Ricky Pine's Blog, page 102

Review: Silver Stars

Silver Stars by Michael Grant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I speak a lot of how I sometimes have trouble finding good YA historical fiction, mostly because last year, I read a couple of examples - Razorhurst and Salt To The Sea - that just didn't cut it for me. I keep forgetting, however, that Front Lines exists - and now, so does Silver Stars.

Michael Grant's series continues in its exploration of an alternate history where women got to fight in World War II...and make no mistake, this brick of...

Review: Aftermath

Aftermath by Chuck Wendig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So I went into this first Aftermath book having read maybe...one Chuck Wendig book before, and having not really liked it. That said, this book, as Star Wars novels go, isn't half-bad, but I can see why it gets a lot of bad reviews. Wendig goes for a somewhat George R.R. Martin-esque storytelling approach - not in terms of killing your faves off, but in terms of short, choppy chapters that jump around between multiple POVs, many of which are...

Review: A Conjuring of Light

A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This one was a little low on my current library-haul TBR pile, which has ballooned to a pretty massive size since I'm currently done with school, but thanks to Aimal Farooq's urging, I bumped it up and decided to read it before tackling Star Wars: Aftermath.

I think I made the right choice.

The first two books in this trilogy, I liked them but didn't love them. Compared to The Archived, The Unbound, and Vicious, I thought they were g...

Review: Mistborn

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've been wanting to explore this section of Sanderson's Cosmere for a while, but it's been hard to get ahold of the books because my library has a way of losing them. After getting reminded by my friend Aimal (though she wasn't so impressed with the book herself), I finally ordered it from another library, and now I've read this first book and judged that maybe Aimal was right - the book's a little bit overrated, though not bad at all....

Logan: My Feels Are NOT OKAY!

***THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW.***

Two movies, two days, two movie reviews. Yesterday was an explosive funfest with Kong: Skull Island, and now I'm here to review Logan, the latest extension of the often quite tangled threads of the X-Men movie 'verse. Like last year's Deadpool, Logan is pretty damn different from all the other X-Men movies, to its benefit, and is not only among the best in the entire franchise, but also one of the best superhero movies of all. (Though you kno...

Review: Frostblood

Frostblood by Elly Blake
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It seems like this first Elly Blake book is pretty love-it-or-hate-it because, as YA fantasy stories go, Frostblood takes a lot of inspiration from previous YA fantasies, to the point where, more than most of its contemporaries, it feels like it's copycatting at times. Especially given that its premise centers on a girl of a different type of blood, looked down on for it, and drafted into the rebellion to use her secret powers against the opp...

Kong: Skull Island - A Well-Oiled Chaos Machine

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.***

Kong. He's been a staple of American cinema for 84 years now, from his first groundbreaking movie to the campy af '70s remake to Peter Jackson's love letter and three-hour tour from 2005. Now, in 2017, he's back on the big screen, rebooted into the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse which secretly began with 2014's Godzilla reboot, and headlining an inspired, propulsive film that's probably the best genre Vietnam War movie since J...

Review: Caraval

Caraval by Stephanie Garber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not unlike last year's Ruined by Amy Tintera, Stephanie Garber's debut novel Caraval is set in a Spanish-influenced fantasy world, and has a bit of a slow-paced beginning but really picks up the pace in the second half. The similarities end there, however. While Tintera's fantasy was a more action-packed piece in the vein of Throne of Glass, Garber gives us something more akin to Alice in Wonderland - and especially Splintered. But there w...

Review: The Orphan Queen

The Orphan Queen by Jodi Meadows
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've admittedly been sleeping on the works of Jodi Meadows for a while, but recently, when there erupted a furor over the cover of her upcoming series starter, Before She Ignites, I realized I might have been missing out on some good books. So I'm going to be combing through her oeuvre for a while to get a taste before BSI - which I really want to read - hits shelves.

As a first impression of Meadows' work, I probably would've found a...

Review: Teeth

Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If Andrew Smith wrote a story about merpeople, it'd probably be a little something like Hannah Moskowitz's Teeth. This book is a bite-sized piece of modern Gothic magical-realist surrealist weirdness, so literary it hurts. Parallels to The Metamorphosis, in particular, run wild - and take note that I LOATHED The Metamorphosis when I had to read that book in high school, because it was so relentlessly downbeat and impenetrable. Moskowitz's bo...