mariebrunelm's Reviews (478)

Looking for something to read after watching The Rings of Power? Look no further. Brian Sibley has gathered together all of Tolkien's manuscripts relating to the Second Age of Middle-earth in one beautiful volume. All the texts had been published here and there before, whether in The Silmarillion, some of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien's letters or other sources, but they are here organised in chronological order of events to paint the most precise picture of Númenor's history possible.

If you are a Tolkien specialist and already have read everything on the subject, this book is still worth it because of the ton of drawings and the stunning watercolours Alan Lee provided. Since the book is cut into a myriad of chapters, the artist seized this opportunity to fill every blank space with a picture and the result really is gorgeous.

If you've just been introduced to Tolkien through the Rings of Power series, this might be as good place to start as The Lord of the Rings because you're on roughly familiar grounds, at least with the characters involved if not for their narrative arcs. 

This is such a sweet, sweet story. Not without its darkness, but filled with a lot of light and served by a gorgeous edition.
Elatsoe, known as Ellie, is a fierce advocate for life in all its forms. Her best friend Kirby is the ghost of her dog, whom she can summon in a heartbeat. Her ties with the underworld had been limited to play time, but when oen day Kirby howls with anguish and Ellie's cousin is found dead on the other side of Texas, Ellie is determined to do everything in her power to bring justice to him.
This YA urban fantasy adventure is super lovely despite the dark themes it tackles. It came with a lot of hype for me, but its reputation was totally deserved and I loved following Ellie and Kirby on their quest. This edition has stunning chapter headings illustrated by Rovina Cai, and has deckled edges (if that's how you say it), which means that the paper is extra soft under your fingers.
Rep: brown, asexual Lipan Apache MC.

How much pain & heartbreak can someone endure? This is one of the darkest books in Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings universe. Fool's Fate is the second volume in The Fitz and the Fool Trilogy, the last trilogy if you read all of them chronologically, and in this she ties together many, many strands weaved over the course of her other trilogies. I won't spoil you with the specifics of this novel. I will just tell you that when you think Fitz could not be worse, Hobb finds a way to hurt him a little bit more. But it's not about grand events or heroism. This is an aged man riddles with regrets and trying to repair the harm he may or may not have done. As with Hobb's other books it can be agonizingly slow, and yet it would be disrespectful to Fitz to hurry in the telling of his tale of woes. 
Rep : gender fluid / non-binary characters

Donato Giancola may not be one of the Big Three (the three illustrators published by HarperCollins since the 1990s and delighting us for just as long - Alan Lee, John Howe, Ted Nasmith), but his art is just as enchanting. His classical training gives his painting a historical feel: some of them might have been painted centuries ago, which is a compliment. But they always stand out because of an original point of view, or a character's poignant expression. His art book offers a range of paintings and drawings, all of the latter being pencil sketches on brown paper with white highlights, aka my favourite type of drawings because of the life and the dynamism it gives to the scene. Giancola really is a master and although the book is short on text, his pictures really do speak for themselves. 

I picked up this one because I'd seen so much potential in Ancrum's short story The Legend of the Golden Raven. I read the blurb of The Weight of the Stars but somehow assumed it was Sci-fi when it's much more contemporary with a hint of Sci-fi. But what it is mainly is a book bursting with heart. 

Ryann Bird is what you'd call a difficult student. Outwardly she doesn't really care about any of it, except for the group of misfits she's brought together and watches over fiercely. Then a new student walks in. Alexandria is the angriest person Ryann has ever met. So of course the latter agrees to keep an eye on the former. What she didn't expect was for Alexandria to reach to the stars with as much longing as Ryann does.

This book goes from dark to light and back to a darkness that's shot with so much light. You can't help but care deeply for this weird found family and hope they turn out OK. It's an extremely readable book because the chapters are so short you just keep reading one more, knowing your heart is more and more likely to be squeezed tight. Especially when the story starts to get Interstellar vibes. And the emotion kept bubbling up until my eyes were very wet by the end, which is rare enough to note.

Rep: bi MC, black SC, non-speaking SC, and on the whole a bunch of diverse & queer characters. 

Après la brique qu'était Palin bad Heroines, j'ai voulu une lecture courte et relativement mignonne, donc j'ai choisi ce livre jeunesse qui s'est révélé court et... relativement mignon, mais aussi profond.

L'éveil des sorcières s'ouvre quand Nora, collégienne, déclenche un tremblement de terre dans le couloir de son collège. Enfin, elle est presque sure que c'est elle. Mais c'est possible, ça, de déclencher des tremblements de terre? Eh bien, si on est une sorcière, oui! Mais que faire de ces nouveaux pouvoirs? Et si Nora en profitait pour mettre fin à l'horrible jeu auquel se prêtent certains garçons qui se croient tout permis?

