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Skip Trace by Kelly Jensen and Jenn Burke
This is the 3rd Chaos Station book! I haven’t reviewed the first two here, but I enjoyed them and obviously kept reading the series. The first book is a second-chance lovers romance, with scifi thriller stuff! There’s super soldiers, a government conspiracy, outer space shenanigans, aliens, secrets, and kissing. And the second book builds off various plot-related repercussions in the first book– thriller and romance both– while expanding on the relationship between the two leads, Zander and Felix. This third book, while continuing on the major plot points from the previous two books, ramps everything up by, like, ten. It does this great plot thing where terrible events happen that…
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The Second Mango, The Money Book, The Franchise Affair
The Second Mango – Shira Glassman A newly-crowned queen and a lady knight go on an adventure to find the queen a girlfriend, and on the way end up rescuing a bunch a people and defeating an evil wizard. It’s super fluffy and super adorable! Everybody is Jewish and the queen has food allergies and it’s great. And for about half of the book I appreciated the humor and the light-heartedness, but then it tried to be more serious and things went awry. Because I was so attached to all the fluff in the beginning, I couldn’t make the transition over into seriousness, and I ultimately didn’t like the writing…
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Clariel by Garth Nix
First off, if you’re like me and expecting dragons from the get-go and was VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT– sorry, but it doesn’t show up until way at the end and it’s not even a real dragon, so. Secondly, forget the thing with the dragon because Clariel is AMAZING and WONDERFUL and it was totally worth obsessing over for a year or so prior to publishing. No regrets! I love the Abhorsen series. A LOT. And so I was super excited to find out that Garth Nix was writing another book set in that world. Tbh, the only thing I’d be excited about MORE is if Diana Wynne Jones came back…
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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…