Book 22: Fire

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Book Summary:
Fire, the last remaining human monster with an irresistible appearance and hair the color of a flame, is both hated and adored. She has a unique ability to control the minds of others, those that haven't learned to guard their minds against her. When Prince Brigan brings her to King City to help the royal family uncover a plot against the king, she finds that her power could help save the kingdom. In a time of war, she must learn that she is not the monster her father was.

Book Review:
This book is a companion novel to Graceling (whose review can be found here), and takes place approximately thirty years before that timeline in a land called the Dells. There isn't a lot that connects this book to Graceling, except that it introduces how Leck came to be, so you can definitely read it without having read Graceling. Honestly, I liked this story more than Cashore's debut novel. I felt that not only was the story more put together but that the characters were better rounded as well. I was a little put off initially because, like Katsa in Graceling, Fire is against getting married, and I kept thinking that Kristin Cashore must be completely opposed to the idea of marriage. Then the author explains Fire's thinking, which isn't that she doesn't want to get married, it's that she doesn't want to have children because she believes that she should be the last of her kind. She can't subject the humans to another monster that could potentially end up being cruel like her father was. In the end, she ends up falling in love and getting married.

I loved the characters in this novel. Fire was very well written, and I really felt like I knew her. Not only does Cashore describe Fire's looks and personality beautifully, she also makes the reader understand how Fire thinks and feels. Although, she did have a very Katsa-like feel, she was different enough that it didn't bother me when similarities between the two popped up. The one thing I didn't really like is that although Fire is only like sixteen years old, she is written in a way that makes her seem much older. The character of Leck both intrigued and bothered me. On the one hand, I liked getting to read his background, as that was a complaint of mine from Graceling, but on the other hand, I felt that his storyline was out of place and didn't mesh well with everything else that was happening. It seemed like Cashore put him in the story for the mere point of connecting this book to Graceling, and I felt that this was completely unnecessary as it could have stood just fine on its own without that connection.

I thought the storyline in this novel was much better than that of Graceling. Cashore apparently learned from the first novel, and decided to make the romance actually secondary to the main story. My biggest issue with the plot goes back to the character of Leck. Because the author felt the need to bring him into this story, there were almost two distinct plot lines occurring that really had nothing to do with the other, even though throughout most of the novel Cashore tries to write as if they do deal with each other. It doesn't help that the story kind of jumps back and forth between these two plots at random, and it wasn't until close to the end that I understood that Leck had absolutely nothing to do with the story of the war that was happening. It was a little confusing until that point.

I have to say that my biggest issue with the story, and honestly with Graceling as well though I didn't really realize it until after reading Fire, is that Cashore obviously has a view on casual sex that she tries to impress upon her readers. This wouldn't be a huge deal to me except that her target audience is teenagers. On top of this the women in her novels are not ideal role models for young girls as they lie, cheat, and sleep around to get what they want, and they are very irresponsible to boot, getting pregnant because they are either too lazy or just don't care enough to take the medicine that will stop this from happening. I realize that to an extent this is true to life, but it bothers me nonetheless.

So overall, I did enjoy this book. It was a quick read with a decent storyline and good character development. As far as family friendliness goes, there is little, if any, cursing, but there are definitely multiple sexual references (this book talks about periods and pregnancies as well). I originally said in my review of Graceling that I would let my younger teens read it if I had kids; however I would like to update that by saying that although I would let them read it, I would definitely talk to them about all of the things that both these novels bring up.

My Rating: 8/10

Book 21: Graceling

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Book Summary:
Katsa lives in a world where some are born with innate skills. These Graces are feared by many but exploited by those in power. When she was young, Katsa learned that her Grace was that of killing, and though she despises it, her uncle Randa, king of the Middluns, uses her to punish and torture those who displease him. When she meets Prince Po, a Graced fighter, her world is turned upside down. In the midst of turmoil surrounding a horrid secret in a faraway kingdom, she doesn't expect that this cocky prince will become a true friend and that he will show her more about herself and her Grace than she thought possible.

