(Double bingo!) It feels like I’m cheating to count this as my banned book “Fahrenheit 451” square, because in the nearly 20 years since I read this the first time it’s become omnipresent. Not that it wasn’t a hit even when I picked it up the first time around in the middle school library where my mom worked, killing time between the end of my school day and her closing hours with an endless supply of books, but the popularity explosion and merchandise inundation really […]
Everything I knew I always wanted
I keep hearing things about N. K. Jemisin, but my reading list is so long. HOWEVER. Jemisin ticks so many boxes for CBR 10 Bingo – award winner, birthday, start of a series, etc that I made space. I was very surprised to find that my library had no Jemisin books in the collection, so requested a copy of The Fifth Season via interlibrary loan based on recommendations on the CBR FB page. Thank you, folks, for the excellent recommendation! This is the first book […]
This is How You Use a Novella to Transition a Series!
I only read the first sentence of the synopsis for this one – all I knew was that it was an Ilona Andrews Hidden Legacy novella so it was an automatic preorder. I saw that it was about Connor AKA Mad Rogan and Nevada’s wedding but it’s not like I needed any more detail to read this one. As a result, I was pleasantly surprised to see that after the prologue with Nevada’s introduction to Connor’s mother, the novel shifted perspectives to the next Baylor sister, Catalina. Don’t get […]
YA sequel that holds up to the first
Unfortunately, it seems to have become a bit of a given in publishing that sequels are generally a let-down. Maybe it’s a function of the first being more popular than anticipated and the second being rushed, but there seems to be taken for granted a drop in quality. Fortunately, in her latest series Strange the Dreamer, Laini Taylor holds ground. Another unfortunate reality of modern publishing is that anything with a teenage protagonist becomes “young adult”. There are definitely some themes in here that are too […]