Oh, I adored this book. It was The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland and Coraline all in one. Valente is an excellent narrator with a sure grip on the cadence of Victorian storytelling, the art of the fairy tale and the narrative voice of young adult literature. She's pitch perfect throughout the story.
The Girl... is one of those books that knows all the tropes and puts them to great use, often at slightly odd angles to the way in which one is used to them. Having read Baum, Carroll, Gaiman and other masters of the children's fairy story, I can appreciate just how great a handle Valente has on her material and just how deft a touch she uses in making it her own.
I haven't read a book that I would describe as "perfect" in a while, but this definitely qualifies.
Alright, I'm done gushing now.

A fun book, surprisingly light on the technical details, but perhaps that's what makes it fun. Duane's vision of coding and hacking as an MMORPG of its own is intriguing and what it lacks in realism it makes up in good storytelling.
Her characters are very relatable and her plotting is very well done. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

And thus concludes my "I finally got around to reading the Hunger Games".
I think I feel better for it.
Having read them in fairly quick succession, I find myself picking up on Collins writing tics and tendencies to rely on chapter-ending cliffhangers A LOT. It does get annoying.
Also, and I don't know it, it takes me about a fifth of each book before I actually care about what's going on; mostly because Katniss sulking is annoying and frustrating and we all know she's going to step it up so her internal drama just ends up taking up space and doesn't really build her character because she does it over and over again (It reminds me of Rand al Thor, although thankfully, not as interminable).
Otherwise, well, it was a pretty well-handled story and I thought Collins did a good job not pulling punches. I can see why the series worked; it has that compelling drive in it that I associate with the Harry Potter books of "I have to finish this now!" which explains a lot of its success to me.
Spoiler alert:
Really? It's a brave new world and we HAVE to marry off our two broken heroes? We couldn't just leave them broken? We had to bring back the beyond-crazily altruistic Peeta? Sorry, that bothers me and I don't know why. I think I would have preferred it without the epilogue. Everyone knows that the hero never returns and Frodo cannot stay in the Shire. I wonder why Katniss can.

I really enjoyed this book and I think that Mantel does a brilliant job making Cromwell a deeply sympathetic and fully alive character.
Oddly enough, I think my experience of reading this book suffered from being so late to the party. I mean, it was a really good book. But it wasn't the greatest thing ever written in the English language.
Which is not to say that I won't be devouring the sequel as soon as I can. Just that exams are, apparently, detrimental to my ability to appreciate books in a timely fashion.

There's no star amount for "eh, it wasn't bad. I finished it and will probably read the sequel" although, possibly more in the hope that something interesting and unpredictable will happen to the characters.
That was my biggest problem with the story - from the first page to the last, I could predict every single plot twist. The characters could have been interesting (though many were familiar archetypes with little of their own three dimensionality) but she just never came out and surprised me.
So, certainly not a bad book, but nothing to write home about.

This series was one of the books on my unofficial "to read" list since right around when exam period began. I'd discovered Aliette de Bodard through her short fiction (her recent novella won the Nebula this year) and, even there, her ability to convey a sense of place and world in her fiction is mesmerizing. She has a sense for what the reader needs to make people-as-members-of-a-culture seem real and she gives her characters a history. One of the things I look for in fantasy is a sense that the world built by the author is one that feels real and plausible and, by grounding her fantasy in Aztec culture, de Bodard definitely succeeds (and, I've said this before, it's so nice to read something beyond badly-researched, generic European setting).
But make no mistake, Servant of the Underworld will be very familiar to fantasy readers. De Bodard's plot draws heavily on the mystery tradition as well as the magical but, in the end, she has told that timeless story of the reluctant hero on a quest to keep things from getting worse and who is asked, in the end, to save both the world and himself. She tells it well and I very much enjoyed reading it. I look forward to the next book in the series and am curious to see whether she will continue to play with old tropes or try something new. I kinda hope for the latter, but would cheerfully read the former as well.
I mean, Aztec fantasy noir? What's not to like?