Mandy
Oh man, this was really, really good. I'm hovering between 4 to 4.5 stars, maybe even considering a 5 star.
Reasons why I think this was a great read:
- It wasn't wholly absorbed in a self-contained love story between the two protagonists and just some random social misgivings easily overcome, but rather each of the protagonists had their own distinct motivations, backstories, and causes to fight for in life that tied in with the society around them which clashed with each other despite their mutual attraction.
- It actually showed me the world that the protagonists lived in, and the relationship interacts meaningfully (and sometimes contradicts) with that society rather than exist in a bubble within it. You know, just like how real relationships would.
- The conflicts between the protagonists felt realistic and deserved, rather than petty arguments arising because one person decided to go for some good ol' noble idiocy or because there were stupid, avoidable miscommunications. The conflicts arose chiefly because the protagonists belong to such different classes in society and were officially fighting on opposite sides of the women's rights movement. I also liked that the class differences weren't just magically swept under the carpet like in most romance novels, where it makes it seem so easy for a rich and titled man to marry an impoverished, “low-born” nobody with no thoughts about the consequences at all.
- The conflicts had actual stakes involved, and no matter what decision was made, you know it was going to cost someone dearly in a lot of ways - rather than resolutions that seemed to only involve someone getting over their ego and apologising.
- The female protagonist in particular wasn't a Mary Sue. She actively went through some shit to fight for her cause. Her backstory was fairly heavier than expected. She still felt endearing despite it all, and I found myself rooting for her in the end.
If anything, I think the only scene that caught me a little off-guard was when Annabelle decided to initiate a one-night stand with Montgomery after he saved her from prison. It felt really sudden and random and almost out of character, but I didn't mind it that much because I really enjoyed the conversations they had in between having sex, lol. I liked that they weren't just being baring themselves physically to each other but emotionally as well. And the way they parted after that scene really wrenched my heart good and proper.
All in all, a fantastic romance novel and I would certainly be excited to follow this series!
3 stars. I was struggling to continue this book for the first 50% but then I devoured the last half in one evening - although I'm still trying to decide whether it's in a good or bad way.
Sally Lockhart has set up as a teenage independent woman in Victorian London by establishing herself as a financial consultant. An elderly lady client comes in to ask her about her latest investment which had totally sunk all her money when the Anglo-Baltic Company unexpectedly collapsed. Sally suspects fraud and immediately begins investigating, along with her friends Jim Taylor and Frederick Garland.
The writing style felt very middle-grade so at the beginning I was a little unsure about whether this was meant for a younger audience. Imagine how jarring the contrast was when, after the 50% mark, the plot developed in a way that certainly wasn't meant for middle-grade audiences.
The central mystery of this story has a lot to do with complicated machinery (unsurprising considering Pullman's experience in the steampunk-ish genre), and Pullman doesn't pull any punches with the technical details. I personally found it rather boring, and coupled with an ebook copy with messed-up formatting, I couldn't help skimming through a lot of passages in the book. I definitely found the side-mystery of Alastair McKinnon much more engaging and interesting than the central one with the Anglo-Baltic Company.
About the second half of the book: WHAT JUST HAPPENED? It's like the story went from being ye olde regular Victorian mystery to pulling out all the stops and becoming a full-fledged soap opera at the drop of a hat. The first sign to me that shit was going down was when Chaka died, that really upset me. I do not like it when pets die in books :( After that, everything went on fairly well until suddenly Sally initiated a one night passion with Frederick after they had confessed to each other? I found that super out of character. I get that Sally may have been emotionally affected by the attack on her shop and the death of Chaka, all because she had pig-headedly (in my opinion) refused to go live with the Garlands for her own safety. But even so... why would she just randomly decide to have sex with Fred just because they established that they loved each other. Immediately after that, the evil henchmen set fire to the house, in which Frederick immediately dies while saving Isabel Meredith, who conveniently turns batty just at that moment of the fire when she's never really displayed any sign of mental instability??? We never really get any hint that she's going off her rocker even after she finds out about McKinnon's marriage - things were happening too quickly and we never get the chance to explore that, and the onset of her mental instability was just too conveniently sudden too.So after Frederick dies, Sally immediately goes to find Mr Bellmann to seek her revenge. He immediately proposes marriage to her, and she rather quickly accepts his hand, especially after she has fleeced him of the money/gold that she had set out to recover for Miss Walsh in the first place. Then later she asks Bellmann for a very-unsuspicious tour of his factory and Steam Gun production, during which she shoots something and the whole thing explodes.But of course, Sally is blown conveniently out of the way during the first detonation, so she survives almost unscathed while Bellmann is blown to pieces. Oh, and later she of course finds out that she is pregnant with Frederick's baby because everything is super convenient. Why is everything so convenient in the second half of this book!??!?!
Despite all the rants I have for the second half of the book, I won't deny that it was still a very entertaining read just for the drama, which is why this book is even 3 stars at all. I read the first book a really long time ago so I can't quite remember much about it, but I don't think I recall having the same thoughts about this. I'll probably continue the series at some point since I own the last 2 books, but it's fairly low on my priority at the moment. I might just want to check out The Golden Compass by Pullman, which I hope is a much better read.
Re-read review (22 Jan 2021): My first re-read of this book in a super long time and if anything, I just love it even more than ever, I burst into tears when I finished (could also be hormones talking).
I love it that we have this female protagonist who is rather insecure and unsure of herself at the beginning of the story, and it's her younger sisters that are trying to bolster her self-worth, which is such a great twist on that usual “evil stepsisters” trope. I love that so much of this book, even though the sisters were apart from each other, Sophie never stopped thinking about them or caring for them in whatever ways she could. I love that we have one sister who wants to get married and have ten children, and another sister who wants to keep on learning and making a name for herself and both of them are fine with that, support each other and help each other achieve their goals even if wildly different.
I love that it shows so many things that aren't very common but which I really like to see in YA stories: a female protagonist that starts off being insecure, but very gradually starts to realise how powerful she is because she took the first step to get out of her comfort zone, and not because anyone else (and not a dude) told her so; a hero that is endearing but so flawed and annoying at the same time; truly believable chemistry between the two leads which develops throughout the book to culminate in a very satisfying ending (that doesn't even need to show them kissing or being all handsy with each otherThis has always been one of my favourite books of all time, and this re-read has only cemented that status.I just love it, OK? *cries*---------------------I bought this many, many years ago, attracted by the colourful cover and the illustration of a handsome, crazy wizard. I did not regret it.Howl's Moving Castle is the kind of book that I come across only very rarely, where the moment I finish reading the last page, I lean back, exhale, try to digest all the plot twists at the end, then I immediately turn back to the first page and begin re-reading immediately. I am personally someone who isn't in the habit of re-reading books almost ever.Though I have owned this book for more than a decade now, but it's still in relatively good condition and I still occasionally re-read it. I think of it as one of my favourite books of all time, and it introduced me to the magical world of Diana Wynne Jones.
