Lia

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me was a fun story slowed down a bit by exposition dumps and the heroine’s hyper-competence. It picked up about halfway through.

In this story, a protagonist from our world finds herself dumped into the setting of a fantasy book series she loves. In the first half of the story, we meet characters and events from the secondary world and the protagonist starts finding her way around. This is where, as a reader, I struggled with exposition-heavy explanations.

My ability to maintain suspension of disbelief as the story unfolded was uneven. The setup required jarring transitions between Maggie’s remembered relationship with a beloved story and real danger. We learn that our heroine conveniently resurrects every time she’s killed (we don’t know why). Also conveniently, her memories of beloved books somehow translate easily into a form of street smarts. Her skills and achievements felt unearned.

However, if you have the same problem, I recommend pushing through.

I wound up loving the latter half of the book. Events started unfolding more organically and I enjoying the characters more. I wanted to know what would happen next. Maggie starts developing relationships that feel real. The book found its footing and started building out its characters and themes.

In the end the phrase “This kingdom will not kill me” had thematic depth, and I was completely invested in Maggie’s story. Very glad I stuck with it until the end.

This story is sweet, and also surprisingly dark. I loved the juxtaposition. It’s fundamentally about how true love can weaken us, and why we might choose to continue loving anyway once our resulting weakness is revealed to the world.

The Half-Hearted Queen opens with our heroine, Nym, under duress, captured by King Nicosia, and weakened by literally having given away half her heart. The metaphor lasted with me throughout the book as Nym struggled to decide whether to protect or risk even more of herself.

I absolutely loved the first act of this book. In some ways I feel like it should have been the entire story. The stakes were high, and Nym’s resilience on full display.

I didn’t love the latter half of the story as much. I sat with it for a few days before writing this review in order to let the feeling crystallize into words: Prince Renn felt like a different person than he was in the first book, removed from nearly all of his physical and emotional context.

I enjoyed the grounded feeling of the first book, as Nym settled into the palace and slowly learned the people who lived there. The second book felt less grounded, and some of the characters’ motivations revealed themselves as if from nowhere, suddenly enough that they felt unearned. There was a prophecy involved that still confuses me.

However, I think this is a duology that will benefit from being read together, in quick succession and as one story rather as two separate volumes. I think if the first book had been fresher for me, the second’s reliance on the remembered emotional scene-setting in book 1 would be less of a hurdle for the reader to overcome.

I love this series, which creates its own religious landscape (the World of the Five Gods) in order to address concepts that can be difficult to speak about outside of church or temple. Here the topic at hand is death, the stories we leave behind after we go, and the need to make amends as we face it.

This installment is a short one-off story set in between several of the series' earlier entries, when Penric and Desdemona (his demon) are serving as court sorcerer to the Princess-Archdivine of Martensbridge. They must accompany her to diplomatic talks determining the future of a temple complex. There, they find a murder.

In this case an acolyte is murdered (by snake bite!) in the process of attempting to contact the princess-archdivine. Penric must track down the truth she was trying to reveal and help lift up those he encounters along the way, including a recalcitrant orphan. Meanwhile, Desdemona speaks with a former friend and lover of her previous host, Ruschia.

The novella is short and contemplative. I did not find it more compelling than some of the other Penric and Desdemona entries (my favorites come a bit later in the timeline). The entire series is wonderful, though, and this was a welcome return: 4.5 stars.

A Deadly Education is volume 1 of the Scholomance, a surprisingly mature entry into the magic school subgenre.

The somewhat unreliable narrator is El, aka Galadriel, an independent teenager studying at the Scholomance, a magic school in a pocket dimension. The sentient -- and ornery -- Scholomance is chock full of dangerous monsters and life-threatening assignments for its high-school-age inhabitants. El and her classmates much reach past extreme cases of trauma-induced teenage self-centeredness to make "allies" if they want to graduate alive.

As the book begins, El finds herself rescued against her will by Orion Lake, the school hero. As news spreads that the two are 'dating', El struggles to maintain her isolation. She begins to make friends and frenemies, all while facing down mean girls and monsters.

A Deadly Education is a fun and ultimately meaningful take on the power of friendship. It's a school-age flight of fancy grounded by the idea that we must all remember to question the stories we tell about ourselves.

Highly recommended, especially for teens.