I was already poised to like this book, past feelings about Sarah J. Maas aside. It’s a Beauty and the Beast/Ballad of Tam Lin hybrid retelling, and unless you make some sort of grave mistake, you’ve already got the outline of the story ready to go (tried and true over hundreds of years and variations), and it’s pretty hard to mess that up. And she doesn’t! I thought the story worked well as a combo B&B/Tam-Lin/original elements mish-mash. The first half is mostly Beauty and the […]
Naomi Novik is two for two in my book (I still need to read Temeraire!!)
I read most of this book in a day. It was so charming and lovely. In the vein of Uprooted, Spinning Silver is another loosely inspired retelling of a fairytale, this time Rumplestiltskin. I’m honestly not sure which book I liked better. It’s been a while since I read Uprooted, and this book is one of those that gets better in your head the longer you sit with it after you finish. Our Rumplestiltskin is actually one of our heroines, Miryem, the daughter of a moneylender (a historically […]
Read this for all the sick Mr. Rochester burns.
Project: Catch Up On Review Backlog, review #2 out of 11 I didn’t like this one as much as My Lady Jane (mostly because it wasn’t as funny), but overall I still had a really fun time listening to it. I mean, really, the standards were ridiculously high, first of all because I do think the first book was just plain funnier, but also because a) They had to live up to that all that funny and maybe the story they were telling this time […]
A fun adaptation of a classic book that never quite clicked for me.
This was a fun way to spend several hours, but I actually think I would have liked it better if I had never read Pride and Prejudice. If you’re not aware, Heartstone is debut author Elle Katharine White’s retelling of the Jane Austen classic (a top ten book for me), but with dragons (and such). I want to be clear that I find nothing wrong with this book at all. It’s a cleverly told story that takes the frame of its source material and transforms […]