Oh my heart!....Monty and Percy are so freaking adorable. They had some cute fluffy, a little slow burn, and real relationship problems.

I love Monty's sister and yet hate her. I don't necessarily like all her dialogue but I lived that she was a woman of science and constantly brought solutions to the problems.

I also find it amazing that pirates are constantly the liberals of every story!

I don't think it quite deserves the comparison to My Lady Jane though. both books are Wonder and I adore them but they have in common being a historical fiction and being a comedy. The narration is the comedy in My Lady Jane because of the ridiculousness. This book gets it's comedy from the lead character mostly being so sarcastic and having relatively modern stances.

this book brings a romance that happens to be LGBTQ bi-racial (but it doesn't emphasize how amazing the LGBTQ bi-racial romance is) + traveling around Europe with some comedy while commenting on the ridiculousness of sexism, racism, homophobia (...plus some hypocrisy of those being sexism, racist and homophobic). A strong rebellious lady also makes an appearance but is by no means a focus of the story.

Addicted. Went back to the store to buy the series

love! love! love!

This was a REALLY interesting book that made me think of so many different topics! The value of copyrights vs. open source, the value of money, the corruption of money in government, the role of internet, equal access to internet, isolation, creating new food, loss of language and voice, etc. Even the idea of having to pay for your name or hair cut or past generations transgressions is eye opening. this is what I imagine would happen if North Korea and the USA merged (or if the USA just let some of their super right winged and already elected politicians loose).

It give me hints of Divergent (with the control and technology) and The Hunger Games (with the rag tag group of rebels and the sign of the rebellion being to draw your mouth zipped shut by your fingers).

I loved the creepy underworld/rebels group the most but everyone was pretty well developed. Speth is a really interesting character to watch and I was shoooooook by everything that she went through and did. I can't believe how different she was from the beginning vs. the end. It's slow to start but picks up around 1/3 of the way in.

This was a lot darker than the first one. I loved the continued use of puns. It was really cool to get Rex's point of view and I was not expecting the ending with Robin Hood--that shoooooook me. I loved the weaving of the King Arthur myths and Robin Hood. The academy for villains really cracked me up--in fact, good portions of this book gave me vague "oh! that's just like The School for Good and Evil" feels. The very ending left me confused and stunned. I don't know where this leaves the entire plot...or the next book! I'm quite excited for the sequel because the ending could mean so many things!

Wow, this was an immensely boring and weird book that I did not like. It's a "mystery" without any suspense and a super slow pace.

Why was it set in the 1940s?! There was no purpose to that! Ugh! I love WWII and Shakespeare but this book...no! Its so underwhelming!

I just didn't care about any of the characters or the big problem...

And the hidden family member who is wheelchair bound and angry about it...really? Are we really using that?

This book was okay. I loved the setting and the bringing back of things mentioned in the first book but I had some big issues with the writing. I don't think the characters have been well developed enough to have the emotional back and forth that the main character does. She's comes off as selective in what she remembers depending on her mood. The romance triangle was also drawn out and way too played up. I think I'll read the sequel but who knows...

3/5 stars

This book was alright. I don't know that I would've finished the book as a physical book instead of audiobook because nothing really seems to happen until the very end and even then...I found it a little underwhelming. I also did NOT like the wrap up...or total lack thereof. There's no real explanation for anything that happened. Maybe that was deliberate but it came off much more like the author scrambled or didn't know how to end it.

2.5/5

Hmm... essentially a condensed and less well written version of the Lunar Chronicles.

I liked the concept and plot but the author started the story in the middle of it but didn't proceed to explain anything. The author is clearly a fan of info dumping but none of the information dumped gave me any clarification to everything going on. That didn't make the story come off as mysterious to me as much as the author didn't know how to write what she wanted to write.

There's a ton of useless info dumping...about random things that never became important. I'm not a fan of info dumping but at least do it to leave traces or hints for what's to come. because that wasn't done, a lot of the twists and turns came randomly out of nowhere and made me think "well that doesn't even remotely make sense with the character's history" or "well isn't that awfully convenient."

There really isn't any character or world development. This definitely played a roll in me not being super interested in the end. I still have zero sense of who any character is other than their lineage.

Honestly, I don't know that I would've finished it without the audiobook that helped me push through. This book came off as a debut author's work yet Weber has several publications in this genre so I definitely expected more.

I cannot remember the last time I gave a one-star rating. Holy crap, are there problems with this book.

I don't mind when authors take a plot and make their own version of it--just do it well. I'm so much more willing to respect an author for flopping if they do something unique. This book has the same "royal-heir-battle-off" that soooooooooo many other books have but it was not done well.

The entire logic of the battle off doesn't even make sense. Two heirs have equal claim to the throne...so to avoid a problem the council wants to pick people other than them? wtf logic is that? I know there needs to be a problem but at least be creative.

The dialogue and inner monologues are are boring or repetitive (sometimes it's both). there is no need (other than to fill pages) to repeat the SAME damn thing over and over and over again when nothing has changed!

There is such little world development in this book. The author was either lazy, took up too much space with (paragraph above) or way too much edited out. The character development was also pretty lackluster. There are a few character traits at the beginning and the relationship established between the twins at the start...three pages later all of that is abandoned. The characters are infuriatingly stupid and naive. it's blatently obvious from the beginning that this person is the villain but everyone else is so stupid, boring and repetitive that I just started to hate them.--I WAS BEGGING FOR GEORGE R.R. MARTIN TO BURST IN AND JUST RED WEDDING EVERYONE. An illiterate toddler could've picked out the villain at the end of chapter two yet somehow two adult-ish aged people who are potentially going to be running a country were too dense to figure it out? really? And what royal family gives their children such poor education that they can be this easily manipulated?!

This book has been done to death so if you're going to publish it, you make sure to do a half decent book. Joelle did not and I am so beyond amazed that this was published. There's better fan fiction that I would've much rather read.