Despite my lukewarm feelings about the first book, I read the next two volumes in Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mystery series, A Cast-Off Coven and Hexes and Hemlines. I know that people hate-watch TV shows, but do they hate-read? It takes a fair amount of time and energy to read a full-length novel (even if you sort of skim parts of it), so why do I keep coming back these books when they aren’t particularly good? Is it because I realized that Lily Ivory (why not […]
This review is about the books you should read instead. But also maybe read this one too.
tl;dr: Stick with the first three books in this series: Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen. I don’t know what Nix is doing with these later ones, but he’s not doing it super great and it’s a total bummer. Goldenhand isn’t a waste of time, but it does not hold up to the originals, especially the first two. The Back Story For five years I was a seventh grade English teacher. One of the best parts of the job was hearing my students’ book reports and reading […]
I really liked some of this book and I absolutely despised some of this book. But sure, I’ll read the next one.
A few years ago, my kids joined the swim team at our neighborhood pool. This meant many hours of me just sitting on a chair at the pool, having nothing to do but read. So I assigned myself a “pool book” — one that was longer than I might normally read, just so that I would never run out of stuff to read during practice. So far, just while the kids have been practicing, I’ve read all five books in the A Song of Ice […]
Sleeping Beauty, Environmental Warrior
Beauty is a complicated fantasy novel about fairy tales, feminism, environmentalism and the end of the world. It involves fairies, angels, humans, and time travel, and places a heavy emphasis on darkness vs. light, on creativity and destruction. There is a whole helluva lot going on, sometimes maybe more than the author can handle, but author Tepper, who died last year (because of course she did, it was 2016), certainly demonstrates great passion for her subject matter. The novel begins in 14th century Westfaire with […]