“Tearing something down isn't the end; doing something great, or better, something right, is.”

Wildcard by Marie Lu is the sequel and finale to Warcross, Lu’s 2017 sci-fi hit. It continues Emika’s story after the thrilling and surprising events of Warcross, revealing new allies, enemies, and secrets, and continuing the premise that not everything is as it seems in the tech world of Emika and her friends.

I wasn’t sure when I’d get around to reading Wildcard, as I didn’t end up preordering nor had plans to buy it soon, but when I saw it available on Libby from my library I snatched it up right away! Warcross was a quick read and I expected its sequel to follow the same pattern, and I needed a quick read right then. My reading friends were kind of split on whether they thought it was a decent sequel/conclusion, so I went in not really sure what to expect from it, and in the end, I’m kind of stuck in the middle.

My biggest issues were all with the first 60% of the book. There was nothing inherently wrong with it, no specific writing, character, or plot issues, it just felt like something was missing. The spark that Warcross had simply didn’t exist in the first half of the book for me, and I didn’t feel truly connected with the story. It zoomed by so quickly and so fast, that it forgot to take me along with it. I was reading the story and understanding the events and how all these pieces fit together, but I wasn’t connected, invested, in what that all meant. Most books grab you and that world takes over your own for a while, but that didn’t happen right away here, and for a sequel, it was a bit disappointing. I just plain didn’t care for the first part.

When the ending started really kicking in, and things were finally coming together and starting to make sense, I finally found the spark again, the reason I loved Warcross and Emika and all the others. I found the way things ended to be a perfect conclusion, both how the immediate plot was wrapped up as well as the distant future explained. But it just wasn’t enough to fully save the reading experience for me, and that’s why this book is only getting 3 of the 5 golden stars.

After reflecting, I’m more able to pinpoint the specific problems with the book that may have caused my original distance and why the final portion drew me back in. We spend the beginning portion of the book with fairly shallow feeling characters, as I never felt like Emika’s Warcross team and other friends ever got enough build up to mean something to me. Of course, I cared what happened to them, but I wasn’t necessarily too interested either. When you add this to the new characters added in the beginning, it feels too much like an entire beginning, with characters you’re supposed to know and love but just don’t yet. It keeps you at a distance, like you don’t fit in this circle with these people. However, as the book goes on and you learn more about Sasuke and Jax, one of the new characters, a connection starts to be built again, and this is where I started getting into the book. This in addition to the increasingly larger role Hideo plays, the secondary character who received most build up in book 1, I started to feel more at home in the story, and thus enjoyed it more. It all just came a bit too late.

All in all, I don’t regret reading this series at all, and I’ll always read whatever Marie Lu writes next! I just wish I had gotten back into this faster, and been able to enjoy the ending to its fullest.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is Jesmyn Ward’s latest award-winning novel centered around poverty in the American South. Filled to the brim with the living ghosts of a not so dead past, Ward navigates the lines of family, race, and love, surprising readers with the brutally honest portrayal of a family divided. Wrapped up in Ward’s classic lyrical style, Sing, Unburied, Sing tackles these themes in a new way, a deep pain made accessible for every reader.

I always find it hard to rate novels I read for courses at university because I find I read them in a very different manner than when I’m reading as a hobby. That’s why you’ll never find a review for classics such as Wuthering Heights or modern literary fiction like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The mindset I’m reading in is more analytic, more critical, and I usually miss the opportunities to form a bond with the characters and judge a book on its entertainment merits. Sing, Unburied, Sing, while close to that mindset, deviates in the sense that the course I was reading it for wasn’t strictly academic. The focus of the reading was to find the marketable traits of the book, find what other readers can find in this book, a mindset that falls quite in line with my reviewing mindset.

However, Sing, Unburied, Sing is still a very hard book to rate based on the content alone. This is a novel centered heavily in pain and little in growth, and without Ward’s writing, the book would have been all doom and gloom. While there are small moments of redemption, the focus of the novel is still rooted in pain and in grief, emotions that I have never experienced on the level this book deals with. It made it hard to relate, but I still enjoyed the novel overall. Reading about experiences so different from my own always has its upsides, and I did know the darkness I was heading into beforehand.

