Ricky Pine's Blog, page 122

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...

Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I find it very hard to believe that this book was written by the same guy who wrote The Knife of Never Letting Go. Not only because the books have totally different settings and genres - this one being set in the modern day and straddling lines between contemporary YA, magical realism, and paranormal, as opposed to Knife, but The Rest of Us proved impenetrable.

Sure, I get that it's supposed to parody YA paranormal by showin...

Review: The Knife of Never Letting Go

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Adam Silvera's recommendations very rarely go wrong, so when he recently fanboyed about Patrick Ness blurbing his next book, I decided it was high time I read some books by Mr. Ness. So I got out three from the library recently - not the whole Chaos Walking Trilogy, but this book and two of his standalones. After reading The Knife of Never Letting Go, though, I think it's safe to say I should have picked out the rest of t...

Review: The Hidden Oracle

The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rick Riordan knows what his readers want - drama worthy of the gods, action-comedy like nobody's business, a smartass narrator, and characters you've just gotta love.

This time, he's delivering something a little different - not a teenage mortal discovering their true calling as a hero, but an age-old god, brought down to normal and forced to slowly overcome his superficial tendencies as he discovers a new unearthly conspiracy to brin...

Review: Wink Poppy Midnight

Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Maybe it would have helped if I didn't somehow lure myself into thinking this book was fantasy, instead of some kind of contemporary...magical realism...surrealist...thing. As it happens, however, genre-busting is not to the benefit of Wink Poppy Midnight, especially not when one of the genres the book throws in is surrealism. As a result, the book, while bite-sized, is extremely difficult to follow. The nigh-indistingu...

Review: Shades of Earth

Shades of Earth by Beth Revis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The final book in the Across the Universe trilogy gets into some seriously different territory. No longer are Amy, Elder, and their comrades forced to survive on a wayward spaceship. Instead, they're finally going down to Centauri-Earth and finding it every bit as lethal as you can expect, populated as it is with toxic plants and deadly pterodactyl creatures. And that's just the beginning. There's some kind of sentient creature out there...