Book Review:
As far as debut novels go, Kristin Cashore did a decent job writing this one. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this book and read it in record time. Overall, the story was engaging and the main characters were interesting. I found Katsa and Po to be pretty well rounded characters, and I loved reading their evolution from strangers to friends to lovers. The back story on both of these characters was decently written, so I definitely felt like I knew them really well by the end of the novel. I think Katsa's character was possibly my favorite thing about this story. Even though she believes her Grace to be terrible, she finds a way to use it for good by helping others whenever she can. I've read multiple reviews where people didn't like that she had such a big issue with marriage and couldn't understand why she hadn't changed her mind by the end of the book given everything she's gone through with Po. I, however, felt that this added so much to her character and that it made perfect sense. Until she leaves Randa's court, she's never had freedom, and even though Po loves her and would never cage her, if she married him she would be giving up her freedom again. Even though I don't agree with that train of thought, I think that it completely matches Katsa's character.

As far as other characterization goes, I don't think Cashore did a great job. Most of the characters other than Katsa and Po are very one-dimensional. I wish we had gotten a little more background on characters like Oll, Raffin, Giddon, and Bitterblue. I felt that these characters were very important to the plot; however, I didn't really feel like I knew them. They felt more like characters instead of friends. And then we have Randa and Leck. I felt that these two characters were very poorly formed, especially Leck since he is the main villain of this plot. Other than the two of them being kings who crave power, I don't fell that I knew anything about them like why they actually acted the way they did. The author definitely could have done a better job writing these two.

I really liked the idea behind the plot of people with Graces that could be as mundane as swimming or as powerful as mind-reading or suggestion. I thought, though, that the plot as a whole was somewhat poorly formed. They say over and over again how people are afraid to be around those who are Graced, but most people that Katsa and Po come in contact with don't seem that scared until either Katsa and Po get angry. And even though the main plot is supposed to be about Katsa and Po finding out who had kidnapped Po's grandfather and in turn learning of a great threat and thwarting it, I couldn't help but feel that this was actually secondary to Katsa and Po's relationship. I know that the novel is supposed to be a coming-of-age story and that their relationship is a big part of that, but it just seemed to overwhelm the book to a point that the rest of the plot outside of their relationship was not well written. For the first half of the book they're trying to figure out who kidnapped Po's grandfather, and then once they figure it out, they realize that King Leck is not what he seems and the rest of the story is them trying to kill him. When if finally gets to the climax of the book, the scene in very underwhelming. Cashore definitely could have put a little more effort into this aspect of her story.

As I said earlier, overall I did really enjoy this book. It was an easy read, and even with the issues of secondary characters and plots, it was definitely worth the time. As far as family friendliness goes, there is no cursing that I remember, but there are some definite sexual references as Katsa and Po decide to become lovers instead of marrying. I would say the killing and torture in the book (there isn't a ton of it, but there is some) is probably worse than the sexual stuff. If I had a younger teen I would probably let them read this.

My Rating: 7/10

Book 20: Shadow of Night

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*Spoiler Alert: This is book two in a series. To read my review of book one please go here.

Book Summary:
Diana Bishop, a witch, and Matthew Clairmont, a vampire, have timewalked back to the year 1590 not only in an attempt to get another look at the enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782 but also to find a witch that can train the spellbound Diana. Once there they are plunged into Elizabethan London, where mistrust lies around every corner. As Matthew's past comes back to haunt him, the two must draw closer together if they are to survive the vampire's shadowed history. And in the midst of turbulence among witches, Diana learns that she is not only a powerful witch but a unique one as well.

