more tolerant of YA Heroine tropes) I would have stuck it out longer. I love the idea of the Cerulean people and society, but unfortunately not much else about this book.

The Cerulean Duology:

1. The Cerulean
2. The Alcazar

Review: I Shall Wear Midnight

Title: I Shall Wear Midnight

Series: Discworld #38

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, injury, fire, body horror, miscarriage, teenage pregnancy, child abuse, suicide attempt

Spoiler Warning: This book is 38th in a series and 4th in the Tiffany Aching sub-series. This review may contain mild spoilers of the previous Tiffany Aching books (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith), but not any other Discworld books.

Back Cover:

It starts with whispers. Then someone picks up a stone. Finally, the fires begin. When people turn on witches, the innocents suffer …

Tiffany Aching has spent years studying with senior witches, and now she is on her own. As the witch of the Chalk, she performs the bits of witchcraft that aren’t sparkly, aren’t fun, don’t involve any kind of wand, and that people seldom ever hear about: She does the unglamorous work of caring for the needy.

But someone or something is igniting fear, inculcating dark thoughts and angry murmurs against witches. Aided by her tiny blue allies, the Wee Free Men, Tiffany must find the source of this unrest and defeat the evil at its root before it takes her life. Because if Tiffany falls, the whole Chalk falls with her.

Chilling drama combines with laugh-out-loud humor and searing insight as beloved and bestselling author Terry Pratchett tells the high-stakes story of a young witch who stands in the gap between good and evil.

Review:

The Tiffany Aching books all have a pattern. Some sort of magical evil being or force comes to the Chalk or after Tiffany herself. Tiffany must gather information and figure out what the thing is and how to stop it and rein in the Nac Mac Feegle while doing it. And then even though Tiffany is a child, she has to deal with it herself, occasionally advised but never helped by the older witches. And then, obviously, she deals with it. I don’t feel like that is a spoiler because the book never really has any doubt – it tries to make it sound like Tiffany could fail, but the reader knows she won’t and the real question is just how she does it.

In this book, Tiffany is 15 (and turns 16 somewhere during the story). She is The Witch now, coming into her own as the witch of the Chalk but still not entirely sure how to balance a witch’s duty of caring for others with taking care of herself. All throughout the book people were pointing out that Tiffany had to take better care of herself if she wanted to effectively help others, but I don’t elevate that to a theme because it never gets resolved. Tiffany does not take any of the advice, and in fact does not get a good night’s sleep until the last few paragraphs of the book.

All the attempted themes were a little muddled in this one. I think “it’s okay to ask for help when you need it” was trying to be a theme, as Tiffany needs to get the help of several people through the course of the story, but that’s undercut by the fact that if she were to ask another witch for help, they would lose all respect for her. Tiffany gets help from non-witches, but the “being a witch means dealing with everything yourself” message counteracted the “it’s okay to ask for help” message.

This book also introduced a lot of new and interesting characters: Roland’s fiance and her horrible mother, an abused girl from town who is definitely … something, a witch from Ankh-Morpok, and a guard at the Baron’s castle who is way smarter than he pretends to be. Esk from Equal Rites even made an appearance as an adult. I enjoyed all the new characters and dynamics in play, and I found myself really liking Preston, the guard. I’m hoping they all show up in the next Tiffany Aching book.

There’s only one Tiffany Aching book left, and even though I’m sad I’ve almost come to the end of my adventures with Tiffany, I have really high hopes for it. It’s also the last book in the Discworld series, though, so I’m considering waiting until I’ve read the rest of the series to make it a capstone of sorts for my Discworld reading experience. But I may just get too excited about reading more about Tiffany. We’ll see.

The Discworld series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review: The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Title: The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Author: Shaun David Hutchinson

Genre: Magical Realism (my best guess, this one’s hard to categorize)

Trigger Warnings: Bullying, blood, gun violence, suicide, suicidal ideation, death of parent, child abuse (mention), toxic relationship

Back Cover:

Sixteen-year-old Elena Mendoza is the product of a virgin birth.

This can be scientifically explained (it’s called parthenogenesis), but what can’t be explained is how Elena is able to heal Freddie, the girl she’s had a crush on for years, from a gunshot wound in a Starbucks parking lot. Or why the boy who shot Freddie, David Combs, disappeared from the same parking lot minutes later after getting sucked up into the clouds. What also can’t be explained are the talking girl on the front of a tampon box, or the reasons that David Combs shot Freddie in the first place.

As more unbelievable things occur, and Elena continues to perform miracles, the only remaining explanation is the least logical of all—that the world is actually coming to an end, and Elena is possibly the only one who can do something about it.