This is a book that draws out discussion, especially around the characters. Most are posited on the line between good and evil, most of them carrying the guilt of this positioning along with them. Ward has created a large cast of complex characters, none of which you can wholeheartedly like but none you can fully hate either. It creates an interesting reading experience that keeps the reader on the fence and focused, constantly trying to pass a final judgment on the characters but never being able to.

The themes of the novel are also varied and full of depth, from the racism present in the biracial coupling/family of Leonie and Michael to the comments on the prison system of the US. This is a very political novel even if Ward never comes out and announces her opinion, only shows the truth through the eyes of the characters that have lived it. It is a novel full of layers, the heart of the novel hiding somewhere among all of them.

Lastly, this novel delves quite deeply into the idea of magical realism, using ghosts and an underlying sense of magic in the family to strengthen and deepen the themes and characters shown above. The ghosts are there to bring the past alive, to comment on the continuity of some issues as well as the continuity of some characters. There’s also a sense of magic and “witchcraft” in the matriarchy of Leonie’s family, one that seems to end with her. While this is never fully developed or explained, it exists enough for the reader to draw something extra from it, for it to contribute something, however small, to the novel overall.

All in all, I’m not going to say this was an enjoyable read. It was a painful one, an honest one, one that attempted to describe the depth of human experience and pain using lyrical language and magic. However, I can safely say that it is extremely deserving of the awards and prestige it has garnered, and I am not surprised at all that Ward won the National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017.

My Lovely Wife is about a couple that murders to bring sparks to their love life. It is a hobby that starts unintentionally, but after seeing how the hunt and thrill that comes with murder reignites their love-life, the husband and wife duo are convinced to keep on killing for fun. But when your hobbies are torture and murder, it’s easy to get carried away.

I picked up this book as a buddy read with two of the fellow mods over at The Book Coven, and while I was intrigued by the plot and story itself (especially seeing as I’ve been reading thrillers a bit more frequently lately), I still should have waited with reading this one. I just wasn’t in the right mood for a thriller I think, and it led to me not appreciating what was well done about this one. Additionally, it didn’t help that My Lovely Wife is a quite different set-up from what I expected from the synopsis. Specifically, it isn’t a duo that loves killing but rather a wife who gets off on control/is pleased by hurting others and a husband who is pretty passive and therefore kinda just goes along with whatever his wife wants. This passivity is probably what killed the book overall for me, along with the easy to guess twist.

Twists, to me, are one of the most important parts of thrillers. If I can guess it quite early on, my motivation to read on dies very quickly. Unfortunately, that happened here. While I didn’t guess the extent of the twist, I guessed a lot of the shocking twists and turns that led up to the final reveal, so it made all this ‘whaaaat?’ moments turn into ‘yea okay so I was right’ moments. From the other Goodreads reviews I’ve seen, it seems like a lot of people were able to guess this twist as well, so hopefully it is better hidden in future books!

The characters were also something that was hit or miss. Now, of course I didn’t like them as people, as you weren’t really supposed to, but there were some overbearing traits that frustrated me. Specifically, my issues were with the husband’s passivity, which led to some scenes and moments that were rather boring and monotone, especially near the end. However, I did like the relationship between the husband and wife and how the novel explored the dynamic there, as well as the rationalizing the husband constantly did in his head. It made for some very interesting scenes and inner monologues.

In connection with that, I also quite liked the writing style and the viewpoints it ended up providing. I’ve read books from the POV of victims and books from the POV of stalkers, but the husband falls somewhere in between the two, neither true villain to true victim. It also caused the ending to make me feel quite uneasy, as since I didn’t have a true opinion regarding the main character, I couldn’t decide how I really felt about how the story ended up ending. It’s still leaving me questioning.

Overall, I didn’t dislike this book at all. The “it was just ok” that goes with the two-star rating is very fitting for how I felt about this book, and while a lot of that was due to the timing of me reading this, I can’t blame my meh experience all on myself either. However, it seems like a lot of people still enjoyed this regardless of the predictable twist, so I would still recommend you at least give this book a shot.

