fantasy

Winter by Marissa Meyer

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Winter-finalOkay, this might be awful, but I wasn’t blown away by Winter, the last installment in The Lunar Chronicles.  I think maybe it was too long?  All the action takes place on Luna, but there’s just so much back and forth and splitting up and reuniting, and…I don’t know!  I liked it, but I wasn’t desperate to read it the way I expected.

The characters remain amazing.  Meyer has found a way to make her heroines and heroes both strong and vulnerable.  The women are especially powerful – the final confrontation between Cinder and Levana was an epic standoff…between two women!  That doesn’t happen nearly enough.  I also really liked Winter, and how her mental breakdowns were viewed as weakness by ignorant bad guys, but as strength by those who know her.  And Thorne remains the dashing snarky hero of my heart.   Continue reading →

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

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Inimona_final‘ve long been a fan of Gingerhaze (Noelle Stevenson’s online persona), but I didn’t read Nimona when it was a webcomic.  I hate waiting for new updates (which is also why I watch Netflix more than TV).  But now it’s out in book form, and IT IS SO GOOD.

Nimona is clever, gorgeously drawn in a deceptively simplistic animation, and incredibly touching while also being laugh-out-loud funny on multiple occasions.  In the words of Stevenson herself:

Nimona is about a supervillain mad scientist knight and his shapeshifting, trigger-happy girl sidekick, the titular Nimona. Ballister is actually a pretty nice guy, but Nimona just wants to blow stuff up. They go up against Sir Goldenloin, the codpiece-wearing swishy-haired hero, and the duplicitous institution he represents. It all takes place in a medieval-futuristic world.

It’s dedicated “to all the monster girls” and I am in love with the raw emotion behind Nimona’s story.  She’s a shapeshifter, dangerous and angry.  She joins Ballister Blackheart in supervillainy in one of the coolest settings I’ve seen:  there are kings and knights alongside science labs and touch screens.  Teaming up against Goldenloin (who has a secret past with Blackheart) and the good (evil?) Institute, Nimona and Blackheart become good friends…until Nimona’s monstrous side gets out of hand.

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Nimona is every girl who has felt Too Much, who feels used and abused, who knows trusting people is the first step toward being betrayed.  This comic gets deep, y’all.  The fact that she makes jokes about “I’m a shark!” is just icing on top of a really emotional story about beauty and the beast – but genderswapped!  I’m SUCH a fan.

You can read the first three comics on Stevenson’s website HERE.  Though be forewarned, the drawing style matures throughout the story (it was written over the course of a couple years).  It gets SO GOOD.  Now I’m off to dive back into the Internet world of Gingerhaze.


Book Jacket

Nimona is an impulsive shapeshifter with a knack for villainy.  Lord Ballister Blackheart is a villain with a vendetta.

As sidekick and supervillain, Nimona and Lord Blackheart are about to wreak some serious havoc.  Their mission: prove to the kingdom that Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin and his buddies at the Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics aren’t the heroes everyone thinks they are.

Explosions will be involved.  Science and sharks will be too.

But as small acts of mischief escalate into a vicious battle, Lord Blackheart realizes that Nimona’s powers are as murky and mysterious as her past.  And her unpredictable wild side might be more dangerous than he is willing to admit.

Nemeses!  Dragons!  Science!  Symbolism!

All these and more await in this brilliantly subversive, sharply irreverent epic from Noelle Stevenson, based on her award-winning web comic.

Release Date: May 2015

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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This was so much fun!!  While also being really dark.  It’s a hard balance tSix-of-Crowso create a criminal group who are…actually criminals.  I love Kaz desperately, but there is no doubt in my mind that dude is bad news.  But the great thing is that as horrible as he is, Inej can totally handle him, so I feel okay wanting them to be in love.  But I’m rambling too quickly without any background.

Set in Bardugo’s world from her Grisha trilogy, we get to explore Ketterdam and Fjerda.  And our cast of six characters are from all over the world – I really appreciate a woman who creates a fictional world and still manages to have racially diverse characters.  I mean, honestly, Bardugo is genius at world building.  She’s created five nations with distinct people, values, languages, and cultures.  Throwing them all together in one criminal gang and watching them hate and love each other is so much fun!   Continue reading →

Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan

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A new Rick Riordan series: rejoice!

Seriously, will I ever tire of reading his modern-age mythologies?  I honestly don’t think so, especially when he can get me interested in Norse mythology (of which I know very little other than that I am attracted to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki).  Speaking of which, it was fun to see Loki on the page, as well as Thor, and to see how they compare to their Marvel counterparts.