Review:

I picked this up because it was immediately available at the library and a long time ago (I don’t know how long, but I haven’t been on Goodreads in a year and a half) someone I followed on Goodreads had loved it. So I grabbed it, more because it was available than from any strong desire to read it.

Looking at it from the outside I probably shouldn’t have liked it much. It’s very slow, with hardly anything in the way of plot, but I didn’t find the characters strong enough to call it character-driven either. A good seven hours of the nine-hour audiobook is Elena trapped in decision paralysis about whether she should do what the voices want or not. The plot is determined not to give her any information that would assist in that decision to force her to make it herself, which she was expending all her effort to avoid. If there weren’t so many interpersonal things happening between characters, it would have dragged a lot.

The characters do all have good character arcs though, so maybe you could call it character-driven for that. Elena’s love interest Freddie had the strongest arc in my opinion. Elena herself and her best friend also felt like they had some kind of good arc, but I’m not entirely sure I could put into words what it was. Even Elena’s mother and ex-boyfriend got arcs, albeit smaller, simpler ones.

Looking at it from this review, you might think this is a boring book. But weirdly, it’s not. By all rights it should have been – it’s very slow, all Elena’s attempts to learn more about plot-related things are foiled, she spends the vast majority of the book avoiding the one decision she has to make. But somehow, I liked it. Elena was relatable in her fear of making the wrong decision, the complexity of the relationships between characters was good, there was enough magic to satisfy my fantasy love while still having a very contemporary vibe. I can’t really tell you why, but I did enjoy this book.

Review: Elysium Girls (DNF)

Title: Elysium Girls

Author: Kate Pentecost

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, death of parents, natural disasters, blood, forced institutionalization (mentions), murder (mentions), bullying, terminal illness

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 29%

Back Cover:

In this sweeping Dust Bowl-inspired fantasy, a ten-year game between Life and Death pits the walled Oklahoma city of Elysium-including a girl gang of witches and a demon who longs for humanity-against the supernatural in order to judge mankind.

When Sal is named Successor to Mother Morevna, a powerful witch and leader of Elysium, she jumps at the chance to prove herself to the town. Ever since she was a kid, Sal has been plagued by false visions of rain, and though people think she’s a liar, she knows she’s a leader. Even the arrival of enigmatic outsider Asa – a human-obsessed demon in disguise – doesn’t shake her confidence in her ability. Until a terrible mistake results in both Sal and Asa’s exile into the Desert of Dust and Steel.

Face-to-face with a brutal, unforgiving landscape, Sal and Asa join a gang of girls headed by another Elysium exile-and young witch herself-Olivia Rosales. In order to atone for their mistake, they create a cavalry of magic powered, scrap metal horses to save Elysium from the coming apocalypse. But Sal, Asa, and Olivia must do more than simply tip the scales in Elysium’s favor-only by reinventing the rules can they beat the Life and Death at their own game.

Review:

On the outside, this book looks awesome. Title? Awesome. Author’s last name? Awesome. Cover? Awesome. A demon in disguise and a girl-gang of witches making magic-mechanical horses to take on Life and Death? Awesome.

The reality of the story is, unfortunately, less awesome.

Above all, it is slow. It’s not even a slow burn, it’s just slow. Sal is hated by the whole town for having visions of rain that didn’t come true (which, first of all, she was nine years old at the time, and it seems cruel and petty for the entire town to turn against a literal child for believing something untrue). She thinks she’s finally going to be able to prove herself to the town when Mother Moreyna names her as her successor, but then it turns out Mother Moreyna just wanted a successor for the optics and she isn’t going to actually teach Sal anything. Then Asa shows up, who also has magic because he’s a demon.

Sal does many things that I think could have counted as a “terrible mistake” that would get her exiled, especially if the town decides to be strict and petty – which they definitely seem inclined to do. I kept waiting for one of them to finally make the people kick her out so we could get on with the awesome part of the plot. And it just kept not happening. Sal kept puttering around town wishing people would stop hating her, Asa tried to decide if he should do the mission he was sent for or not do it and stay with the humans he’s so interested in, and nothing happened.

There were a fair number of plot hooks (what actually happened to the murdered guy who used to live in Asa’s house? Why does Sal keep getting visions of rain? What is the point of Asa’s mission?), and I think they might have been enough to hold me if I wasn’t expecting something totally epic that the first 29% of the book didn’t deliver. It may get more awesome later on, and I’m not discounting the idea that I might pick this one back up when I’m in the mood for something slower or have the patience to wait for the awesomeness to start. But right now I don’t, so I’m leaving it here.