A surprisingly refreshing and unique murder mystery that kept me hooked from start to end!
In the small town of Chipping, some of its principal inhabitants are getting ready to stage an amateur play for charity. Miss Prentice, the middle-aged cousin of the local squire, successfully wrestles the part of playing the play's overture from her best frenemy Miss Campanula. Unfortunately, a swollen and inflamed finger puts a damper on things and finally forces Miss Prentice to give way to Miss Campanula last minute just before the performance. But when Miss Campanula strikes up the first three chords of her infamous Prelude and puts her foot on the soft pedal - a gun goes off from inside the piano.
In terms of the mystery, my very first initial suspicion of the culprit turned out to be correct (thanks for the training, Agatha Christie!) but that doesn't mean that the mystery was in any way predictable. Marsh did a great job leading me on a wild goose chase and I changed my suspicions around almost the entire cast of characters before the final answer was revealed.
The characters themselves were not exactly endearing, but they certainly jumped off the pages at you, especially the two main church hens of Miss Prentice and Miss Campanula. I enjoyed the characterisation of them all immensely. The only complaint I'd have is that Marsh really writes her female characters viciously. I get that this book and the character dynamics within it are a product of their times, but it was still hard to read when we barely get a single female character that we can get behind (the only one perhaps being Dinah Copeland). It also always seemed that all the women in this novel hate and plot against each other, and usually because of the way they related to men. I've read some of Marsh's other works but I don't recall if this was as prominent in them as it was here.
I love golden era cosy murder mysteries for three of its main characteristics: the interesting-ness of the puzzle/mystery, sorting out the red herrings and the actual clues, and finally finding out the answer in the end with everything wrapped up in a neat little bow. In those aspects, I think this book definitely hit the spot, hence my high rating for it. When it comes to gender relations and stereotypes, honestly very few of the books from the 20's and 30's will hold up to intense scrutiny (some better than others though), so I've learnt to turn a blind eye to that, even if it's not something I would be able to look past for a book written in the past 20 years. So if you can look past that dynamic, the mystery and character work of this book is definitely magnificent and well done.
I really discovered this series on a whim because the first instalment was on sale on Audible one day, but wow has it paid off in spades. I usually don't pay much attention to the marketing blurb but the one for the Heathcliff Lennox mysteries describes it as a mix of Downton Abbey, Agatha Christie with a dash of P. G. Wodehouse, and it is actually remarkably accurate.
While an opera troupe is performing privately for an aristocratic family, a black cat shrieks, startling the two main singers on stage. They later fall through a stage trapdoor which gives way beneath them, leading to the death of one. Major Lennox arrives on the scene with his trusty canine companion, Mr Fogg, to attend the wedding of his childhood friend Lady Caroline Bloxford, daughter of the house in question, and is so caught up in a series of murders along with Inspector Jonathan Swift.
Being a great fan of the 1920s-1940s era of cosy mysteries, I've also tried many contemporarily written cosy mysteries but none of them have really made a huge impression on me - except this series. The humour is on point and not overdone, the writing is engaging and avoids the pitfalls of trying too hard to sound like Christie, the characters are engaging and relatable, and the mysteries are just a whole lot of fun but also complex and intricate at the same time.
I'm bummed that we only have 5 Heathcliff Lennox mysteries to devour, and really hope that I'll be seeing more from Menuhin, seeing as the latest one was only just published in Aug 2020. This series is highly recommended for fans of cosy mysteries, Agatha Christie, and especially so if you enjoy a touch of Wodehouse-esque humour.
This is really quite unlike anything I've read before and gives one an intimate but entertaining insight into the Heian court of Japan, circa 1007 AD. The Heian period, by the way, is a much less talked about historical period of Japan, compared to the Edo period. This was many centuries before the Japanese started wearing kimonos, and was a time when they were still strongly influenced by Chinese culture but were also developing the foundations of what we now would associate with Japanese culture.
Sei Shonagon is one of the Empress's gentlewomen and she ostensibly writes a “Pillow Book”, a sort of private and personal diary/notebook, that not just records down the gossip and scandals happening in court, but also serves almost as a scrapbook for her. There is, however, scholarly evidence to show that Shonagon had, in fact, deliberately put the Pillow Book in circulation amongst the other artistocratic members of the court, despite her protestations to the contrary.
When going into this book, it is strongly recommended to start off reading the Introduction - basically, the beginning parts written by the translator that you probably always skip. McKinney provides some enlightening insights into the world in which Shonagon lived, and these brief explorations into the upper-class Heian world was just as entertaining as the rest of the book was. Furthermore, McKinney's introduction helps one make sense of the world that Shonagon writes about, and which she obviously wouldn't have spent much time dissecting or explaining to the reader - pretty sure she never expected this to be read more than a millenia after she wrote it!
The book has its share of gossip column stories that she writes about various other members at court, but what I really thoroughly enjoyed in this book were the random lists of scenarios and things that she wrote down, which I felt painted such a beautiful but oh so relatable picture of human nature and life, even when we're separated from Shonagon by the span of a millenia.
[25] Infuriating things - A guest who arrives when you have something urgent to do, and stays talking for ages. [...]I also really hate the way some people go about envying others, bemoaning their own lot in life, demanding to be let in on every trivial little thing, being venomous about someone who won't tell them what they want to know, and passing on their own dramatized version of some snippet of rumour they've heard, while making out that they knew it all along. [...]It's also ridiculous the way people will push open a wooden sliding door so roughly. Surely it wouldn't make that clatter if they'd life it a little as they push. [...]People who go about in a carriage with squeaky wheels are very irritating. It makes you wonder irately if they're deaf. And if you find yourself riding in one you've borrowed from someone, you even begin to loathe its owner.Someone who butts in when you're talking and smugly provides the ending herself. Indeed anyone who butts in, be they child or adult, is most infuriating.
[60] I do wish men, when they're taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn't insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety... After all, who would laugh at a man or criticize him if they happened to catch sight of him on his way home from an assignation in fearful disarray, with his cloak or hunting costume all awry? One does want a lovers' dawn departure to be tasteful.
