amelianotthepilot's Reviews (835)

Andrew attends a private school in Virginia with his twin sister, Dove, and best friend, Thomas but what the prestigious rich school doesn't know is that the forest has come to life and is trying to kill them. 
An ace love story set amongst thorny vines and woodsy murderous fable creatures. Andrew writes macbre forest stories and Thomas draws them, are they the cause of these disturbances? Could they give up their hobbies and passions? Is it real or is it all happening in Andrew's head?

I loved this book and the ending was delicioussss. The ace rep was beautiful. It was a bit young (but it is a kids fiction).

this was a great sequel to the Brave movie but also was so clearly trying to hit the 'Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons' fandom back in the day lol. I think the boy in this is very Jack Frost-coded, he's not a winter ice god but he is a forgotten boy god who struggles with his task and loneliness. 
The story is a bit slow at times but the ending was wonderful. I love Maggie Stiefvater's writing.

(2024): wow this sucked. this is the one where Rose

is imprisoned for killing the monarch and Lissa grapples for the throne. The Dashkov brothers break her out and show her that strigoi can be healed by being staked with a spirit infused stake. She works with Dimitri and Sonya to free kidnapped Jill who is Lissa's half sister and in the process Rose looses control of Spirit and kills Victor. Rose has sex with Dimitri and breaks up with Adrian. The dramatic end court scene Rose reveals Jill as a Draghomir allowing Lissa to be on the throne but Tasha shoots at Lissa but Rose jumps in front and almost dies. Rose and Dimitri are restored as guardians to Lissa and Christian but Rose and Lissa's bond is gone now that Rose died and came back on her own. Adrian is bitter and super attached and Rose insists none of it his fault lol. Lissa is crowned.

(2014 review): This conclusion wrapped the series up very nicely and was still exciting was always.
i love the POV through the bond cause thats a really cool way to show to POVs with only one person though.
SO SAD tho! aaaa Adrian <3333
read the book its good

(2024): oof man what the hell is this. not only does it promote manipulative and abusive relationships. This is the one where Rose has to save Lissa and Christian from

being held hostage by strigoi Dimitri. Then she makes out a bunch with Adrian and lets him feed on her. Ending with the murder of the queen.

(2014): This was a really good book and made me fall in love with the characters all over again.  I didn't like the 4th book and disliked pretty much everything that happened but in this book so many happy things happened including the finding and saving of Dimitri followed by a painful absence of Romitri until they fell in love all over again and Dimitri became his usual badass self.  Lissa and Christian finally got back together after 450 something pages and the AdrianxRose relationship was fabulous.  I would like to state that my state going into the book was heartbroken but still shipping Romitri like FedEx but by the end of the book I ship AdrianxRose and think Dimitri needs to redeem himself(this will probably change yet again by the end of the next book). This book was exciting from start to finish with so much action that there was two climaxes which resulted in an amazing 5th installment to the Vampire Academy books.(i still really wish they had a better name and better covers).  Im super excited what crazy new adventures Rose and crew get into in the next and last book.  It will be a sad parting from the series (but thank gods for subseries')!

Similar to the first book of this series, although I love the cover of these books I find the cover and title a marketing nightmare-for years I saw these and assumed they was actual little kids encyclopedias and did not understand why the book girlies were hyped about it. After reading it i’m still eh. However I liked this one better than the first and presume i’ll like the third better yet.

The story is written as academic Emily Wilde’s field journal as she goes on a new expedition to discover fairies in the Austrian mountains. In this world fairies are known about and avidly studied in universities but still largely regarded as mischievous tricksters that the general populace leave alone. Emily is an academic from Cambridge and is attempting to discover a faerie door while working on her latest book. She and her colleague Wendell Brambley end up entangled in a small wintery mountain town’s fae community drama and an adventure ensues with vague romance. Mostly same as the first.

