Rhythm of War | Review

Mortals search for meaning, so it is proper they should create it. You get to decide what it meant. What you meant. 

This installment of the Stormlight Archives was on massive scale we have yet to have the pleasure of seeing. We pick up about a year or so after Oathbringer with a steady unrelenting war with Odiums forces. Kaladin is succumbing to his trauma and takes a mandatory leave from the army. Shallan discovers a spy within her ranks and beings to see enemies all around her, unsure of who to trust, including herself. Adolin, feeling like he has little to contribute, takes on a diplomatic mission to go to the honor spren of Lasting Integrity in Shadesmar to petition for their help to return to aid humans. Navani struggles to find her place between Queen and Scholar. And Dalinar must find a way to defeat Odium once and for all.

Clearly this book is PACKED, and thats probably only half the characters that have roles and amazing stories. There is still Venli, Eshonai, Jasnah, Terravangian, Teft, Dabbid, Rlain and more! Its incredible how I feel overwhelmingly satisfied with almost every character and their progression in this novel.

On top of just pure character plot and development we have the wider cosmere. Never before has Sanderson written so unabashedly about his lore. This was honestly the hardest to follow, I felt like there was so much I had to keep stopping to piece it all together. This didnt hinder my experience at all, as it isnt necessarily bad or confusing, in fact its probably to the betterment of Sanderson. Im more interested in his lore, rereading books Ive already gone through, and getting on to more side stories like Dawnshard and Mistborn Secret History. There's so much to unpack here about the cosmere that I feel like it would not be blasphemous to now say that this is on par with Tolkein and Sanderson needs his own Silmarillion!

To keep this novel as short as possible Im just going to focus on the stand out Characters for me, starting with Kaladin:

I am not a fan of Kaladin. I completely understood his role and dont think he should change but I was never completely on board with him through the first 3 books. He just got on my bad side and wasn't always fun to read from. But this book even made ME feel wonderfully overcome with Kaladins journey. The look into depression, and trauma with him is incredible. His fight to be a surgeon or soldier returns. His strength is tested, pushing him to his absolute limits. Almost the entire novel you are worried for him and his fate. I wouldnt say subjectively his plot is my favorite, but damn....I might have to admit as objectively as I can, that his story and journey is the strongest. His plot is also very connected to Navani's.

So quickly I will bring her up. She deserves her own section and for it to be longer, but theres a limit! Her struggle with overcoming her own self worth while dealing with an incredibly ancient and masterful foe was phenomenal. Like most of the characters in this book, her climatic ending was rich with satisfaction!

Lastly we will travel into Shadesmar to talk about Shallan and Adolin. As has been the trend in the previous books, Shallans story very similarly aligns to Kaladins own trials. Her past ever haunts her and we hadnt even heard the whole story until this book. Just like Kaladin I was on the edge of my seat so afraid for Shallan, probably my favorite character from the Stormlight. After my own research in DID I felt like Sanderson represented it very well without straight up announcing, "Hey this is a real thing that people in our world cope with."

Im most interested to see what her goals and path will lead to after this book.

This leaves me with my other favorite, Adolin. Oh...sweet Adolin. I hope this books stops any Adolin haters from ever dishonoring Adolin again. I know this is getting personal, though they shall remain nameless, I know there are many people out there having assumed Adolin would turn into Odiums champion or some kind of "turn to the darkside". The plot line and how Adolin handles the honorspren, the deadeyes, and his wife Shallan was just incredible. There are even smaller moments like him helping Kaladin. Adolins story has one of favorite moments of the series now, on par with the "Honor is dead, but Ill see what I can do." scene. Its weird, Ill admit, how defensive I can get about a fictional character. But Adolin is so pure, not perfect, but honorable and kind. I think he's one of the best characters of this novel, completely flying under the radar. His whole journey I think mirrors toxic masculinity issues of the real world. This strong man, who is told by his country not to be emotional, not to hug. He respects others that are deemed "below" his station. He likes fashion, he likes respectful duels. But he also has his own hesitations, his own weakness' and self-doubt. He doesnt have the deepest traumas like Kal or Shallan, or the most respectful and important roles like Dalinar and Jasnah. But he's my favorite.

I just have to end this and express again how much these characters stories have blown me away. I teared, and got choked up on multiple occasions. Out of sadness, or just pure epicness, whether it was good or bad this book is full of emotion. And its full of pure interesting world building. 

I feel like I have to let alot of it sink in and it would take a reread of the whole series to know where I would place it in terms of "which ones best" but I feel like it definitely has some of the best moments of the series and the book continues to build the series, no steps taken backward. It took the most important step, the next one.

The Diviners | Review

 

Set in the 1920's we are introduced to a world very much like our own. Small towns have big drama and small problems. New York is the city of lights and opportunities. And things go bump in the night. As we follow a unique and diverse cast of characters we are further inducted into a world where creepy crawlies are more than just ghost stories.