Overall a great read and a great entry into the Cosmere universe, which I am loving with every book. I read this after [b:The Way of Kings 7235533 The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1) Brandon Sanderson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388184640l/7235533.SY75.jpg 8134945] from the Stormlight Archives.Siri is the youngest daughter of the Idrian king and has spent her life believing that she's the runt of the Royal children. Her eldest sister, Vivenna, lives her life in picture-perfect decorum, perpetually in training to eventually be the bride of the God-King of their neighbouring country, and historical enemy, Hallendran. But Vivenna and Siri's places are switched. Siri, who has little to no idea about the politica intrigues behind their two countries, finds herself neck-deep in the sinister watchfulness of the Hallendran court and the husband she had never wanted, while Vivenna struggles to find her place now that everything she had trained herself for has crumbled before her eyes.I love how different the world is but yet there are underlying motifs that isn't explicitly explained or shown to you, but you could just about pick out or sense so that you know instinctively that you are very much in the same universe as the events in Stormlight Archives. That's fantastic overarching world-building in my book.I've been on the lookout for a good colour-based magic system for a while now, since Brent Weeks's [b:The Black Prism 7165300 The Black Prism (Lightbringer, #1) Brent Weeks https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327921884l/7165300.SY75.jpg 7534979] whet my appetite but which I DNFed for other reasons. In a sense, Warbreaker kinda filled that void, but also not really. It's not as intensely colour based as The Black Prism was, where different wavelengths of colour actually had different magical effects). Rather, Warbreaker purported that magical power lay in something called Breath, or BioChroma, which living persons could possess, give away, use to heighten their senses, or imbue them into inanimate objects/dead things to Awaken them.I took an extraordinarily long time (for me) to finish this book primarily because of my own personal life, rather than because of the book itself. However, I did find that the middle 20% to maybe 40-50% or so sagged a little for me. As usual with Sanderson books though, the last bit of the book from 70% onwards is as good as a non-stop read for me, with all the revelations hitting you fast and furious. Some twists you could probably see coming, but some would hit you out of nowhere. For fans of his other works, there are also some easter eggs here that may leave a nagging suspicion at the back of your mind - “Where have I heard this before?” - and then when you double confirm your suspicion in another book, you realise just how many hints Sanderson has planted around the continuity of his universe in all of his books.Character-wise, Sanderson doesn't disappoint. Although she wasn't my favourite character, I personally enjoyed Vivenna's character arc the most. Everything she has known and believed her entire life is tested to its extreme, and her character development was the most stunning. I enjoyed the whole discussion about beliefs, about how every side thinks they're fighting for the right one, and how one person's austerity could look like luxurious extravagance to another. I liked most of the other main characters in the book as well. Lightsong was also another stand-out in the cast - he's irreverant, his humour is on point, and I loved how mercurial and unpredictable he was. (Ending spoilers) Most of all, the scene at the end where he finally realised that he had in fact been Returned for a reason, and gave his life to save the God-King - that was just amazing. I loved that Llarimar was his brother, and that he wasn't just some manipulative fanatical priest trying to stamp Lightsong into the mold of the god he wanted him to be, but that he truly believed in him because he had sacrificed his life to save his daughter. Also, I loved how the God-King did a 180 from his reveal, and that he is not in fact a tyrant but a poor cinnamon roll. He's probably my favourite character after that, but Lightsong is a close second.
This is a rollicking fun and quick read if you suspend some disbelief.
Nicholas Drummond of New Scotland Yard is shocked when his friend, Inspector Elaine York, is murdered in New York while on duty escorting and guarding Britain's Crown Jewels, on loan to the Metropolitan Museum. He flies to America and is soon embroiled in a plot to steal the biggest diamond of them all, the enigmatic and supposedly cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond. Along with Michaela Caine of the FBI, the duo hunt down an evasive art thief without realising how thick the plot really is.
This book is basically like an episode of CSI - it's quick, it's fun, and it invites you to switch off your brain and roll with whatever they throw at you. Plot-wise, I managed to guess some of the big reveals (thanks to years of reading Agatha Christie and being overly suspicious of everything), like when the Koh-i-Noor that Drummond and Caine saw right at the beginning which they thought was a replacement replica was the real one, and that Victoria Browning was sus - I somehow called of that early, and some plot developments didn't make sense or was a little convenient for me, but overall I was still nevertheless engaged to keep on reading. The chapters were sufficiently short and tumbled on to each other so you never could find a good place to stop.
The characters were a little cliched but they weren't annoying or obnoxious. Nicholas being the grandson of a baron or something kinda reminded me of those "Romancing the Rake" romance novels where the male lead always has to be related to the aristocracy in some way, and he was just as physically perfect too, being frequently referred to as “James Bond” by Caine. Michaela, or Mike, was OK as well, but we don't really quite know much about her to be super attached to her.
Ironically, the character I enjoyed the most was Kitsune, the Fox, the jewel thief. We seem to actually spend more time getting to know her and her backstory than we do with our two main leads. I also wish that we had known more about her motivations and why she became a thief in the first place. We only know that she was a bit of a kleptomaniac when she was a kid, but it doesn't quite follow through that she would then choose to spend the rest of her life a professional burglar. Although we get to know her more than the two main leads, I still felt like I wanted her fleshed out even more.
I felt like the story dragged a little bit around the middle sections, when the two main leads are chasing Kitsune around, from the time when she stole the Koh-i-Noor all the way until we found Anatoly dead and when our main leads eventually land up in Geneva, but it wasn't intolerable and still much easier to wade through than a lot of other books. I was particularly disappointed when, in Ch 88, Elaine's video to Nicholas appeared so conveniently out of nowhere, just at the crucial moment. It was very very convenient. And then we find out that Kitsune had done something so completely out of character as to get drunk and tell Elaine about the legend of the 3 stones, which in turn helped Nicholas and Mike to find out about it, which they otherwise could never have guessed. Honestly this pulled the ending down a little for me, I didn't like how convenient it was. The ending was also not very surprising and didn't pull any huge twists that shocked me. I was getting a little worried that the Koh-i-Noor diamond would really turn out to have some magical properties but it turns out that it doesn't? Or does it, since Lanighan's cancer was cured? I don't know... I would be a little miffed if the magic came through in later books. I'm a huge fan of fantasy but I don't like it so randomly shoehorned into what is otherwise a completely non-fantasy story for a little pizzazz.
Tl;dr this was a mindless read that is more enjoyable than many of its kind out there. As long as you don't go in expecting a super-sophisticated or complex mystery, you might get a lot of entertainment out of this.
Honestly, I love Stephen Fry's sense of humour and narrative voice so much that I would enjoy almost anything that he churns out. Mythos is no different.
I first listened to this exclusively on audiobook format almost 2 years ago now, when Greek mythology was an area that I kinda knew the barest superficials about, but didn't really have any in-depth idea. This book blew my mind away. It was like a collection of amazing short stories starring these out-of-these-world characters and it was so, so entertaining. It kickstarted an interest in mythology and after I had listened to it the first time, I did a lot more digging and research.
Two years later, having discussed a lot more on Greek mythology, read up a bit more, and listened to more podcasts about them, I'm now more familiar with the stories. I can see that Stephen Fry's rendition of them are almost like a summarised version of the myths and, arguably, slightly sanitised in a way. They're still very entertaining nevertheless, and with his trademark wit and humour as the proverbial cherry on top.
