3.5 stars Madeleine has never left her house or been outside. She’s got a rare auto-immune disorder and lives in a house hermetically sealed, with special filters making sure nothing gets in that could hurt her. The only people she sees regularly are her mother, whose a doctor, and her nurse, Carla. On very special occasions, when he’s been decontaminated thoroughly, she’s allowed to meet one of her favourite tutors, but Madeline’s life is lived mostly vicariously through books and the internet, dreaming of the […]
I liked this better two months ago.
This book has definitely soured on me since I finished it in May, which is a shame since I am quite literally about to start the third book tonight. This series for me has turned out so far to be a shoddily written, cliché-packed, predictable behemoth with an uninteresting not-as-smart-or-talented-as-she-or-the-author-thinks-she-is protagonist. It’s very much a yo-yo book for me. One minute I’ll be rolling my eyes so hard I’m about to sprain my optical nerve, the next Maas writes something genuinely interesting. Also, both books […]
If you like the title, you’ll like the book?
*sits speechless for a while* *squints* I liked it?? I’m just going to describe what this novel is about. (Yes this is a book review that lacks words for my opinion about the book. I did a beautiful interpretive dance that conveyed my sentiments exactly, but, alas, it cannot be transcribed to the page.) The novel follows three childhood friends as they venture from the safe life of their village into the army. We meet Amishag, Yael and Lea at school when they are teenage […]
We are not all heroes
I was inspired to write this review by this tweet. YA is an interesting genre. Nix’s previous books (which I adore) have given us a very typical YA heroines. They are morally clear, they have self doubt which they work through, and they are generally good. In Clariel – which a lot of Nix fans didn’t like – we don’t get that. Clariel is a prequel to Sabriel – Nix’s first “Old Kingdom” book. It’s set a couple of hundred years in the past. Clariel […]


