Rating: 3 stars.

This book was such a trip. If you were reading this, knowing NOTHING about vampires, I think it would be really scary trying to work out what was going on with Carmilla, and what she was. As it was, Carmilla kind of read to me as a relatable as hell young woman (up all night, sleeping until noon, rising only to drink chocolate? mood). This is a short read, and totally worth it if you're interested in old gothic literature and vampire lore. Or if you're interested in really, really thinly veiled anagrams. Seriously, they're ridiculously bad, and they spend ages looking at a painting of Carmilla labelled Mircalla and they don't even twig a tiny little bit.

I received a copy of Fairy Tales for Fearless Girls from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 3.5 stars

This was a lovely collection of fables, each a few pages long. They were nicely simple, with easy to understand concepts and important messages. The settings and characters were a diverse mix, from several different cultures each mirroring different 'traditional' fairy tales. From an adult reader's perspective, some of the stories were a little weirdly paced, but that's not so important when they're intended for children. I could absolutely imagine reading these stories to my nieces before bed, and I fully intend to buy them a copy of this book once it's released.

The biggest thing that jumped out to me in this book was the character development. It's hard in tie-in novels, particularly those set between a movie and its sequel because you can't change too much of significance without either the book or the movie being made incoherent by the next movie release. Resistance Reborn, in my opinion, handled it really well. I'd definitely call this a Poe Dameron novel. It covers a few different characters, but his development arc is the one that really draws you in, and it's the one that ties this book to both The Last Jedi and to Rise of Skywalker. Rey is a minor character in this novel, but I'm happy with that. The movies tell Rey's story, so it's nice to see the people of the Resistance that we miss in the movies.

The main plot of this book is simple enough, as I'd expect from a novel tying in two movies, and its simplicity is beautiful because it lets the characters really shine. The Resistance needs support, and is looking for leaders to help turn more and more people to their cause. But the allies Leia was expecting to find are silent or missing, so Poe is on a mission to find out what's happened to them. But Poe, brilliant Poe, is still reeling from The Last Jedi. He's learning to take responsibility for his actions, and the way his decision led to a lot of deaths during the attack on the Dreadnought. It's about Poe learning to process his grief, and how his found-family within the Resistance can help him with that.

Throughout the book we see lots of familiar names drawn from different parts of the Star Wars canon, but we see new characters too. Bless Rebecca Roanhorse for all of her additions, honestly. Teza especially, delights. She's a woc, an ex-Imperial warlord turned Black Squadron bad-ass, and I love her. Roanhorse also wrote the existing characters really, really well. Poe felt perfectly written (I could hear Oscar Isaac in my head, I swear) and the strength she gave Leia in her writing was beautiful. It was perfectly Leia.

There were a few fleeting FinnPoe moments that I thoroughly enjoyed, but, well. We knew we weren't going to get much from the franchise in this regard, so I'll take what I can get. There's a conversation about Finn's 'just friends' that makes me laugh every time I think about it.

One of the main things that jumped out at me with this book is that it felt like a side-quest. That's the case with a lot of Star Wars novels, to keep the movie canon coherent, but where Resistance Reborn (above) handled it well, this one just felt like nothing happened? The plot was fine, I guess, but there wasn't any development. No background development, no First Order development, and definitely no character development. Honestly? It annoyed the shit out of me.

This is supposed to bridge the gap between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. Not that you'd know that until page 141 of this 224 page book. Two thirds of the way in before there's any acknowledgement! At all! References to The Last Jedi are so infrequent I actually kept track. It happened three times. Three. Page 141, page 179 and page 203. Honestly, if Rose wasn't one of the main characters in this story I would genuinely insist that this book was set after The Force Awakens and had been mislabelled. Especially when they talked about expecting back up - the point of The Last Jedi's ending was that they were all alone. Who is this back up?

