holy hell I loved this book SO much more than The Thief and the Queen of Attolia. Eugenides and the Queen are such damn sneaky trolls this WHOLE book and it makes it so much more fun that you know the whole time that side characters are blind to essentially a giant royal gag. Speaking of side characters, I freaking LOVE Costis. He's used so well. This book did a lot of political and character development in a really short amount of pages.

Oph this hurt my heart with cuteness. This concept of Hazel "not matching" her parents hurt. I'm a firm believer that you choose your real family--no matter what you all look like together so that hit me in the feels. There's a household dealing with becoming a single parents household and another with a parent with severe depression...then the Snow Queen retelling is folded in. Lots of Narnia feels. It's just a really thoughtful book with a sweet message/morals. I love MG books like this.

This was so fun! I'll have to borrow the physical copy to look at the illustrations. This is just a run quick fantasy adventure that focuses on two sides overcoming their differences and coming together. No super complicated plot and enjoyable characters. I'd also recommend the audiobook--the narration is fantastic.

A super solid 4.5/5 stars

Damn okay so this book was adorable. There's a bit of a Hansel & Gretel twist/retelling which I got so excited about. The mystery of the witch's/apartment's power was actually really cool and well rolled out. Characters were developed along with the plot and a steady pace. I also would LOVE for some of the creepy stories told in the book to be put in like a novella as a companion or just for the author to make them full-length stories.

Awesome amount of LGBTQ+ rep in this book and i really expected that from these authors. The idea of a sci-fi queer King Arthur retelling got me so damn excited but it fell flat unfortunately when I looked outside of the characters rep. The writing itself isnt bad but the authors just didnt take any time to relationship and character build. It's like there's whole scenes missing where they developed characters. It just seemed hastily slapped together on that end which was really disappointing. I was just being told that there was chemistry between people. They needed to slow the plot down and add scenes that maybe nothing happened plotwise but scenes where I start to get Gwen and Arthur--to buy into their relationship--to see the hurt near the end.

3.5/5 Stars

Interesting. This honestly wasn't bad (just a little too much on the cheesy drama side for my current mood). I liked the plot and (having listened along to the audiobook) the narration A LOT! There were parts the reminded me a bit of Daughter of the Burning City. The whole concept of Shakespearean characters escaping the theatre is a pretty unique twist and dilemma so I'll keep book 2 in mind for when I want a cheesy romantic read.

Thank you to Caitlin for the recommendation!

UPDATE: There's an interesting thread talking about the Indigenous rep available here.

I received an eARC from Edelweiss and a physical ARC through work.

This is a rather difficult book to rate and I almost want to get a final copy to see if the big issue that I had was fixed but I don't know...

I was incredibly disappointed in the use of the only Indigenous character. Particularly with how vocal Justina Ireland is on Twitter about PoC rep...this was incredibly underwhelming and not done well in my opinion. I truly hope this has been fixed in the final copy. Indigenous characters are rare enough in YA literature...

then there is a single one in this book which maybe has 5 speaking lines, is never developed, is very quickly pushed off screen to never return and you're lead to believe his only role was just helping the white politicians kidnap and deliver stolen black people! Are we still only writing Indigenous characters like that? It's very passingly clarified near the end that he helped Jackson escape but that's not a solution! It was even more heartbreaking to see this after reading the authors note. She took so much of the idea for this plot from the horrific Industrial schools used on the Native Americans yet mentioned them so passingly and never truly developed them. I expected more from this author.

PS, if you have a different view of this then I would love to hear it. I feel so weird that I’m the only one who seems to notice it or maybe I missed something?

I really adored the writing style of this book. I had to very sadly put it down a few times in order to go to work and I debated just calling in sick so I could keep reading. I loved our main characters and that so much of the focus was on friendship and family relationships instead of romance! Jane is sassy and made me burst out laughing several times at her comments.

I love the references to current events with the trigger happy white guard when Jane is on her first patrol. I really appreciated the comments on the different shades of skin. I feel like that's a topic that wasn't really being written about for a long time yet I have friends that are black that talked about it a lot.

Ha-ha! Finished another trilogy *pats self on back* Full trilogy with consistent covers *high fives publisher*

It's a pretty straight forward wrap up. We gotta take down evil ass sister and get the humans to work with the Ruins to do so. We got a happy ending for the most part but I did find the ending "battle" to be pretty rushed and anti climactic...and the take down seemed too simple and clean overall. I think all ends were tied up nicely though and the characters were consistent throughout the whole trilogy.

Huh...this was a lot more cheesy than i was expecting. I wish they wouldve played up less of the predictable romance and more of the politics. I needed more unpacking of the political conflict that lead to all this chaos. But the characters were well established and I really liked them and I was able to really quickly stan certain characters and loathe others. I love misdirection but sometimes you just need a "he a villain. He a good dude!"

3.5/5

RTC