Miranda @ Bibliodaze

Very rarely do you see sex handled well in YA--at least, not in paranormal YA. Sometimes you do come across a contemporary novel that handles it, but it’s rarely ever the focal point of such a novel. I’ve always been a little disappointed about this, since, despite what people seem to believe, teens do have sex and masturbate and do all kinds of things society tries to tell them not to do. To not acknowledge this in a novel focusing on teens continues to do them a disservice. Sex takes up a large part of Anatomy of a Boyfriend. Specifically, meeting someone you realize you want to have sex with, and having sex for the first time. And it’s handled well. The build up from heavy petting to the actual, awkward first time is believable and genuine, and it was nice to see a teenage girl in a YA novel who wanted sex and wasn’t punished for it. Even better, the sex isn’t wonderfully epic the first time--there are a lot of missteps between Dom and Wes, and Dom doesn’t even have an orgasm herself from anything Wes does because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And best of all, at one point in the novel, Dom experiments and manages to get herself off with a personal massager. When do we ever see that in a YA? Fortunately there were a lot of other good things about Anatomy of a Boyfriend. The writing style and Dom’s voice were very real and believable as a teenager, and her experiences going through her first real love made me alternately laugh and cringe at memories of my own first love experience. I enjoyed Dom as a character but she’s one that readers are going to be divided on; either they’ll love her or they’ll hate her because she is a very realistic seventeen year old. She has her flaws and her judgmental attitudes about things, and she can behave like a real brat at times. She tried my patience once or twice, but honestly the moments where she acted like a brat just made her more likable because she felt real. I do wish her best friend Amy had gotten the same kind of depth--basically she’s just a really horny 17 y/o and every conversation she’s a part of includes some kind of sexual innuendo, which got old fast--but I did appreciate how close she and Dom were. Wes was a cute enough love interest, and Snadowsky did a good job of showing us why Dom would be attracted to him while also giving really subtle clues as to why he and Dom wouldn’t work out in the long run. If there were any quibbles I had with the novel, it’s that in the first few pages there’s a pretty ridiculous and offensive portrayal of a fat woman. It’d be one thing if Dom were judging her for being fat, but the writing backs it up by fulfilling pretty much all of the stereotypes of a fat person. I get the intent was to have Wes and Dom’s first meeting be horrifically humiliating, but there were other ways to go about it than that. As a fat person myself, it left a bad taste in my mouth and did not set a good first impression for the rest of the book. Thankfully I did end up enjoying it, but still. Dom also has a few moments of slut shaming, although sadly I could see how this is realistic for a teenage girl to both be sexually active and still judge others and call them “sluts”, or worse, judge herself as possibly being slutty. It’s not very often that Dom does this, though, thankfully. Given all of this, I’m interested in seeing what comes next in Dom’s story in Anatomy of a Single Girl. Hopefully I’ll be just as impressed.See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand. Finished copies of both this book and the sequel were provided by the author for an honest review.