There's the hill I'm apparently going to die on, too, which is that kids can have a little violence in their books. The Star Wars movies are violent. People die, people get hit with blasters and don't get up again. If a kid can watch a movie in which Poe Dameron explodes a TIE fighter with the pilot still inside, they can read a book in which Poe Dameron blasts someone in a fire fight. There's a point in this book where Poe knocked someone out in the middle of combat and stopped to disable their blaster. Who the hell has time for that during a fire fight. It was so ridiculous it knocked me right out of the book for a minute. I wrote in my notes that I could let this go, but since then I've read other kids books that have handled violence really well, and you know what? I can't let this go. This avoiding violence to the point of pantomimery shit is so annoying, and it does not tonally match a series where several characters get their HANDS CUT OFF at all.

It's not just the violence that is massively oversimplified. I fully believe that children can understand morally grey characters. One of the major themes in Star Wars is the dark and the light and the space in between. Redemption, and forgiveness. So why is this book so black and white? Rey coming out of The Last Jedi is a conflicted character. She saw light in Ben Solo, and darkness in Kylo Ren and she's coming to terms with them. So whyyyy the hellll does she sound like Rey from The Force Awakens in this book? She talks about him like he's a monster, and like she's only ever heard rumours of him. Where is the woman who threw hands with Luke Skywalker halfway through The Last Jedi? I would just love some character complexity, and it felt like the character development in this book was going backwards. Treating kids like they can't understand complexities in character motivations is pretty patronising. Poe felt out of character for most of the book too, and there was no mention of where Finn was or why he wasn't there. I'm not convinced he was even mentioned during the story.

The plot was fine, and I'm sure children would probably still enjoy this, but honestly? Buy them a better Star Wars story, they deserve it.

"Ben Solo had sought to abandon everything he had been, even casting aside his name. But Luke sensed that Kylo Ren was just a shell around the same broken boy he had tried so hard to reach."

It's hard to sum up my thoughts about this book. I mean, it was okay? I loved The Last Jedi from the first time I saw it. Yes, it was definitely a flawed movie, but I enjoy watching it and it's still one of my favourite movies to curl up and watch. This was a solid novelisation, and it added to the movie in ways that were definitely needed. It just didn't blow me away or anything. I don't think I'll write a full review for this one, mostly because I don't have a lot to say. The Last Jedi novelisation was, unsurprisingly, exactly what it says on the tin. I'm glad I read this, as it expands a little on the backgrounds of some characters who were side-lined by the movie trilogy, but overall it was just fine. If you loved The Last Jedi, or you want to read more about TLJ characters, or you want to be overcome with strong Ben Solo feelings, then this is a must read.

3.5 stars. May write a review for this at some point who knooooowssss.

Full review: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/renegades-by-marissa-meyer-review-renegades-1/

I was pretty sure I was going to love this series on principle. I’m a big sucker for superhero stories, I love villains more than is sane or healthy and, as everyone who has ever heard me open my mouth or twitter knows, enemies-to-lovers is my shit. I have also read enough cheesy Steve Rogers/Tony Stark fanfiction in my time that I go wild for the identity porn trope. So when I read about the Nova/Adrian/Nightmare/Sentinel/Insomnia/Sketch chaos, I was sold. Once the whole trilogy was out (or so I thought) I picked up Renegades and Archenemies from my local library and settled in to devour them. Only the trilogy wasn’t all out in the UK, I’m a fool, and I ended up getting a copy of Supernova shipped over to me because I couldn’t physically wait to read it.

The premise of this series is simple, the reality of it is twisty as hell. Nova is part of the supervillain team the Anarchists, who were forced underground after their leader Ace Anarchy was killed in a huge battle between the Anarchists and their superhero counterparts – the Renegades. Nova is the youngest of this team, young enough that the Renegades aren’t looking for her and after an assassination attempt on the Renegade leader Captain Chromium goes awry, it seems like the only way to complete their mission is for her to join the Renegades under a new name.

