"Ships, Secrets, and Survivors" by Sarah Rodecker and Helena George

This book is like if you took one of those teenagers-having-a-big-and-slightly-deadly-competition books and abruptly turned it into a seafaring pirate adventure book partway through. And also the teenagers are all actually adults; the protagonist is like 20. And all the ships can talk.

The main character, Ravin, is a sort of ex-assassin. "Sort of" because I'm not sure if, when you've trained to be an assassin but then failed the assassin entrance exam, you count as an ex-assassin or just a never-was-an-assassin-to-begin-with.

But there's also a character, named Shade, who's constantly suspicious of him. And we know Ravin is trustworthy because he's the protagonist, but in a world where assassins are an established system of untrustworthy ne'er-do-wells, it does make quite a bit of sense to not trust the one that suddenly appeared in your midst. On a related note, Shade's change of heart and cessation of suspicion does not seem to me to make sense with how his character is up to that point.

I think this could have used maybe one more proofreading pass. There are a couple places where I think I can see what they're going for, but there are a couple of words left out.

The ending wraps everything up a tad neatly for my taste. It's just oddly convenient how everything works out.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for sexual references. Honestly I think the movie ratings do a better job with this sort of thing, because they say "parental guidance until the age of [age]", meaning that parents can decide whether or not they want younger children to read it (or, in the case of movies, watch it). But I wouldn't hand this to a 13-year-old without a few reservations (or at least without talking to their parents), so there you are.

4 stars.

(Endnote: In case you were wondering, which you almost certainly weren't, the titular "ships" are not the romance kind of ships. Except for two side characters who are married, there's no romance in this book.)

"Dragon Thief" by Blake & Raven Penn

To be clear, the titular Dragon Thief is a thief who steals dragons, not a thief who is also a dragon.

This may be the only book in which I've ever seen someone use the "reckless and flirtatious protagonist" trope and actually pull it off. I think it helps that Asher (the dragon thief in question) is funny, and he does have some character depth to work with. His various crushes do get a bit annoying at times, but it's not constantly, and he's not an annoying person overall. Plus he does prove himself able to crush on only one person at a time.

It also helps that Asher never does anything outright stupid. And whenever he does things that would seem to be outright stupid, he usually can almost make them work through sheer Asherness.

Oh, and Asher isn't an orphan! One (1) of his parents is still alive! It's his dad. And his dad isn't even the annoying kind of parent who doesn't want the kid/teen protagonist to do the plot. He's just as invested in the plot as Asher is, albeit also a bit more cautious.

Dragon Thief's setting is basically a fantasy world trying to be a Western. Sort of. It uses a lot of the Wild West tropes; no trains :<, but there's random tumbleweeds and things, and there's one character (Boone) who would absolutely be a cowboy except he's in a fantasy world.

But the setting is also full of dragons, to the point that most of the animals are replaced with dragon versions of those animals. So jackalopes exist but they're drakalopes instead, their buffalo are replaced by dragon buffalo, raccoons are replaced by draccoons, et cetera. Also people ride kirin instead of horses. And there are, y'know, actual dragons.

The magic system in this is very well thought out. And you don't need to flip back to the setting guide every time they mention something (coughHandofSteelcough), which means they did the worldbuilding naturally. And there isn't a single "as you know, Bob" to be seen!

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Ha!" The newer Mage Hunter pointed at me. "Caught you. Who ever said the Keeper's treasure was dragon eggs?"

    There was a moment of silence as I blinked back at him.

    "Um... you did," I said.

    "That's true, you did," Dad added.

    "Did I?" the Mage Hunter looked at his older companion.

    "Yes, you did. Come on Lothar," she grumbled.

    Page 77. Lothar is Dragon Thief's resident Comic Relief Villain.

(Endnote: There's a character in this whose name is Solrac. "Solrac" is "Carlos" spelled backwards. I have no idea whether or not this is intentional, but it's funny either way.)

"Hand of Steel" by Jessi L. Roberts

Hey look, more Christian science fiction! Not particularly good Christian science fiction, but it's there nonetheless!

I would like to note that Hand of Steel's protagonist is like Spensa from Skyward if you took out all the parts that made her likeable. She's another perpetually angry teenage girl, and both she and Spensa live in sci-fi space universes, but Spensa is somehow much more fun to read about.

(Actually, if I had a nickel for every time this summer I read a book whose protagonist was a perpetually angry teenage girl, I'd have three nickels: one from Apprentice, one from Skyward, and one from this. That isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened thrice.)

This book seems to assume that you already have the entire setting in your head before you read it. Or something. It'll just tell you "oh, this guy's an elba," without ever bothering to first introduce you to the concept of elbas or what the heck they look like. It does have a brief setting guide in the back, but having to constantly refer to that in order to be like "wait, which of the six alien races was that again?" is really immersion-breaking and doesn't actually help me envision anything.

You can't see it from the cover image, but this book is not very thick. I suppose that goes some way toward explaining why it feels the need to just explain everything in the setting guide, but... surely there could have been space for some grand sweeping descriptions of planets and aliens so readers (like me) don't have such a hard time envisioning everything.

Also, this author has some of the shortest paragraphs I've ever seen.