Let’s start with the good things about Ten Tiny Breaths first. Kacey is a pretty awesome main character; obviously damaged with a lot of issues, but a lot of attitude to back it up. It’s nice to read a main leading woman character with a backbone. Her character growth was believable and her relationship with her sister was nice, even if that relationship and character got shoved off to the side after a certain point. Her friendship with Storm, an acrobatic stripper, was nice too. There were some legitimately nice surprises as far as the plot went. I honestly didn’t see a twist with a character coming, though in hindsight I maybe should have. It didn’t go the predictable route with Kacey and Livie’s aunt coming to cause problems for them either, which was a nice touch. If only the rest of the novel had been as good as these individual things, this review would go very differently. Unfortunately a big failing of the novel for me was Kacey and Trent’s relationship. That aforementioned backbone of Kacey’s? Yeah, it vanishes pretty much whenever Trent levels his puppy dog eyes at her. This leads to him getting away with things he absolutely shouldn’t, such as sexually blackmailing her. Kacey calls it what it is, and she does get angry about it, but other than that? He faces no repercussions. I had a hard time rooting for them to get together and stay together because of this and a few other reasons I can’t mention because of spoilers. If I can’t root for the main couple of your romance novel to get together, then your novel is pretty much sunk. More than anything I really wanted Kacey to give Trent a nice punch in the gut because of how he was acting, especially when he kept trying to force her to go into therapy for her PTSD. Granted, Trent does acknowledge afterwards that it wasn’t a good idea, but that coupled with everything else he’d done made his apology pretty much useless to me. There’s also a huge issue of some pretty constant slut shaming throughout the novel. Kacey immediately judges Storm the first time they meet because she has large, obviously fake breasts. Of course Kacey soon learns that there’s an actual person with a personality and a mind of her own attached to those breasts and readjusts her opinion a little. She still makes some scattered comments about Storm’s breasts even after they become friends though, which rubbed me the wrong way. Then Storm helps Kacey get a job as a bartender at a stripper club, and Kacey’s wholly unpleasant judgment comes out in full swing. Especially when one of the strippers happens to do her job and try to get Trent’s attention, Kacey is merciless. Unfortunately, the writing of the novel backs this up: All the strippers (except for the One Special Woman, Storm) are portrayed as airheads and just not as awesome as Kacey because they happen to take their clothes off for some good money every night. The slut shaming really did ruin a lot of the novel for me and lost me a lot of sympathy I originally had for Kacey. I still liked her overall personality, but if they could have taken out the horrific treatment of the strippers I would have been a much happier reader. So needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be checking out the rest of this series, given what I saw here. There were some aspects here that I enjoyed seeing in a New Adult title, but the unhealthy romance and poor treatment of other characters has not enticed me to read the other two novels.See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand. I received a review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I hate it when you end up disliking a book everyone else has loved so far. But that’s the case for me and This Song Will Save Your Life. There were some things I liked here, but they couldn't outweigh the irritating or bad. I think the novel’s biggest hurdle is the main character, Elise. I don’t have an issue with unlikable characters, but there always needs to be something in there that can make you sympathize with them. Even if it’s something really tiny. My problem with Elise was that she is pretentious, and in a way that irritates the daylights out of me: She’s pretentious about music. Only certain kinds of music are worthy enough to be listened to, and everything else is crap, and if you like said crap? Obviously you’re not a very intelligent person. Granted, that comes down to personal taste. I don’t like people who are pretentious about what music they listen to, so it follows that I wouldn’t be wild about Elise. Other readers may not be bothered by it. Personally, I’m going to continue to rock out to Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears whenever I feel like it. The other problem is that, while Elise does have every reason to be scornful of her classmates, the writing rarely ever treats said classmates fairly. There are a few cases--Amelia Kindl, for one, and Elise’s kinda sorta friends Sally and Chava are treated well enough. But then the novel falls into the usual trap of having a group of mean girls, and they stay pretty much mean girls throughout the novel during the few times they show up. There’s a difference between a character being disdainful of another character in a book and the writing itself being disdainful as well. The kids at school just can’t possibly compare to the cool quirky new people Elise meets at the underground club Start, and the writing doesn’t do anything to disprove that. But there are some legitimately good points here too. There’s a scene of Elise learning how to DJ that’s actually very interesting and well written, and I wish there had been more of that instead of most everything else. In general when Elise is DJing, I enjoyed the novel more than I did with anything else. Her love of it felt genuine, and the descriptions of the club were really well written. The romance, also, is slightly unusual for a YA: It’s based mostly on lust and physical attraction, and the writing doesn’t try to pretend it’s anything else. Char, the love interest, was a huge douchebag and this is more or less addressed at certain points. This is a refreshing change from other books where he’d likely be excused from his behaviour. I think that if people are okay with a pretentious, unlikable main character, they’ll have an easier time with This Song Will Save Your Life than I did. As it is, I was expecting a lot more and came away disappointed. See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand!