I've also recently read Gaiman's retelling of Norse mythology and find it interesting to compare the two. Gaiman, I could tell, was more interested in the storytelling. Fry, however, is more interested in how these myths have impacted our everyday lives, specifically how they have strongly influenced English as we use it today. Instead of just fun little stories, it felt like Fry strove to show that these myths have played a much larger role in our pop culture than a lot of us realise. He makes connections between these gods and stories and things that we see everyday and know the meaning of so instinctively that we may not have realised they came from Greek myth - for example, the staff and the serpent symbol synonamous with modern-day medicine being a reference to Asclepius and the serpent he saved which had then whispered the arts of healing into his ear.
Definitely a good read if you're at all interested in Greek myth. If you're a beginner, the engaging way Fry tells these stories will keep you entertaining from start to finish. If you're a veteran at Greek myth, the humourous way he retells and interprets these myths may still put a smile to your face.
Yeah, I never thought I'd cry reading this book but I did. Twice.
The book picked up almost at a bit of weird place, where The Two Towers left off. Pippin has gone ahead with Gandalf to Gondor, Merry is left with Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and the Riders of Rohan, and Frodo is now in the custody of Mordor orcs while Sam ventures to save him. Sauron is already on the alert, mustering up all the armies of Mordor to march upon Minas Tirith in Gondor.
There were parts of this book that I skimmed, particularly the battle scenes which I wasn't a huge fan of. The bits where Tolkien goes on for pages describing the scenery and landscape through which our adventurers are traversing is still happening in this book, but instead of whimsical and beautiful places like the forests of Lothlorien or the Old Forest of Tom Bombadil, we're generally getting the dark, stifling, ugly crags and deserts of Mordor, so those were much harder to read as well.
So yes, while I did skim through some parts of this book, it also had so many beautiful, heart-warming, uplifting, or just hilarious parts.
I loved the Macbeth-ish part when, during the battle at the siege of Gondor, the Nazgul said, "No living man may hinder me!" and Dernhelm is like, "*But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter." And then she just swoops in and smites some Ringwraith ass. I love that we had two characters (Eowyn and Merry) that all the other warriors and men were like, eh stay at home and don't hinder us during the battle, who actually rose to the occasion and slayed them some Nazgul.
More than ever, I love the hobbits. All four of them. I love how, even though they've seen and been through some really horrible shit, Merry and Pippin just stayed down to earth and drew their courage from the way they choose to lead their lives simply. This quote from Merry in particular, after he came out through a very dangerous time:
“But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.” - Book 5, Chapter 8 “The Houses of Healing”
choose
Firstly, when Frodo and Sam (or really mostly Sam) have destroyed the Ring and they wake up in Gondor, and everyone's bowing to them, honouring them and going, "Praise the Ring-bearers! Praise them with great praise!". I love that you have a story with all kinds of awesome, great people that could've been heroes of their own stories any day - valiant warriors, noble kings, powerful wizards, immortal and wise elves, hardy dwarves, etc. but in the end it's up to these humble, almost powerless hobbits to save the day. They have no powers, no strengths except that of will, and even that wavered sometimes, and really nothing special to make them "the Chosen One", they were just simply caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. But they persevered and made it through and saved everyone's asses. And it's not like they had superhuman strength of mind - both Frodo and Sam wavered so hard, whether in terms of how difficult the journey was or how they became tempted by the Ring. They both contemplated just giving up, especially the closer they got to Mordor. But they didn't - and they made it through! And I felt so hard the strength of their achievements, and I love how ordinary Tolkien wrote them.
I don't think it needs to be very much explained why this chapter made me cry. The bit when Frodo made his goodbyes to Sam, and they realised that they must be parted forever. And then when Gandalf said, "Here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil." OH MAN. OHHHH MAN. Just typing it out makes me cry all over. It just felt like I'm on that journey with them and now it's ending and fdslajfdkls;fjkl;asdjfdls;a dissolves in a puddle of feelings
This is probably slightly closer to 3.5 or 3.75* for me, but I'm bumping it up to 4* because I feel like this world and magic system has huge potential.
I was a little confused on how to rate and review this one because it's one of those books that started off strong, became a little repetitive and just okay for the middle, and then ended off with a huge bang. I probably skimmed through from the 40% to 75% mark of the book as there was a ton of setting up and I felt a little lost in the world. Plus, I wasn't always engaged by the writing style. The last 25% of the book was just wow though, and I think the ending of the book may have bumped it up a whole star for me.
The story takes place in a world that's sort of a cluster of primitive civilisations. It's a world that's post-apocalyptic only because they deal with apocalypses on the regular, known as Seasons. That is when the Earth shakes and ashes fill the sky, plants die, animals die, the whole schpiel. They've run through many (advanced) civilisations who couldn't survives these Seasons, so the one the story takes place in is primitive because they spend more time and technology on figuring out how to survive a Season rather than like, making cars or airplanes, for example. Within this world, there are people called orogenes, who have some kind of linked consciousness with the actual planet but to varying degrees. They can literally shake the earth beneath their feet, but in so doing they draw energy and heat from every heat-giving source around them, which could kill everyone in their vicinity or even in the entire town they're in by “icing” them. Everyone else who aren't orogenes, called Stills, are deathly afraid of them yet rely on them to quell the seismic activities that threaten their lives.
In this world, we meet Essun, a middle-aged orogene who comes home one day to find her 3 year old son beaten to death by her husband and his father, Jija. He has disappeared with her 7 year old daughter, Nassun, and Essun makes it her mission to find them both. We also learn about Syenite, a young woman and a budding orogene in the Fulcrum, the organization that trains orogenes to hone and control their powers, who is sent to accompany her mentor, Alabaster, and also to have a child with him as soon as possible in order to replenish more powerful orogenes for the Fulcrum. Lastly, we also have Damaya, a little girl who is just discovering her orogenic powers, who is feared by her family and thus given up to a Guardian from the Fulcrum, who brings her back to the capital city where it is headquartered but also teaches her the extent of the harshness of her training.
The most striking thing about this book when you first start on it is how you experience Essun's story entirely from a second-person perspective. That's right, the narrative runs like: You are she. She is you. You are Essun, remember? (actual quote) It's a little disorienting at first only because we are so little used to reading second-person perspective in fiction, but it's oddly easy to acclimatize. The initial set-up of the story was pretty strong, although the magic system does take a while of getting used to. The world in this one is very very solid, but also rather gritty and brutal. Sometimes it feels like there is not one spark of actual happiness in any corner of the world, which can be rather depressing. Nevertheless, the greater overarching plot of the world, the universe that this story is set in does draw you in. The ending, in particular, caught me off guard.