It's like one sentence to a paragraph. Maybe two if we're lucky.

And this is the entire book.

And while I fully know and understand that giving a sentence its own paragraph can be a way to give that sentence force, it manifestly doesn't work if you do it approximately twelve times a page. All that does is make your prose really choppy. 

Plus, thanks to a combination of this and the author's lack of concrete descriptions, half the fight scenes read more like outlines than actual scenes.

I suppose I might have liked this book a bit more if Skyward and Starsight weren't fresh in my mind to compare it to. The trouble is, those books are really good, and this has enough similarities that I can't help comparing them.

And now to compare it to something else! Specifically The Beast Player. Like that book's author, this one seems to like putting her protagonist through moral dilemmas. But unlike in The Beast Player, it's glaringly obvious to an outside observer (i.e. the reader) what the right thing to do in most of Hand of Steel's dilemmas are. So really they're just the protagonist getting confronted with the fact that she's wrong and not believing it.

Most of those revolve around the Ultimate Ruling Space Corporation Government's habit of using enslavement as a punishment for crimes, coupled with its rather loose definition of what a "crime" actually is. This makes it glaringly obvious to an outside observer (reading this book) that Your Leaders Are Totally Evil. Which, one, the evil government is not my favorite trope, and two, it gets a tad annoying when the protagonist repeatedly fails to realize something that's glaringly obvious to readers.

As I mentioned above, this is Christian science fiction. Sort of. The Christianity feels like it gets lost in the rest of the book, which is not really what one tends to want in Christian fiction. That said, it is still a plot point when it does manage to surface, so that's better than just being set dressing.

In conclusion, I think that Carthage must be destroyed this book needed a better editor.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence and a lot of slavery. Those, together, only really merit an E10+, except that there is also {T exactly one mention of slaves being sold to a brothel, which feels like it was just thrown in there to be edgy}. And that pushed the rating up.

2 stars.

(Endnote: Did I mention it takes like three chapters for the protagonist to actually get her cybernetic hand? That doesn't seem like a lot, but the book only has fourteen.)

"Starsight" by Brandon Sanderson

Y'know what, I think I like this better than the alternative. "This" being: |not all of the aliens are evil! Unfortunately, some of the aliens are evil, and they're taking over the alien government.|

We get a lot of tasty lore in this book. In particular, we learn why |the humans are stuck on this one planet|, and also more about how |the protagonist Spensa's (non-unique) ability to teleport and do pseudo-psionics| works. There are also |the delvers|.

Speaking of which. |Delvers| are |giant extradimensional beings| that |live in hyperspace [not called hyperspace but it's basically hyperspace]| and |don't like realspace people. And especially don't like it when realspace people mess around with hyperspace|. Apparently |it's painful and annoying to them, or something. So if you do too much hyperspace, they might decide to go into realspace for a bit and delete your planet|. But it's |revealed at the end of the book| that |they also don't realize the people whose planets they're deleting are sentient, and when one does realize that (via Spensa doing telepathy stuff at it during the climax), it immediately nopes back into hyperspace|.

Also, there's a plot twist in here that genuinely shocked me. That doesn't happen often.

One thing I do not like is that, because we |do a lot of interacting with aliens|, we |see bits of alien biology|. Many of these |aliens do not conform to the human "male and female and nothing else" pattern|, and while that could just be worldbuilding, it also smacks of {T-ish the whole gender ideology thing}. But it's not applied to humans, so there's that at least.

One thing I do like is how Spensa's character arc went from "|let's murder all the aliens!|" to "|let's murder all the aliens except the ones I'm friends with!|" to "|let's only fight the evil aliens and leave the rest of them alone!|". I also liked that |her disguise as an alien who totally isn't a human trust me on this| isn't |foolproof; multiple characters see through it to some degree or other. However, this doesn't lead to the inevitable "we found out you're a human, now go to jail" arc, because A) both of these characters have their own agendas which would be jeapordized by a "there are human spies everywhere" furor, and B) both of them draw somewhat wrong conclusions|.

|If you didn't highlight the spoiler tags, the fact that I said| potato soup |in this paragraph will be confusing to you. Or it might not be, if you read enough of my blog and know that I do this sort of thing on heavily redacted posts.|

My shipping was correct! It is now canon! Sort of.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...probably still T for sci-fi violence. A harder T, though, for the stuff mentioned in the paragraph with the content warning tag.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Keep them distracted."

    "Resigned sigh."

    I looped us after an enemy ship. "Did you just say the words resigned sigh?"

    Page 10. It's Spensa, talking with her robot copilot.

    Cobb folded his arms where he stood near the door. "I asked my command staff, scientists, and engineers to tackle the hyperdrive problem. How do we find a way off this planet? All the ideas I got back were wildly implausible, except one. It's only mildly implausible."

    Page 49.

(Endnote: Did I mention the |samurai fox-gerbils|?)

"Skyward" by Brandon Sanderson

Finally, actually villainous aliens! Ones that aren't a heavy-handed metaphor for colonialism! I rejoice!

