Rating: 5/5 Summary: Elias is the best soldier in Blackcliff, he’s also their most reluctant. He hates what they carved him into and wishes desperately for freedom. Laia loses everything one night during a Martial raid of her house. Her grandparents are killed and her brother captured. She is scared and has no one. She turns to the underground Resistance in hopes they will help her free her brother. In order to get them to help her, she agrees to become a slave to the […]
20 years late to the party. I’m surprisingly out of place.
The Giver (1993) – reviewed 4 times previously (3.75 avg) I love dystopian fiction. Give me a zombie apocalypse or oppressive regime, and I’m happy. Unless we’re talking about really having to live under those circumstances, in which case you can count me out. So The Giver should be right up my alley. Only….well, it’s written for 14 year olds. It’s not that this isn’t a good book, I’m just 20 years too old for it. This book is trimmed of any excess. There’s a […]
A haunting reminder of what we can be: just boys grown tall.
Some spoilers below. My wife attempted this book a few months ago and it devastated her. For her, it was an unremitting wasteland of degraded women that, instead of highlighting the great strides towards equality that we’ve made, emblazoned the vast distance we’ve had to travel to become a society barely cognizant of the barriers still firmly in place. To read such a visceral recitation of subservience and lack of empowerment endangered her emotional equilibrium. So, despite near universal acclaim, I was somewhat reticent about […]
Everything old is new again, and I want to inhale it all
This is the first time since The Passage that my brain has DEMANDED MORE when I’ve gotten to the end of a Book 1. I want, I want, I want. I freaking fracking loved Red Rising, and it was a huge surprise to me, because as per uzh, I had totally forgotten what the book was about by the time it was checked out to me, making it a totally shocking, harsh deep dive into an incredibly complete and consuming future dystopia. There’s a lot […]