My opinions on the series remain the same after reading this one. I think the characters are interesting and the world building fascinating however the dedication to writing the whole story from the perspective of a scholar’s field journal left it extremelyyyyy boring and bland and very young sounding. This limited perspective made the romance mostly left to the readers imagination. I found the plot twists particularly boring as our main character is very clever and would often just state things as they are. Although I do appreciate this dedication to writing an erudite character who actually is smart and useful and not just supposed to be smart. I often found Emily’s character sorta boring since she solely focuses on her research and rarely mentions emotions, romance, or social interactions. There was an allusion to her perhaps being aromantic which would be nice rep and make more sense. It could also be argued this lack of romance is because it’s supposed to be academic notes but that is ridiculous since she often mentions things that are not academic related. 

I also disliked the one chapter we get from Wendell’s perspective. I found it quite lazy. It’s exciting to get the love interests perspective but I think that should either be a consistent choice to have every other chapter from a different POV or do it as a seperate novella or just tumblr release.

Although the story was fun I found the climax events escalated entirely too fast and resolved too quickly and easily. However I do think it was better than the first book’s. There is also virtually no character development. But I did enjoy when the human characters experienced fae lands. It had a very visceral feeling to the descriptions and woozy character actions. I also absolutely love the fae world building it’s fascinating.

Although I love the cover of this book I find the title a marketing nightmare-for years I saw this and assumed it was an actual little kids encyclopedia and did not understand why the book girlies were hyped about it. After reading it i’m still eh.

The story is written as academic Emily Wilde’s field journal as she goes on a new expedition to discover fairies in Scandinavia. In this world fairies are known about and avidly studied in universities but still largely regarded as mischievous tricksters that the general populace leave alone. Emily is an academic from Cambridge and is attempting to discover proof of a new species while working on her latest book. She and her colleague Wendell Brambley end up entangled in a small wintery town’s fae community drama and an adventure ensues with vague romance.

I think the characters are interesting and the world building fascinating however the dedication to writing the whole story from the perspective of a scholar’s field journal left it extremelyyyyy boring and bland and very young sounding. This limited perspective made the romance mostly left to the readers imagination. I found the plot twists particularly boring as our main character is very clever and would often just state things as they are. Although I do appreciate this dedication to writing an erudite character who’s actually is smart and useful and not just supposed to be smart, I often found Emily’s character sorta boring since she solely focuses on her research and rarely mentions emotions, romance, or social interactions. It could be argued this is because it’s supposed to be academic notes but that is ridiculous since she often mentions things that are not academic related. 

I also disliked the one chapter we get from Wendell’s perspective. I found it quite lazy. It’s exciting to get the love interests perspective but I think that should either be a consistent choice to have every other chapter from a different POV or do it as a seperate novella or just tumblr release.

Although the story was fun I found the climax events escalated entirely to fast and honestly resulted in the first dumb choices of our “smart” main character. The climax events also were resolved entirely too quickly and easily.

There is also virtually no character development.

I did however enjoy when the human characters experienced fae lands. It had a very visceral feeling to the descriptions and woozy character actions. I also absolutely love the fae world building it’s fascinating.

something ironic about listening to this book about slowing down at 2.5x speed

honestly not as interesting as i thought it’d be. mostly talks about how i’m genera our work style is bad but there’s not much we can do about it as workers, it’s the employers that need to realize that time does not equal quality and that our work should not be the 9-5 anymore

*Thank you to the author and publisher for an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.*

I would’ve eaten this up in 2012. That being said I still really enjoyed it, it was dark academia, egyptian myths, gothic horror, a hot mysterious man. However there were a lot of loose plot threads.

The book follows Andromeda who decides to attend a spooky private school to solve her older sisters death. She believes her sister’s not actually dead and there’s more to it. When she gets to school she immediately realizes she’s right as there’s lots of weird things going on with a school club cult for the elite and student disappearances.