The general story itself was alright, and I liked some of the side characters even if they were one-dimensional at times. But Colby's belief that he was utterly entitled to know everything about Bev was highly irritating, as well as how he kept passive-aggressively shaming her about lying to him in front of other people, even strangers at times, and no one called him out on this or said "Hey, you're acting like a douchebag, you need to knock it off." Bev maybe shouldn't have waited so long to tell him, no, and he was entitled to be angry up to a point, but he crossed a line when he acted like a jerk to her because of it and brought strangers into their private business by shaming her like he did. I was hoping Bev would punch him at some points, and while she does get angry, he never apologizes for what he did and gets away with it. If the book had been narrated from Bev's POV instead of Colby's, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. I was way more interested in her than Colby's deal.

Actual rating: 2.5I’d been hearing little bits and pieces of this novel for a while now, and admittedly I was seen drooling over the cover more than once, so when I saw that the publisher had it up on NetGalley for review, I went ahead and requested it. I’m not sorry I read it, but there were a lot of things that could have been done far better than they were. An asteroid named Persephone is set to make a collision with Earth in a week, by the start of the novel. Due to massive underfunding of NASA and other space programs, there’s no way to really stop it and nothing to do but prepare. During the week that follows, three island teens go about their lives as best they can: Sienna, a suicidal teen released from a psychiatric home because of the asteroid, who has to deal with her father introducing her to his new fiancee; Caden, a young man with a drunken mother and absent father; and Zan, whose boyfriend Leo was killed in a car crash ten months earlier and whose death she still hasn’t quite recovered from. The prose is the real strength of Tumble & Fall. The atmosphere and mood of it is haunting and very still, even when big things are happening. There’s a lot of uncertainty about Persephone and how bad the damage will be (which is actually a complaint I’ll get to in a minute), so people are simply either trying to go about their lives as best they can or are simply spending every second they can with their loved ones. It’s a very unsettling read, not just because of the asteroid but because it feels very real. If all of humanity was about to be killed, in some parts of the world this is probably what it would be like. Calm, but with an unnerving creepiness underneath and a sense of loss. As well as that, there’s genuine emotion in the novel. It feels very natural and real, from Sienna’s struggles with her mental health and her family, to Zan’s heartbreak over Leo’s death, to Caden’s anger at his father and mother. It never descended into melodrama, which it easily could have. The prose kept it from doing so. However, there were major missteps in the novel that kept it from truly shining. Sienna’s story was one of the worst, I think. She meets a boy named Owen she used to sometimes play with as a child, and immediately starts spending a lot of time with him and then running off with him in the middle of the night. Within two days of knowing each other, they’re declaring their love for each other and Sienna is ignoring her family in favor of him. Personally, I was far more interested in Sienna’s new family dynamics than I was this random guy she was suddenly into. I can’t stand insta-love, and unfortunately Sienna and Owen fell right into that pit. I wanted to see more of how Sienna dealt with her father’s new fiancee, Denise, or maybe her spending some time with her brother. I wanted to see more of them trying to figure out how to deal with each other in the aftermath of her suicide attempt and her six months spent at a psychiatric home. Given how one-dimensional Owen was as well, I just felt no urge to know him or read more about him, not like I did the rest of Sienna’s family. Zan’s storyline was also fairly predictable, though I won’t go into specifics why. There was only two ways her storyline could have unfolded, and it’s a pretty basic storyline we’ve seen a hundred times before. That’s not to say there isn’t good emotion in there, because there is. I just knew where her storyline was going, so more than anything I felt bored by her chapters. Caden’s story is the stranger one. His life quickly unravels and he’s thrust into odd situations, and out of the three I think his storyline is the one I enjoyed the most. His character growth felt believable, as well as his attraction to another character in his storyline, mostly because they weren’t declaring how much they loved each other within two days of meeting each other. The resolution of his storyline was the most touching, along with Zan’s. But here’s my biggest complaint about the novel. If you’re going to have the catalyst for everything be something scientific, you had better make certain you get the facts of it right. Spoilers for the novel underneath the cut.At one point, the government decides to launch a nuke at Persephone to see if they can steer it off course. This, of course, does not work, as any disaster movie from the 80s could have told anyone. Instead Persephone is broken into many other pieces, still heading on a trajectory for Earth. Zan and her friend Nick are told this by another character, and it’s mentioned how the scientists don’t know how bad the impact will be. Now, at this point, there had been a lot of uncertainty around Persephone as a whole, which I was willing to overlook for a while. Maybe NASA truly had been underfunded to the point where there wouldn’t be any certainty what Persephone would do. However. If she’s finally close enough that they can launch a rocket at her and she’s only about a day from colliding with Earth, at this point, the scientists should know exactly how big she is and what the impact event will consist of. They may not know where exactly she’ll land, but they’d know what would happen if she did due to her size. None of this is mentioned. There are no announcements made about what will happen, what people can expect, nothing. Persephone is kept in an air of uncertainty and therefore so are the characters. Everyone kind of assumes that it’ll wipe out humanity, but never is it specifically stated by any official during the course of the novel. This felt like such a forced attempt at keeping some haunting mystery to everything that it really brought the novel down a few notches for me. Given the really effective, pitch perfect final image the book closes on, I think that ending would have been stronger if we knew for certain that all of humanity was going to be killed in the collision, or at the very least a good chunk of it. Readers are smarter than this, and they can handle a sad book with a more conclusive answer. Given the strength of the prose, emotion, and the technical writing, I’d be interested in seeing what else Alexandra Coutts has to offer in the future. But I do wish the overall characters and their storylines had been stronger, and I do wish the scientific facts hadn’t been skimped on in order to maintain a vague non-answer about the fate of everything.See this review and others at On The Nightstand! I received a copy of this book for review through the publisher on NetGalley.

