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The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson
I really wanted to like this book more than I did! The first third of the story is kick-ass: contemporary setting with wonderful characters, strong protagonist voice, and mysterious foreshadowings. Then the rest of it happened, and I lost the plot. Part of the problem is that the first third is so VERY strongly rooted in contemporary YA language/style. It’s Real Life and it’s totally convincing. And then the Chaos incident happened and things got weird.
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Runaways, Vol. 1-3 by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona
Okay, so this is the first major story arc for Runaways (I think). These three volumes comprise a complete story, so theoretically you could stop there and be perfectly happy![1. Especially because I’m in the second series right now and it’s not as good, nope.] I was perfectly happy, because I love stories about teenage superheroes having personal problems. The fact that their personal problems consisted of evil supervillian parents was just icing on the cake. Other personal problems: friendship, learning to trust, betrayal, romance and squishy teenage feelings, sometimes sounding like they spent too much time watching Dawson’s Creek or whatever show was popular back when this series ran,…
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The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
I love GV’s previous book, Mechanique, and I absolutely adore fairy tale retellings, so I was fairly certain The Girls at the Kingfisher Club would be a huge hit with me. No surprise: it was! It’s not just the fact that it’s a retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales, the 12 Dancing Princess. It’s because the writing was so beautiful, the setting so interesting, the characters so lovable in a tragic kind of way. True, the father-villain was over the top with his nutsoid views about family and heirs (surely 12 healthy daughters are better than any nonexistent son?) but such is the world of the fairy tale…
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Steampunk and court intrigue: a review of The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
Shout out to Memory, who first drew my attention to the existance of this book on NetGalley. This is one of those books I would never have found on my own if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me. And that would have been a real shame, because The Goblin Emperor is amazing and lovely and I love it and OMG OMG I read it all in one day! It’s a pretty big book and actually not all that fast paced, but I adore court intrigue (especially in fantasy settings) so I was basically glued to my Kindle from start to finish. I actually had a hard time NOT rereading…
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Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi
I bought Ascension because of some review I read somewhere on a blog (which I can’t find now), because I love scifi and I love space stories and I’m tired of scifi space stories with straight white people in them. Ascension, while not a perfect book, has a LOT of exciting things in it that should make any scifi fan happy to read it. It started off very strong. The first half of the book was fantastic; it introduces us to the world of Ascension and the people who navigate through it. There are alien planets! Creepy aliens with creepy alien technology! Spaceships and space pirates and also psychics who…
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Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Yes, the TV show came before the book! Which explains why I kept thinking “this feels like an adaptation.” I have a love-hate relationship with book adaptations of movies; mostly they always feel derivative and pointless, and not even Neil Gaiman can make one great. The Neverwhere novelization is better than most, but it still can’t top the TV show. The problem might be because when you’re writing an adaptation, you have to stick pretty close to the original source. You can expand things a little (like internal dialogue or whatever), but basically you’ve got a paint-by-numbers kind of thing. It ends up feeling very stale and forced, and it’s…
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REVIEW: Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott
This is an AWESOME book. What makes it awesome? I’ll tell you what makes it awesome: 1. the characters! Specifically, Suzume and her development over the course of the book. She goes from spoiled normal kid to PTSD-ed refugee with magical powers to someone with a lot of spoilers hanging around. It’s great!