The protagonist of this book somewhat reminded me of the protagonist of Apprentice, in that they're both perpetually angry teenage girls with slightly strange names. However, I liked Spensa from Skyward much better than Kerr from Apprentice, because A) Spensa is rather smarter, and B) Skyward's setting, not being a dystopia where you can get imprisoned for snapping at the wrong person, is more suited to this sort of character.

Spensa also has habit of making hilariously over-the-top threats whenever she wants to yell at someone, which I found amusing.

I really liked that this flips a lot of the standard tropes on their heads. For one thing, we have the actually villainous aliens. There are other examples, albeit ones that require major spoilers:

The |"clearing your family's name"| trope. |Spensa's dead father was branded as a coward for running away during the initial battle against the aliens, and Spensa spends much of the book trying to prove that he wasn't a coward. And she does discover evidence that he wasn't a coward, but unfortunately that comes in the form of evidence that instead of running away, he turned traitor, fired on his own allies, and had to be shot down. Later evidence proves that he did this because he was (sort of) mind-controlled by the aliens, but it's still a nice subversion.|

The |"person in authority who hates you for no reason"| trope. |There's an admiral who is seemingly dead set against letting Spensa achieve her dream of being a space fighter pilot and fighting the aliens. As it happens, this is because she's pretty sure that Spensa inherited from her dad the trait that lets you be mind-controlled by the aliens, and she really doesn't want a repeat of the "pilot goes insane and shoots down three of his comrades before being shot down himself" incident.|

Brandon Sanderson does not hesitate to |kill characters off| in this book. It pretty effectively hammers home the |"these aliens are dangerous and we're on the back foot fighting them"| aspect of the story.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence. No actual swearing, though there is repeated and vehement swearing with made-up swear words (the best kind of swear words).

4 stars.

(Endnote: Now is the time for all good men (and women) to get in a spaceship and fight some aliens.)

"The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi (translated by Cathy Hirano)

Really my only major quibble with this book is that it could have used a bit more denouement. But then it also has like five story arcs one after another, so 80% of them ended properly, even if the last one left off somewhat abruptly.

*looks at Goodreads*

So it turns out there's a sequel. Never mind, the lack of denouement can stand.

This was originally written in Japanese, and had to be translated into English. I suspect that, in Japanese, the prose is beautiful. The translation is, well, a translation, so it can be a bit choppy at times, but one does get used to it fairly quickly. I did, at least.

The titular beasts are these giant flying things called Royal Beasts. I imagined them as birds, but they're not really birdlike; they have fur and teeth, and they don't lay eggs.

As it was originally published (in Japan), this was two separate books. That goes some way toward explaining the abundance of story arcs.

In the first of the several of those, the main character acquires a wise mentor slash surrogate father figure. He keeps bees, and he's really nice. It's entirely possible he's my favorite character in the entire book.

This author likes to put her protagonist through moral dilemmas, which is not something I see often in books. Usually the only moral choices a protagonist will face are A) the ones that are a choice between doing the right but difficult thing or the wrong but easy thing, or B) the ones where the right choice is obvious to the reader, if not the characters. This book opts for C), the ones where there's a choice between two options and both of them are, in some form, the bad option.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for mostly veiled sexual references. One of the main plot points revolves around the reason why the giant flying bird things don't reproduce in captivity, and it involves them, y'know, reproducing. It's not described in any detail, but it does happen.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has nothing to do with the Beast Crest from Hollow Knight: Silksong.)

"Apprentice" by Kristen Young

This book is weird. Not in necessarily a bad way, but also not really in a good way either.

It's dystopian. The premise of the book involves a government called the Love Collective (are you weirded out yet?) who claim to promote love and peace and harmony, unlike all the "Haters" who don't constantly promote love and peace and harmony. They also brainwash people, because they're dystopian.

Allow me to point something out. When you're living in a dystopia and you suddenly realize "hey, this is a dystopia" and want to get out, the expected course of action is to, y'know, not tell anyone while you try to figure out how to escape. It builds tension quite easily. Such is the plot of Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Sky Inside, the first book of Vega Jane, everybody's lives in Nazi Germany and the USSR... In fact, the one thing you don't do is go around saying seditious things to people.

Our main character, Kerr Flick (these people have the strangest names), is seemingly unable to keep her mouth shut. She goes around saying seditious things to people, which is not generally a quality you want in a dystopia. |It very nearly gets her arrested and brainwashed near the end of the book; she's only saved by Underground Resistance Members Ex Machina.| She's also constantly angry, which does not contribute to fitting in with the other dystopia people.

For whatever reason, the Love Collective has decided that normal names are for other people. We have people named things like "Buff" and "Pim" and "Freb". I think the most normal name in the entire book is "Lee".

My pseudonymous acquaintance Kittens warned me that this book was really weird. Having read it, I can now confirm that she told me so.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence.

2 stars. It's not that the book is bad, exactly, it's just really weird and I don't like the protagonist very much, and I mostly finished it because I wanted to find out what the heck was up with this universe. Which, hey, that did keep me reading, so the author must have done something right. I was originally going to give it three stars until I failed to force myself to read the second book, and realized that I actually disliked reading it. Hence, two stars.

(Endnote: No, monsieur. For loooooooove.)

"How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse" by K. Eason

"Fantasy space opera political intrigue" is not a genre I knew existed. And yet, here we are.

