Who’s ready for some kvetching? Plot-wise, all you really need to know is that Heartless is the origin story of the Queen of Hearts, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. So although you know how it’s going to end, here is a general SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this review, because I don’t want to dance around the details of what bugged me. The very biggest problem is that the heroine, Catherine Pinkteron, is an absolute mess of a character. To a certain extent, […]
Serpent Demon
Serpentine is set in the same world as Cindy Pon’s other series, The Kingdom of Xia. However, as I’ve never read those, I can’t comment as to whether the events there have anything to do with the ones in this novel. I really enjoyed this novel though, it’s a quick read that uses the under-utilized fantasy resource of Chinese legends and mythology as it’s base. For this alone, it is well worth the read. Skybright is the head handmaiden to the youngest daughter of a […]
“The fact is, the contest has always been invulnerability, and even when you win, you still lose.”
Paper Valentine started off promisingly, an intriguing cross-genre YA story that explores loss and the fine line between challenging and enabling your personal demons. Hannah Wagnor is an almost uncomfortably silent protagonist, whose mind is always going a thousand miles a minute but who lets precious little of those thoughts slip through her lips. Part of that is self preservation — she’s (actually) haunted by the ghost of her recently deceased best friend, Lillian, and she isn’t in a hurry to make that fact known […]
Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for
I forgot that I finished this book. I’d been dragging my way through it, reading it only because the library was going to take it back, but then The Raven King came out and then my request for Eligible came in and I started and stopped The Glass Sword so many times that I briefly considered just not picking it back up. But I hate that. So I guess I finished it? But I had to read some spoilery reviews on Goodreads to remind myself […]