But Riordan’s talent proves that he didn’t need to lean on the popularity of Marvel’s Norse gods to make a really fun book. I’m still getting the hang of Norse mythology, but I like Freya and her cats, and the Nine Worlds provided a lot of really fun settings for our characters to explore.   Continue reading →

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

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I’ve JUST finished the book, like two seconds ago, and I LOVED IT.  I expected to like it, an a sort of ironic “Isn’t this odd, reading a pseudo Harry Potter fanfiction that was excerpted in Rowell’s Fangirl?” And for a while, I was mostly interested in assigning every character to their HP equivalent, but that quickly turned into genuine investment.

I LOVE Simon!  I love Baz!  I love Penelope!  I even love Agatha, although for a while she was a useless wet blanket (but then she acknowledges her role as a useless wet blanket, only meant to further someone else’s story, and when she said “peace out!” I adored her for it).  I love the magical world in Carry On, how they have phones and computers and are simply just like Normals, but with magic.  That makes more sense to me than Harry Potter’s culturally-backwards wizarding world.  But!  I’m not comparing!  (Okay, it’s impossible not to compare.)   Continue reading →

The Winner’s Curse by Marie Rutkoski

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I loved Rutkoski’s Kronos Chronicles series, and her ability to create a believable fantasy world holds true.  Can you sense the “but” coming?  But….I thought The Winner’s Curse indulged in YA romance tropes, when I know she can do more interesting things with relationships.  Kestrel and Arin have a definite Romeo-and-Juliet vibe going on, since he is her purchased slave, but their feelings for each other felt too inevitable.  Is that a weird complaint?  Neither of them seemed to really care about the social implications of their feelings for the enemy, even if their internal dialogue begs to differ.   Continue reading →

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

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I couldn’t finish it.  It was a fast read, and I got to page 129 (chapter 15), but I just had zero interest in reading more.  Which is a real shame, because I loved Sanderson’s Mistborn.  In that novel, he clearly showed that he could write women with complexity, but Steelheart was one big boy-book borefest.  And when I say it’s a boy book, I am flabbergasted that I didn’t like it, because I’m a huge fan of Fight Club, Percy Jackson, Star Wars…all the boy things.   Continue reading →

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

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Oh noooO!!!  Too many feelings.  This review is going to be less intelligent and more an emotional outpouring of OH MY GOSH THIS BOOK.

I mean, the premise is fantastic.  Harry August lives his life, dies, and…is reborn.  As himself, same parents, same place, same situation.  But he remembers everything of his life before.  It turns out there are other people like him, and this is the story of how these men and women influence the world and each other.

It’s super cool and fascinating, and the structure allows for some amazing questions.  There’s the run of the mill immortal quandary:  What do you do to keep life interesting if you’ll never die?  Harry becomes a scientist, doctor, engineer, world traveler, etc.  He learns everything, he meets everyone, he gets married a few times in different lives to different women.  He is captured, tortured, and dies in a whole bunch of different ways.   Continue reading →

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

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Ugh.  I would not have made it through this book if it weren’t for the constant encouragement by my trusted book-loving friend Kelly.  She insisted it got better, and while she was right, it took 250 pages to get there.

I honestly don’t know why the first 250 pages existed.  I mean, I do, but they were so derivative and repetitive and blegh.  It’s a stereotypical Beauty and the Beast story, except like….without any of the fun drama and disgust captured far better by Cruel Beauty or The Hollow Kingdom.  They fall for each other far too quickly, and they’re both attractive, nice people….isn’t the whole point of the fairy tale the fact that at least one of them is a little bit beastly?

HOWEVER.  Things make a turn in the last third of the book, and I enjoyed the ending so much I almost find myself looking forward to a sequel.  Things got darker, more complex, and a lot more interesting.  I wish the whole book had been that way!  Continue reading →

Crimson Bound by Rosamund Hodge

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It’s such a relief when the second book of an author you love turns out to be excellent.  Cruel Beauty immediately became one of my favorite books, and now that I’ve read Crimson Bound, I can trust that Rosamund Hodge is going to be an author I can trust to create beautifully haunting worlds of remade fairy tales.

I love Hodge’s darker spins on classic stories and the incredible amount of creativity she infuses into her story.  Although undeniably Little Red Riding Hood, the necessary elements of seductive danger and innocence stolen are laid on top of a rich fantasy world of sometime-France and faeries.  It is so good.

One of my favorite things about Hodge’s romances is that she refuses to play into “happily ever after” tropes where good wins and bad loses.  Although there is definitely pathos to the end of her stories, Hodge insists that there is good and bad in all of us.  It is when her characters accept their badness and cling to their goodness that the plot starts moving.  People fall in love with each other’s whole self–there is no fairy tale princess here, just broken people needing and loving each other.  This is exactly the kind of romance I like to read.

I cannot wait for her next book, and I encourage everyone to read both this and her first book, Cruel Beauty, as quickly as possible.  Continue reading →