A decidedly clever story that plays with a number of conventions (portal fantasies, lost parents, confused adolescents) without ever falling into the realm of the overly predictable and frustratingly inaccurate. Will definitely be hunting down the sequel.

This was a very solid YA fantasy novel; it hit all the right notes and I enjoyed the attention to statecraft and not merely treating the main characters well, but focusing on larger political problems. The cynic in me thinks that things worked out surprisingly well, but the rest of me is pleased with how Golding negotiated between the implicit promise that everything will work out okay and the intricacies of politics.
A book that made Shabbat go by faster. And, really, is there any more to ask?

A Dena recommendation, which is what happens when you go to the briars with your sister.
I liked everything about this book except the main character, who admittedly grew on me, but frustrated me for most of the book since it seemed as though he plot was predicated on her making the worst choices possible.
Still, the story itself and the combination of real-world politics and fantasy was very well done.

This is another one of those books that I fell in love with as a kid and reread periodically...at the end of another semester of grad school, usually. This series is Duane's best...imho. It's everything that clever, funny and earnest speculative fiction should be. It's also the only series that has ever made me want to own a cat.

I love Brennan's dialogue. She is one of the reigning queens of snark and her books are so much fun to read. Also, she's riffing on the gothic novel. What is there not to like?

I was pretty sure I would enjoy this, based on how much I liked Lord's other book that I've read, and was not disappointed. It's a brilliant mix of myth and fantasy and just good old storytelling.

Oh, this was a really good book! Interesting and clever and well-written with excellent characters and not set on either the East Coast or the West Coast of the US (Europe! It too is a thing!). And the plot was nicely unpredictable - I saw very little of it coming. Also, A+ for mythological references. I really liked this one (and I had the sense to take the second book out at the same time as the first...).

This is a 3 star book for Sarah Rees Brennan, if that makes sense. It's not that the book wasn't good or enjoyable or clever or that the characters have gotten any less brilliant or witty since the first book. But it felt very much like, well, like the second book in a trilogy that exists to tie together books 1 and 3. Things happened because they needed to happen to advance the story, but sometimes they felt like they took too long or didn't hang together as flawlessly as I expect.
The romance, for example, had so many false starts and repeats of the same mistake that I wasn't as excited as I wanted to be when it finally worked out.
That's the problem when you consistently write really excellent books, writing a good book leaves me disappointed.
Still planning to read the third, though. I need to know how it ends!

Still have mixed emotions about Affect Theory AS a thing that crossed literary and psychological spaces AS such. It feels like it's being co-opted to mean too many things and falls in to the same pitfalls that Deleuze and Gauttari often do by taking "as-if" to mean "is".