Ricky Pine's Blog, page 120

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...

Review: Unteachable

Unteachable by Leah Raeder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Going into Unteachable, I knew this book would be a risk for me, because the subject matter of a teacher-student relationship really makes it hard to enjoy the read. That said, though, Elliot Wake does have a serious way with words, and the prose, like with Black Iris, helps make this YA/NA fence-straddler so compulsively readable. That, and the supporting cast, because while Maise (not unlike Laney) tends to rub me the wrong way (which goe...

Review: This Savage Song

This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although The Archived series remains my Schwab favorite, This Savage Song is a pretty close second, I think.

You always gotta love a bit of fantasy dystopian, and this book, perhaps the closest thing to a Black City spiritual successor there's been since that trilogy came to an end, is no exception. Schwab expertly blends zombies, vampires, and demons (the closest analogues I can think of to this world's three classes of monster) in...

Review: Salt to the Sea

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The internet's been hyping this book so much lately that I couldn't help but pick it up at the library recently. Unfortunately, it absolutely fails to live up to the hype for me - and makes me wonder if I've got a problem with historical fiction, and especially YA historical fiction (I recently gave a bad review to Razorhurst, for example.) The real problem with this book is that it's written in no less than four different POVs, which...

Review: Darkest Night

Darkest Night by Will Hill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I first got into Department 19 a few years back, only the first three books were available, and I read those in pretty quick succession. I remember going into Book 3 and wondering when the series was going to come to an end, because at the time I didn't really see an end in sight.

Now that I've finally gotten as far as Darkest Night, that question has been answered - in 700-plus pages of supernatural horror action, a sort of YA analogue...

Review: Transfer of Power

Transfer of Power by Vince Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Now I can finally read the first published Mitch Rapp book after reading the two prequels Flynn published before his death...and I have to say, it's striking how much the plot of this book has in common with the movies Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. It's a pretty standard post-9/11 thriller...except it was released before 9/11, even before 24 and Jack Bauer took the world by storm.

Unlike the two prequel novels, this one was...