The atmosphere of this book is incredibly set up in my opinion. We mostly follow Evie O'Neil, as she Nancey Drews her way through New York, helping her Uncle try to solve a dangerous and cryptic new serial killer.

Evie is a Diviner, a person with special powers, hers being the abilities to see the past and memories of an object she touches. I very much enjoyed Evie. She is a brash and blunt young woman with alot of spunk (sometimes too much as it usually ends up getting her into trouble.) We watch as she tries to deal with the trauma of losing her brother in the war and struggling with whether or not to hide her powers.

There is a larger cast of characters we switch to every so often. Each character has their own past and the chapters that peel back their layers get you very invested in them.

The pacing can, at times, be a little slow. The spooky creepy parts are the most interesting as we sometimes get a glimpse into what the killer is doing, and their past. But even when we aren't focused on that I really enjoy the 20's atmosphere the author creates.

Besides some pacing issues, I'm not a fan of some of the romance directions and have me worried for how they will be addressed in the future books. There are demons and ghosts in the world! We dont have time for love triangle drama!

Overall Im very invested in the Diviners and learning more about them. Toward the end we don't really have almost any closure on some characters, just a wrap up on the main plot. So this has me excited to continue the series, I just may want to get to them soon as I can see myself losing interest.

Sorcery of Thorns | Review

Sorcery of Thorns introduces us to Scrivener, our special orphan is (luckily) special because of where she happened to grow up rather than because she was born that way.

In this world magical Tomes are Sentient. They have personalities and souls of their own. But they are also dangerous, so they are housed in great libraries and protected my librarians. Scrivener being one of those librarians.

The only people that can use said tomes are magicians, and magicians can only have their power by summoning demons and conscripting them to their service, bargaining for a price. So because of this librarians are wary of them, thinking them evil even though....they work in a library with books....created by magicians...for magicians?

The plot kicks off when a saboteur of these great libraries is going around sabotaging the libraries. Scrivener gets caught up in one of these incidences, and manages to beat one of the evil books. So she is then under suspicion of doing...such evil? So she is going to the main city to be put on trial...or something

For too long of the early parts of the book she believes the magician escorting her, Nathaniel, is the person who ACTUALLY sabotaged the library. But since the reader isn't an idiot we know this is just a waste of time and OH LOOK, she figured it out...

We also meet Nathaniels demon, Sylas, who is the best character of this book.

Scrivener continues to fumble along this plot of conspiracy, sabotage and danger. Confusing the reader to who the real enemies are. Is it the tomes? the magicians? the demons? the people? the political maneuvering? Who knows?

That is until near the end, with a plot twist that is so grand that you'll be thinking, how did we get here? why are we going here?

Some stories just don't need to be tales about the end of the world.

By my description you may tell that I am just a bit underwhelmed by this story. To be blunt, I really couldn't care for what was happening most of the time.

The characters, I just didnt care for. Scrivener was not interesting to me. Nathaniels back story was very compelling but how he was used in the plot, not interesting. Like I said Sylas was the best character, but I didn't fully understand what it really meant to be a demon and his struggle by the end. Is he compelled to be evil? Did love change his blackened, old withered heart? I dont know, but he was enjoyable.

The world gimmick, that being the sentient grimoires, was cool. But I feel like they should have been focused on more, because they were the best part of the world. Everything else was odd, like I pointed out, Magicians are feared, even though the libraries are for the magicians.

Lastly the Villain was nonsensical. He had the "You dont understand why Im doing this, but Im doing it for right reasons." The reasons were not clear, or he just didnt have any. So we couldn't sympathize or believe him, so he was just one of those generic mustache twirling folk.

Also as a pet peeve, there was a romance slipped into the pages of this book, and I wish it was ripped out. But thats just a preference, it didnt effect my rating.

It was just not for me, a solid 3. The tome aspect of the novel will probably stay in my brain but everything else is forgettable and underwhelming.

(P.S. LOVE the cover. I usually unhaul my 3 star and below books, but I think Ill hang on to this one)

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue | Review

My name is Addie LaRue...

I know, another 5 star review? But hear me out. I didnt bawl over the ending, it isn't my favorite book of the year, and I'm not over the moon gushing. But Ill be damned if I cant say that this is one of most lovely books with an enchanting premise if I've ever read one. A book doesn't need to be perfect to be 5 stars, and this one isn't, but it was amazing. So let's begin...

Some she's found by accident, others in the course of this or that adventure. She keeps them tucked away, like slips of paper between pages of her book.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a story of a girl, born in France in the early 1700's. Her small village life gets all the more restricting and suffocating as her family plans to marry her off. She sees the world differently than most in her village, and their idea of the life she should have does not work for her.

