I only listened to the audiobook because Carrie Hope Fletcher narrated it and in the end of my ALW Cinderella obsession I saved it at the library to see if she's any good as an audiobook narrator. As someone who struggles with audiobooks and usually slogs through these types of contemporary novels, I enjoyed this quite a lot. As with any audiobook, I do zone out trying to imagine the scenes and turn my ears off so I miss parts and going back to relisten to them breaks the immersion (my hate for audiobooks is not a topic for this review but take things with a grain of salt they do not jell with my brain at all).

Carrie was so good she made the other narrator seem even worse, which is probably my only criticism. Did not like the male MC's POV because I did not like the narrator. 

I appreciated the relationship not being toxic, and it's a big sad that this is a noteworthy win for a romance book. I also appreciate that there are a bunch of subplots going on because it makes it feel a lot more real and lived in. Atmospheric. Made the characters very vibrate.

Another win: while I was struggling to pay attention to the audiobook, I did have moments where I zone out with the little movie playing in my head, imagining the scenes. This is slightly problematic as I mentioned before this makes me turn my ears off but normally this only happens with books I enjoy and I rarely have this happen with audiobooks, even if I've read and loved the book in a physical format. 

This is very well-themed. 

I don't know how to review a cookbook, but I read over a few recipes and they're detailed enough I think I can make something out of this so that's a plus. I like the variety between fruit, savoury, and sweet pies since I've always preferred savoury pies and am very picky over dessert pies. Very excited to make these for people's birthdays this summer.

This series is just as good as I remember it being when I was 11. I wish I'd been able to hunt down a copy of this when I was that age because I would have been feral over it. Quality series right here.

I don't think Maguire is a good world-builder. He is a character author. There are a bit too many "world-building" elements in the book, usually offhand comments about some random thing that sounds vaguely Ozian but has no actual consequence on the plot nor do they do anything to make Oz feel like a lived-in vibrant place. In this vein, the names were getting to me. There seems to be no explainable aiming convention. Some names feel like they fit as they capture the whimsy of the original story, however, Maguire's writing is not whimsical whatsoever, so it creates tonal conflict, especially when some people have very believable names and others are called something silly. If there were more consistency between the different cultures and the naming conventions this would have been a strong point to help distinguish between all the different peoples of Oz. 

 

This book differs from the previous two installments (and I will admit I read both of those before I started Goodreads, so well over six years ago when I was certainly too young) in that the structure has changed completely and we are no longer following the Thropp family. Much like “A Column of Fire” by Ken Follet, I don’t think such a dramatic change in style benefits the series as people, like myself, who were fans of the first two installments can get put off by this. It’s better suited to a spin off in my opinion. I wouldn’t say that necessarily makes a book bad, but I’ve always found those types of shifts jarring when it happens in the middle of a series. 

 

Unfortunately, the first 75% of this book feels boring and inconsequential. We follow the Lion, Brrr, and some other characters who drift in and out of the plot as ponder about the events of the past two books. The total change in structure means the reader has little connection to Brrr and is merely invested in the story insomuch as they are invested in finding out what happens to Liir. Frankly I did not enjoy Brrr as a character and he was vastly overshadowed by his supporting characters like Yackle. There’s a long interlude with a talking bear that felt pointless and made me notice from the start how off the world building feels. I know there are politics around talking animals, but for the life of me I can’t tell you what that means. I think I was substituting in the politics from Narnia since I had nothing concrete for Oz. 

 

I still don’t quite understand why this book is about Brrr and I think that’s what bugging me the most. This entire series feels like an afterthought, this book I particular. It does not feel like this was planned out as a series from day one, and I felt like this book spent a lot of time trying to justify the series a whole instead of being interesting. It spent a lot of time rehashing old plot information from the first two novels and justifying them instead of moving the series a whole forward. That last 25% was the best part of the book. It was the only part of the book that kept me reading late until I finished the entire thing. Yet the first 75% is an inconsequential drag that I was so tempted to DNF save for the fact I knew that the ending had something important to the rest of the series. I just wish we had a better path to get here because reading that felt like a chore. 

Interesting premise, bad execution/wrong medium.

The interview style of this book is not doing it for me. It feels like the character work authors do to better understand their characters, not what you publish in a book. I keep wondering who this interview is and why they're so unprofessional before I get bored by the non-giant robot related life details about characters that have zero development. Stop telling me all this stuff. Show it to me. Write a book. This is a book, but it feels like character worksheets. 

