Ricky Pine's Blog, page 145

Review: Armada

Armada by Ernest Cline
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't think I've ever seen a book so wall-to-wall with pop culture references - and, being largely of the sci-fi and classic-rock varieties, these references go very much appreciated by me. The story seems like a very familiar one, but that's done completely on purpose, with total self-awareness of the tropes and cliches involved. Take the 21 Jump Street movies, dial down the raunchy comedy, dial up the nerd factor and Holy Shit Quotient, and...

Review: An Ember in the Ashes

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can definitely see why this one's getting so much hype - it's essentially The Hunger Games in a setting that's closer in appearance, military, and technology to the ancient Roman Empire on which Panem was loosely based. This book has just about everything you can expect in a dystopian - an oppressed young woman, a young man who's stuck in the system, evil overlords, an evil Commandant (ugh, the Commandant.) It's pretty high up t...

Review: Lights Out

Lights Out by James Patterson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Three years we've had to wait for the conclusion to Daniel X, and I think it's safe to say that wait was too long. Although the book was wild and action-packed and pulled no punches, so it's almost worth it. I was at least glad I was able to remember just about everything necessary from the previous books, even though I haven't picked one up in a few years now.

I think the best part of the book for me was the numerous Night At The Museum...

Review: The Badlings

The Badlings by Ksenia Anske
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh, Ksenia Anske, how you and your imagination continue to be inspired like nothing else. This is my second book of hers I've found on Wattpad, and it's every bit as gothic and disturbing as Rosehead. Here, however, it's a little less Alice in Wonderland and a little more Grimm meets Jasper Fforde (or Neil Gaiman - I've seen a few other commenters on Wattpad who support this comparison.) But there's definitely more than a bit of Fforde in...

Review: Rapture

Rapture by Lauren Kate
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Fallen series concludes with considerable style. Here, we get a wide variety of exotic foreign locales - in the present day this time, not just in the past like in the previous book. Here, we get so many answers about the origins of the Luce/Daniel curse - and boy, those answers are real doozies. Especially the biggest reveal of all, the whole reason why Lucifer went bad to begin with. It's ironic that God went and created the angels as suc...

I'm A Goodreads Author!

Yes, you're seeing that correctly - Goodreads has let me into their Author program! You can find my page here. Be warned, though, my page is still as GIF-a-riffic as ever, so it may take a while for you to navigate. (Sorry-not-sorry!)

So far, I've uploaded my four complete novels (not my fanfics) to GR, and you can now rate and review them if you're on GR!

Red Rain

Blue Monday

The Magi

The Scalers

I can't wait to see what you guys think of my books! :D

Review: The Rebirths of Tao

The Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tao's got a new body this time around, and after years of training, he's every bit as good as Roen now, if not better. Yep, Cameron Tao is a second-generation Prophus host. And in between his parents saving the world from those blasted Genjix, he's gotta navigate that most horrifying of places known to teendom - high school. Thankfully, the high-school thing takes a backseat after a while (in favor of the ongoing Quasing war we're al...

Review: Diary of a Teenage Superhero

Diary of a Teenage Superhero by Darrell Pitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wattpad has this complete book for free, but only this one - not its sequel, which is available only in a five-chapter sample. This one, however, is quite entertaining on its own, being less of a typical "superhero" story. You won't get too many Marvel-style stories here. Nope, it's a little closer to I Am Number Four in style, or perhaps Heroes - darker, edgier, characters on the run, government agencies involved, that so...

Review: Undertow

Undertow by Michael Buckley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In San Francisco, people wearing red "Niners" shirts are a good thing, because they're supporting a storied local sports team. In the Coney Island of this book, however, the Niners are anything but fun to have around. Here, they're a gang of anti-merpeople racists whose mission is to ensure that the grand social experiment of incorporating undersea people (the "Alpha") into a human school fails miserably. Even worse, they have the governor...

Review: Mindwar

Mindwar by Andrew Klavan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Klavan instantly surprised and entertained me with his Homelanders series, but this one was a bit of a pain to slog through in comparison. Not that it was a bad story, though. It was a pretty entertaining little mixture of Homelanders and The Mortality Doctrine. But it was quite complicated compared to Homelanders, much less futuristic and deadly than The Mortality Doctrine, and overall actually pretty middle-of-the-road. Also, I found it a l...