On the evening of her wedding she makes the mistake of praying to any god that will answer her, but the only god that was listening was one of night. Luc enters and strikes a deal with Addie, to give her freedom from her life. She accepts without realizing that true freedom is to pass through the world with no strings attached, and so she finds herself immortal, walking among humans only to be forgotten as soon as they leave sight of her.

That is, until someone doesn't forget her...

I am the one who sees kindling and coaxes it to flame.

I want to get my biggest praise out of the way first. The way Schwab writes is outstanding. I don't think I've come across a book that does prose like this, and gets away with it so beautifully. There was SO many analogies, similes/metaphors and "one liners" that never came across cringey, out of place, eye-rolling, cliche, or beat you over the head. I'm just incredibly impressed by her writing. 

Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for.

Normally I don't like slower paced books, and that's definitely what this felt like, but with her writing, and possibly just my mind set and the fall weather and such, it just worked for me. So if you don't like slower reads with little plot, maybe this will work for you too, but I can see how it might not. The story is really just her retelling her life over a 300 year time span with it occasionally jumping to the present (2014).

People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it's not a full fire, but Addie's hands are full of candles.

Another strong positive is the character. Not characters, but THE character. Addie LaRue was fantastic. I was so enraptured in her life, her stubbornness, her strength, her vision and so much more. We see her battle Luc over many years as he tries to get her to surrender her immortal life so that he may claim her soul.

We begin to see a startling similarity between the two as they both find their own ways of stoking the fires of artist throughout time, but done so in very different ways.

She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in the winter, though they still dread its heat.

The nuance in which she is so eloquently written was fantastic. The way she battles Luc with her mind and words, but then how she struggles with still wanting to/ having to face him. After all he is the only person that can remember her, that can say her name. That is until Henry...

Blink and you're halfway though, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things.

Henry is my least favorite part of the book. He is introduced as the only person that has been able to remember her in 300 years. It teases us slowly as they spend more time together, which I didnt mind because we still jump back to Addie's past in France, Germany, Italy and so on. But soon it gets to a section that is all about him, and that's when the book slowed down for me a lot. His story didnt grip me, I didnt really for sorry for him, and I found him (to be blunt) weak. I didnt feel the passion for him. I also began to worry that the book may not address the question, "Does Addie only like him because he is the only human that can remember her?"

Easy to stay on the path when the road is straight and the steps are numbered.

But by the end I was very happy that it wrapped up very nicely in a way I appreciated Addie's story. It really secured the 5 star rating from falling to a 4. 

And this is what good-byes should be.
Not a period, but an ellipses, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up.
It is a door left open.
It is drifting off to sleep.

It was a story beautifully written, a strange long life wonderfully captured.

Six of Crows

 Better to have terrible truths than kind lies.

Ok wow...alright Six of Crows I see you.

I feel like I'm late to this, that's obvious.

This book has been around booktube for a while, its pretty popular. To me it seemed to come off as a fantasy romance with a side plot of a heist.

So I never thought I would end up liking it, Im not huge into YA romance, it usually doesnt strike the balance I prefer. I feel like people underplayed that this really just a character driven novel. Sure there are inklings of relationships, they struggle with knowing if they should or would want to get together. But thats just because they all have incredibly difficult and troubling pasts.

Almost all of them were compelling, and the ones that weren't still came across well. I was just really happy with how the characters were written, their stories and how they interacted. That was definitely the highlight. My vote is for Inej the pirate queen!

So what else was there? Lets start with the powers.

By the end it went from PG13 to rated R real fast, there was some nasty stuff happening with those Grisha Powers. I wasn't fully wrapped around the powers. I think its because I didnt know they would play such a role. My understanding of the Grisha-Verse was heavily skewed. The way I interpreted this series and Shadow and Bone was that they were in the same universe but so far apart that it wasnt obvious. It seemed to me that Shadow and Bone was deep fantasy, and Six of Crows was more modern and so had less magic. But they are only 5ish years apart. I just had to explain this because this affected my comprehension as I was reading and it wasnt until later I realized how much these powers would effect the book and by then I knew I was missing some stuff. (Which isnt all bad because that means Ill have a really good reread!)

Additionally to the powers was the world and different nations! All of that was really interesting as we got a look into how different nations are, their culture, way of life, and most importantly to this book, their prejudices.

This was so much better than I thought it would be, I was very happy with it and looking forward to the sequel!

No mourners.

No funerals.

Night of the Dragon

They tell stories, nowadays, of a wandering fox. Most times it would appear as a humble peasant girl, but sometimes as a yokai with glowing golden eyes.

Immediately following Soul of the Sword, the 3rd and final book of the Shadow of the Fox series picks up with our crew heading to a port to catch a ride for the Moon Islands and stop the villains from using the Dragon Scroll.

