amelianotthepilot's Reviews (835)

magnus and crew adventure across the worlds to find throw missing hammer and defeat loki’s plan to start ragnarok. they learn that the true reward ✨is the friends they made along the way✨

Twin witches both have matching horn necklaces but one mysteriously gets murdered and her heart torn out. The remaining sister will do anything to avenger her sister and figure out the murder. Set in Palermo, Sicily.

The writing was fine but the plot was exciting and wild. The lore was a bit confusing and I don’t think quite made sense but it made for a fun mystery. However, I immediately knew who the murderer was. The slow burn with the demon prince was delicious but the ending cliff hanger was eh. Books that don’t wrap up the main plot in one book annoy me.

This book wrecked me. A combination of Wall-e and Pinocchio in a sci-fi setting. 

A great improvement from his other books. It’s wild to see that he wrote something like The Lightning Struck Heart and is now all the way to this. The writing is really well done the plot is interesting the concept and world building spectacular the characters feel so real and emotional AND queer representation! The only main flaw and my major complaint is that he  continues to not have a single female character. Maybe you could argue that as a man he’s just writing from what he knows and doesn’t want to overstep his bounds but at this point it’s ridiculous. Queer male relationships can exist alongside female characters. They are not exclusive. so far out of all of his books i’ve read so far he continues to have maybe one extremely minor female character in his books and all other characters are male/male coded. Even in this book, a book full of robots, only one character was female and one was nonbinary/gender fluid (it was unclear they were an omnipresent robot system).

The plot follows Gio a robot inventor man who lives in a remote forrest next to a scrapyard who is raising an orphan boy child, Victor, as his own. As he grows up Victor makes friends from scrapyard discarded robots, he collects a Nurse robot named Nurse RATCHED, and a WALL-E-esque roomba named Rambo. Then one day he finds a male android in a pile and decides to rebuild him. As stories go everything changed and went to hell and onwards goes the adventure. It was a whimsical journey full of interesting conundrums in a dystopian US that really left me introspective about relationships. Also we love some ace representation even though it came surrounded by a lack of female characters. Certainly doesn’t pass the bechdel…

This story was a really interesting concept, plot, and characters but extremely difficult to follow. It lacked set up and as a kids/young adult book that’s pretty key. It doesn’t explain the three types of monsters until 100 pages into the story and even then the reader is left with an incomplete picture. The plot is relatively simple to follow but the world building is confusing. This dystopian setting would benefit from a map as well as a more fleshed out explanation of the monsters and what they do and how they live. 

The plot follows two high schoolers on different sides of ‘the seam’. They live in a dystopian mega city called Verity that is plagued with monsters. The south is governed by a militaristic ruling family that utilizes monsters to defend while the north is ruled by a business man who utilizes the monsters and has people pay him to keep them ‘safe’. The monsters are Malachai: evil vampire-like creatures that like to kill, have really tough skin, and a bone breast plate, Corosai: evil hive mind creatures that are mostly shadow and can be destroyed with light to the face, and Sunai: a siren-like creature that reap evil human souls only but without them starves and goes off like a bomb before continuing. Our main characters August, a Sunai from the South side who is adopted into the military ruling family, and Kate, the daughter of the businessman ruler of the North side, meet in a precarious arranged situation and end up on an adventure together. 

My main confusion was over August, the Sunai, who isn’t really explained. The reader slowly pieces his situation together which is meant to be mysterious but just ends up confusing. He has tally mark tattoos that mark how many days since he’s last gone off like bomb, and these magically appear and disappear. He needs to ‘eat’ evil human souls in an unspecified ‘often’ and if not he grows physically and mentally ill. He has this adoptive family situation that isn’t fully explained but his two ‘siblings’ are also adoptive Sunai, and no other known ones exist. 

I really enjoyed the story but it is clearly one of VE Scwab’s earlier stories and has a lot of loose threads. It’s cool to see how she’s grown as an author. I recommend the book but I’d read a world building explanation first.

The concept of Olivie’s books are so interesting. However this book, although really interesting, lacks something that I cant quite put my finger on. 

The plot yet again follows a whole cast of characters with no real main character. Olivie really delves into each character and fully gives them their own stories jumping between their side thoughts and plots and tying them to the main plot. The “main character” is Fox the adopted son/‘godson’ of Death. The other semi main character is Vi, a previous human who is recently turned a vampire and now is a real estate agent currently struggling to sell a house with ghost. After a series of events Vi, Fox, and an assortment of characters make their way to The Game. ‘The Game’ is a gamboling game played amongst immortals and death to risk everything to gain everything.

The Game is where the plot started to fall apart for me. There were a lot of great quotes and thoughts on death and life and mortals vs immortals. But The Game was sorta vaguely described and the stakes not fully explored. It was too vague and too important but resolved quite quickly. 

Yet again I find the pacing of olivie’s books a little odd. It jumps quite quickly between conversations and abandons action in favor of slowly drawing other things out. I think they would honestly work better as movies.

A spectacular r+j retelling. I don’t usually like r+j retellings as the plot is too obvious but this was a really interesting take on it. It follows two magical mob families, The Federovs-a patriarch and his three sons, and The Antanovas-a matriarch and her 7 daughters. We slowly find out the reason why they are rivals as it destroys all of their lives. A story of political intrigue, mafia deals and murders, and forbidden loves.

I loved the characters and the plot kept me guessing. The constant perspective switching was also fun. The shakespeare/r+j references were also great.

My only complaint is that Olivia Blake’s writing can sometimes be too long and flowery. It’s lovely to read but sometimes I just want to read faster. 

the quartet ending with summer is interesting. Years normally start with winter and end with winter but the choice of beginning of fall and ending with summer, the school calendar year, makes more sense to me. summers are slow, steady, heavy, sweltering- and i feel like that is most like later life. and fall is full or change and  unrestfullness, shedding skin- like the beginning of life

i didn’t really like this book though. i liked that it tied together some previous characters. but it overall didn’t feel like summer to me and only had a few pages of summer themed prose.

overall not a big fan of this quartet, i don’t understand the hype

cute queer adventure love story of a Rook, a non magical orphan who makes up for his lack of magic with technical genius and just wants to belong, and Sun, a uniquely magical rival. They both apprentice for powerful wizards in their city and end up rivals to lovers as they go on jobs together and go against the tyrannical magical government system.

elliot page’s life experiences from growing up queer in the film industry and coming out to realizing he’s trans.