“But all lives are important, all people are important, because everyone is a book.” -Tanith Lee
I’m back and I’m ready for another bitchfest about this “R.L. Stine” series! If you haven’t read part 1, please do! It’s longwinded, but if you enjoy rants, I think it’ll be worth your while.
Continue reading “R.L. Stine Retrospective – Part 2: One Last Kiss”
I love to revisit nostalgic reads I enjoyed as a kid and teen. Some, I continue to love throughout the years (Blood and Chocolate & The Witch of Blackbird Pond) and others don’t hold up so well (sorry, Artemis Foul Fowl). Recently, I embarked on a quest to re-read two childhood R.L. Stine favorites of mine (aside from basically the entire Goosebumps series) and try out his debut adult novel.
Continue reading “R.L Stine Retrospective – Part 1: The Sign of Fear”
Celaena Sardothien is the most badass assassin in all the land, though aside from her title of “Adarlan’s Assassin” we’re given little evidence of this. Young, achingly handsome Prince Dorian, with his piercing sapphire eyes, and his equally young and devastatingly handsome captain of the guard, Chaol, drag her from the depths of a salt mine where she’s been slaving away for a year. The King will hold a tourney, comprised mostly of criminals who he gives almost free reign of his castle to, in order to choose a champion to do his dirty work. Can Celaena eliminate her competition to regain her freedom, tactfully handle the oodles of compliments she receives from two sexy men, and pick which sexy man she’ll fall in love with, all while embarking on a side quest from an ancient ghost?
If you can’t already tell, I wasn’t a fan of this book (and I realize I’m in the minority on this), so if you don’t want to read my rant, here’s the short version: the characters were cardboard cutouts and walking clichés, the dialogue was clunky and full of our heroine and heroes constantly interrupting important conversations with thoughts of how attractive they find each other, and the plot had too many elements with no real focus. I feel like Maas wasted an opportunity to actually portray a badass young assassin and instead wrote a half-assed love triangle set inside a castle and called it a fantasy novel.
Here are a few highlights from my Twitter:
Started a YA novel. Page two and I’m hearing about how beautiful our heroine is 😧
YA adventures continue: page 6, a handsome youth appears! Page 8: another boy! This one “achingly handsome”!
Special snowflake eyes, glimmering golden hair, thin: our heroine is a strikingly lovely, highly skilled, totally average teen! Even when she’s so thin she’s skeletal, she’s still so beautiful!
Yes, I too, often remark mid conversation on someone’s looks when it’s not at all relevant to what I’m discussing.
Confirmed by our hero, our heroine is still beautiful even when sweaty! Thank gourd!
Our heroine is wild and has “impossible anger.” What even does that mean?
Hero B pauses his thoughts of important political intrigue to think about our beautiful, strong but secretly fragile, heroine.
Guest tweet by @redstarreviews: he ponders how her inner brokenness draws him to her while her rough sarcastic exterior confuses his emotions….
I struggled to gather my thoughts on this book. I know it is part of an incredibly popular series and while I don’t read YA as often as I used to, I do still enjoy the genre. Throne of Glass could have featured an intimidating, strong-willed female lead delivering some serious ass kickings. Instead, we’re beaten about the head with Celaena’s title of “Adarlan’s Assassin” (re: the best in all the land at only eighteen) but aside from a few fleeting scenes, readers are never given any real taste of her skills or even her past. I at least wanted to know about who she’s killed in the past! Mass failed to impress me with her lead character, to make me feel invested in the story and to excite me.
The majority of the book follows the “tell, don’t show” format. We’re constantly told how beautiful the three young heroes of our love triangle are, what they’re wearing, and how attractive they find each other. Snore! While romance isn’t my genre of choice, if it had at least been well written, I would have considered this book to have some redeeming quality. But the characters lacked personality and their “relationships” lacked depth.
Celaena wavers between a petulant teen starved for the attention of the sexy men who are actually her captors and a tough girl who occasionally thinks of murdering people and escaping. She wants to be seen as a serious threat, but she also wants to be invited to royal parties and play dress up. She wants to hide in her room and read, but really she’s just lonely and wishing she had friends! None of her thoughts or actions solidified her personality for me. Dorian and Chaol are just pretty faces that waver between not trusting an assassin (as they shouldn’t, if she were actually a threat) and wanting to smooch her.
The dialogue is clunky and unrealistic. As I mentioned in some of my tweets, our characters often stop serious conversations to remark, mentally or aloud, about how attractive they find each other. Celaena also fails to exhibit her strong, independent personality with gems like this:
(A competitor tells her that he thought she’d have run off. Celaena “trembles with rage” and Chaol tells her to save it.)