Details can make or break a book. Depending on the reader, some details will work and some won’t. Unfortunately for me, Ignite was full of details that just didn’t click together. The entire premise is based around a looming war between Heaven and Hell, angels and demons. Our main character is one such demon, formerly an angel before she fell, named Penemuel. Pen is now set with the task of killing and collecting souls for Hell for the upcoming battles with her twin brother Azael. However, from the beginning we can see that Pen isn’t really feeling the whole “soul reaping demon” thing anymore, at least not as much as she thinks she should be, so clearly during the course of the novel she’s going to face hard decisions about who she wants to be. I can understand that, as it is a young adult book, it needs to be easily marketable to young adults and therefore the characters need to be appealing to teens. But it’s severely distracting when a millenia old demon not only appears to be just sixteen physically, but also acts like a sixteen year old girl. There’s a scene with a lake and her intended love interest and all the awkwardness and “tee hee oh goodness he’s shirtless!” of taking your clothes off in front of someone of the opposite sex that felt like it would have fit in better in a contemporary novel than it did this. These are really old characters, and inhuman characters at that. Why would they care about getting down to their knickers in front of each other? On top of that, why would the demons or angels have a concept of age like the humans do? They live for so long, why would they care about keeping track of how old they look, enough to put it into concepts and words like “sixteen”? Teens are better readers than some give them credit for. They aren’t going to be disinterested in a story just because the main characters are inhuman and act like it; a lot of them are probably going to be very fascinated by an inhuman main character who acts like an actual otherworldy being. I know I would have been at sixteen, and I still am at twenty one. There’s also another scene where Pen has to perform CPR on someone. This scene was so jarring it took me right out of the novel, because why would a demon know CPR? They don’t need to breathe and they have no working hearts. Where would she have learned it from? Why would she have thought it important enough to consider it not only useful, but necessary to learn in case she might need it some day? She hangs out with other demons and not humans, unless she’s planning on killing them, in which case the CPR really isn’t going to be of use in that situation. It was just beyond ridiculous. Added to that, Pen and Azael are two of the snarkiest characters I’ve read about, and that is not a compliment. While we do get a break from the snark occasionally, it’s just so overused and poured on that I got tired of it really quick. Snark is only effective and funny if it’s used sparingly. Eventually, while I did try to keep with the novel if, I decided I just didn’t care enough to continue. I will say that the technical writing it self, at least, wasn’t awful. It wasn’t anything stunning, but there were occasional moments of nice description and it was easy to read. But honestly, the CPR thing killed it for me. As I said, small details can make or break a novel, and that one broke Ignite for me.See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand! A copy of this novel was provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

A little messy and all over the place, jumping between time periods in no real order, but I did manage to get sucked into the writing and the stories Masha told. I also enjoyed the different viewpoint of Rasputin, as Masha had a very positive opinion of her father. The romance was a little uncomfortable as one of the people involved is only thirteen, and it could have done without a lot of the sex at the end, but overall I still liked it well enough.