I thought the plot was overall very fun but very tropey and no super new ideas. Elite school occult activity is a classic, dead things appearing in her personal affects to scare her off also a classic but never returned to or explained later on, a corrupt school, mild magic to pursue immortality. None of these aspects were very new or exciting but the fast paced action and looming romance kept the story interesting.

The main character was quite a basic unknowledgeable headstrong hero blundering her way through and I think that was my main problem. The lore was all delivered to her at convenient moments by Jae, another student who also ✨happens✨ to have a similar cult death in his family and ✨happens✨ to know absolutely everything about everything. Our main character trusts him far too easily and willingly even after he betrays her trust. She almost immediately forgives him every time and her trust and forgiveness all seem to be based on the fact that he’s hot and attractive. Their romance isn’t built on much besides physical attraction and the guys protective nature. Meanwhile some other important lore regarding the sister is randomly dropped midway through the book.

I found a lot of details to be randomly added such as cancer and the constant random mentions of Scottish places. I still find it absurd that when mentioning this occult society it was said to be “all over the world” but then only Scotland and this school were ever mentioned. Truly random.

Despite these flaws I still found the book very fun and fast paced with lots of fun drama and despite the relationship not really having a base it was still fun.

sorta a horror story? 

a creepy woman in a house taunts people in her life for her enjoyment due to her misfortunes.

Pip an orphan raised with a blacksmith is introduced to a rich woman. Through this his expectations for life become tainted and “great” and he now strives to succeed above his situation in life and become a gentleman. Randomly he comes into a large sun of money which does transcend him to this status however he has no idea who gave him the money or why and has many “great expectations” as to who it is and why. Even with the money and education he is still largely unaccepted by his new society and isn’t able to make a name for himself.

Meanwhile there’s a whole mystery plot happening around his sister’s injury and also another with the convicts from the beginning of the story.

*Thank you to the author and publisher for an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.*

First off the world was very cool and it has all the things I like in a fantasy novel: an adventure, interesting magic, beautiful and otherworldly world descriptions. 

However, there were a lot of problems with this book and I think a lot of them could be solved with some editing. The writing itself was good but the plot wasn’t exactly cohesive and I didn’t love the characters. It follows Kylene, a 16 year old girl who is a self taught herbalist, and Lovelace, an adult man wizard. Who’s paths eventually cross as they both run from a rogue evil wizard and his peacekeepers.

I thought these were a bizarre choice of characters to follow as they are two demographics of readers and so I related to one and was utterly bored by the other. I found the fantasy names to be a bit cliche and also a bit of a pain. There were so many world building dumps that I just plowed through without really remembering who’s who and what silly fantasy words they’re talking about.

I think the main problem was the structure of the plot. The inciting incident sorta doesn’t happen until 100 pages in. The book itself is quite short for all of the world building it does. It’s only 200+ pages with all for the action happening in the later 100. 

I thought the opening chapter about a random boy was very catchy and interesting but then bouncing between too seemingly unrelated characters plots didn’t really make sense.

The book ending ends up making the whole story feel like a setup for the actual plot (which would be book 2). It all felt like backstory.

I think the setup for the story is interesting but then it’s unclear what all the characters goals are until 100 pages in. I don’t know what Kylene is attempting to do really besides find her dad but she doesn’t seem to have a real plan or goal. Lovelace and Co’s goals are also unclear. We’re getting lots of wizard lore and then for some reason they stop in 1 town to recruit help but only 1 town and then give up and continue on their journey????? As a result there’s 0 character growth.

The two kids that Lovelace ends up picking up felt more like pets and plot devices than people. 

Overall J thought it was a very mid fantasy book which was disappointing since the world building was cool and the synopsis sounded really promising.

SPOILERS FOLLOWING:

I don’t understand why Kylene goes by a different name at the end it was utterly ridiculous.

Also I don’t believe Lovelace and Gunner would have defeated Alev, he was far too powerful and the fact that they all died but then somehow they came back to life was ridiculous.

The Kylene pools bit at the end with the trippy death/transcendent montage was ridiculous.