This book chewed me up and spit me back out. In a good way, of course. But seriously, I had a major book hangover after finishing this one. The writing, the story, the characters were all so, so beautiful. I started sobbing after it was over because I was so overwhelmed with how lovely what I just read was. The story follows Cyril Avery’s life, born in the 1940s, all the way up until present day. His mother was cruelly kicked out of her rural […]
“If you can’t win the game, you have to cheat.”
Have you read Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue? If not, stop reading this review and go read that. This is the sequel, and both books are utterly delightful and disarming. This book is the second in The Montague Siblings series (or duology? there are only two of them) and the story belongs to Felicity, the more sensible and academic of the two. Gentleman’s Guide made it clear that Felicity has more interest in science and medicine than domesticity and society and in her […]
Standalone fantasy novels are rare and precious. This one was not bad.
Khai was destined from birth to become the Shadow of the Sun-blessed princess Zaryia. Both born during the same eclipse, Khai was the child who caught the hawk’s feather thrown by the selected priestess, thus confirming that he was the chosen one. Raised by warrior priests deep in the desert, Khai is trained in all the deadly arts of stealth and fighting, and gets his first chance to kill a man at age nine. He hones all his abilities to become the very best Shadow […]
Hold On To Your Hats, Turns Out I’m Mad
To say that this book is inelegant with the subjects it attempts to deal with is putting it kindly: this novel is obnoxious and gross. I don’t even remember how I first became aware of it, but I remember reading a synopsis and thinking, “that can’t be right?” I was baffled as to how it would work, and thought I certainly wouldn’t like it. But curiosity got the best of me (oh, also the author stating that people should read it before criticizing it, due […]