I would say that the pacing of most of this book is a bit too slow for me, but I also find that the ending set up a lot of details and further plot line which I'd be really excited to see more of, so I would need to read more of this series to find out how they're gonna continue from all these revelations we had at the end.
du Maurier is very quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. Her writing is engaging and reads smoothly, her stories are always gripping and entertaining, and her characters are so enigmatic and almost sinisterly charming.
When Philip Ashley was orphaned as a child, his rich bachelor cousin Ambrose, 18 years older than him, took him under his wing. When Philip turns 21, Ambrose decides he needs a change in weather and goes off on a long continental trip, during which he meets and marries a lady who is distantly related to them - or their cousin Rachel. Slightly more than a year later, Ambrose dies from a brain illness in Florence, Italy, where he had been staying with Rachel. Philip is enraged and resolved to confront Rachel, but is unexpectedly drawn by her kindness and gentility. But is Rachel more complicit in Ambrose's death than she had at first appeared?
Rebecca, which I enjoyed thoroughly (perhaps even slightly more than this one), had a very slow start and it took a while before the reader is plunged into the thick of things. My Cousin Rachel has no such qualms. The action is gripping from the very first page. Rebecca also had a more obviously sinister, creepy vibe to it than this one, whereas the same creepiness in My Cousin Rachel requires some digging and thought, but it's still there.
The beautiful and engaging writing already won me over, but the characterisation of this book is its main attraction. Philip Ashley is quite possibly one of the dumbest main characters I've read in a long time, but yet you can read the childishness, the self-entitlement, and the petulance from Rachel's POV. You can understand why she had no wish to tie herself up to him for life. Rachel, on the other hand, is a beautiful enigma, a play of light and shadows. Is what you're seeing what you're getting? You don't know, and you probably never will know.
Some spoilerish thoughts on Rachel and the ending:
The easy interpretation of this book is to label her a villain, manipulative, cold, and calculating - but I personally think she's so much more than that. I enjoyed how she resisted interpretation and pinning down in all senses of the word. Both Philip and Ambrose were almost driven mad by how they couldn't get her no matter how much they tried. She took their money, it's true, but I don't think either of them would've minded if that had allowed them to pin her down at last. But she refuses to be so. She refuses to even be pinned down by us readers, in that we, like Philip and Ambrose, can never fully understand her intentions or her mind. I feel like that's why the ending of the book is so vague and confusing on first read, especially if, like me, you read it as a mystery novel (and even a bit like Rebecca) where we'll be presented with a nice denouement and all the answers we need with a neat little bow by the end. This isn't the case, and it's deliberately discomfiting. Rachel would sooner die before she is forced to be captured, to be pinned down and account for her actions.
Yeah, I got about 15 pages in before I was like, “Wait, what's happening?”
In that short span of time, we see Anna of Kleves having sex with her cousin, a teenage boy that she had literally only just met about an hour ago. Already, he starts professing his love for her before they barely had half a day's worth of conversation. When he starts to kiss her, she says no, but he insists and she lets herself enjoy it. I'm just SO confused!! I later read other reviews that said that she gives birth to an illegitimate child by her cousin and has a secret family on the sidelines when she's going through the whole Henry VIII debacle and honestly, I'm not really here for it. I am increasingly fascinated by Anna of Kleves because I like that she made the best of a shitty situation, swallowed her pride and managed to keep her head down long enough to not just avoid a beheading by Henry VIII, but even to become a pretty well-respected lady of the court. I liked the fact that she remained single throughout her life but in so doing survived almost all the wives of Henry VIII, and even some of his children. I get that there is probably very little material on Anna of Kleves to work with, so I was already expecting some creative storytelling to fill in the gaps but having sex at 12 years old and then having a secret family on the sidelines is just too much for me to handle. That Anna would go against her entire worldview that's been drilled into her since she was born just for a teenage boy she's barely met for more than a few hours and had little conversation with, and her uncle's bastard son too - I just cannot. Even if we allow for her being only 12 years old, it's still so so hard to stomach.
Hovering between 3 and 3.5. This was a solid world with an intriguing, if sometimes confusing, magic system, although it felt really rushed during some major scenes and I wound up not feeling attached to most of the main characters.
Every two decades or so, there is a Turning: a magical tournament in which the various magical Houses participate in for a chance to win and become the leading House of the Unseen World. This time though, the Turning happens in 13 years instead of 20, and a mysterious champion turns everything upside down when she emerges from the Shadows to represent an unknown, new candidate.
I usually don't like urban fantasy but I'll give this book props for writing urban fantasy in a way that still somehow managed to engage me a lot. I also really appreciate that the book casually weaves in modern technology into the magical world. The magicians live in a world pretty much like our own, just that they take care to hide themselves from us “mundanes”, something pretty akin to the world of Harry Potter. But they don't shy away from technology. In fact, they've found a way to wrap up some magic with technology itself, so emails can be sent with wards and spells, or similarly some wards over information can make a person unable to type anything but nonsense if they attempted to convey that information electronically.
The characters were OK, but honestly I didn't find most of them super interesting. Our protagonist, Sydney, is probably the most fleshed out person in this book, but for some reason she fell a little flat for me. She was okay. I didn't hate her, I didn't love her, and because she has a pretty traumatic past, she wasn't much given to expressing affection or humour. The only way she knew how to express herself was in asserting her magical powers, which was pretty badass but I felt like we barely scratched the surface of what she could do.
She has a bit of a romance with another character in the book, but the beginning of it felt a little abrupt. I get that it was a one-night stand, but then they just randomly ditched a Challenge that Sydney had just finished and hopped off within 5 sentences of meeting each other? I didn't really buy it. I didn't mind the romance. I didn't really buy into it, but it wasn't obnoxiously annoying and was really kinda barely-there for me to really have much thoughts about it either way.
The antagonists in this book all kinda felt a little too much like cartoon villains, and not even particularly powerful ones at that. The only one I was remotely interested in was Shara, and I felt like it'd have been nice to see more from her perspective, what her motivations were, what she may possibly have suffered before, what had caused her to be trapped to the House of Shadows etc. but then she died but none of these were answered, at least not in this instalment. I was also a little miffed that the major confrontations in this with the villains near the end was so short and abrupt. Both of them, even the big fight scene at the end, lasted a grand total of TWO pages each. That's really hardly enough and barely gives us a taste of what badassery magic is capable of. So the climax of the book was really anticlimactic - over before it even really began - and the bad people were just casually eliminated or chased away before we really felt like anyone was in danger. Heck, even Sydney's destruction of the House of Shadows took me by surprise at how short and abrupt it was. I even had to read back and check whether it wasn't just a dream sequence because it felt like it. So she waited all this time and suffered at the hands of Shara, when she could've just gone in and burnt everything down as soon as she acquired the magic from the Four Seasons duel? Why did she even wait? I don't think her magic even increased much between the Four Seasons duel and when she finally decided to tear the House down.
