Ricky Pine's Blog, page 117

Review: The Mime Order

The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The sequel to The Bone Season takes Paige and all her squad back to London, deep in the heart of Scion territory, where instead of Bone Seasoning, we're getting geared up for another big sorcerous event of major importance - in this case, the aptly named "Scrimmage." The Scrimmage, I think, may have served as a pretty major inspiration for A Gathering of Shadows, actually. I'm a little bit disappointed that The Mime Order takes its...

Review: Genius: The Game

Genius: The Game by Leopoldo Gout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this book up because I recognized the name of one of James Patterson's many collaborators - who, most recently, has been working on the CBS adaptation of Zoo. Is this Gout's first solo work? It's the first I know of, anyway.

The intro feels like classic Max Ride, being presented in the form of a letter demanding your attention, and then we jump into the story itself. It alternates between three very diverse POVs of talented b...

Review: The Bone Season

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So the third book in this series, The Song Rising, is going to finally hit shelves in about six months or so, and having all but forgotten what happened in the first two books, I've decided to reread both The Bone Season and The Mime Order.

Good thing too, because looking at this first book, I realized that in the two years it's been since I read this last, I've managed to forget just about everything that happened. Even some of th...

Review: Storm Front

Storm Front by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harry Dresden is a wizard who occasionally consults for the Chicago PD. He looks and acts a little bit like Nicolas Cage's character in The Sorcerer's Apprentice - dark and sarcastic. He's under threat of the Doom of Damocles, meaning any perceived breaking of the Seven Laws of Magic could result in his instant execution. Which seriously impedes his investigation in a very bizarre magical murder.

Hooked? I hope so.

Four years ago, I read this...

Review: Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The comparisons to World War Z and The Martian aren't entirely off, as this book contains elements of the former's style (a rough literary equivalent to found footage, consisting entirely of journal entries, interviews, news reports, and the like) and the latter's Twenty Minutes Into The Future setting and even a bit of its sense of humor (from the book, that is - I didn't like how the movie cut down on the laughs, and yet somehow wo...

Review: Monsters of Men

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The thing about this series is that it starts out magnificently in The Knife of Never Letting Go, but by the time it comes to its conclusion, it's lost steam. That's not to say Monsters of Men is a bad book, not by any stretch of the imagination. But in between the message about War Is Hell, Ness gets the story so bogged down in Noise and a barrage of new terminology that, between Books 2 and 3, it becomes extremely hard to follow what...

Review: Moonlight Secrets

Moonlight Secrets by J.L. Weaver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The second full-length novel in this series takes readers on a lovely, monstrously good trip to India. It's a unique story, I think, combining colonial India with werewolves - has that ever been done before? To my knowledge, no. And with Weaver's colorful, pop-off-the-page characters, Moonlight Secrets demands your attention, making you either impatient if, like me, you started reading it while she was uploading chapters to Wattpad, o...

Review: The Great American Whatever

The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I gotta admit, this one disappointed me just a bit, but that was probably hype damage more than anything else.

Near-constant film references are always a plus, and this book, through Quinn's narration, delivers there. Sure, he tends to sometimes get a bit pretentious, knocking on the sort of "big-budget CGI cheese-fests" that are my bread and butter, but it's all good, because even having not seen some of the classics he name...

Review: Burning Midnight

Burning Midnight by Will McIntosh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

File this one under "Hidden Gems of 2016."

In an alternate present, the world's been taken by storm by these many multicolored spheres that, when "burned," enhance you in ways both mental and physical, and have become a huge part of society - so much that nobody really remembers a time when the spheres weren't around. But where do they come from, what's their true purpose, and what happens when this worldwide real-life video game is tak...

Review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harry Potter is a huge, huge part of my childhood. Coming back to this world nine years after Deathly Hallows came out, in the form of a new sequel play, I was, like pretty much everyone else, hyped up. Cursed Child doesn't quite live up to the hype, because of the often bizarre ways in which the characters have changed, but the twisty plot, especially by HP standards, helps make up for it.

Albus Severus Potter isn't h...