There is a mysterious giant robot that may or may not be alien and we aren't living in the moment with the characters. We are getting their final statements on the matrer. Maybe the author intended for us to feel like we are sifting through files trying to find out what really happened, but even that sort of story need and anchor and framing device which we don't have. This should have been a TV series if this is how the author wanted to tell the story, it does not work as a book.

Very different from the film! Maybe almost a prequel? That will depend on where the 2nd boom goes for sure. 

I never got into this series when it came out despite wanting to read it, my local library never picked it up and I never saw it pass through second hand stores, so I'm very past the target age group. I do wonder what I would have thought if I'd originally read it as a pre-teen early teen, since I was into Ever After High and School for Good and Evil. 

It was very enjoyable, but what did bother me were the villain parent. Lady Tremaine felt off, she never struck me as someone wantonly evil per se. All of the villains are underdeveloped characters who's main quality is evil to point of not even loving their children. Though I will concierge this is probably better suited for a target audience, but I was thinking the boom would be much more interesting if the parents were trying to be good parents, but utterly fail becuase they simply can't/don't know how. I felt like the struggle between wanting to be good and having to do evil wasn't the best executed either, but other than that I enjoyed thia read a lot andnplan on finishing the series. 

I'm curious how this will go given how different from the films it is. Currently, I like the series more than the films. There is lot more going on in terms of politics in both the Isle and the Kingdom. And I like the authors writing style. It does feel a bit like to story is being told to me by a narrator, however, I think that works well for the target audience and in the context of the book. Gives it a bit of charm. 

perfectly mediocre. 

I don't want to be mean in saying that, but everything about this book has been done better. For a debut, it's good, but it needed more work. The writing style was basic (I will say it was much better in the snippet of the next boom which makes me slightly more inclined to continue with the series), the characters felt a bit flat, lacking some depth and nuance, and in trying to set this book in Scotland instead of a fictitious world, the author created a lot of problems for herself. First, it was hard to place the time period as the silhouettes of the skirts described do not line up with the early 1900s, despite all other clues (electricity and locomotives) suggesting that is when this takes place. If the faeries end up instigating WWI in the next book I'll let this slide, but historical fantasty was not the right move. 

I think this would be a good introduction to fantasy for a newer reader of the genera, as it has a lot of very popular tropes. They were all surface level and not overly developed, but not terribly executed either. It's one of those books where you sit there thinking oh if these few things were tweaked or changed this wiild be an easy 4 or 5 Star read because there is honeslty nothing wrong with the book, it's just painfully mediocre at times and struggled to stand out in any meaningful way. This was published in 2014 before we had such a great fantasy boom, so I'm not sure it woild recieve the attention it got back then if it was published today.

I do think trying to set this in historic Scotland is what truly limited this book's potential. I  an alternative world, it could be well known that faeries are doing their faeries business, thus creating new challenges for the MC to keep her faerie murdering under wraps. Also, I think having a generic monster would have been better than faeries, it seemed so out of place at times save for the fact that it's in Scotland and that's the place of faerie stories. That also could have pushed the author to develop the monsters a bit more, as the faeries felt very monolithic despite attempts to make different types and ranks of faeries. It never felt truly clear what the real threat was besides them killing people and having some powers. 

I have a lot to say about how the MC was trained to do this battle as well. A lot of it would be solved if the characters weren't so flat. It makes it hard to see why Kiaran is even bothering with the MC when she is so Vengeful and clearly unable to overcome it, and the reasoning feel like a cop out. It makes the end battle feel unearned in my opinion. 

All of these are more symptoms of mediocrity, because nothing felt bad per se, just not particularly good either. It's a good foundation, however, you can't live in a foundation, you need to finish your house. 

Another absolute win by Leigh Bardugo. This is making me think I need to read Nonth House again because maybe I was too stressed out to enjoy it properly. 

There are some murky patellels that can be drawn with Shadow and Bone that truly show off how much the author and grown and improved in her craft since her debut. All the character jump off the page vividly in this book. I never knew where it was going. Characters I assumed woild take more of background role carried so much emotional weight in the plot. Every single chapter felt like some new twist happened, weaving the story like a tapestry before me. 

Could not put this book down. Recently I've been picky about what I choose to read and I was on the edge about this, but it was phenomenal. Had me gripped from the opening and it delivered. She's writing new legends.