Ricky Pine's Blog, page 119

Review: Tell the Wind and Fire

Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I've never read A Tale of Two Cities, so any references to that book in this one are all but lost on me.

That said, it's a unique enough book, updating Dickens' classic with magic and modern social commentary in an alternate New York where the Lights live in luxury and the Darks in walled-off ghettos like the Nazis took over the place. Naturally, the Lights hold all the cards, and the Darks are tired of bei...

Review: Titans

Titans by Victoria Scott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A nice big thanks to the Wattpad4 for bringing Victoria Scott and Titans to my attention!

Going into this, I noticed that a lot of reviews, not without reason, compared this book to Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races, mostly because of the stories' shared plots involving some kind of genre twist on horses and horse racing. I have to say, though, that I preferred Scott's relatively little-known story over Stiefvater's heavily-hyped one.

For...

Review: Into the Dim

Into the Dim by Janet B. Taylor
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book, being that it was a YA Outlander with a harder sci-fi twist straight out of Tomorrowland. Sadly, while Into the Dim starts strong, after the long info-dump that explains (to an extent) how the Tesla-based time travel tech works (and I liked how the machine's able to prevent you from arriving at a moment right as you're leaving, to ensure no time paradoxes of any kind), it turns into a real slog to read, plag...

Review: Shade Me

Shade Me by Jennifer Brown
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The only things this book has going for it are the pretty cover (which, with its combo of black-and-white and neon stripes, reminds me strongly of the ill-fated Arclight series) and its protagonist having synesthesia (a most interesting condition.) Unfortunately, the book, as a side effect of being set in Hollywood, is laden with so many virtually indistinguishable pretty and/or superficial people (and I mean indistinguishable - for a while...

Review: A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So apparently The Knife of Never Letting Go wasn't my first Patrick Ness book after all. Turns out I read this one...three years ago? And I wasn't impressed at first, for whatever reason, and managed to forget I ever read it to begin with.

But now that I've picked the book up again in anticipation of the forthcoming movie, I know what I was clearly missing.

Like Knife, this book is shelved in the YA section at the library despite contain...

Review: The Death Code

The Death Code by Lindsay Cummings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hard to believe it's been about a year since I read the first book in this series - and now I've just finished the last. (Yep, it's a duology, like so many other series coming out these days.) Just like its predecessor, The Death Code (not to be confused with James Dashner's Maze Runner books, The Death Cure - can't wait till 2018 for the movie! - or The Fever Code - can't wait till that book hits shelves this fall!) is packed with...

Review: A Court of Mist and Fury

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I went into this book, I was happy with the way it was going, with Feyre and Tamlin trying to stick to a happy life in the Spring Court while Rhys remained far away and out of sight, though not out of mind. Unlike the vast majority of fans, I loathed Rhys. I thought, after the end of the first book, he would be little more than another Loki-copycat pretty-boy bad-boy, a viciously power-hungry creep in the vein of the Dar...

Review: A Drop of Night

A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A girl with a pen and a dream recommended this book to me.

Sierra...thank you so much.

At first, I went into A Drop of Night thinking, oh no, a bunch of rich kids of various levels of spoiled packing off and going to Europe for some kind of corporate-sponsored archaeological dig? Do tell me, what could go wrong?

The answer: everything.

Anouk, along with everyone else in her party, winds up trapped in a truly steroid-enhanced clockpunk h...

Review: More Than This

More Than This by Patrick Ness
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third Patrick Ness book I've read in a row thanks to Adam Silvera's glowing recommendation of the man's work. I loved The Knife of Never Letting Go and wasn't so jazzed with The Rest of Us Just Live Here, but this book is much closer to Knife in terms of style, so I ended my Ness mini-binge on a high note.

Now I know why Silvera's a fan - I bet this book, in particular, was a huge inspiration for More Happy Than Not. Like Sil...

Lights Out: Moody, Self-Aware Scares

"If Mommy's crazy, does that mean we're crazy too?"
-Martin, Lights Out
***Some spoilers, but none for anything beyond the movie's prologue.***

In order to properly set the mood for this movie review, I'm going to first share the two-and-a-half-minute short from which it originated. 

Sufficiently scared yet, my dear Pinecones? Let us press on.

What you see in the short film above translates quite smoothly into the opening sequence of the feature-length version now hitting theaters, but with a...