Ricky Pine's Blog, page 41

Review: Realm Breaker

Realm Breaker by Victoria Aveyard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a minute since Victoria Aveyard - who established me as a lifetime passenger aboard her hype train with the Red Queen series - published a full-length novel, and once again, she shows just how many leaps and bounds she's made in her craft since she started publishing six years ago. Though this story has a few pebbles in its path, and does tend to feel a bit like so much Prolonged Prologue, it's still pretty...

Review: The Gilded Ones

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picking this book up from the hold shelf at the White Salmon Library, the librarian told me that this wasn't the first time she'd seen this particular book cross her shelf. As well it shouldn't, given how well-done Namina Forna's debut is, following a lot of the most relevant trends in fantasy with powerful results. Rooted in a world with numerous cultural and ethnic groups that serve as parallels to real ones, protago...

Review: Burn

Burn by Patrick Ness
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I guess I'd just missed that Patrick Ness came out with another book? At least I got to pick it up as one of the first reads I found at the library in my new hometown in Oregon, a town not too dissimilar to the fictional setting of this book in Frome, WA. Rooted in an alternate 1957 - Eisenhower is still president, and the book begins on the day of his second inauguration no less - Ness clearly takes a lot of inspiration from E.K...

Review: On This Unworthy Scaffold

On This Unworthy Scaffold by Heidi Heilig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me a while to remember some key details from the second book of this trilogy given that it’s been a little over a year since it came out. But now the finale is here and, as with all things Heidi Heilig, it’s a story that breaks all the rules, dissecting history through a skillful world builder’s lens and experimenting with form at every turn, periodically switching to sheet music and stage script form...

Review: Aru Shah and the City of Gold

Aru Shah and the City of Gold by Roshani Chokshi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Of course. Of course. I had to know that while Roshani Chokshi had first announced that the first series under the Rick Riordan Presents banner would be a four part series, of course she just couldn’t stop there. And so she doesn’t, not when the latest Pandava adventure delivers the most complex group dynamics yet among Aru and her fellowship (the LOTR references fly thick and fast at times, among othe...

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...