Ricky Pine's Blog, page 113

Review: The Maze Runner

The Maze Runner by James Dashner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quite fitting, isn't it, that the first book I read after Trump's victory is a dystopian? Because as this tweet says:

I foresee dystopian novels enjoying a sudden resurgence in popularity.

— Xen Sanders/C McCade (@thisblackmagic) November 9, 2016

Legit fear for the future aside, though, rereading The Maze Runner allowed me to turn the clock back not fifty or a hundred years, but more like five. Back to a time when Obama was in the Wh...

Review: The Star-Touched Queen

The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I guess this book just isn't for me...which is a shame, because it sure looks pretty and fantastical, and at least it doesn't suffer from a bad case of purple prose. More like lilac. Unfortunately, The Star-Touched Queen proves to be seriously hard to follow, and the characters feel a little half-baked, mostly because dialogue is something of a weak point for Chokshi. Her characters talk so formally that it gets distracting,...

Review: The Revival

The Revival by Chris Weitz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was expecting better for this conclusion to the Young World trilogy, but I confess myself a bit disappointed with the final result. It's shorter than I expected, which isn't really to the book's benefit. There are simply too many POV's to keep track of, which makes the story feel pretty disjointed, and there isn't much of a resolution. But at the very least, Weitz keeps things interesting with an always-moving plot, and at least we get to...

Review: Ahsoka

Ahsoka by E.K. Johnston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll admit, I don't know as much about Ahsoka as I should. I haven't seen any of the animated Star Wars movies or TV series, whether because of the off-putting animation style of The Clone Wars or the Rebels ads playing up bizarrely Phantom Menace-esque humor, I'm not sure. But at least E.K. Johnston's book provides enough backstory for people like me who aren't so well-acquainted with Ahsoka. Not to mention glimpses into the lives of other ma...

Review: Labyrinth Lost

Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Labyrinth, like Pan? A little bit, to be sure.

Labyrinth Lost is a little something completely different from The Vicious Deep - although it still carries a lot of Zoraida Córdova's trademark style, darkly fantastical and often darkly humorous too. Alex, our bruja heroine, is a powerful young woman with so much potential, and yet she's every teenager that's ever been in that she wants to forge her own path, turn her back on what her f...

Doctor Strange: Marvel's Most Literal Movie Magic

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

"I've come to bargain..."

Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe began this year with Captain America: Civil War, an absolutely A-grade thriller. The next in the series, Doctor Strange, has a lot of hype to live up to - not only as Civil War's follow-up, but also from hype of its own making, with the marketing campaigns highlighting what promised to be the movie's greatest strength - its unique visual style, completely new for the MCU.

Welcome to the Ne...

Review: The Midnight Star

The Midnight Star by Marie Lu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First and foremost, I have to say, I'm surprised at how short this book is compared to its predecessors. Short it may have been in terms of physical size, but in terms of content? Twists, turns, power failures for all the Young Elites, uneasy alliances aplenty, and impending worldwide environmental disaster? The Midnight Star was every bit as big and five-star as we've all come to expect every time Marie Lu releases a new book. It never...

Review: Nevernight

Nevernight by Jay Kristoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Those who are dead are not dead
They're just living in my head."
-Coldplay, "42"

This week, a creative writing classmate of mine presented a story told in the point of view of an awkward young man at the laundromat who picks up a girl, goes home with her, and appears to sleep with her...except he's stabbing her dead, violently, and then he moves on to her sisters as well. Our general consensus - even the professor agreed with it - was that th...

Review: White Night

White Night by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That's two Dresden Files novels in a row for me this Halloween. This one deals a little bit more with the Hitchcockian archetype of the man falsely accused of a grave crime - or, in this case, many grave crimes, as our friendly neighborhood White Court vampire Thomas is the prime suspect in a series of serial killings in which the real killer leaves a reference to a certain Bible verse at each scene: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."...

Review: Proven Guilty

Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rereading this one on Halloween was a perfect idea, given how much Harry Dresden (and by extension, Butcher) poke fun at all the most obvious horror-movie tropes. In between all that, Dresden goes on another long, dangerous adventure, in which he has to wrestle with the moral quagmires of sentencing young magic practitioners to death for breaking rules they may not even know about.

But again...those horror-movie tropes. That's where these...