Some readers may be unsatisfied with the open ending and the fact there are no real answers provided by the end, but the world building and characters more than make up for it. Fen is an awesome leading lady, and the fact that romance plays no part of her character arc but her platonic/familial love for others does is something that's been sorely missing in YA for a long time now.Seriously recommended for anyone looking for a well done apocalyptic sci-fi YA story.

Unlike some other Norse myth books I’ve read, I actually did enjoy the exploration of the myths and the expansion of them in this book. Some things could have been better--saying that Loki and Thor weren’t friends in the myths when, actually, a large part of the time they were--but overall it fared better than some other books I’ve read in the past. Unfortunately, there was a lot here that was bad otherwise. The biggest complaint I have is that the writing just got downright stupid at times. There’s a part in the beginning of the book where the three main characters all fight a pack of wolves, and then a tornado touches down and comes right for them, and yet they keep fighting each other. Outside. In the open, on a piece of flat land. I honestly do not understand the point of this scene at all. It was already tense because the characters weren’t quite so evenly matched in terms of strength or numbers with the wolves; why add in a tornado? It just made everyone seem incredibly stupid, and I had to put the book down for a second to go, “Wow, really?” There’s also the fact that, at times, everything seemed just a little too easy for the kids, especially when it came to avoiding law enforcement. I also had a hard time reading the main characters as thirteen year olds. A lot of the time they spoke, thought and acted like they were much older; I kept thinking they were sixteen, not thirteen. Other than that, the characters were the main reason I kept reading. They were actually likable, and I rooted for them even when the plotline got silly. The writing was more or less easy to read, but at times it bludgeoned me with how the characters were feeling. They stated it outright in their narration, and it felt a lot like it was telling me instead of showing me how they felt. I don’t need to be told that two characters are sort of friends now after traveling for a bit, I could tell on my own by how they spoke to each other with more respect than they initially did. Honestly, the writing felt dumbed down at times, and I hate to think it’s because the book is written for a younger audience. I wish I could have liked Loki’s Wolves more than I did, but honestly, I’ll still probably read the sequel just to see where it goes. I did appreciate the treatment of the myths and the world building, and the characters, so I may overlook the occasional eyeroll worthy moment for the next few books.See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand!

Twixt is a moving, beautifully told tale about redemption and whether one can ever truly be beyond hope of said redemption. Diemer has definitely developed and improved her writing since The Dark Wife. Not to say the aforementioned novel is bad, because it certainly isn’t, but there’s a marked difference in how that novel read compared to this one, and it’s all an improvement. At the core of the story is a mystery, or actually several. Who is the girl who woke up in the snow, covered in blood? Where did she come from? Why can’t she remember her past, even with the help of something to remind her? How does Abeo City operate, what are the creatures who terrorize the City and snatch away its residents, where do they take them? All of these questions are answered in time, and the way Diemer builds upon the mystery and delivers the answers is especially satisfying. This is due also to the terrific world building in the novel. It’s honestly some of the most creative world building I’ve seen. There are so many layers to Abeo City and its residents and creatures that I’m still thinking about the world a week after I’ve finished the book. Added to that, Diemer manages to capture a great atmosphere in her writing about Abeo City. There’s always a steady sense of unease present in the text, even when the characters are happy, and the City is incredibly creepy. Granted, it is a little easy to guess what exactly Abeo City is after a while. But for the most part, Diemer keeps the reader guessing, and the eventual reveal of what the City is and how it came to be more than made up for how obvious it was where the characters are. If there were any downside to the novel, it’s that the main couple do veer perilously close to insta-love. Diemer, for the most part, avoids it a little by having there be a mutual attraction instead of immediate love. But it does progress at a fast rate, due to the short length of the novel. Still, the relationship was sweet, and I also enjoyed Lottie’s relationships with the rest of the cast, who all get their moments to shine. This book reminded me of why Diemer is one of my favourite authors, and why I’ll read anything she puts out. She’s just so good, and her stories are always wonderful. Twixt is no different.See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand!

