Ricky Pine's Blog, page 15

Review: The Mars House

The Mars House by Natasha Pulley
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I admit I kinda thought this would be an interesting sci-fi romance, a sort of Red, White, and Royal Blue in space situation (I say having not read RWRB beyond checking out little snippets of it during my bookstore days when the book was first super popular). Boy oh boy oh boy was I wrong, and when I checked back against the blurb and realized that this was more akin to a romance between an oppressed minority and ...

Review: Ashes of Man

Ashes of Man by Christopher Ruocchio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ruocchio's fifth novel of the Sun Eater would have been a three star comedown for me based on the first 400 pages or so, where the plot really slows down and grinds its gears while setting up the next match on the 4-D chess board. This book does bring great promise of the villains behind the villains, the Cielcin gods who want to truly lay waste to everything and everyone in the known universe, but it takes fo...

Review: Wildwood Imperium

Wildwood Imperium by Colin Meloy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Portland's Narnia concludes in a third sprawling, nearly 600-page brick of paper - with some of those pages, as usual, thicker than usual in order to accommodate Carson Ellis's color prints. It does add a little something new for texture - the Chapeaux Noir, a group of French anarchists with plans to bring down the big old Fantastic Mr. Fox style Industrial Wastes, who ultimately give this book some eerie similari...

Review: Take Flight

Take Flight by J L Pawley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I guess Pawley is making some steady progress on getting the revamped Generation Icarus series reissued in this new format - I don't think the third book is out yet? But hopefully by the end of this year at least. In the meantime, though, it was great to once again get a throwback to the old Wattpad days with one of the best angel books you're not reading, now in a new form, with a hell of a lot more focus on Tui than I ...

Review: The Reformatory

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my first time reading a book by Tananarive Due, which is definitely going to have to change. While Stephen King trod similar ground with his book The Institute a few years back, Due goes back to 1950s Florida, taking some inspiration from a real-life ancestor of hers who perished in such a "school" as the one depicted in this book. Not only is the full scope of Jim Crow laws in effect, but the Gracetown S...

Review: Death and Glory

Death and Glory by Will Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The fifteenth mystery in Will Thomas's decades-running Barker and Llewelyn series keeps things fresh and unexpected as Victorian London's top enquiry agents take on a mystery involving former Confederates, thirty years after the end of the Civil War. As well-known as it is that there were many who continued to believe in the "Lost Cause" even to the present day, this book also dwells on aspects of the Confederacy th...

Review: Kingdoms of Death

Kingdoms of Death by Christopher Ruocchio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think Ruocchio was originally planning a trilogy for this series, but much like his fellow hella young science-fantastist Pierce Brown, his work really grew far beyond its original scope, and very quickly too. So it was first extended, as I remember, to five books, then six, and I believe a seventh is on the way as well. But for now, here's what looks to be the middle of the Sun Eater saga, a noticeably...

Review: The Trees

The Trees by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Working my way through Percival Everett's bibliography in reverse order, I've now found one that's very different from all the other books I've read from him, because it covers very dark subject matter indeed - confronting the history of White supremacy and lynching, with references to some of the most infamous such incidents in American history, and also some very long lists of historical lynching deaths. Not just B...

Review: An Echo of Things to Come

An Echo of Things to Come by James Islington
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Licanius Trilogy continues with a 700-plus pager of an epic, including a much-appreciated recap of The Shadow of What Was Lost and the trilogy's expansive backstory. Now, the story continues with a lot more focus on Caeden, whose secret past has been revealed, at least to the reader - and yet there's a lot more pieces to the story than just that shocker of an ending on the first book. As with the ...

Review: Icon and Inferno

Icon and Inferno by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

OLD PINECONE GENERAL'S WARNING: Any resemblance in this book to real life events is entirely coincidental, the book having come out several weeks before the real-world events that so eerily imitated it.

The two books of this latest series from Marie Lu, this YA/NA borderline action thriller with just a touch of sci-fi - now very clearly in the futuristic world of the Lu-niverse, with Emika Chen and Warcross getting som...