There generally seemed to be a lack of stakes in this book too. Although the tournament was all about killing people, and there were a few slightly gruesome deaths that happened, we barely see any of the major characters being killed off. I had expected Miranda to die during the duel between Sydney and Ian, but nope, she just got her magic somehow sheered off for some inexplicable reason. Between Sydney's little support group of Laurent, Harper, and Madison, I really expected one of them to die - but nope, none of them did, even though Madison came close. Sydney was never even close to dying so by the end I wasn't even sorry that she lost her magic because I felt like she had been in god mode for the entire story and we were finally seeing some sacrifices on her part.
Just want to give a shoutout to the only character that I actually got attached to: the actual House Prospero, who is a cinnamon roll.
A solid 3.75* read. This book has a number of flaws which I could probably chalk up to it being a debut work, but ultimately, the magic system and the politics of the world is compelling and engaging enough for me to consider continuing with the series.
Miles Singer is a doctor in Aeland, a country like an alternative Edwardian England, who finds himself suddenly administering emergency help to a dying man, Nick Elliot, brought in by a passerby, Tristan Hunter. Before Nick passes, he reveals that he knows exactly who Miles Singer is - both a mage and the son of a powerful Royal Knight. Miles isn't even his real name. Miles dedicates himself to find Nick's murder, at the same time finding himself tumbling back into the family circles that he has sought to escape for so long, and into the irresistible charm of Tristan, himself not just any ordinary human either.
Witchmark has a pretty rough beginning. You are quite literally thrown in to the world and so many foreign terms are bandied about without any proper explanation. It was disorienting to read, and didn't do much to feel engaging. I actually had to start writing down notes to remind me of things. The dialogue, especially at the beginning, felt a bit stilted and overly dramatic, such as when Grace, Mile's sister, swears by her own blood not to Bind him at their first meeting after he ran away from home.
The set-up of the story, the characters, and the central romance felt a little abrupt somehow, and some bits were just downright contradictory. Miles ran away from home precisely because he didn't want to be controlled by his family due to the class of mage that he was born to be. He spends a good deal of time in the first few chapters of the book running away from and rejecting his sister precisely because he refuses to be subservient to anyone. But yet, the moment he finds out Tristan's true identity (which in itself felt like a rather abrupt and hasty scene), it felt like he immediately and very naturally fell into a subservient attitude, refusing to call him by his first name despite Tristan's multiple entreaties and instead going with “Sir” or “Mr. Hunter” for a good while.
After the world is somewhat set up though, the appeal of the book comes in - this is probably after a good 25% into the book though. I enjoyed the magic system and the politics that's set up here. Grace, Miles's sister, is a Storm-Singer, something like a more powerful form of mage that's in control and who are typically bound with a member of a slightly lower order of mages called Secondaries, who mainly exist to provide their Storm-Singers with energy and power to do their jobs. Miles, himself a Secondary, is rebelling against this system, in proving that the Secondaries' “tricks”, their main magical power, shouldn't be seen as a lower order of magic and not as important, and that some Storm-Singers themselves also have the same “tricks” that only Secondaries do. The politics around this entire system is pretty tight, concise, and compelling, which I appreciated.
I particularly liked Grace Hensley as well. She is fiercely loyal to her family and genuinely cares for her brother, but at the same time she has a dogged persistence in doing what she thinks is right, even if that includes sacrificing her brother's happiness, freedom, or even at risk of her own life. I never really knew whether to like her or to be annoyed by her, which is a sweet middle spot that I really enjoy with characters. Miles and Tristan were fine, I didn't feel strongly either way with them. Their chemistry seemed a little too abrupt and quick, and interestingly enough, their romance wasn't the main attraction for me in this novel (normally it would be).
Overall, a very promising debut novel which, while suffering from its flaws, has huge, huge potential for becoming a compelling world. I'll be keeping tabs on this author!
Phew. This is my second Virginia Woolf novel. Although it makes more sense to me than the first (Between The Acts), I still constantly find myself bewildered at what's happening in the narrative. There's so much dialogue, and a lot of that dialogue is typically very irrelevant and flits from topic to topic. I believe that's Woolf trying to make a point, because she does insert a lot of pretty scathing social commentary especially from the viewpoint of Helen Ambrose, who feels somewhat like an author's mouthpiece. But wow, sometimes it's really hard to follow.
The novel first introduces Helen Ambrose, a middle-aged woman leaving her children behind in England while her husband, Ridley Ambrode, and her sail to South America. She is joined by her niece Rachel Vinrace, the true protagonist of the story, and her father Willoughby Vinrace who is Helen's brother-in-law. Rachel had planned to join her father to sail on to the Congo for an expedition, but Helen convinces Willoughby to leave Rachel in her care in the South American resort that she would be stopping at, to which Willoughby agrees. Later, they meet Mr Hirst and Mr Hewet at the resort, who become interested in getting to know Helen and Rachel better.
Look, I can get that Woolf inserts a lot of pretty damn scathing social commentary, particularly on the state and rights of women, in this book. I can get behind that and see it. I just have an issue with how long her dialogue is. However, as with Between The Acts, I feel like that problem's more on me than on her. I can definitely see why others enjoyed this a lot, because when I did slow down to read some sentences closely, it was pretty striking and interesting. But it was also so dense and didn't capture my attention very well. I don't really know why, seeing that I'm usually a fan of well-written prose. Maybe I'm just not in a mood for early-20th C writing now.
Hovering between 3.5 and 4.
Patroclus is born a prince, the unloved and neglected son of King Menoetius. He eventually becomes fostered by King Peleus, and becomes good friends and eventually lovers with Peleus's son, Achilles, prince of Phthia. But Achilles has a fatal prophecy hanging over his head, and war between the Greeks and the Trojans is looming over the horizon.
I've recently read Circe also by Madeline Miller, and the tone of the storytelling in this one is very similar. It's got the same simple folklore storytelling vibe. This is especially evident in the first few chapters when we witness Patroclus's childhood and his insignificance to his parents, which strongly resembles the first few chapters of Circe and her childhood as the daughter of a Titan.
The advantage of such a writing style, however, is that it's very, very easy to read and very accessible. It definitely contributed to how quickly I finished this book - the narration went on smooth like butter. The disadvantage, I would argue, is that it dampens the vividness of the main character from whose POV we are witnessing the story. While you may know Patroclus pretty well by the end of the book, you don't feel very attached to him.