I’m apparently one of the few people who thinks New Adult has a lot of potential to be legitimately good. I realize that a lot of people who dislike NA have read a lot of really bad NA titles, and unfortunately there do seem to be a lot of bad outweighing the good in that instance. The Art of Love is one of the good. It’s everything NA wishes it could be, and what it should be. The biggest praise I have is that Fitz is not a romanticized abusive “bad boy”. He’s a little strange, sure, but he’s a normal dude who loves art and actually listens when a woman says “no” and respects her choices. Shocking, I know. It’s sad how I feel that I have to praise this as something noteworthy, but there it is. It’s also refreshingly honest, tackling the idea of love at first sight more often than not being lust at first sight instead. Marina starts off as the typical YA/NA lead girl, who thinks poorly of herself and her looks, but there are actual legitimate reasons for her to behave and think this way. She’s not some middle class privileged girl being made to think she’s ugly so she’s relatable to the reader; she has a history to back this up, and her struggles at overcoming it were painfully well written. There were times when the book told us instead of showed us her past, but thankfully they were very few. But better than that, Marina has actual character growth and development. She changes from who she starts off as in the beginning, though she doesn’t completely recover all in one fell swoop. She grows, but she still has a lot of growing left to do by the end of the book. This is such a breath of fresh air compared to what we usually get in a book like this. And while there are a lot of hormones raging and lust and sexy thoughts, the sex isn’t the major focus of the book unlike a lot of other NA. It really is more interested in Marina’s journey and her struggles to find herself, as well as her relationships with not just Fitz but her new friends in New York City, too. There were some scenes and characters that felt a little tacked on--a guy Fitz is apparently rivals with has a scene that adds nothing to the overall plot of the book, as another character ends up being the one to drive the conflict in the end--but they don’t really detract from the book.That being said, the conflict was a little weak and forced. I had a hard time believing no one thought of making one little call to resolve the issue, instead of trying to disguise Marina and obviously setting up the end of the book. But I'm willing to overlook that in favour of everything else this book does right. I’m really happy I read The Art of Love, and I’m very much looking forward to whatever else Anne Whitney has to offer in the future.See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand!

On the surface, Cobweb Bride has everything I should love in a book. A fairytale-esque setting, the focus on ladies being awesome, Death in love with a bride. I should have loved this book. Unfortunately I didn’t. That’s not to say that it’s a bad book, because it’s not, but it could have been so much better than what it was. The first half is mostly all set up for the second half, and while that’s not usually a bad thing, the set up was meandering. There’s a lot of walking around, POV switches to characters that will play a part in the story, and no real sense of urgency to anything despite the fact that Death has completely stopped doing his job. That being said, the second half when all the characters finally come together is the better part of the book, and it managed to keep my interest. It’s a shame there was so much time spent on the set up for the second half and the second book, because the first half really does drag the novel down. The writing itself was beautiful at first, but as the story went on it became a little unrestrained and started falling into the overwritten purple prose area. While some of the descriptions are truly beautiful, there are some that just go on forever and repeat information we already sat through (such as one character remembering how they killed another and that character didn’t die, something we’d already seen play out.) It got a little better by the end as more action was happening, but there were some passages that truly tested my patience. However, even if most of those issues had been addressed... there was one major element of the book that would have kept me from ever truly loving it, even if the rest had been the most amazing thing I’d ever read. Major spoilers under the cut. So one of the main characters, a man named Vlau, murders the daughter of the Emperor and Empress, a sickly girl called Claere. She doesn’t die, obviously, and when she asks Vlau why he killed her, he explains that the Emperor had ruined his family, killed his father on supposedly unfounded treason charges, and killed his brother as well, and left them in dishonour. It’s only lightly touched on that while Vlau’s hatrd is understandable, killing Claere was not right. And then Claere and Vlau end up falling in love, as Claere has him take her to Death’s Keep in order to become the Cobweb Bride. This literally astounded me with how horrific and offensive it was. This guy kills her in revenge for what happened to his family (something she had no part in, mind) and yet I’m supposed to approve of them falling in love with each other? Sorry, no. I don’t care that his hatred was valid. He killed a young girl just to get back at her parents for what they did to his family. That is not romantic. It ruined quite a good bit of the novel for me, for obvious reasons. Overall there are some hints of a good story in this novel, and given where we leave Percy I might be interested in reading the next book in the trilogy, Cobweb Empire. But given the issues I had, I may decide not to. See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand!