Sorcery of Thorns is set in the magical land of Austermeer, where books and libraries hold most of the power - as well as most of the danger. Elisabeth is an orphan who has grown up in one of the country’s Great Libraries, home to deadliest of grimoires, and dreams to be a warden one day, one of the fierce protectors of libraries and their dangerous inhabitants. However, after an attack on her library ends in fatalities with Elisabeth as one of the main suspects, she is forced to question everything she knows about magic and her beloved libraries.

This book came at the absolute perfect time for me. There was a lull in fantasy and sci-fi books in my recent reading schedule and I found myself aching to be transported to another foreign land again, and my book club’s book choice this month finally gave me the chance to jump back into the genre. On top of that, Sorcery of Thorns hit almost all the marks for me to love it, and while my mood/desire to read something in the genre definitely contributed to my love, I feel like I would have greatly enjoyed this book regardless of when I read it.

It’s been a while since I’ve read Enchantment of Ravens (I can’t say I even remember the plot or character’s names…), so I didn’t have any remaining biases going from that book into this one. In general, I do think that Sorcery is more my thing than Enchantment was, and that’s partially due to the world and plot choices of the former, as while I love the fae, magical books and demons just speak more to me.

Generally, I will admit that this isn’t the perfect book. Some parts of the world and plot end up being quite shallow and lacking enough explanation, and some moments pass by too quickly and some things resolved too miraculously, but I believe most of that comes from the choice of having this book be a stand-alone. This story could have easily been spread over the course of a duology, which would have given more space to the world and story to be developed. However, I still enjoyed the stand-alone features of the novel, and am quite relieved I don’t have to wait a year to see Elisabeth’s story followed through. That, and I always believe we need more stand-alones in YA fantasy!

However, even with these shallow moments, I did end up quite enjoying the world that Rogerson built. There is a lot packed into this one book world, from a different demon dimension to a political history, finger-eating magic books to magic vs. anti-magic sentiment. Not all of these could be used to their fullest extent due to the confines of the story + lack of sequels, but the combination of all of them presented a full-fledged world nevertheless. It makes sense that there are more things going on in the world than can be dealt with in one 450 page story, and I found these background stories/world traits contributed to the undertones present in the story.

Where Rogerson truly shined was in her characters. While I’ll admit the main antagonist didn’t really intrigue me like most do, the characters we spend most of the story with were quite intriguing and exceptional. I ended up liking most of them, and the triangles and squares of friendships/relationships that are formed, quite quickly, which is important in a stand-alone novel. It strengthened the sometimes weak plot and made the ending itself more impactful and real, something that’s always important to me. It also kept me reading in lulls during the book, of which I’ll admit there were a few, as if I didn’t care much for the plot direction at that point I at least was learning more about the characters and seeing more of their interactions.

Overall, Sorcery strengthened my like of Rogerson’s novels and writing, and I will definitely be picking up whatever she writes next! This book has made me a permanent fan.

The Kiss Quotient follows Stella Lane, an econometrician with Asperger’s, and Michael Phan, a surprisingly kind escort Stella hires after deciding she needs more practice in the love department. Stella always imagined herself as a girl unable to enjoy romance, but after a few sessions with Michael, she’s starting to realize there’s a whole lot more to kissing, dating, and everything that comes after.

I probably went backward in order by reading The Bride Test first, but honestly, I’m kind of glad I did. This book seemed overall more up my alley, and that did end up being the case, and otherwise, I would have moved to The Bride Test and been even more disappointed. However, this book still wasn’t entirely my thing, though I did absolutely love the cute romance in this one.

The first hour/two hours spent reading this were fantastic, and I quickly become completely absorbed in the characters and story. I stupidly started this at midnight and found myself still reading 3 hours later. I should’ve just stayed up and finished it then because, for some reason, it lost some of its charm when I went back to it in the morning. This could be due to a ton of different reasons: my more awakened state, the time of day, splitting up the plot/story badly, etc. However, I overall just believe the last 30-40% of the book is weaker than the first half.

Most of this opinion comes from how abruptly things were resolved and then tied off. I guess I should have expected this from The Bride Test, where I had a similar issue, but I honestly kind of forgot the reading experience of that book. I was honestly just surprised when I finished the last chapter and flipped to the epilogue that took place months after. The resolution to the conflict also felt pretty weak and short, but I guess that’s partially due to the conflict hinging a lot on lack of communication/miscommunication/etc., as once the MCs actually start talking things come together real fast.

