CBR10Bingo: Brain Candy (BINGO!) Before this year, I wasn’t much of a YA reader. I saw myself as more of a Serious Reader, too serious for the frivolity of YA lit. And while my favorite books are still likely to be denser and heavier literary fiction and hard sci-fi, I’ve come to enjoy the balance that YA brings to my library with the quicker read and lighter tone even when the subject matter isn’t so light. Thus, the Brain Candy square was always going to […]
Not what I was expecting
Spoiler warning! In my explanation of what worked and didn’t for me in this story, I will be going into plot specific details. If you want to approach this story completely unspoiled, you may just want to read the first few paragraphs. Binti is the first of her people, the Himba, to be offered a place at the Oomza University, the finest in the galaxy. She pretty much runs away, knowing that her decision to take her place at the university might mean she is no […]
I wanted to like it …
I didn’t read this one immediately after downloading it, so when the novel didn’t initially click for me, I blamed myself for forgetting that the main character was 12. I had been thinking of it as a YA novel, but with the ages being around 12, it isn’t quite YA, which of course leads to slightly misaligned expectations. “Oh,” I thought, “when they meant it’s like Harry Potter, they didn’t just mean magic, they meant age-wise, too.” However, when the novel continued to not quite […]
We prefer to explore the universe by traveling inward, as opposed to outward
Binti So something that I really liked about this novella is that there is almost no world building. This will come up in another review I will be writing later too. Too often, a new inventive world is described in a too detailed way where simply telling the story and setting up what we need to know as we go will be much much better, and there’s a more satisfying story that way. And so this one does. The only real issue I have with […]