I gave it a chance, but from the start I wasn't overly wild about the writing style. Overuse of exclamation points, an irritating main character who is ~oh so special~, and some pretty basic world building.But worst of all... a flashback to a near rape scene that Tucker goes through, just to show off how awesome she is and how she isn't like her slutty prostitute friend Kally. Tucker chuckles at this memory of nearly being raped and fighting off her attacker at thirteen years old.Sorry, no. Dropped it like a hot potato after that and feel no desire to pick it back up. Just because you can include a scene like that to show how dark or how tough your main character is doesn't mean you should. Rape and attempted rape should never be used as a basic device to show something off.

See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand! I won a digital copy of this book from the lovely author herself. Well, this was a wonderfully creepy ride! I think it maybe could have used another draft to really cinch things in, but it's still a good book.The writing style is wonderful, with some very nice description and good pacing. Val and Gavin are nicely composed characters and fully realized, though as a downside the secondary characters fall flat at times, especially Val's other friends. Since the story is so focused on Val and Gavin I can forgive it, and her friends do get their moments to shine, Lisa especially. I liked the attention given to how being stalked affected Val and how Gavin's actions hurt her, even while at times she found it thrilling. I worried at first that her finding it enticing would be softening it a little, but I shouldn't have. While Val does at times find Gavin's actions a little thrilling, she's on the whole frightened by it and eventually a large part of her personality is radically shifted by what happens. I appreciated this sensitivity to dealing with stalking and the effect it has on someone.But Val, bless her, was not the brightest crayon in the box. I might be holding her to too high a standard since she's fourteen and incredibly naive, but it takes her far too long to figure out that Gavin is her stalker, especially when he outright says he watches her at school and she gets suspicious notes in her locker. Following that, I found her Mother's approach to dealing with this highly troubling as well. When Val finally does tell her what's going on, she says to just keep blocking him whenever he messages her and then says Val should change her Facebook icon, which is of her in her track suit. A paragraph ago her Mother said it wasn't her fault, then says dressing in a perceived provocative manner is needlessly egging him on. Maybe this is just me, but if my daughter had come to me and said that she was being stalked, I would go to the police immediately.Likewise, after her daughter is attacked by Gavin, she allows Val to have a final say in whether or not they should go to the police. Sorry, no. I'm usually in favour of a victim choosing whether or not to proceed with such a thing, but in this case it needs to be the parent's decision, especially since Val is a minor. It really did feel like her Mother was being really light on this just to keep the story going to the (admittedly) horrifying conclusion. There's also a small problem of the POV shifting randomly in some instances. We jump into the heads of Val's mother, a random woman Val runs to for help after Gavin attacks her the first time, and then her art teacher. These served no purpose and felt sloppy, and should have been taken out entirely. We already know Val is a sweet, naive, innocent girl from being inside her head the entire time. We don't need it reinforced from the other characters. But overall I enjoyed Fearscape, and I'm already plotting nefarious deeds to get my hands on the sequel to see what happens.