However, I did really like Michael and Stella, as well as their romance. While some moments in their perspectives got repetitive, I still felt like their ‘relationship’ was quite real, as well as their creation and growth as characters. Besides the miscommunication trope, I liked how their relationship progressed and how natural it felt + how cute it was. This is probably why I loved the first half much more than the second, as that hinged more on the growth of their relationship and focused on them getting to know each other. I guess I’m also just a sucky for tension.

Overall, I did really enjoy The Kiss Quotient, even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of how things wrapped up/how it progressed towards the end. I’ll definitely be trying Hoang’s other releases, as I really like the rep she has as well as the world she seems to be building within this family.

Heroine tells the raw and honest tale of Mickey’s slow descent into opioids after a terrible car accident leaves her in insurmountable amounts of pain right as the next softball season is coming up. Mickey is determined to heal before the season starts, but as her pain and the pressure increases, so does her dependence on Oxy. She quickly falls into a deepening spiral of need and regret, of pressure and pain, and Heroine explores every dark corner of it.

This book is not easy to read, but it was so so worth it. It honestly provides a whole other perspective on addiction, and it ultimately feels extremely realistic. It doesn’t hide the consequences of drugs nor glorify them, McGinnis just provides everything without too much focus on painting Mickey as either innocent or wrong.

First off, McGinnis did a fantastic job of making Mickey a fully fleshed and real character while still making her relatable/understandable. Her worries very quickly become our own, and we soon to rationalize her drug use right alongside her, as we just want to see her succeed too. It made the reading experience quite startling to step away from, as when you leave Mickey’s head, your perspective on her reasoning changes. You realize that there may be other ways to solve her issues than drugs, but when you’re in her head, it so easily becomes the only easy option, and you get why she goes down the path she does. It’s also terrifying, watching her slowly spiral further and further into the world of drugs, seeing her move to harder drugs as well as watch her rationalize more lying, more stealing, and more drug use. It’s overall quite eye-opening in terms of addicts, and it honestly gave me a whole new perspective on addiction and people who suffer from it.

The story also follows a realistic path in my opinion. The drug use isn’t sudden, and Mickey’s rationalization that it’s for everyone around her (in order to not let them down etc) sticks around a long time until she finally admits she’s an addict. There’s also minimal romance and drifting away from friends, as it becomes more and more clear where Mickey’s focus is beginning to lie. Overall, it’s a deep, dark, and truthful depiction, at least from what I can attest to.

Mindy McGinnis just keeps breaking my heart with these traumatic characters and their broken stories, and Heroine was no different. It hurt, but it was still wonderful to read, in the sense that reading McGinnis’s works can be. I definitely will be moving to more of her books in the future.

In These Witches Don’t Burn, witches and magic are very real in the historical Salem. However, even with the magical lore surrounding the town, Hannah and her coven have to keep their elemental magic secret. In between learning magic and dodging her ex-girlfriend, Hannah has to solve the mystery of blood rituals and symbols suddenly appearing in her town, signs that a Blood Witch might just be in town.

I had extremely high hopes (and hype) for this book. Gay witches? Cute cover? Salem? It was the perfect match. I’m still super disappointed in myself for not liking it, but it just wasn’t my thing at all.

I was quite into it at the beginning, even if I had some issues connecting with and caring about the characters. It started off pretty light and cute, some fun magic, some cute flirting, a blood ritual here and there, but it got real serious real fast, and I was not expecting it. Like, this cute cover sold a nice wholesome witchy romance with a mystery spin and what I got was a far cry from that. There’s a lot of trauma and violence and stuff in this book as you go deeper and deeper, and while it’s nothing like some books I’ve read, it was a lot different from what I expected going in.

In terms of the plot, I found it to be pretty shallow overall. The sudden twist at the end was supposed to be super big and twisty, but in the end, I wasn’t really shocked or surprised at all. In general, I wasn’t all that into the plot, due to Hannah’s one-mindedness to them mainly being hunted rather than being the hunter, etc. It lagged at points to and there was a lot of Hannah not being allowed to go anywhere and constantly getting yelled at for doing it anyway. Downside of having surviving parents in YA I guess!