The "fantasy" comes in from the fact that all their advanced technology is actually made of magic (or "arithmancy"). Which means you can hack it with your brain. I don't know why everyone doesn't know arithmancy if it lets you hack into things with your brain; maybe it's harder than it seems. There are also fairies, who the people in-universe didn't think existed until they invited the fairies to Rory's christening and the fairies actually showed up.

Speaking of whom! Rory Thorne, who left the structural integrity of the multiverse entirely unchanged, is a princess (of a space kingdom) who was cursed at birth by a fairy. No, this is not a Sleeping Beauty retelling; she was cursed at birth to... see through politeness. And also lies. This is one of those curses that are also sort of a blessing in disguise.

I think the book started being truly good about a third of the way through, when it decided to drop the snarky feminism and just focus on the fantasy space opera political intrigue. And I have nothing against feminism, but it's like bay leaves: it can make the thing you're making better, but if it insists on being an integral part of the finished product, it's going to mess stuff up.

And once it dropped the snarky feminism (which grated on me, just like a bay leaf), I did enjoy it. Even the fantasy space politics.

This is written in sort of the style of an in-universe history book, which gives it a unique narration voice. The framing also means that it usually just leaves you to figure out the worldbuilding from context, which it mostly does a good job of subtly explaining, aside from a couple of instances of "as you know, Bob" (which, as you know, is not generally a good way to explain lore or backstory).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for bad language and some (mostly veiled) sexual references. I had a difficult time deciding whether to give this T or T15+, and eventually decided to err on the side of "there's nothing stopping a 13-year-old from reading this, but I wouldn't give it to them, so I guess T15+." That said, it's a soft T15+.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I have a theory: Rory Thorne is actually a distant descendant of none other than Carswell Thorne, of The Lunar Chronicles fame.)

"The Schwa Was Here" by Neal Shusterman

A schwa is the upside-down "e" symbol. It's used pretty much exclusively in phonetics, and it makes a sort of "uh" sound.

Don't worry, this isn't a book about typography. It's actually about Calvin "the Schwa" Schwa, a teenager who makes you forget about him. Not on purpose, it just sort of happens. Unless he's pointed out to you, or he points himself out to you, it's really hard to remember him. He's just so eminently forgettable, so much so that people will often forget he's there in the middle of talking to him. Or talking about him. Or writing about him.

He's not the main character, though. That honor goes to

The Schwa Was Here isn't actually a book about the Schwa. Well, it is and it isn't; he's definitely prominent, but he's not the protagonist. The protagonist is Anthony "Antsy" Bonano, a normal and non-forgetfulness-inducing teenager. There's also an incredibly curmudgeonly old dude, the old dude's blind granddaughter who accidentally induces a love triangle, and various minor characters.

Speaking of the love triangle. Love triangles just fill me with a certain je ne sais quoi... I think it's called "annoyance"? This one does at least get resolved fairly quickly, unlike some I could mention (coughKeeperoftheLostCitiescough), in that it doesn't take like ten books and counting. But it still annoyed me while I was reading

This book seemed like it was going to end unsatisfactorily, and then it didn't. The ending, originally bittersweet and somewhat hollow, is made abruptly better by the final two pages.

The chapter titles are quite funny. I like them.

Did you notice that |on the cover, the author's last name is spelled with a schwa where the schwa sound is|? I didn't until |I was like a third of the way through the book|, and I think it's a neat detail. Especially how |you miss it at first, but then you notice it and it was there all along|... it just ties in so nicely with the story.

How many times have I started writing this post? Somehow I keep forgetting about

So yeah, the book was good enough and interesting enough that it inspired... *gestures vaguely at the above post* this from me. It's sort of the blogging version of performance art, I guess?

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for some crude humor and a veiled sexual reference or two.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I think I've cracked the code. The Schwa is actually Kilroy. They were both Here.)

"Winter" by Marissa Meyer

I haven't the faintest idea how to start this review.

We finally go to the moon, in this the final book of a series called the Lunar Chronicles. Though, granted, the "Lunar" part is actually referring to the people who live on the moon. And the people who used to live on the moon, but have moved to Earth because the queen of the moon is a tyrant.

Our Snow White character, Queen Levana's stepdaughter Princess Winter, is insane. Apparently this is what happens if Lunars go too long without using their glamour. (I don't know if I ever mentioned the glamour, actually. Lunars have this thing called glamour, which supposedly works by manipulating bioelectricity or something, and which they can use to change their appearance and/or mind-control people.)

Everyone gets their moment to shine in this book, even Prince/Emperor Kai (our Cinderella prince), who hasn't really had much to do for the entire series. If you don't count the prequel and the short story collection, this is the final book, so all the principals getting to do something cool and cap off their plot threads is only right and proper.

The Evil Queen (Queen Levana) has a very tragic backstory. It's a bit of an explanation for her evilness, but it isn't used as an excuse; whatever made her this way, she's still evil, not just misunderstood. I appreciated that, because it often seems like "tragic villain" and "actually legitimately evil villain" are mutually exclusive in a lot of writing.

