Ricky Pine's Blog, page 114

HeartQuake

It seems like I can't go long without finding myself hopelessly crushed out on some girl at school. More often than not, these girls are either already spoken for, not interested in me (aren't they all?), or both.

For once, the girl I like appears not to qualify for any of the above. Of course, I've been wrong before. If you remember the last time a crush inspired a poem, I later discovered she had a boyfriend, to whom she's since become engaged. Well, that made it easy to move on from her.

I s...

Review: Bloodline

Bloodline by Claudia Gray
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By now, the stories of the original Star Wars trilogy, and also the prequels (love 'em or hate 'em, they're essential to understanding the originals), are the stuff of pop culture legend. So last year, when The Force Awakens began an all-new awesome sequel trilogy as only J.J. Abrams could direct it, there was really only one thing missing...

...how did we get here? The Empire was over - wasn't it? Where and when and how did a new group of ga...

Review: Stealing Snow

Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like Danielle Paige's other best-known series Dorothy Must Die, this fractured fairytale launched with considerable hype, especially with Paige running a number of snow-themed social-media campaigns. Unfortunately, unlike DMD, Stealing Snow didn't live up to the hype for me.

That's not to say it's a bad book. It is, as Kami Garcia said in her blurb, "lush and addictive." And it presents a pretty unique retelling of The Snow Queen - uniq...

Red Rain: Alex and Fionna's Celebrity Faces

***Spoilers for the most recent seasons of Fear the Walking Dead and Agents of SHIELD appear below. You've been warned.***

One of the cool features of Wattpad is that it lets you pick a cast list for your stories, which I do for all of mine, and in great detail. For the Red Rain series, I've had a couple of different young actors in mind as the face of Alex over the years, but ever since I rewrote him as you see him now on Wattpad and SwoonReads (with olive skin instead of white...

Review: Swarm

Swarm by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"'Cause people don't understand, understand, understand
People don't understand people like me."
-Alphas Theme

Last year, I liked Zeroes, but I thought it had a few flaws - namely, its tendency to highlight the least interesting characters in the titular group, and at considerable length too. I have to wonder if Westerfeld, Lanagan, and Biancotti got similar complaints from other readers, and worked to make improvements in Swarm.

For sure, this...

Peppermint Cover Reveal!

Recently, I decided that the story of Alex and Gabe Snow and all the other heroes of Red Rain couldn't finish in four books - it would instead take five. So I once again reached out to Sam Ayers, aka Whisperingwater, to design a cover for this new addition to the Red Rain series, Peppermint.

To recap, here's what Sam's given me before with the first four Red Rain books:


Amazing, aren't they? Now joining the party is the Peppermint cover in all its Christmas-colored glory, fo...

Review: First Lord's Fury

First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

And finally, Codex Alera reaches its grand finale, with Tavi now officially the First Lord of Alera...but he's got to take care of some serious business with those crowsbegotten Vord first. While I honestly think, after this reread, that Princeps' Fury was the series' climax, First Lord's Fury serves as a nice coda as well, especially for its continued exploration of some of the still-unseen lands of Carna and even a scene that made m...

Review: Blood in the Water

Blood in the Water by Taylor Anderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm kind of in two minds about this series at this point. On the one hand, Anderson's got a talent for high action and for expanding the world he's built with every new book he puts out. On the other hand, when is enough, enough? It's become a little hard to keep up with what's going on in every single part of the world, and as a result, the story now feels really drawn-out and spread thin.

At least he's still able to put out a ne...

Review: Princeps' Fury

Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Good thing I'm rereading these Codex Alera books - I'd really rather not forget some of the insanity Butcher served up here. This book, in particular, gets really, seriously, grossgustingly nasty with its onslaught of Vord horrors - Lovecraftian, Alien-like, dripping rot and ruin everywhere they go.

Truly, the stakes were never higher for Alera than they were here - although I'm sure when I reread First Lord's Fury, I'll remember stuff th...

Review: The Flame Never Dies

The Flame Never Dies by Rachel Vincent
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The first book in this series, I loved because of its condemnation of religious corruption in a unique post-apocalyptic setting.

The sequel continues to build on all of that, reaching some seriously emotional, and quite often cuckoo-bananas, new heights with a twist or ten a minute, particularly in its second half.

I think I read somewhere that this is to be the end of the Stars Never Rise series, but honestly, I hope not. Not wit...