K.N. Salustro's Blog, page 11

Review – Beneath the Sugar Sky

[image error]This is the third book in the Wayward Children universe of portal fantasy, and for me, was the most difficult one to read. It’s not a long book, and I think I read it in the span of a few hours, but wow does it jump back and forth between characters with no warning, and no real depth between them.

That’s where the majority of my star-shave-offs come from. I kept getting disoriented when the narrator would go from Cora’s internal emotions, then whiplash over to Kade or Christopher, then snap b...

Review – The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids

[image error]This is a fantasy book about a thief who suddenly finds herself down a friend and up a need to find a mythical weapon in order to save her own life. There’s mages and magic battles, vengeful goddesses, and lots of biting sarcasm.

Unfortunately, I just didn’t connect with any of the characters, protagonist and first-person narrator Amra especially.

I didn’t go back and forth on this book as much as I stayed smack in the middle of the road the whole time reading it. The plot is very cool, and t...

Review – Forest of a Thousand Lanterns

[image error]This is the story of Xifeng, a young woman at odd with her destiny and her own desires. This is the story of her struggle to reach her ambitions without sacrificing the things and people she holds dear. And this is the story of how she learns through cruelty that what you want and what you are destined for are seldom the same.

The twists in this book are fairly easy to spot if you’re familiar with the Snow White / Evil Queen mythology, but I wouldn’t say that you read this book for the twists...

Review – Saga Vol. 9

[image error]Well, shit.

If Vol 8 gave everyone a happy ending and let the world be bright for just a little while, Vol 9 unraveled it all, one ribbon of heartbreak after another.

Saga continues to be a beautiful series, masterfully told and illustrated. It’s fraught with tension, and turning a page brings a whole mess of dread, joy, rage, bliss, and shock. You stop knowing who to root for and start fearing that some of your favorites will suddenly become the ones you want to see dead. And then there’s th...

Review – Six of Crows

[image error]I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting much from this one after reading the Grisha trilogy. I had several hang ups with that series, including a protagonist who keep undoing all of her emotional growth every time she saw her crush, odd plot beats that just seemed to wash the characters along, not great action scenes, and an ending that left me sour.

Six of Crows is much better. There’s a lot more emotional maturity in this book, though I did find myself a little exasperated at the need to pair everyo...

Year in Review – 2018

Whew. Time for another one of these already?

This year went fast. A lot of that is probably because watching the hellscape that is American politics gouged my soul and made me and my partner wake up every day and wonder, “Okay, what happened now?”

But based on my 2017 year in review, it seems like this one maybe went a little better? Maybe?

Or at least, a lot of other things happened, and it feels good to have them under the belt. Here’s how it played out on my end:

Made another army of arki...

2018 Reading Roundup

The year is over, which means it’s time for another Reading Roundup. I read 42 books and 1 novella this year, which is well over my goal of 35. And I am quite proud of that.

Of course, that also means I have a lot of books to run through here, which my hands are not going to thank me for by the time I’m done typing. Oh well. Let’s do it anyway.

So, without further ado, my 2018 Reading Roundup!

The Clouded Sky The sequel to Earth and Sky, which I read last year. I liked this one more than th...

Review – Vurt

[image error]This one was a gift from someone, so I kind of felt obligated to finish it. Otherwise, this one would’ve ended up on the DNF shelf.

If you like trippy, so-far-out-there-it-may-not-even-be-in-the-same-galaxy sex and violence, complete with sibling incest, a few too many people who decided to go at it with German shepherds, and a virtual world that may or may not be some sort of parallel dimension, then have I found the book for you.

For everyone else, you’ll want to spend your time reading som...

Review – Midnight Robber

[image error]4 stars on Goodreads, 3.5 in my mind.

So. This book.

Based on the description, I was very excited for this book. I thought it was going to be a fantasy coming-of-age story fraught with nightmare creatures and a father-daughter bond.

Well, I wasn’t wrong, but not in the way that I expected.

The first thing that I think anyone should know about this book is that it’s far more of a character study than the description would lead you to believe. That’s not a bad thing. However, it’s a study of wh...

Review – The Kingdom of Gods

[image error]4 stars on Goodreads, 3.5 in my mind.

This was an interesting book to read, though I enjoyed it less than the other two. I think that part of the issue (for me, personally) was that Sieh, the Trickster God of Childhood, was the central character, and he just was not one of my favorites from the rest of the series. N.K. Jemisin wrote in her acknowledgements for this one that Sieh actually became her favorite character while she was writing The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, so she knew she wanted...