I also thought that I knew Achilles's mythology but it seems like I may either have been wrong or Miller had respun the famous narrative. I definitely don't recall anything about Patroclus dying before Achilles, and that Achilles had been struck by an arrow through the chest rather than at the heels as I would've thought at first. I like, however, that Miller never makes it a secret that Achilles was going to die, which is a turn of events that most people going into this would probably already know. Because most people already know this, you don't actually spend the entire book feeling like you already know what's going to happen at the end. Instead, by acknowledging it, Miller makes readers guess how it's going to happen, and whether it will happen as per their expectations.
There were some points in the book that legit got me on the edge of my seat. A good half of this book takes place in the Greek war camps while they are actively at war, and Miller doesn't shy away from the ferocity and gruesomeness of death. Whether in terms of human sacrifices for the gods, or how captured women are treated as slaves, the violence that it shows and implies can be pretty discomfiting. The bit that got me most on edge was when Briseis was essentially taken hostage by Agamemnon in an effort to make Achilles bow down to him, and the thought of her getting raped and worse was just so, so horrifying, especially since we have had time to get attached to her from Patroclus's POV.
Though the book could get a bit uncomfortable to read at some parts, I really enjoyed the chemistry that we see building up between Achilles and Patroclus. It never felt so much like insta-love. I enjoyed seeing both the build-up and the downward spiral it had momentarily when Achilles became too arrogant and hot-headed for his own good. I was definitely on Patroclus's side when Achilles was willing to let Briseis be taken by Agamemnon and raped just so that he could have an excuse to move against the king. I loved seeing how Achilles's character arc in that sense, how he went from being a regular, happy boy to being put on a pedestal and gaining hubris because of that, becoming ruthless over the sake of his honour like the men he used to despise.
I'm just... speechless. Stephen King wasn't kidding when he talked about how he felt like this was his scariest book. Not in the usual, jump-scarey, gory sense, but in the subject matters and topics that it deals with with raw, brutal clarity. This book had me on the verge of tears at some parts, or froze a permanent grimace on my face at others, but it was all engaging and I got sucked in so hard that I was late to feed my cats (hah!) dinner because I just had to get to the end.
Dr Louis Creed decides to make the move to Ludlow, Maine, with his wife Rachel, two young children, Ellie and Gage, and their cat Winston Churchill to start a new career as a doctor in the local university's infirmary. It's not a glamourous job, but it's a relatively pleasant and stable one. The Creeds make friends with their elderly neighbours, Jud and Norma Crandall. Jud shows the family around, and takes them hiking along the nature path behind the Creeds' new house, which leads to a communal pet burial grounds called the Pet Sematary.
What follows after is a master class in how to write a seemingly normal narrative with a sickening sense of something's not quite right and eerie foreboding. But what this book delivers isn't just horror in the supernatural sense, but also horror in a very, very human sense. This book is all about death: how children begin to parse it, how adults confront it, and how old people look at it straight in the eye. It's about grief, trauma, and how the road to Hell is always paved with good intentions.
This is my first ever Stephen King book so I don't really have much to compare it to, but I am absolutely bowled over by his writing. I've said before in other reviews that I'm an impatient reader, I like to skim passages because I want to get to the end quicker, but Stephen King had me clinging on to every word, even when it was seemingly unimportant. There's no high-flown vocabulary or weird gimmicks here, it's just the sheer magnetism of his writing style.
Horror is a genre that is almost entirely new to me. I have steered clear of it because I'm not very good with jump scares and things that go bump in the dark. I don't know what freak mood I'm in to make me want to dip my toes in this genre now but I'm very much enjoying the ride. What I like most about it is that so many horror novels, especially King's, is only superficially concerned with the scary unreal things - the real crux of it is examining the horrors of being human, the things that scare us in everyday life. Often times, the human protagonists almost always end up just as scary as the supernatural antagonists, and I love it.
This book is deeply unsettling to read. It's brutal and it's uncomfortable af. But it's also insightful and reflective on so many things. I have so many quotes saved from this because King goes off on short tangents sometimes to reflect on some irrelevant topics, like the realities of marriage and parenthood. In Pet Sematary, of course, the most uncomfortable bit to read was when Gage died from the accident, especially during the fight between Louis and his father in law over the coffin, knocking it over and causing the latch to open just a bit, just enough for Louis to have seen Gage's hand. That was the part where I had to close the book and set it aside for a few minutes before continuing. I've never done this with a book before, but I guess there's a first time for everything. A lot of the things in the plot makes you uncomfortable, but it also never feels meaningless or cheap, like it's just there for no reason. These aren't jack-in-boxes in haunted houses, but real solid traumatic events that's handled with brutal honesty and insight.
I never thought I'd say this, I thought I was past this, but this book gave me nightmares on the first night I read it, after the scene where Victor Pascow comes back in Louis's waking dream. There was just something so visceral about the way events played out during that part, and I also made the poor decision of reading that at about 2-3am in the morning before turning in. I woke up in the middle of the night because of that.
In short, I will need some time to digest and recover from this book, but I will definitely be reading more Stephen King again.
Do I really need to introduce Jeeves? If you haven't read it, read it. If you've read it, you already know why this has such mass appeal, even 90 years after it was first publshed.
Most of the Jeeves short stories (and arguably most of Wodehouse's humourous works) follow a certain formulae: our narrator, Bertie Wooster, gets into some entanglement or mess because he's bungling and silly. His valet, Jeeves, swoops in to save the day through some roundabout method that has everything put back into its place with oddly satisfying precision, and along the way he always manages to fulfill his own agenda without Bertie even realising it, like finding a way to get rid of a particular clothing item that Jeeves disapproves of, or to resume a trip that Bertie had earlier cancelled and which Jeeves had been keen on going.
Wodehouse's humour is legendary. It's honestly a pretty scathing reflection on the careless superficiality of the British upper class of the 1930's, but it's still hilarious to read today. With such names as “Cyril Bassington-Bassington”, you just can't take a lot of things seriously with Wodehouse, nor should you be. Bertie is your regular air-headed childish foppish gentleman who relies entirely on Jeeves, who is in a conventionally lower middle-class position as valet, to run his life and solve his problems because he simply doesn't have the mental capacity to do so. As the reader, you are on the outside seeing Jeeves literally twisting Bertie around his little finger, and Bertie is happy to let him. Not only Bertie, but even his upper class foppish friends or his dragon-like aunts have come to rely entirely on the indubitable competence of Jeeves.
Slightly unrelated to the book, but it is testament to the perfection of the casting choices of Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves that I read the entire book with both their voices in my head. I intend to go catch up on some of their Jeeves episodes, which are no less iconic than the stories themselves.
This was a good solid 4-star read. I found that it dragged a little in the middle, but I was pleased enough by the ending to come away with a good impression of it.