There’s a lot I can’t and won’t go into in a book review, because I don’t want to ruin some of the moments in this story that made me genuinely gasp out loud, but Renegades is a strong first entry into a new series, setting up overarching plot threads that are left unanswered, ready for the next book. I’m glad I read these once the series was complete, though, because I think I would have found it infinitely frustrating to have some of these plot-threads seemingly abandoned. (I’ve read all three books, they definitely aren’t abandoned and Marissa Meyer has the overarching series structure of a genius, okay). The story itself was well-paced and I was constantly hungry for more information, more clues and just a little bit more drama. It was always delivered. I loved this story, and it ended on a cliffhanger so good that I had to stop and reread the last chapter one more time.

The real strength of this series is its world-building. Superpowers as a concept can be very, very overdone by now, but Marissa Meyer uses old and new superhero stereotypes to create a society that is both familiar and different enough to be interesting. It throws a lot of references back to traditional superhero ideas, and I think that’s good – it’s a genre that’s so ingrained in pop-culture that it would seem strange not to pay respect to it – but Renegades stands on its own too. I particularly like the way that these powers are manifested. So often in superhero media, we track an origin story back to a single traumatic incident. The Renegades world pays its dues to that tradition, and prodigies can be made as a reaction to trauma. But they can also be born too, with their powers a natural part of human evolution.

I also love the society collapse that Marissa Meyer has envisioned. Renegades is set in a world recovering from a near apocalypse. There are the leftover signs of a society forced into crime and chaos, where being powered or being able to barter were the only ways to survive, and I like seeing this recovery stage. I’ve read a lot of books about a society in collapse, it was nice to see a society rebuilding and the complications that brings. The ‘apocalypse’ society breakdown was caused by the Anarchists rising up and overthrowing a society that discriminated against prodigies, and every character had different and complicated motivations. Some of the villains were truly creepy, but they still had firm motivations. Nova’s motivations always made sense which was important to me with a morally-grey protagonist.

Full review: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/archenemies-by-marissa-meyer-review-renegades-2/

I have to admit that Archenemies was a weaker series entry than Renegades or Supernova. Writing this after finishing the series, it's hard to separate out the events of Archenemies from the later book. I ended up making a list of things I remembered post-Renegades and splitting them until I remembered where Archenemies ended. I'd say that's because I marathon-read these books, but I had a week's break between the two and I really do think that Archenemies suffered a bit with middle-book filler. Note that I still gave it 5 stars, though, because it really, really, picks up in the second half.

I think the reason I prefer Renegades is that it was very action-driven. I usually care more about characters than plot, but Archenemies went a little bit too far the other way. After Renegades left us on the cliff-hanger that Ace had been alive the whole time, it's basically not discussed for ages. The other plot threads left at the end of Renegades, like Adrian's mother's murder, were left alone too and it just felt a little bit strange after how exciting the end of book one was. The first two thirds of Archenemies were slower, and while I enjoyed the character moments I think they could have been more concise. It was so good to see Adrian and Nova's relationship develop, and to see brotherly moments between Adrian and Max, but I wanted a little more punchy action or superhero drama - even a patrol sub-plot would have helped. It meant that Archenemies was slow through the middle, drawn out in character development that wasn't moving the plot along, before it picked up hard in the last third of the book. It just would have been nice to have the character development and the plot move along together.

The ending though, holy wow. There was so much left up in the air at the end of Archenemies. I only had to wait a week for my copy of Supernova to show up so that I could read on, but I feel for anyone who had to wait a full year to read the resolution to this series. It felt like everything had gone wrong that could possibly go wrong at the end of this book, and like Supernova had to start explosively. There is a lot to be resolved in Supernova, a lot and things are bound to be intense. Nova has definitely thrown caution to the wind, and I was nearly feral with excitement by the time I hit the last page.

The only other thing I can say without flooding the review with spoilers is that the Renegades? They need to chill, holy fuck. One of the major aspects of Archenemies was 'Agent N', which I won't discuss in much detail because this is a spoiler-free review. Agent N made me repeatedly say 'what the FUCK' out loud. Just a quick little side-slide into crimes against humanity, prisoner experimentation and punishment without trial in my superheroes? Y'all are being villainous as hell, Renegades, pack it in if you want to be the 'good guys'.