Hannah

I read this book in one sitting and it was everything I was looking for after finishing the Truly Devious series. 

Pippa is what I was missing with Stevie from Truly Devious. She's consumed with solving a murder from five years ago, but she also does her homework and keeps her life mostly together. Yes, it's weird that I care so much about this element of my ya characters, but I got so stressed out by Stevie's absolute disregard for the elements of her life that weren't murder and it distracted me from the plot of Truly Devious.Moving past the Pippa v Stevie comparison, Pippa and Ravi were such a lovely pair and the twists of solving Andie Bell's murder and clearing Sal Singh's name were exciting and consuming. One of my top reads of 2023. 

This book was such an interesting combination where the first half of the book is a non-magic but compelling story of a boy, Charlie, helping an old man and his dog while recovering from his father's bout of alcoholism and the death of his mother. The second half of the book feels like a whole new story, with a fantasy world, a kingdom ruled by an evil king, a damsel-in-distress princess, and Charlie transforming into a prince out of a fairy tale. I enjoyed both halves, but the first half with no fantasy elements was my favorite and established all my emotional attachment to the characters. The world that Charlie came from felt so deep and real with fleshed-out characters while many of the supporting characters in the fairytale world felt a bit too cutesy.

I think all worlds are magic. We just get used to it.

Eh. I liked Feyre in the human world, she was strong and fierce and a protector of her family. Very Hunger Games heroine type. But then it all goes downhill once she gets taken to Fae and loses all the strength that made me respect her. We basically watch her paint for half the book.

I couldn't stop grinning through this whole book, regardless of how it made me look at the bus stop. Emily Henry is a genius at witty dialogue. And Gus... I love Gus. He's like a modern Mr. Darcy with his vibe of “I'm completely in love with you. I will demonstrate this by standing nearby and insulting you”.

The second book is even wilder than the first. Darrow is out of the institute, but the challenges and power struggles are nowhere close to over. He now serves the man who ordered the execution of his wife, the father of the gold woman he's growing to love. Darrow struggles to navigate this world of greed and power without becoming a monster himself.The betrayal by Darrow's poet friend Roque broke my heart, but I loved the deepening of his relationships with Sevro and Mustang and the new friendship with Ragnar. I love Ragnar so much. I loved watching his transformation when Darrow finally treated him as a man, an equal. It made me love Darrow even with all his struggles to be a good friend and good leader. 

The premise is cute and interesting. An angel falls because they question whether all the rules in heaven are truly the right way to live. Another angel contracts them to tempt a human woman who never sins into small temptations. I loved that the fallen angel ended up as a high school therapist, I wish that would've been a larger focus of the plot. The actual execution was slow and repetitive. There are only so many times that I can watch a problem be solved with chocolate. The romance felt forced and lacked chemistry. Also, I know the teenage niece was being constantly tempted by a demon meant to bring about the apocalypse so I'll give her slack, but even with that factor did she have to be so unlikable?

This series is so, so good. It is an emotional rollercoaster that is at times hard to read because the characters' pain is your pain. You grow to care so much about these well-fleshed-out characters, and the author does an amazing job at making both the reds and golds and all the colors between complex. There is no clear good and evil. The reds are not wholly good and the golds are not wholly bad. I love how he shows this yet still makes you understand that the societal structure that stands on the backs of the suffering lower castes must be destroyed. He shows the struggle in a rebellion - the balance that must be struck between tearing down and rebuilding and how easily the good side may become bad if they don't hold onto the future they're fighting for.The audiobooks for this series are a masterpiece.Darrow is a Red and a HellDiver. He lives in the deep mines of Mars, loving his wife Eo and taking pride in his work even as his people starve and his death threatens to arrive every day via a pit viper or a lost limb. Then, Eo shows him a secret section of the mine they were never supposed to see - a garden. He's never seen the sky, never felt grass beneath his feet. Eo tries to convince him to rebel, but he won't risk dying like his father did. He has Eo to live for. That's before they're caught exiting the garden. Eo is whipped and then executed when she sings a forbidden song that still lives in my head to this day.

My love, my love
remember the cries
When winter died for spring skies
They roared and roared
But we grabbed our seed
And sowed a song
Against their greed
And
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper swing, the reaper swing
the reaper swing
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper sing
A tale of winter done
My son, my son
Remember the chains
when gold ruled with iron reins
we roared and roared
and twisted and screamed
For ours, a vale
of better dreams

 Darrow is saved by the Sons of Aires. They ask him to sacrifice everything to save his people by undergoing the carving to become a Gold and infiltrate the institute.

This book was an apocalyptic hug. Favorite read of 2023. I love everything about it. Ryland Grace is a joy to tag along with, even as he's facing certain death in a separate solar system from Earth. His inner dialogue is so entertaining. Rock stole my heart even though I'm terrified of spiders.It was so heartwarming to watch these two work together across culture and language to communicate and solve the mystery of astrophages to solve both of their planets. The solid and steady growth of their friendship was lovely and the world-building was so well done. I appreciated how flashbacks were introduced as a form of Grace slowly getting his memory back, so it didn't feel forced in the overall plot.