Miryem is a moneylender's daughter who can turn silver into gold. Well, at least, she knows how to barter her silver well enough to get a gold coin back for each one. Unfortunately, her father the moneylender is too gentle and kind to collect his debts, so to prevent her family from going cold and hungry, she has to harden her heart and go out to run his business for him. Because of an ill-timed boast to herself about it in the forest, Miryem attracts the attention of the king of the Staryeks, a race of winter fae people who have been casually terrorising mortals for generations. Together with Wanda, the daughter of one of Miryem's debtors, and Irina, the daughter of a duke, Miryem has to find a way out of a supernatural conflict that threatens the lives of their people.
The characters of this book, love them or hate them, are really quite spectacular to behold (and not always pleasantly so). The female characters are generally strong, but I found them a little muted compared to the male ones, probably because they're more stable. Miryem is kind and can be generous, but generally she's calculative with her money. Wanda is unfortunately lacking in education, but she's physically strong and does what needs to be done to protect her brothers. Irina is... whew. Despite being a duke's daughter, she's downtrodden but grows increasingly... almost ruthless and manipulative as the book goes by. After all, she is the only one who can actually outmaneuver both Mirnatius and Chernobog. Honestly, at the end of the book when Irina was making these decisions to let Chernobog into the Staryek kingdom just to save her people, I was the most afraid of her than I was of the actual flame demon from Hell.
The male characters here are out of control! Wanda's father, usually known as “Da” when we see the story from her perspective, is a pathetic bullshit excuse of a human being that you would find yourself thinking violent thoughts about (and honestly, I found myself wishing his death had been even more violent than it was). But the two biggest characters here are Tsar Mirnatius and the nameless Staryek king. I spent the first half of this book thinking that these are some crazy toxic male characters, and indeed there's no denying that they are toxic. But by the end of the book, after learning more about them, you may find yourself re-assessing that. In any case, I like that they both had to be saved, quite physically, by Irina and Miryem respectively. I feel like the happy ending may not be to everyone's tastes, but I think the part of me that likes fairytales and happy endings very much enjoyed the way it played out, which is why I liked the book so much.
The narrative structure was OK, but may not be to everyone's fancy. It's told from a first person POV, but it switches fairly frequently between characters. We get at least 2 characters' POVs every chapter. There also isn't a clear indication of whose perspective we're reading from, which is probably a deliberate decision, but that also means you need to pay more attention to the context of what you're reading to figure out whose voice you're reading now. I thought that the POVs would be fixed between the 3 main female characters, but I was surprised later on with the POVs of some other side characters (namely Stepon, Mirnatius, Magreta - especially Mirnatius. I wouldn't have expected to see the POV from one of the "villains" of this book).
If you live in a country that experiences winter, this is a great book to whip out and read during that season. It's a book that takes place in and almost celebrates winter to some extent, with a dark fairytale vibe and a fairytale ending.
Hovering between 4 and 4.5.
If you ever find yourself getting a little jaded at the news cycles and wishing you could just lose yourself for a little while in an AU version of the real world where things are happier, simpler, and not as complicated as they are in real life, this is the book you need to read.
Alex Claremont-Diaz is the First Son of the United States (FSOTUS) and, being in the same age bracket, bears a grudge against Prince Henry, the younger Prince of England, for stealing the media limelight. That is, of course, until accident demands that they act as best friends temporarily to avoid a press disaster for both their countries.
What a delightful trip this was. I rarely get into contemporary romances, but this was certainly one I could get behind. Sure, you probably need to suspend disbelief for some aspects of it, as you probably need to for most romance novels, but at the core of it you're getting the story of two young men exploring the odds of not just being gay but also being gay with each other in the complicated arena of international relations.
The characterisation of Henry and Alex, as well as their relationship, was excellent. We do see layer after layer being peeled away and seeing how they grow from the person they had always thought they were at the beginning to the person they always wanted to be by the end. I'd argue that Henry's growth arc was more obvious in the book though, since we largely get Alex's POV in the narrative.
The side characters were a treat to read as well. They all had distinct personalities and many of them leap off the page at you. It's impossible to imagine this book without the host of side characters making it possible. I think I started shipping Zahra/Shaan as much as, maybe even more than, Henry/Alex from the small glimpses we had of them. Nora/June is a popular ship that I could get behind too.
The plot was okay. Honestly I called most of the plot twists before it happened so I wasn't super blown away by it, but it was still a much more solid plot that did a relatively decent job at working through the fallout and improbability of a publicly homosexual relationship between such public figures as a Prince of England and the First Son of the United States. I wouldn't say it's realistic; I'd say it's optimistic, but that's honestly also nice to read sometimes.
I liked that we kinda saw how the relationship between our main leads grew and developed. Maybe the starting of it was a little sudden, but McQuiston really took her time growing Henry and Alex's feelings for each other and it shows in all the right places. My heart felt squeezed a couple of times while reading this book.
This book focused a lot more on American politics than the inner workings of the British royal family, but it felt very timely and almost prescient with the emphasis on a 2020 Presidential elections. It felt like I couldn't have picked a better time to read this book, tbh.
This is a romance novel that works far, far better than most of the cliched entries of its genre. Fantastic book that reads like a fanfiction of real life, almost, and is such a cute and happy read to lift the spirits.
OK, this probably won't be much of a review because I pretty much just skimmed through 500 pages of this book.
I started skimming through because by about page 200, or around Chapter 20 or so, I was getting really bored. I'm usually extremely spoiler-sensitive, but this time I felt like I needed to know something to spur me on. So I just kinda skipped through huge chunks of the book to intentionally spoil myself about something to motivate myself to continue.
But nope, basically nothing new happened. So I just skimmed all the way to the end, and precious little has changed from the beginning.
I did, however, appreciate the characterisation of Vin. I don't think she had a ton of character growth in this instalment, but I like that she's both strong and vulnerable at the same time. I liked Sazed and his plotline. I was deliciously creeped out and on edge with Marsh and really wanted to know where his allegiances are going to lie.
But I think the problem with this book is that we get hooked by a lot of questions posed in the beginning, but nothing happens to resolve almost any of those big questions by the end. Such as who was the apparent spy or kandra amongst Vin's friends? Because I skimmed, I have no idea whether this was resolved or not but it seems that all the old hands are still well and alive and apparently not a spy - Ham, Dockson, Breeze, Clubs, Spook. So I can only assume that it was either not answered explicitly, or that it was resolved without taking any casualties from the band. What happened to Marsh? We don't know. He tried to kill Sazed but then got hammered (but non-fatally) over the head by Ham, and basically nothing happens. It seems like we're asked these big questions, we just uncover like 30% of the answer and the book ends that way.
Thankfully, I'm also reading Way of Kings at the same time by Sanderson. Although it's a 1000-page instalment of another series, there's something happening in every chapter. Not so much this one. I'm starting to think I just maybe gravitate towards Stormlight more than Mistborn.