As I said in my review of Illuminae, the first book in this series, I always worry about young adult trilogies going off the rails in their second or third books, because I’ve been burned by this so many times. If the plot doesn’t get downright silly, standard tropes are thrown in that kill the suspense because I know exactly what’s coming next, or characters become completely one-dimensional and only exist to move the plot forward. Not so with the second book in this series, […]
Actually Unpredictable YA
I used to read a lot of young adult fiction. I still read it relatively often for a 35-year-old woman. And as much as there’s a ton of genuinely great young adult fiction out there, a lot of it is rote and predictable. This holds especially true, unfortunately, for both sci-fi and fantasy and is often even more true for a series in either genre. You can guess at so many elements that will appear: a love triangle, a mysteriously reappearing parent, the list goes […]
I wish I would have realized this series is not for me before I wasted all this time reading it.
I should have known better. I really should have. And I should have kept my big mouth shut about this book. Halfway through I decided to blab to Goodreads that I was actually really enjoying this book, way more than I had the first two, and that maybe juuuuuust maybe I would read a book in this series, and by these authors, that I really, truly enjoyed. The universe loves destroying dreams. Seriously, the first half was really fun in a way this series hadn’t […]
YA readers should definitely check this out–you might like it better than I did.
I had medium expectations for this book, despite the almost overwhelmingly positive reviews from everyone I know who’s read it. Jay Kristoff’s writing never completely gels for me, but he’s always an interesting author, and the small writing issues I usually have with him don’t matter in the grand scheme, so I keep reading his stuff. The two books I’ve read by his co-author, Amie Kaufman, I haven’t been very impressed with. So I kept my expectations low on purpose. This turned out to be […]