The world was the most interesting to me, but I still wish it had been more fleshed out. We learned there were three types of witches, but that there were also other ways to access magic without being a witch. It generally just felt very broad and shallowly defined, and I would’ve liked a stronger or stricter magic system. Even within the elemental magic system things weren’t really clear, Hannah both needed to learn things and couldn’t do a lot but at the same time it sometimes felt like she could? I don’t know.

The characters were generally okay, though I didn’t end up liking any of them. We had a large cast of adults, all her were somehow useless and very not suspicious of any of the weird things happening, which just led to a lot of random teenage scrambling and detectiving when the adults failed them (over and over and over again). I also didn’t personally feel the sparks in the romance at the forefront, unfortunately, it was a well-written f/f romance but I just didn’t feel the connection between them, which made a lot of the scenes fall flat later on in the novel. I did really like the best friendship that the novel was also partially centered on, and I liked that a female friendship was part of the focus of the novel.

Overall, I’ll keep my eye out on Sterling as her writing and stories mature more, as many of the issues did make sense for a debut, but unfortunately, I can’t say I loved this one.

The Truth About Keeping Secrets is a poignant tale about love, grief, and the histories that haunt us. Sydney’s world falls apart when her dad unexpectedly dies, and it isn’t helping that his death is odd. Sydney can’t help herself from obsessing over the possibilities, and when she starts getting weird texts to her phone, she knows it’s no coincidence. As she grows closer to June Copeland, the homecoming queen, and an unlikely friend, secrets start to come out and her world, as she knows it, starts to unravel.

I absolutely loved this book. From the gripping reveals to the beautiful prose to the heart-wrenching descriptions of grief and coping, Brown weaves an intricate tale of loss and love. Additionally, I would highly recommend listening to the audiobook version of this, as Brown narrates it herself, and it just adds another layer of emotion to the story.

This is one of those books that’s hard to break into parts because the puzzle pieces of the story meld together. There're no seams to pick apart or any easy way to slice the story into manageable bits. It’s fitting, because the story itself isn’t necessarily an easy one to read, while also being one that’s both highly entertaining and extremely gripping and haunting at the same time. From the characters to the plot to the setting, a well-rounded story emerges, and I loved every minute of it.

I really loved Sydney as an MC. From the way she interacted with the world to how she thought about things and coped with her dad’s death, she felt like an utterly real, and tragic, person. I also loved the LGBTQ+ rep in the story, and while it isn’t all that happy of a story in that regards, I felt like it clicked in well with the rest of the novel. Her narrative voice was also absolutely amazing, especially when brought to life by Brown herself. Some moments read a lot like a stream of consciousness, and Brown constantly played with grammar and writing style in order to fully capture what Sydney was feeling at any given moment. It allowed me to get utterly lost in the story, losing the world around me in exchange for the world Sydney was in.

I also really loved the way the story moved, carried on by both an emotional storyline as well as an outer, murder mystery one. The two seemed to parallel each other amazingly well throughout the story, one coming in when the other weakened and vice versa while also supporting each other in moments of high tension. I also really loved the ending itself, and what it meant for Sydney, her grief, and her growth overall. It was what sealed the deal on me loving this book.

Overall, I absolutely recommend this story, just be prepared for its dark depths of emotion. I can’t wait to read/listen to what Brown writes next!

The Merciful Crow follows the winding and entangled tale of a future chieftain, a fugitive prince, and a too-cunning bodyguard as they navigate their heavy responsibilities, the suffocating caste system of their world, and types of magic and demons they never thought possible. Told through the eyes of Fie, someone who has been cursed and burned by the world she swears to protect from the deadly plague, The Merciful Crow weaves a tale of fighting against the system sworn to keep you down while still staying true to your values, of changing the game while still participating.

This was another one of the ARCs I was blessed with at BEA (admittedly one of the toughest to get thanks to how randomly they were being given out?? But that’s a rant for another time), and I was hyped to read this! Ever since this was put on my radar I was dying for an ARC (and had hoped that the July ARC in the Fairyloot box back in November would be this), and I couldn’t believe I actually had it in my hands! While I can’t say it was at the top of my reading list once I left BEA (I mean, Gideon the Ninth, Ninth House, and Starless Sea had to take precedence), it was super high up on my list!