“I’m going to kill him,” she breathed.
“No, you’re not. If you want to shut him up, then beat him. He’s just a brute from the king’s army – don’t waste your strength on hating him.”
She rolled her eyes. “Thank you so much for interfering on my behalf.”
“You don’t need me to rescue you.”
“It still would have been nice.”
Ok what!? Chaol says it lightly, but yes, she shouldn’t need rescuing. ALSO RESCUING FROM WHAT? Ahem – sorry. But seriously, her competitor did nothing but comment that he thought she’d have abandoned the competition. Its conversations and actions like that which stopped Celaena from being a convincing character.
The whole competition aspect of the story didn’t make sense either. I could see no reason why the king would have two dozen or so people competing for the position as lead assassin and allow them (many of whom were known criminals) free reign of his castle and attendance to royal parties. Because there were so many characters and so many weekly skill tests, most of them – characters and tests alike – are skimmed over, draining any tension from this storyline and leaving Celaena a lot of downtime (for parties and pining over cuties!)
On top of all this muck, there’s a side plot involving the ghosts of dead royalty, faeries, outlawed magic, and evil beasts. Maas spread herself too thin trying to tackle too many subjects and instead left them all feeling haphazard and unfinished.
If you read my whole review – I applaud you! I just had too many thoughts on this book and unfortunately, none of them were pleasant. I can say the cover art is gorgeous though – it’s certainly a beautiful looking series!
Jet Latter and her robo-dog Otto are dragged by the family to Ollywood, city of dreams, when her sister’s film career takes off. Jet is bored and feels ignored, so she sets off to explore the city alone (well, except for Otto, of course) and finds the strange underworld of Subway. But Jet and Otto soon discover, there’s another city, even deeper than Subway, where the magic of film becomes a reality.
I’ve been neglecting my quest to read more Tanith, so on impulse, I grabbed this off my shelf. What fun!
Imagine sometime after you’ve turned twelve, your family moves to a new town just before school starts up again. Your dad then tells you it’s time to have “the talk” and you panic – not the birds and the bees, gross! – and takes you to a corn field at the edge of your new town. But as it turns out, this talk isn’t what you expected – your dad tells you that you’ve moved to a town full of people with superpowers, that he has superpowers and that you’re actually starting to develop your own powers! You’re telekinetic like your father, so you can move things with your mind. Now imagine how being blind is going to impact your powers. In fact, your new school, full of other kids with superpowers, has placed you in the special education class with other children they feel are disabled, despite having powerful abilities. Philip Sallinger is both more powerful than the average human boy, yet considered less powerful by his peers due to his blindness. He and his new friends must come to terms with their new abilities and also with the stigma of being classified as disabled. On top of all this, a strange figure arrive and starts to stir up trouble that Philip and his friends can’t seem to stay out of. They must find a way to overcome their difficulties and work together to save the town.
From the back of the book: His wife taken. His people enslaved. Driven by a longing for justice and the memory of lost love, Darrow will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies…even if he must become one of them to do so. For the first time, Red will rise.
From the back of the book: Struggling with bad grades, a video game addiction, and his father’s death, Dennis Ouyang is on the verge of dropping out of college when four adorable angels appear and take charge of his life. But nothing is ever what it seems, when life, magic, and gaming collide.
Homeland takes place a few years after Little Brother – after Marcus has had to drop out of college and is struggling to find a job. He runs into Masha at the Burning Man festival and she hands him a flash drive, containing thousands of files full of dirty government secrets. She makes him promise that if she goes missing, he has to release the documents. Marcus then gets a job with a local politician who promises change – then Masha goes missing. But if Marcus releases the documents right away, the world will know who did it and he could also cost his employer the campaign. Once again, Marcus is being shadowed by dangerous people and has to decide what to do with the documents before they’re taken from him.
From the back of the book: A boy named Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is this possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he here? And where is this place? The street seems familiar, but everything is abandoned, overgrown, covered in dust. What’s going on? Is it real? Or has he woken up in his own personal hell? Seth begins to search for answers, hoping desperately that there must be more to this life, or perhaps this afterlife…
I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
From NetGalley: There are three rules in the Walled City [Hak Nam]: Run fast. Trust no one. Always carry your knife. Right now, my life depends completely on the first. Run, run, run. Jin, Mei Yee, and Dai all live in the Walled City, a lawless labyrinth run by crime lords and overrun by street gangs. Teens there traffic drugs or work in brothels–or, like Jin, hide under the radar. But when Dai offers Jin a chance to find her lost sister, Mei Yee, she begins a breathtaking race against the clock to escape the Walled City itself.
Milliebot Reads 