This book, for the most part, was a very good mesh of the first and second book. We have some small, episodic like adventures like in book one. And then there is a good amount of character interaction and romance from book two.

It isnt all good, however, I actually have quite a few issues with the book.

Yumekos fox powers get  far more powerful for some reason. Early on in the novel I was getting annoyed that her throwing out her blue fox fire would STILL startled her opponents (because they dont know its not real fire) We got alot of that in the first two books. Then all of a sudden her fox fire was real and burned people. I dont know if I missed something because she didnt really seem to question this or fill in any blanks.

There was a couple more issues that the author actually managed to correct later in the novel. So though through a good portion of the book I was getting annoyed, or irked at the development, she managed to come up with good reasoning, or even better, not fall into some bad tropes.

I will say one thing that always throws me off in books is when the thing you expect to be at the end, is SMACK dab in the middle. It really threw off the pacing and made most of the rest of the book feel drawn out. It didnt help either when the last half turns into a long "climax" of confusing, convoluted reveals and unnecessary battles.

For the most part I was planning on giving this a 3 stars, but I think the ending (mostly after the climax) really pulled it up from that lower score. I think this book evoked a lot of emotion in me. I appreciated the consequences of this war and the fights. By the end I really did come to enjoy the little gang we picked up along the way.

Overall, the climax was a bit over-reaching. This seemingly episodic YA fantasy trilogy had the ending of a 5 book long epic fantasy, which was incredibly jarring. But I liked how the author didnt always take the obvious or easy way out with some of the plot points and I say is a solid ending to her series. 

I would very much enjoy a 4th novel, with lesser stakes, and some more episodic adventures of the roaming Kitsune once more...

I wanted to go into a few spoiler discussions below with some specifics about the ending.

Spoilers:

I didnt like how early on they set up that this naive peasant girl was going to be the new leader of the moon clan. BUT as I mentioned above, the author corrected that toward the end by letting a lot of time pass before Yumeko took over.

Furthermore on that point, I felt like the first two books didnt focus enough on Yumeko being without a home, or that being an orphan bothered her. Its why alot of the mother/father/moon island clan stuff didnt fit really well for me. I didnt feel like she needed to be, essentially, a special chosen one. BUT AGAIN, I like how the author showed Yumeko knowing there was more to do in the world and she left to explore. The letter where she described the fox yokai being seen at the places we previously visited was really sweet and struck a cord within me. Like I said above, I would like a nice novel of her roaming adventures.

Some of the stuff I feel like the author avoided was obviously the resurrection trope. I was really nervous she was going to revive everyone that died which would have been...so bad. And I feel like I already explained how she avoided or corrected my annoyance with Yumeko being the leader, and wanting to find a home and stay there.

Most of the Seigetsu stuff went completely over my head. I dont understand about the bead, and his whole goal, it felt out of left field. Also with Yumekos mothers pain in that cave, and the mask...it was just alot all at once. I still didnt feel particularly attached to the mothers character or story since we got it all in the last half of the book. The ending fight with Seigetsu in general went on too long. But it was cool to see Yumeko try to outsmart him. There was just ALOT about the climax I didnt care for. But it had some good moments like Daisuke and Okames fight. Suki bringing back their spirits to help Yumeko in the end. 

Speaking of which. In general I thought Sukis whole thing was pretty cool. She is the first chapter we get ALL the way back in book one, which honestly REALLY stuck with me. I felt so bad for her. But I like how she became their guide, and the fact that she led them when they were all alive, and then again when most of them were dead...that was some good stuff right there.

In conclusion, like I said, Climax was a bit much for me, but the ending was really really good.

Kings of the Wyld | Review

 We are each what the past has made of us.

Well this was, in a word, badass.

Kings of the Wyld pretty much gave me exactly what I was expecting and more.

Kings of the Wyld is the Epic of a band a mercenaries. The most epic of mercenaries, they are in their glory battling demons, rescuing princess' slaying dragons. Oh wait? No this is many....MANY years after that?

Yup, this is a story about a bunch of crusted, busted old mercs. They've gone their own ways, maybe started a family, maybe lost that family. But one of their members, Gabriel comes back into the picture asking for Clay Cooper (our "main character") to help get the band back together and save his daughter.

And so reluctantly Clay sets out with Gabriel to reform Saga. 

Getting to each member has its own host of issues, their own years of baggage must be dealt with and they even pick up a fair few new ones.

Its not easy to pull off , and maybe some wont like this but personally I love when a story is told to you like you already know the world. There isnt long slogs of exposition or anything, but through dialogue or events we slowly learn more about this world and Saga in a very natural way.

There is some blunt badassness, the Band shows their age, their humor, it just has everything. On top of all of that there is some very emotional moments, some intense back stories and broken histories. I didn't expect to love this as much as I did and its definitely a new favorite.

I cant wait to explore more of this world and meet some new characters in the sequel!