However, shortly before reading this the author tweeted about getting rating bombed, and it seemed like it could have either been actual ratings or an actual ‘rating attack’, so I did go into this read a lot more critically than I always do. I actively tried to look for issues with character creation, plot holes, or a faulty magic system, and this impacted me in the sense that it took me longer to get into the book and I never fully fell into the world and the story (also didn’t help that I was crazy busy while reading). However, even with all that going against this reading of the book, I couldn’t actually find anything I disliked about it. Everything about this story is super unique and seems pretty solid, from the characters and their relationships and motivations to the world itself, from the castes to the magic system.

I also absolutely loved the way the story was told, in the sense that not every single character talked the same. It’s not something that ever bugged me before, but seeing an author run with the idea of different dialects and accents combined with different manners and styles/formality of speaking may change that. It just added to the depth of each character and caste, as Fie, the main character, spoke in way different cadences from a royally trained prince and his bodyguard. It’s one of those details that is often overlooked in writing, and I loved seeing the idea played with here.

I also just absolutely loved the magic system. It definitely seems like a lot of thought was put into it, from the origin of power from dead gods to then chosen ones with set powers in each caste, to the use of teeth by the Crow caste to emulate the powers of the other castes. It’s just a very versatile style of magic, and I loved seeing how Fie played with different combinations of teeth and powers as well as her battling the ‘souls’ and stories that remained in the teeth of the dead.

I was also super into the dynamic of the characters. I won’t go too much in depth because of spoilers, but I just loved how different Fie was around every single character in the story, from her clan of Crows to the prince-bodyguard duo she is forced to travel the country with. A lot of thought seemed to go into every single one of her reactions and actions, and I loved it.

There were still a few moments where I wished for a bit more of an explanation, as some details of the world I still don’t feel I have a full grasp on (like the plague itself), or some things that took me too long to figure out on my own.

Overall, I feel like this is an extremely strong debut, and I’m super excited to see where the rest of the series, and the author’s career, will go! Definitely go out and give this one a try if the synopsis at all intrigues you.

Wilder Girls is the haunting tale of an isolated boarding school consumed by the Tox, infecting and deforming the girls of the boarding school and killing almost all the adults. Narrated by two close friends, Hetty and Byatt, this book follows both the close relationships between the remaining girls of the school as well as the mysteries and intrigue hidden behind the Tox itself, and how the government is handling the situation.

I really wanted to love this book. An isolated boarding school? Some deadly virus thing changing everyone it comes across in very odd ways? An f/f relationship thrown in the middle of all that? It was a recipe for perfection, and had me quite hooked for a while, until all of a sudden it didn’t anymore. This is one of those books where the idea was fantastic, but the execution needed a lot of work.

My main issues were with the plot itself, as I was quite into the strained yet flourishing relationships between the three girls this book centers around. There’s just a whole lot of things that don’t line up overall, things that are hidden from either the girls or the government that either group could have very easily figured out or seen. However, this book was leaning towards a 3 star rating right up until the end, where the author suddenly decided to info dump the entire twist in the last 10 pages? While most had been predictable or not altogether shocking even if I hadn’t guessed it, it was given to the reader like ripping off a band aid, ‘if I do it super fast they won’t think too hard about it’ I guess?? You’re also just left with that, there’s no true resolution of the actual plot at hand or anything, you’re just dropped with the explanation behind everything. It’s super open, but doesn’t actually give you enough to theorize the rest of what happens yourself or anything. It was just too messy for me.

The pacing was also all over the place, as already seen by the ending. For a short book, there is a whole lot of nothing happening in the beginning, and even when things start to pick up, there’s too many slow down moments to really keep the fast pace high tension vibe going. It could’ve definitely used some tightening up in that regard.

I tried really hard to enjoy and love this book, and while it was a quick read, I can’t say I had too much fun besides seeing my books read this year go up. There were just too many issues with how the plot and twist were handled for me to enjoy what that plot and twist actually were.