My Review:
I really wanted to love this book. If you read my review for the first in the series, you'll know that even though there was much I didn't like about A Discovery of Witches, overall I was swept up in the story. Shadow of Night, however, was completely different. After about ten pages in, I was terribly bored by the storyline. As far as characters go, I was really annoyed (even more so than I was in the first book) by how Matthew treats Diana. Harkness tries to explain it away numerous times by the fact that vampires are possessive, but her explanations fell on deaf ears with me. It just wasn't a good enough reason for him to be continually angry with her. The alchemical stuff was also just a little too much. I understand that Diana is a historian who studies alchemy, but there was just way too much of it written into this novel. If I wanted to read a book about alchemy, I would have picked up a book specifically on alchemy. On top of that, making Diana's and Matthew's blood do extraordinary things in alchemical experiments was too far fetched for me, even in a fantasy novel.

There really was very little that I enjoyed about this book. One of the things that I liked, though, was the introduction of more characters. I really liked the addition of Gallowglass (Matthew's nephew), Annie (a young witch who comes to live with them), and Jack (a homeless boy they take in). I felt that these characters added a lot to the story. I also liked when Matthew and Diana visited Sept-Tours to see his father. This, actually, was one of the only parts of the plot that I enjoyed.

Overall this book is not as good as A Discovery of Witches, and I can honestly say that I have absolutely no desire to read the final book of the trilogy.

As far a family friendliness goes, this is definitely an adult book. There are curse words thrown around a good bit (though I don't believe there are any f-bombs), and there are numerous sex scenes (some of which are a little more graphic than others).

My Rating: 3/10

Book 19: The Dog Stars

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Book Summary:
Hig is a survivor. He survived the flu that killed everyone he knew. He has no family left and no friends...unless you count Bangly, the cynical codger with whom he cohabitates in a compound of abandoned buildings, and Jasper, his ever faithful pup. For years, Hig knows only one thing, just keep surviving, but after his pup dies of old age, he decides to go out past the point of no return in his 1956 Cessna to see if he can find the source of the random transmission he heard on his radio three years prior. Without enough fuel to return home, Hig discovers that he can have more in his life than what he originally believed.

Book Review:
Let me start by saying that I did not enjoy this book. It took me five painstaking weeks to finish this novel. Everyone kept telling me I should stop reading it, but I just couldn't bring myself to do that for a couple reasons. First, I thought maybe I'd get into it if I just kept pushing through, and second, I need to have books that I review that I legitimately do not like. That being said, I honestly like absolutely nothing about this novel. I mean, I can understand why others have liked it (it's gotten pretty decent ratings on goodreads and amazon), but it just was not for me. Okay, so let me break down all the reasons I basically wanted to shoot myself while reading this book.

First off was the writing style. This was the biggest turn off for me. There were absolutely no quotations anywhere, and just about every other statement was either a run-on or an incomplete sentence. This seriously drove me bat-crap crazy. I realize that the book was purposely written this way, and I actually understand why it was written as such. However, it made me want to gouge my eyes out.

Secondly, I did not enjoy the plot at all. It starts off after basically everyone in the world has died from some unknown flu (which we don't find any real details about until nearly the end of the novel), and then it goes to tell the story of next to nothing. I mean, stuff happens, but when it was over I felt like nothing of importance occurred. I realize that important things did actually happen: Jasper dies, Hig learns things about himself, he finds Cima and her dad, etc. I guess, though, that I didn't care about any of these characters, so none of this seemed that important to me.

Lastly, the ending. One day random planes start flying overhead, and when Hig tries to contact them they don't respond. This happens for days or weeks (I'm not really sure how long), and then the book ends. Who was in planes? Were there a lot more survivors? Were they the Arabs that were spoken of early on in the novel? I have no idea because the book just stops there without letting us know.

So, overall, I basically hated this novel. As far as family friendliness goes, this gets an F rating, as in next to every other word was an f bomb. Also, there are a couple graphic sex scenes along with a ton of violence including some cannibalism. I definitely would not recommend this book to anyone.