We get to see the Lunar aristocracy (and Prince/Emperor Kai has to deal with them), and they are exactly as shallow and vapid and vain as one might expect.

I really liked how they did the poisoned apple in this retelling.

It's pretty clear to me that the author had the entire series basically planned out before she wrote the first one. Each book retells a different fairy tale, but bits of setup for each of them are woven throughout the previous ones.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sci-fi violence and some sexual references. Also child abuse as part of some backstories. Marissa Meyer managed to go the entire series without descending into lameness or ideology shoehorning (I'm looking at you, Shannon Messenger and Keeper of the Lost Cities), so some extra kudos to her for that.

4 stars. The whole of this series is greater than the sum of its parts, because I'd probably give the series 5 if I did overall series ratings. Maybe I should start doing that.

This has been my second of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: Winter's skin is not canonically purple. I'm pretty sure she's dark-skinned in the book.)

"Cress" by Marissa Meyer

I knew it. I knew it! The plague turns people blue!

(Back during the first book, I theorized that the plague in this series--letumosis, also called "the blue plague"--turns people blue as one of its symptoms. This I inferred from the fact that it's called "the blue plague." However, I didn't remember any actual confirmation of that until I ran into some in this book.)

Anyway. As you may be able to guess from the cover, this is a retelling of Rapunzel. But because this is a sci-fi series, Cress (our Rapunzel) is imprisoned on a satellite instead of in a tower, and her escape involves a partially botched reentry after our Gothel character tries to ruin everything. (Despite her best efforts, however, Gothel only ruins some things.)

I actually don't think I've read the original fairy tale. I'd watched Tangled (2010), but that isn't the most faithful adaptation, so I missed out on some details that I think this book did in pretty cool ways.

Case in point, in the original, the prince was blinded after getting shoved out of the tower. Which makes the fact that Carswell Thorne acquires some head-trauma-induced blindness from getting thrown around during the reentry make a lot more sense. Given that blindness from head trauma is actually a thing that can happen, that's actually rather brilliant.

Carswell "Probably Flynn Rider Guy" Thorne, by the way, is our prince for this. He first showed up in the previous book. As I suspected, the reason his cargo ship can go to space is for plot reasons, so he can rescue Cress from her satellite. Cress has an almost comically bad crush on him, because she's sixteen and he (thinks he) is Han Solo. It's honestly kind of adorable.

"Thinks he is Han Solo" is pretty much Thorne's entire character; he wants to be this cool smuggler person with a stolen spaceship, but he can't quite pull it off. Case in point, he starts the series... in jail. For stealing that spaceship. He doesn't even have a grand plan to escape, he just sort of gets dragged along in Cinder's beecause she needs his spaceship.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some sexual references and a rather disturbing telepathic torture scene.

4 stars.

This has been my first of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: I'm just glad the author picked "Cress" as the name for her Rapunzel character, and not "Spinach" or "Parsley" or something.)

"A Cast of Stones" by Patrick W. Carr

This book's cover does it no favors.

Seriously, it looks dark and creepy. And also, weirdly, kind of low-effort. I actually put off reading it for a while because the cover pushed me away so much. (Yeah, I know, don't judge a book by its cover and all that, but on some level you're kind of supposed to. That's the point of the cover. If the cover played no part in people's assessment of a book, then there's no real reason aside from "it looks pretty" for books to have cover art at all.)

Okay, mini-rant over. Despite what the cover would seem to indicate, this book is actually pretty good.

Plot summary: In a world where casting lots to decide things actually works, the king is dying without an heir. So we have to pick a new one, or else the magic barrier protecting the kingdom from the demons will fall apart and the kingdom will get overrun by demons. And because casting lots to decide things actually works, that's how we're going to do it. Also there's Fantasy Christianity involved.

Except |the demons don't want us to choose a new king, because they want the magic barrier to fall apart so they can overrun the kingdom|. At least, I'm pretty sure that's who's behind all the problems we keep having.

I've noticed (from my incredibly large sample size of exactly two) that whenever you have Fantasy Christianity, things tend to be named in some sort of butchered approximation of Latin. Granted, I've only encountered Fantasy Christianity twice, in this and in Deathless Beast, so I may be missing the vast array of Fantasy Christianity that's named in a butchered approximation of Swedish or Swahili or something. But the Latin is probably thanks to the Roman Catholics and their historical insistence on Latin for everything.

(Granted, most of my knowledge of Roman Catholicism dates to roughly the sixteenth century, so they may have changed significantly since them.)

I really liked that the main character |isn't the Chosen One|. That honor goes to the side character who could have been really annoying if he were actually annoying at all, and who's still slightly residually annoying because the main character is envious of him.

And speaking of our main character, he has issues. Mainly alcoholism. I'm not an alcoholic myself, and I don't know any, so I can't speak to how accurate the portrayal is. He's also not instantly good at everything (he is, in fact, bad at most of things), but he gets better at some of them after a good training montage or two.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for alcohol abuse and fantasy violence. Also some veiled sexual references, but those are veiled, as they should be.

4 stars. 

(Endnote: This is the book that inspired my previous post.)

"Scarlet" by Marissa Meyer

Welcome to the Future European Union, where there are still farmers. This we know because our protagonist, Scarlet Benoit, is one of them. I honestly thought this was going to be set in Future Africa, but I was wrong.

