All in Book Reviews
I remember the moment I started reading Harry Potter - as a child, I received Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a Christmas gift and tore through it within the next two days. Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban followed, and then I had caught up and had to wait for the next book. Each release was a huge celebration. I dressed as Hermione Granger for Halloween well before the movies came out. Harry Potter was my gateway drug to fantasy and science fiction.
I have this theory I call "middle book syndrome," which basically states that the middle novel of a trilogy is inherently in danger of becoming nothing more than a set-up for the third book - that it will lack a proper plot of its own and become a dragging plod from start to finish. It's the mark of a good author to avoid this, but I'm always leery when I pick up the second book of a series.
I've never read any of Richard Kadrey's other work, but when I saw The Everything Box being compared to Christopher Moore's novels (which I love), I knew I would have to pick it up.Boy, I'm glad I did.
You know how sometimes you read the first chapter of a novel and you just know that you're going to love the whole book?I had that feeling with Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel.
I have mixed feelings on The Emperor's Blades. I want to love it, I really do - but I can't bring myself to get past "like." On paper, this book looks like a perfect fit for my tastes, but in practice I found it somewhat lacking.
What do you get when you cross Battle Royale and Ender's Game and then set them on Mars for good measure? Red Rising, that's what.
Well, this was a weird one.See, for the first 1/3 of this novel, it's fairly typical YA boarding school fare: a minor mystery, a small group of enterprising young girls determined to solve it, quirky teachers, some small magics. Nothing terribly bad, but nothing terribly exciting or groundbreaking either. In fact, by the end of Pt. 1 of the book, I was ready to write it off as a yawn.
I guess I'm getting into a bad habit of thinking books are standalones when they aren't. That was the case for City of Stairs (now with sequel City of Blades) and it's also the case for V.E. Schwab's earlier novel A Darker Shade of Magic. A Darker Shade ranked very highly on my list of top books read year, so when I finally discovered (in January) that a sequel was coming out (in February), I marked my calendar to purchase it.
You can't hear me, but if you could, you'd hear me sigh. I have conflicting feelings on this book. Let's start with the positive, shall we?
This book is, in a word, gut-wrenching. It will make you sick to your stomach - but in all the right ways.
Stop. Go read Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs. I'll wait. Are you done? OK, good. Now that you've read what was quite possibly my favorite fantasy novel of the last five years, we can discuss its sequel and the novel that may have supplanted it.
I'm really not sure where to start with this book, because the last third of it tainted an otherwise excellent novel.
I don't often pick up books set in our world that aren't outright fantasy, but every now and then I like a good religious conspiracy theory novel. Michael Livingston's The Shards of Heaven isn't quite there, but it's close.
