I love Laini Taylor. I adored Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and I really liked Days of Blood and Starlight. (I admit, I was not 100% enthusiastic about Dreams of Gods and Monsters. But as a whole, the trilogy was top-notch.) So I was ready to love this. And I did. Until the very last page.** Super quick overview here: Like the Smoke & Bone trilogy, Strange the Dreamer takes place in a fantasy world at an unknown time in history. Our hero, Lazlo Strange, […]
The American Revolution Through Slaves’ Eyes
Laurie Halse Anderson’s award-winning YA novels set during the American Revolution are superb. Not only does she get her history correct — with fascinating detail about daily life for wealthy and working classes, Loyalists and Patriots, city life and army camp life — but she also provides narrators whose perspectives are unique and provocative. Isabel and Curzon are slaves. Each brings a different view of the revolution and what it means for them as slaves. The three novels take the reader from May of 1776, when […]
You Keep Telling Yourself That, Pal…
John Wayne Cleaver has some (most) indicators that he’ll probably be a serial killer one day: The superficial/not actual indicators: His middle name is Wayne, his dad is named Sam (which makes him the Son of Sam), his last name’s Cleaver, he’s obsessed with serial killers. The real: The “triad”–bedwetting, animal cruelty, and a compunction towards arson. Oh yeah, and he’s a sociopath. But as much as John studies serial killers, he keeps telling us and his therapist that he’s studying them so that he […]
Conflicted. Still, till death.
I love the rat queens. The first book was amazing, fresh and funny. The second book was fast paced and hilarious. Before I read the third volume I went back and re-read the second one. That when I realized it was like a whole new book. I couldn’t remember anything about it at all. Apparently this series quality is deteriorating. And fast. It’s been a week since I read the third one. And I can’t really tell you what it’s about. There is a bunch […]