As you may be able to guess, this is a Little Red Riding Hood retelling. Complete with |genetically engineered wolf-hybrid soldiers|. Our Big Bad Wolf is named, [drumroll please]... Wolf. He and Scarlet also fall in love over the course of the book, because of course they do. (This falling-in-love also comes with a side effect of Wolf stopping being evil.)

(The |wolf hybrid people| follow those discredited theories about alpha and beta and omega wolves and pack dynamics and all that. However, putting the best possible construction on this, it's possible that they follow those because |they were engineered by the moon people, who probably haven't seen an actual wolf pack in generations and so are going off those instead of any actual science. But that theory set me wondering if they howl at the moon, and if so, whether they howl at the earth or at the floor when they're on the moon|.)

I suspect our Flynn Rider character, for the next book (which I suspect is going to be a Rapunzel retelling), has shown up in this one. He's slightly insane, or possibly just very weird, and he has a space cargo ship. Well, a space-capable cargo ship, because I don't think there are any Mars or Venus colonies, and I also don't think the evil moon people want to do much trading. So really, I don't know why his cargo ship can go to space, except for plot reasons if he turns out to be Flynn Rider.

(I know Disney made up Flynn Rider for Tangled. But they made him out of the prince who's in the original story, and it's easier to say Flynn Rider than "the prince from Rapunzel".)

Oh, and also: |prison break!| Because Cinder |got thrown into jail| at the end of the last one, at |the behest of the Evil Queen|. That's where we picked up Probably Flynn Rider Guy.

[Edited on 2/1/2025; changed cover image]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for violence and sexual references. (There might also be some bad language in there, but I don't remember any.)

4 stars.

(Endnote: For whatever reason, I seem to have been obsessed with parentheses (these things (that are on the outside of this clump of words) that I've been using a lot) today.)

"Cinder" by Marissa Meyer

Behold, it's Cinderella, except it's set in Future China and there's evil moon people. And also Cinderella is a cyborg who's also a mechanic, and there's a plague that nobody can figure out how to treat.

Thankfully, Future China doesn't seem to be Communist anymore. (The fact that apparently this universe has had two more world wars might have something to do with that.) People can own their own businesses now -- or, in the case of the main character, people's stepmoms can own their businesses.

This is a retelling of Cinderella, but it isn't purely Cinderella; I'm pretty sure the author had the entire series at least mostly conceptualized before she started writing this one. So the Rapunzel character (I think book three is about her) and the Evil Queen show up in this one. The Evil Queen is appropriately Evil.

There are four more books in this series, and I intend to continue through them. And not just because this one ended on a cliffhanger.

The pumpkin carriage equivalent in this is a really old, orange car. I don't actually know what kind of car it's supposed to be, so I imagined it as a Volkswagen Beetle.

There's like three different characters who could conceivably be the fairy godmother. Probably they all are. I was pleased that |the doctor guy turned out not to be evil|.

I really liked how they did the "Cinderella has really small feet" plot point: the main character is a cyborg, and one of her cyborg parts is a foot. Which is really small.

[Edited on 2/1/2026; changed cover image.]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some bad language, violence, and sexual references.

4 stars.

(Endnote: The plague turns people blue. Or something. It's called "the blue plague", so I can only assume part of its symptoms include turning people blue.)

"Leviathan" by Scott Westerfeld

How do I even begin to describe this book? Uh...

Plot summary: During the beginning of an alternate-history World War I, a girl dresses up as a boy to join the RAF (which uses genetically engineered creatures for everything). Meanwhile, the son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand flees to Switzerland in a steampunk/dieselpunk mech tank.

It would already be epic with either the steampunk or the genetically engineered warbeasts. I can see WWI-with-monsters (we already have the-Napoleonic-Wars-with-dragons, after all), and WWI-with-steampunk almost begs to be written. It's the inclusion of both that makes this so unique and cool.

I see that this is a trilogy with two more books (Behemoth and Goliath), so I'll probably be getting those out of the library at some point.

My main quibble with this book is that it's rather too evolutiony in the British parts. If it didn't have that, I would have pretty much no quibbles.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence. The multiple POVs (Deryn in the RAF and Alek in his steampunk mech tank) might be a tad tricky, but it could be done.

4 stars. Could possibly have been 5, conceivably, if not for the evolution.

(Endnote: The titular Leviathan is an airship that's actually a giant genetically modified whale being. Because this is Leviathan Britain and everything is alive.)

Mini-Reviews 16: Tons of #9 Coal

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

The main characters of another of Sarah Dessen's books (This Lullaby, I think) cameo in this one. I thought that was neat.

It's about a girl who's trying desperately to pretend everything is fine and hold things together while everything falls apart around her, and also a guy who's into weird music and who she maybe (okay definitely, this is a romance novel) likes.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for discussion of an eating disorder (and possibly also a suicide attempt), an in-the-past and mostly offscreen sexual assault, and swearing (including one instance of The Cardinal Swearword).