See more of my reviews at On The Nightstand! I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.In a kingdom called Rurik lives the Princess Ailsbet, daughter of the cruel King Haikor. Haikor has decreed that taweyr, the magic of men, war and death, is more important than the magic of women, neweyr, which can grow plants and help livestock. Haikor keeps the taweyr strong in his kingdom while eliminating the neweyr, and his kingdom (and its inhabitants) are suffering for it. Ailsbet is unweyr, so she’s left to focus on her one passion: music. However, when she finds out that she may not be unweyr at all and learns of a prophecy that could save both Rurik and the distant kingdom of Weirland, she has to choose between avoiding her father’s wrath and keeping to her own passions, or possibly saving both the kingdoms and the magic in the land. Princess Marlissa (or Issa for short) lives in Weirland, and likewise has an interest in the prophecy. When the chance arrives for her to be able to make it come true, she decides with some reluctance to take it. Forced to live in a land with an overabundance of taweyr and little to no neweyr, which she has plenty of, Issa must learn to survive in the dangerous court of King Haikor while giving away no hint of her intention to bring both magics together again, as they once were. When I saw The Rose Throne up on NetGalley, I jumped on the chance to read it. Despite the fact that Harrison’s last venture (Tris & Izzy) wasn’t up to par, I remember loving her Princess and the Hound series when I read it a few years ago. I hoped I’d love The Rose Throne the same way. Alas, it was not meant to be. Harrison introduces a lot of interesting conflict in the second chapter, but she never delivers on it. I get that the book is a fantasy romance novel with a much heavier emphasis on the romance. But honestly, if you don’t intend to follow up with the consequences of what the characters did, maybe you should take out those elements altogether. When I finished the book, I literally sat there for a moment, thinking “That was it? That was your ending?”* Most of the interesting conflict and other elements are brushed over in favour of the romance. Sadly, that falls incredibly short as well. I did not care whether or not Issa and Kellin got together, or the drama surrounding how they could never be together. I was more interested in both girls finding some way to fulfill the prophecy, except that they never do. They take the prophecy at face value and don’t stop to consider that maybe there’s another way to read it. Therefore, most of the novel is just them standing around trying to avoid Haikor’s cruelty and survive in his court. That kind of tension can only carry a novel so far. There’s also a huge problem I’ve begun noticing in Harrison’s writing. She writes in a very detached, passive voice. There’s little to no internalization or introspection of events where the girls are concerned. A character close to Ailsbet dies, and she literally has one short paragraph dedicated to Ailsbet’s reaction to her death before Ailsbet goes off thinking about politics in the next paragraph. This character’s death is barely brought up again, and we don’t see Ailsbet’s emotions to it again either. Even if Ailsbet and this particular character weren’t overly close, I still think there should have been more of a reaction past a small cry. Therefore, I had trouble connecting to any of the characters or caring about their problems. If they apparently don’t care enough, why should I? Truthfully, I only kept reading to see how the prophecy would come into play and how Issa and Ailsbet would set things to right again. Sadly, that never happened, because it was apparently more important that we focus on Issa’s angst over never being with Kellin and the romance than attempting to save an entire kingdom. I’m not against flawed characters or even selfish characters, but Ailsbet and Issa never progress past what they are in the beginning. They stay stagnant and selfish, and it was bitterly disappointing to see them make the choices they do in the end. Overall, I wish I could have loved The Rose Throne. It had the bare bones of everything I love in a story, but the narrative choices that were made, the writing style and the characters kept me from liking it. I still have hope Harrison can recreate the magic that I saw in the Princess and the Hound series, but I’ll be more hesitant to try her works in the future. (MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ENDING UNDER CUT!!)In the ending, Issa brings some neweyr back to Rurik and then immediately leaves for Weirland again, after promising Kellin they’d be together one day. Ailsbet likewise leaves for another kingdom. Haikor still lives and both girls legitimately do not care that he will continue to make Rurik suffer after they’re gone, or that they’ve left the throne without an heir, or that Edik, Ailsbet’s thirteen year old brother, was killed by Haikor for standing up for his sister. But hey, who cares about a dead thirteen year old boy or a possible civil war when Issa has the possibility of getting together with Kellin one day, eh? Or that Ailsbet can focus solely on her music instead of taking up responsibility and doing something to save her kingdom? Clearly that’s not important at all.

Not feeling the new title or the cover so much, but whatever. It's silly how much I'm looking forward to this, considering how much the first two books in the Iron Fey series disappointed me.