My Rating: 2/10 (It gets an extra point because of Jasper the dog)

Book 18: The Storyteller

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Book Summary:
After the death of her mother, Sage Singer becomes an introvert who works through the night, trying to escape her memories and loneliness by doing the one thing she knows, baking bread. When Josef Weber begins coming to the bakery, the two form an unusual friendship. This all changes when he confesses to her that he was a Nazi, and he has spent the last seventy years hiding from his past. He only asks two things, that she forgive him being that she is of Jewish decent and that she kill him. With confusion over her own identity and the idea that her closest friend could have done something so terrible, Sage must make the toughest decision of her life.

My Review:
Let me start by saying that I am not a huge Jodi Picoult fan. It's not that her books are awful because she's actually a very good writer; it's just that all her books seem like a lifetime movie in the making. This one is no different. It was very well written, and I liked the idea behind it. A former Nazi asking forgiveness of the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor is a great plot. However, this storyline is squeezed in among an affair, a romance, a death, and about ten other subplots. Even though this is the main point of the book, at times it got lost amid all the other things that were going on. I really like that Picoult did so much research before beginning this book. She pretty much learned everything she could about Nazis so she could weave a plausible back-story. She also learned about what someone who actually hunts down Nazis for a living does to find and prosecute World War II criminals. Lastly, she learned the intricacies of bread baking, which being that this is something that I actually know about, I thoroughly appreciated that Sage actually knew her way around baking bread. I think my favorite thing about his book was the ending, and Sage finding out that sometimes people aren't who they seem to be.

Though I enjoyed Minka's story from the war, I felt that it drawn out longer than it needed to be. I honestly skipped pages during her story because it literally went on for well over a hundred pages, and though it had everything to do with her story as a Holocaust survivor, I didn't feel like it was as important to the plot as Josef's story which was not nearly as long. I also did not like the subplot of Sage dating a married man. I don't feel that it added anything to the story other than causing Leo to judge her for it. I understand the reasoning behind the author using this, as it's a device to help us see how much Sage changes from the beginning of the book until the end, I just thought the book would have been fine without it.

Overall, I thought the book was very well written, it just wasn't really my type of book. I think that if you really like Lifetime movies, you would probably thoroughly enjoy this novel. There is some swearing and a good amount of sexual references.

My Rating: 6/10

Book 17: A Discovery of Witches

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Book Summary:
Diana Bishop is an alchemical history professor doing research while at Oxford University. When she requests a manuscript called Ashmole 782 at the Bodleian Library, she believes it to be an ordinary book, that is, until she gets her hands on it. Even though she has tried to keep all magic out of her life, she can tell that this ancient text is bound with it. Insisting that she wants nothing to do with her magic, she makes a few notes and then sends the book back. What she doesn't realize, however, is that this text has been lost for centuries, and the magical community will do anything to get thier hands on it. Soon after, witches, daemons, and vampires begin appearing at the Bodleian. One in particular is Matthew Clairmont, a distinguished scientist who also happens to be a vampire. Once Matthew enters Diana's life, she finds that nothing will ever be the same.

My Review:
If Harry Potter and Twilight were to have a baby, I'm pretty sure it would be this book. That being said, Deborah Harkness is a better writer than Stephanie Meyer, so this was a halfway decent book. I really enjoyed the fact that because Harkness is a history professor by trade, she somehow manages to make a novel that is one part historical fiction and one part modern fantasy. I have very mixed feeling about this book, however, because for some reason I really enjoyed reading it even though so much of it bugged me. Maybe Deborah Harkness put a spell on the book because that is pretty much the only explanation I can come up with.