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, a kissing book, DRAMA!, modern setting, rated T15+, romance, school drama, YA

Bitter End by Rex Stout

 

It's another Nero Wolfe book. A novella, this time. I read this on a tablet in an airport, which is not my favorite way or place to read books, but it was good enough that I liked it regardless.

 

Basically, someone puts quinine in a can of liver paté (no idea what paté is but I assume it's some kind of meat paste thing) that Nero Wolfe subsequently eats. He Does Not Like This and begins a personal quest to find whoever did that and make them pay.

 

I don't have tons to say about this, but I do have some favorite lines to share.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for violence (people getting shot at and stuff, plus it is a murder mystery).

 

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

 

    "I am under no obligation to catch murderers indiscriminately."

    Page, uh, I have no idea? This is an ebook and it doesn't like telling me the page numbers for whatever reason.

 

     "Some news for you. [NAME REDACTED] is under arrest: they just took |her| away from here. Mr. Wolfe would like to have |her| prosecuted for feeding him quinine, but the cops prefer to try |her| for murder. [REDACTED]'s guilty of both."

    Page nobodyknows. Page numbers are a mess in Ebooks, it's one of the reasons I don't like them as much as actual paper books.

Tags for this one: 4-star, mystery, rated T

Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel (illustrated by Christopher Steininger)

 

Content warning: This is a book about bats. If you don't like bats or are afraid of bats, don't read it.

Basically, a young bat's clan of bats is migrating south after the young bat (our main character) accidentally provoked some owls into burning down their home tree. Then he gets separated from the clan, goes on an a bunch of adventures, and meets the girl deuteragonist. She's not really a love interest, though that may change as the series goes on.

The book is actually pretty creepy. The art doesn't help, but the story features such delightful things as a rat civilization, a cult of bats who can sort of transform into humans, and these carnivorous jungle bats that try to eat whatever they can get their hands on (including some pigeons and the deuteragonist).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for all that stuff I mentioned above.

3 stars. Could conceivably have been 4 if it hadn't kept talking about evolution.

Tags for this one: 3-star, adventure, modern setting, rated T, talking animals

(Endnote: And the boss man said, "Well bless my soul!")

"Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian" by Eoin Colfer

This book is basically one long final battle, and as such, it's a fitting climax to the series.

[Unmarked spoilers ahead.]

It starts off with Opal Koboi (again) enacting her Very Definitely Real Final Master Plan, involving having herself killed (the "herself" in question being a past version of herself who tagged along with Artemis when he returned from the past in The Time Paradox) and also stuffed down a nuclear reactor so when she explodes from this actual time paradox it doesn't destroy anything important. Except because this is Opal Koboi's Very Definitely Real Final Master Plan™, it actually turns her into a ridiculously powerful magic person.

The usual gang (that being "Artemis, Holly, Butler, and eventually Mulch Diggums, possibly with Foaly support") assembles to stop her from opening some magic gates and unleashing ancient obliterate-ALL-the-humans! magic. Artemis's brothers (of The Fowl Twins fame) also feature in this one, though mostly because they got possessed by some ancient ghosts Opal also unleashed.

This is pretty much the best way the Artemis Fowl series could have ended. It completes Artemis's character arc, it defeats recurring villain Opal Koboi for good this time, it (briefly) brings back stuff from all the way back in book 1... my only quibbles, really, are the somewhat ham-fisted "this is how the world went on spinning after Opal Koboi blew up half the tech in it" epilogue parts. (To be clear, it's not the fact that they were in there, we needed to know how it worked. It's how the author chose to do those that irked me.)

I think this post would also be a good place to talk about the overall arc the series took in quality. It started off quite strong with the original Artemis Fowl, dipping very slowly down from Arctic Incident through Eternity Code to Opal Deception before hitting another peak with Lost Colony. Then it dove off a cliff into Time Paradox, crawled out of the ground with Atlantis Complex, and came back strong for this one. Did that make sense? No? I can do a ranking later if anyone wants.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T. It's good to know this series didn't pull a Mr. Terupt and steadily increase in content level over the course of it.

4 stars. 

(Endnote: I'm not actually sure who the titular Last Guardian is. Maybe the ghost of the original guy who set up the ancient obliterate-ALL-the-humans! magic in the first place?)

"The Chaos Grid" by Lyndsey Lewellen

The author, in her acknowledgements, describing when she picked up this as a half-finished product after leaving it alone for two years: "It was only halfway written. I had no idea how to end it."

*looks at ending*

Me: "Yeah, that tracks"

And that, I think, is the core of the problem with this book. It has a strong vision going for the first half, but then the main character completes her first journey, and... then what?

The author answered that question with a course of action that felt more like it should have been a second book.

Basically, the story takes place in an alternate future Texas where humans tried to fix global warming (or something) but accidentally broke the world instead, causing all sorts of weird mutated things and crazy weather to take over the land. They then built a bunch of cities inside giant domes, kicked out anyone they didn't like, let the farmers do their own thing because they still needed food, and started doing drugs.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the drugs are a recent development, but yeah. The main antagonist of this book is an evil company that makes drugs, and its minions and drug dealers are the secondary antagonists.

There's also rebels trying to blow up the domes and failing because the domes have their own army, and a bunch of Mad Max wannabes who do nothing but hunt the more giant of the weird mutated things.

