Ricky Pine's Blog, page 39

Review: Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Westerfeld took a little more time to give us this third book of Impostors - in part, I think, because wasn't he really sick with Covid last summer? But with this third book - and the third new cover art style too, going back in line with the recent paperback reissues of the original Uglies series - we get ourselves another blisteringly fast-paced futuristic thriller. Seriously, the opening of this book, with several...

Review: The Kaiser's Web

The Kaiser's Web by Steve Berry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Steve Berry returns with his annual high-stakes thriller examining the dark side of recent history - in this case, getting down and dirty with what may have happened when the Nazi regime fell, because we all know a lot of Hitler's minions escaped to South America among other places. In this case, though, the challenge for Cotton Malone and Cassiopeia Vitt lies in figuring out whether or not it's true that a far-right n...

Review: Victories Greater Than Death

Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the run-up to this, her YA debut, Charlie Jane Anders has spent a lot of time not only offering amazing artwork and pins based on this book for preorder campaigns, but also outlining in long Twitter threads how much she seeks to upend the conventions of space opera by keeping things fun and light, while also emphasizing that the genre's roots need a little bit of pruning of old, offensive impulse...

Review: Lost in the Never Woods

Lost in the Never Woods by Aiden Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think Aiden Thomas said, in the run up to Cemetery Boys, that this was the first manuscript they worked on, even before their #ownvoices debut. Maybe so, and released a bit out of order in that case, but it's still a pretty good book that Thomas has given us. My guess is that they really started working on this book a few years back, when fairytale retellings had become one of the biggest YA trends. Given how...

Review: Rule of Wolves

Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Leigh Bardugo took a while to get around to giving us this, the seventh novel so far of the Grishaverse, and the second of her second duology. Two years after King of Scars and its cliffhanger ending that made me so angry that I'm still livid about it to this day. But this time, Bardugo gives us 600 pages of jam-packed fantasy action and social commentary that leads to a much more hopeful Bardugoan cliffhanger, the ant...

Review: Red Tigress

Red Tigress by Amélie Wen Zhao
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Would it really surprise you to know that in this terrible time of increased anti-Asian racism, of #StopAsianHate trending online, that this book, sequel to one its author wrote in response to widespread issues within Asia itself (in particular human trafficking), is authored by the one Asian author YA Twitter would rather pretend was cancelled? Or, more accurately, that as soon as it became clear she was a victim of ra...

Review: The Iron Raven

The Iron Raven by Julie Kagawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To think it's easily been over five years since the last time Julie Kagawa's career was built so immediately on the strength of her uniquely scientifically fantastic Iron Fey series. But now, she's back to that world with the start of the new Evenfall series, now centering on a wonderfully engaging - and interestingly conflicted - protagonist in Puck. I admit, I still look back at Puck as another example of me shipping ...

Review: Court of Lions

Court of Lions by Somaiya Daud
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think when Somaiya Daud came out with her debut novel in 2018, it was meant as the start of a lovely, lush, beautiful new trilogy of YA SFF like none we'd ever seen before. But now I think that, given the two year gap between this book and its sequel and how little attention it seems to have attracted across the community (despite much-deserved love from Tahereh Mafi and Veronica Roth, among others), Daud might have r...

Review: Lore

Lore by Alexandra Bracken
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Okay...so a lot of the time I pick up an Alexandra Bracken book after months, if not years, of looking forward to it and I find it interesting to start off. But her narratives historically tend to sacrifice a lot of action for dead air and bloat to pump up the page count, and I'm sorry to say that her latest was no exception. Though promising an action-packed sort of Hunger Games starring the Greek gods - in modern-day New Y...

Review: A ​Court of Silver Flames

A ​Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well I'll be honest. By rights, this isn't a four star book. A 3.5 really, and if not for the fact that Nesta and Cassian are fast becoming major comfort characters for me, it'd really just be a straight 3. But to see that this is where Maas is taking the world of ACOTAR next - in addition to her freshly announced TV adaptation with the team behind Outlander - with a fresh new trilogy focused on Nesta and Ca...