Grumpy. Angry. Stupid. How long since last sleep, question?

This was an enjoyable read with characters you want to spend time with. I particularly loved the grave witch with her demon rooster and the godmother who was meant to be evil, but instead lived a mediocre and kind life with her chickens.

Why did I think she must have slighted me? Why didn't it occur to me that she might just be doing the best she could?

‘Go,' she whispered... ‘Run and be free. They cannot use what they cannot find.'

I was done after the first time Mercy said “Nuzzle Nook”. I liked the premise - a land in between worlds called Tanria where drudges live. Hart is a marshal patrolling the land to secure the border.

This was an interesting read that approaches time management from a philosophical perspective rather than from a self-help perspective. It asks several questions: What is our experience of time? What qualifies as a good or bad use of it? The premise asks us to set aside the goal of attempting to stuff our days with slots of value for a future payoff and instead consider how we want to allocate our four thousand weeks to enjoy the present. 

Some parts of this were rather repetitive, but I came away with good insights. I do wish the book would have focused less on what is wrong with our approach to time and more on building a vision of what could be better.

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (‘This shouldn't be happening'), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.”

A book that mixes magic and fairytales with Judaism. A Jewish girl, Miryem, loves her father but is watching him let the family starve because he won't fulfill his role as a money lender. Her grandfather is a wealthy man of the same profession, and she wants that wealth and comfort for her own family. This desire is spurred into action when her mother becomes sick. Miryem starts collecting the money herself. Little does she know what can happen to a girl who turns silver into gold.

“But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones”

Maia is the youngest son of the Emperor and was never meant to lead, let alone see the Imperial Court again. He's been long exiled due to his heritage. His mother, the third and regretted Empress, was a goblin.  When a crash kills the Emperor and three older sons, Maia finds himself the unexpected (and unwanted) Emperor.

I thought this story was beautiful. I felt so much for Maia due to his childhood abuse and the gentle manner in which he took on each challenge before him. I loved him for not becoming the monsters who raised him once he had the power to do so. 

This book was so beautiful and sentimental. Linus Baker, a social worker, is working for a satirically capitalist company ruled by “Extremely Upper Management.” Linus assesses orphanages for magical children in a world where those with magic are discriminated against. When he's assigned a month-long investigation with a highly classified orphanage, he discovers that life can be so much more than the grey world he's grown comfortable with.

“He dreams. Is that understood, I wonder? He dreams of a future that he may never have. And while his dreams may seem small, they are still his and his alone.”

Full Series Review –

This series made me want to read every other book T. Kingfisher has written, even with all the grit and heartbreak and me falling for the wrong character who was kind of the bad guy and broke my heart by dying in the end, but said “Darlin''” in such a heart-gripping way. The premise? Amazing. Cannabalistic tattoos, wars, demons, criminal underworlds. It has everything. The characters? There is something wonderful about having heroines and romances focus on older women who have lived through some shit.The ending? Heartbreaking, had me crying until I brought on a headache at 1 am. I was so mad at Brenner for being idiotic enough to let a demon in. I was so heartbroken by the way he looked at her and said “Darling” as his last words before he lost his soul for good. I was so uncertain if he'd ever really loved her, if he was capable of love, but in that moment I hoped he was and that he'd redeemed himself. “There were a great many things she had prepared to say - vague explanations, stripped of any facts that could be dangerous, mentions of the Dowager's name, promises of amnesty in the unlikely event any of them survived. She considered them all and rejected them one by one. ‘Would you like to go on a suicide mission?' she asked instead. He smiled. It was the first genuine smile she'd seen all day. ‘I would be honored,' he said.

“Old boy, in this life there will always be a certain amount of shit to be shoveled. I really would urge you to buy a long-handled spade and simply get on with it.”

A perfect heartwarming comfort novel.

“How many times had women who told the truth been muzzled with the label of madness?”

The Bachelor is mashed with classic fairy tales through the setting of a support group for modern women dealing with their trauma. Each chapter is a different woman's story. Each one is captivating and disturbing. 

Through all the stories is an underlying plot where the “therapist”, a man wearing a human suit to play the role of a young and attractive male, has something nefarious planned. The ending reveal of who he is was quite a twist, I'd grown convinced that he was Raina's former lover Rumpelstiltskin when he was really her current husband - host of The One (aka torture chamber/traumatic version of The Bachelor). Outside of that mystery, I loved watching the women grow to support each other and pull out what it means to be a woman in this world.“Maybe don't even be out there, on the street, not if it's dark, not if you're a kid, not if you're a woman, not without a rape whistle around your neck, not without pepper spray clutched in your hand, not, anyway, if you're wearing that outfit”“Morals create a labyrinth of rule geared toward blaming the victim...““Brandon chose you. But what if it were the other way around? What if it were your choice? What would you choose?”“Come on, I gave the fucker the address.” “I practically moved in with the fucker,” said Bernice. “Great, so we're both idiots,” said Ruby.