Though I enjoyed the overall concept of a witch who wants nothing to do with witchcraft who gets violently thrown into that world, I felt that by the end the subplot romance becomes the total driving force for the story. This is fine if you're writing a romance, but I wasn't really wanting to read a romance when I picked up A Discovery of Witches. Also, I feel that though Harkness starts out writing a strong female character who can fully take care of herself, the second Matthew steps into the picture Diana becomes a major damsel in distress. On top of that, Matthew is basically a douche throughout ninety percent of the story, and Diana, after only a couple weeks of knowing him, is completely willing to choose him over her family at every instant. Matthew definitely falls into the stereotypical vampire role of obsession with a woman that turns into the need to posses her fully as if he owns her.  Honestly, I think in general I have issues with vampire romances because they make absolutely no sense unless ultimately the girl is going to become a vampire. If that is not the intention, there is going to come a point where you will look forty years older than your vampire husband. Do characters not take that into account before deciding they want to marry the living dead? On a completely different note, there were definitely some really cheesy lines that I literally laughed out loud at. I also wasn't to keen on the whole genetics side to the story where magical creatures have extra chromosomes, and you can tell what powers a which has based on her DNA. Even in a story about magical beings, this was a little too much of a stretch for me.

All of that being said, I flew through this book and really did enjoy the overall experience of it. Harkness made me care about the characters, and so I fully plan on reading the rest of the series. Maybe this makes me as bad as the twihards or maybe I've just been reading so many books recently that I'm not paying as much attention to writing as I am to the overall story or maybe ever since I first watched Buffy I've just really wanted to fall in love with a vampire, of this I am not sure. Whatever the reason, I definitely want to know what becomes of Diana and Matthew.

As far as family friendliness goes, this is definitely not a book for young teens. There is a decent amount cursing and some semi-graphic scenes both sexual ones and violent ones. I definitely would not let my young teen pick up this book.

My Rating: 5/10

Book 16: Reached

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*Spoiler Alert: This is the third book in a series. If you haven't read the first two books you may want to stop reading*

My review of book one can be found here, and my review of book two can be found here.


Book Summary:
When an epidemic of the plague hits the provinces, the Rising uses their cure to gain hold and overthrow the Society. But when the plague mutates, Cassia, Ky, and Xander must help the Rising and the Pilot find a new cure. They must decide who they can trust. Is the Rising really a rebellion, or are they just the Society under a new name?

Book Review:
It's been a couple months since I read Matched and Crossed, so it took me a couple chapters before I was able to get back into the plot of this series. There were parts of this book that I liked a great deal more than the previous two, but there were also parts that I liked quite a bit less.

First off, I really enjoyed the storyline. I thought this was a much more interesting plot than either of the first two books. Since Cassia, Ky, and Xander are all major players in this book, each chapter is written with one of them as the narrator. As I've said before, I normally don't like when authors do that, but it worked out in this series pretty well. I really liked how in the series as a whole Condie goes from everything being told from Cassia's point of view in the first novel, to going back and forth between Cassia and Ky in the second, and now using all three of them in the third. As far as characters go, I still don't really like Cassia or Ky much; however, I really liked that Xander played such a large role in this story. Since the first book, I've never really gotten the reason behind why Cassia decided she loves Ky so much when she knew next to nothing about him before his face popped up on her microcard. Because of this, I always felt bad for Xander because he truly loves Cassia and had always hoped he would get matched to her someday. Thankfully, though, Xander was given another love interest in Lei, and I really liked seeing that story come to fruition.

Now to the things I didn't like. I thought the last couple chapters were really boring. Honestly, I wasn't such a huge fan of the final wrap up. It's not that the story ended terribly, it's just that I felt that the ending could have been a lot more interesting. It was just kind of a "blah" ending. I also didn't like what happened with Indie. I was really starting to like her, and felt that Condie could have done a lot more with her character. The final thing I didn't really like or even really understand was the whole thing about Cassia and the tablets. I felt like Condie was trying to make us believe that Cassia was really special because the tablets didn't work on her like they did everyone else, but this fell flat for me. I didn't feel like Cassia was special at all. I honestly got tired of reading about her and the tablets, so I ultimately skipped over the parts of the book where she was trying to remember the Red Garden Day.

Overall, I guess the good outweighed the bad in this book. And as far as family friendliness goes, there are very few (if any) curse words and no sexual references.

My Rating: 6/10 - (for the series I would give a 6/10)