So thrilling! It's rare to find a middle grade novel that has the urgency and intrigue that Nielsen offers. I love how sneaky Sage is, and how clever. His emotional depth came late to the story but was worth it.

I finished this yesterday, and already I can't think of one story that stood out to me. None of them were terrible, but none of them were particularly special either.

The idea of an ink mage is so cool. Literally everything else about this book is garbage.

There is misogyny dripping from every page -- the male mage is a wizened old man, the female mage is young and gorgeous and naked. A deserter from the army finds a cosy job at a brothel where the hottest prostitute falls madly in love with him. A stable boy is desired by both the brilliant and competent gypsy girl (I hate even typing that word because it's so racist, but that's literally the word used over and over) and the ink mage duchess and bangs both of them. The duchess sends her cousin off to help her get support and he sleeps with an unattractive woman to get her father's help, and not one person calls him out for being a piece of shit.

Worse than all this to me is that the author claims a PhD in English in his bio, yet manages to spell his own characters names wrong, misused solider for soldier twice in one page, and had more grammatical errors than I could count. My personal favorite was "ready to spit death in the eye" which frankly makes even less sense than the fact that I finished this book.

This book is self-awareness lite, an appetizer for meatier authors like Elizabeth Gilbert or Cheryl Strayed. Every chapter reads like a too short blog post, and if it had been titled Zen Koans for the Modern Mom it would have been appropriate.

And yet, I loved it. I found myself tearing up over and over as Doyle points out things that are so ingrained in us we don't even notice them. She doesn't really help you deal with any of it, but the noticing is the important thing. She offers up her own flawed self as a mirror to help the reader realize that yes, you can trust yourself, and you had better trust yourself, or you will never be comfortable in your own skin.

I liked that she said that the Knowing she achieves after being quiet (she never says meditation, but basically that's what she's up to) is how she connects to god, but she would never ask anyone to call it that, because she has a friend who calls that inner voice Sebastian. This heartfelt offering combined with a joke is what makes her writing so relatable.

tl;dr she even won over the childless atheist and you can read the whole thing in like two hours.

A book version of a Saturday night scifi channel movie. This was a fun thriller, but it was pretty damn stupid. I loved the scary creatures, but I lost interest when the twist happens

Spoiler

the femme fatale is a Russian sleeper agent controlling the president by drugging him

. It was fun, though, and I loved the outrageous ending.

Spoiler

The US gets nuked to shit and every other country goes to war, and then the epilogue is the creatures and I actually read five pages before I realized that the creatures were narrating, not humans. I loved that the humans were still alive and hunting the creatures to get earth back.

The mystery aspect was so fun, and I loved that you got to see Missy's life in flashbacks. It helped create an excellent slow burn. I loved Aubrey's gift and how weird it was and how powerful. I hated Owen so much and loved the slow way that Levi's character was revealed. Small town stories are always fun.

I just wish this book had been one hundred pages shorter and didn't include the long, drawn out, boring sex scene that came out of nowhere. I'm all for a good romance, but you can't give me 80% of a book that is a simmer that takes a far backseat to a murder mystery, and then throw in a full-blown sex scene. I felt creepy and voyeuristic and it totally drew me out of the mystery.

This is a true heist book in that there are alarmingly competent criminals, an impossible break in, harrowing danger if they fail, and top notch banter.

Add all of that in to the Grisha world I already love and have it penned by Bardugo's ridiculously skilled hand? HELL YES.

I loved that every character got enough screen time that you understood their story and cared about all of them. I loved the ridiculous jokes and how smoothly things would flow from tragic to touching to amusing. I wouldn't classify this as YA because it isn't about self-discovery or any normal YA themes, it's a true and thrilling adventure.