Into all this steps our main character, Juniper, a teenage girl with a mysterious triangle necklace and a pair of dead parents. She doesn't want to be in any of the domes, but particularly in one specific dome because her parents died there, so she joins a bunch of monster truckers (who haul food between the domes and the farms-where-people-do-their-own-thing) to escape. Along the way she fights evil drug dealers, her mysterious necklace does mysterious things, there's this guy named Dax who's extremely abrasive and constantly wears sunglasses, and a couple of the monster truckers die.

Then she reaches the farm, and I think that's where the author left off the first time, because it sort of flails around for a while and then starts up something entirely different. Juniper wanders around the farm for a while, then after acquiring a two-headed bird of bad-omen-ness, heads back to a city and... infiltrates the rebels who keep failing to blow up the domes? And then returns to the farm? And then some more evil drug dealers show up, Dax-with-the-sunglasses removes his sunglasses and reveals that he's actually a cyborg supersoldier or something who can stop time, Juniper does more mysterious things with her mysterious necklace to take down the evil drug dealers (just this band of them though), Juniper blacks out for four days, she finally wakes up, and... the book ends.

Did they defeat the evil company that makes the drugs? Nope. Did they do anything to get closure for Juniper's parents' death? Nope. Did we ever find out what happened to Dax? Nope. Did they even make a start at defeating the evil drugs company? Not really.

I would have accepted that last one as an ending, because "actually completely defeat the evil drugs company" would be very hard to do in the last three-eighths of a 250-ish-page novel; the saga of Juniper versus Orange Pipe (or whatever the company is called) could easily have taken a five-book-series to fully flesh out. An ending of "let's get the band together and start pushing back against the drugs" would have tied up the story's themes pretty nicely. Unfortunately, instead we have "We're going back to the dome city and, uh, maybe we can do something there?"

(So she did sort of do what I was expecting, but only sort of.)

The second half almost felt like she was just throwing things in to advance the plot along, similar to how I plotted my first novel. (That book as it now stands will never see the light of day.)

In conclusion, the author's assertion that she didn't know how to end the story was actually pretty spot on.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A strong T for sci-fi violence and some veiled sexual references.

3 stars. If the plot had followed its original direction, it probably would have gotten 4, but as I explained above...

(Endnote: The hardcover editions of all the Enclave Publishing books I've seen have some sort of design embossed in shiny metallic stuff on the cover. I think The Burning Tree had a leaf, and Winter's Maiden had a cool rune circle thing.)

"Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox" by Eoin Colfer

Ah yes. The Time Paradox. The only volume of the entire eight-book Artemis Fowl series I do not personally own.

Let me explain.

Now that we have the eighth type of fairies back (as of The Lost Colony) and can do the big magic again, the fairies have the capability to do things like time travel. Which is good, because Artemis's mom is dying of a sickness or something, and in order to save her, he needs a very specific species of lemur. Don't ask me why.

Unfortunately, back when he was still evil, he caused that exact species of lemur to go extinct. Again, don't ask me why. So Holly and present!Artemis go back in time to stop past!Artemis from extinctifying the lemur, which leads to more time-travel-based shenanigans.

And this is where the book gets weird, and it doesn't stop doing so. I would be entirely unsurprised to learn that this was written with the goal of "make Artemis/Holly shipping less problematic;" normally it's super weird and kind of creepy because Artemis is like 15 and Holly is like 80, but this one solves (well, "solves") that by physically re-aging them until they're both biologically the same age. Doesn't really get rid of the mental age gap though, which is where like 87% of the problematicity comes from.

Also, somehow past!Artemis is more competent than present!Artemis? I found that pretty hard to believe. There's also weird stuff with people who want random endangered animals to go extinct if they aren't useful, which is actually |Opal Koboi's fault. Somehow.|

This book's sole saving grace is that it does manage to be plot relevant, with |time-traveled past!Opal| featuring majorly in book 8.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for being weird.

2 stars.

(Endnote: For all the title says, |book 8|'s time travel is |a lot more paradox-y and confusing|.)

"Kill the Dawn" by Emily Hayse

It's Hamlet... IN SPACE!

The above sentence is a lie. This book has nothing to do with space. Kill the Dawn is, in fact, Hamlet... IN SCANDINAVIA!

Yes, yes, I know Hamlet is already set in Scandinavia. More accurately, it's Hamlet... IN FANTASY SCANDINAVIA! There, we went three for three and we can start being serious.

This is a fantasy retelling of Hamlet, with all the drama and bloodshed that entails. If you want a more coherent review, go here.

I've read some adaptations of the original, including the Manga Classics version, so I mostly know how the story goes. (I haven't read the original, though. The only Shakespeare play I've read in its entirety is Julius Caesar.) So I do have the knowledge necessary to... mostly figure out who people are supposed to be. There are some people in this whose counterparts I can't fathom (if anyone knows who Axel is supposed to be, please tell me) and there are some people whose counterparts I recognized instantly (I'm looking at you, Fainga/Claudius).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence. It could be a pretty good videogame.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Next I'll be reviewing the sequel, No Leave The Dawn Alone You Fool What Were You Thinking You've Doomed Us All.)