D'une trame assez simple, Cordélia a tiré un court roman efficace, entraînant, avec des personnages attachants et un message très pédagogique sans être lourd. A mettre en toutes les mains!

Rep : héroïne grosse avec deux papas, dont un d'origine Mexicaine-Américaine.

CW : harcèlement, sexisme, grossophobie, mentions d'Harry Potter. 

Plain Bad Heroines (PBH) came with a host of Instagram friends' recommendations, which made me wary because of the hype. But what a delight when, a few dozen pages in, I realised the hype was completely justified! 
PBH follows two main timelines of sapphic women caught in the webs woven by a book and the deaths it seems to have inspired. In 1902 three girls are found dead at B's school for girls. The cause seems to be an attack of yellow jackets, but the girls' morbid obsession with Mary MacLane's diary throws a shade over this simple explanation. 
Today between Hollywood and Rhode Island, writers and actresses become embroiled in a movie project with a twist.
This was a festival of sapphic extravaganza, mysteries, a touch of dark academia and a very sarcastic narrator. I loved every page of it and savoured the gorgeous edition I found second-hand, complete with illustrations. A new favourite! 
Rep: Sapphic relationship. 

This book is far, far away from mine, but since it was personally recommended to me by a friend I did not have second thoughts.

We are plunged in Montréal following a mostly unnamed protagonist surviving from one pay check to the next, paychecks he can't help but feed into the slot machines.

This book is a ride. It's loud and vibrant and mind-blowing. The prose grabs you in a couple of sentences and doesn't let go, which makes the book easy to read although it's not an easy read in terms of themes. I very much enjoyed the Québec idioms, which I didn't always understand but which coloured the text immensely. I didn't particularly feel for any character, but I was absolutely hooked and kept reading with a sort of fascinated horror. If you're not afraid of dark books and are looking for some literary fiction, let me recommend this. 

This book had been tempting me for a very long time. As soon as I heard baker + ace rep, I was sold. But of course a book isn't a series of boxes to tick, and this one is so very charming. It's part mystery, part detective story, part romance (but very light), with witches and thieves, all in a fast-paced narrative wrapped in a very cozy atmosphere. It sounds a lot but it's actually not hard to follow. Despite numerous secondary characters, I was never lost and enjoyed myself immensely.

In Baker Thief, we meet Adèle, who has just been recruited as a police officer after being shooed from her last position because she was too nosy and too bent on unearthing corruption scandals. On the night before her first day, her appartment is broken into by a purple-haired thief with unnatural speed and way too much sass. Our other main character is Claude, the owner of the bakery where Adèle likes to pop by every morning for a cup of coffee and a croissant fresh from the oven. Little does she know the relation between her new favourite baker and the thief...

The author is very vocal about LGBTQIA+ identities in this book. Contrary to those stories in which us queer readers are left looking for scraps, here everyone is clearly labelled. At first I wasn't especially sure about this idea of putting everyone in a box, but after thinking about it, it's nice of the author to make a definite space for everyone in this book. It makes it especially comforting for queer readers, but also quite educational for cis-het readers.

Last but not least, the author includes a full list of trigger warnings at the beginning of the book, with all the chapters concerned by each trigger.

Rep: demisexual MC with a condition close to asthma, brown aromantic fat genderfluid MC. Most secondary characters are queer as well, including two using neo-pronouns (ne/nem and ol/ols). 

What happens when you mix sci-fi and fantasy? You get this book which had kind of similar vibes to Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children and perhaps Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell if you squint a lot, but I haven't actually finished that one so I may be completely wrong. What a great way to start a review, don't you think?

All the Birds in the Sky opens with Patricia and Laurence, two solitary kids who embody two sides of what other people can't fathom: witchcraft for Patricia, sci-fi for Laurence. But just as Patricia's story was getting started as she discovered she might have magic powers, she loses them and her journey is forced to pause. As for Laurence, his path may seem a little more straight-forward, but that's without his parents endeavouring to make sure he goes back to being a "normal" child. And yet the two can't help but meet each other again and again over the years, as their abilities take them in very different directions and shape the world around them.

This was such a peculiar book. I'm not entirely sure I got it because it kept evading me and slipping from my grasp. It *is* quite charming, and I would heartily recommend it, but it's also messy and complicated on a surface level, which to me successfully mirrors how life gets messy and can look complicated when at the core it's sometimes not really. I didn't exactly know what to expect going into this book because I didn't pay a lot of attention to the blurb. I certainly wasn't expecting it to have so many different ingredients - sci-fi, magic, a sprinkle of dark academia, romance, found family, and an apocalypse thrown in for good measure. I'm not entirely sure it works, to be fair. But it is charming and it has a lot of heart.

Rep : bi MC, queer-friendly narrative.