Ricky Pine's Blog, page 44

Review: Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

Paola Santiago and the River of Tears by Tehlor Kay Mejia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not unlike Roshani Chokshi and Aru Shah, Tehlor Kay Mejia is a case of an author whose YA fantasy debut wasn't exactly my fave (sadly I couldn't even finish Chokshi's The Star-Touched Queen to this day, but someday maybe I'll give it a revisit), but I liked her Rick Riordan Presents MG fantasy debut even more. For sure, this Mexican-inspired tale of the terrors wrought by the notorious ...

Review: Darius the Great Deserves Better

Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I almost didn't expect that Adib Khorram would write a second book about Darius the Great, but after the well-deserved acclaim his debut novel got, why the hell not? And so it goes, two years down the line in real time, and months enough that Darius has actually grown up quite a bit. Physically and psychologically. He's not only six foot three, he's also lost some weight from taking up soccer at...

Review: Love, Creekwood

Love, Creekwood by Becky Albertalli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mmmmmmm...I dunno. I mean, Becky Albertalli is just one of those authors with whom my responses to her books have always been up and down, very middling, and typically either rising or nosediving in hindsight. Does that make sense? I dunno. But I just feel like this little novella was trying too hard to be an epilogue to both Simon Vs. and Leah on the Offbeat, and as someone who didn't really like Leah's book all t...

Review: Peace Talks

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ahhhhhhhh. Six years since the last Dresden Files book, and look, Jim Butcher's finally got us fans really truly well fed with the promise of two full-length novels this year alone. Also, the promise of both of them being a pretty full-fledged duology within the series' greater scope - aptly titled with opposing names too, Peace Talks and Battle Ground. So yeah, let's be real, this book is setting up a lot of nasty, ...

Review: Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tamsyn Muir got off to a pretty kickass start with her complex, obscenely disturbingly cool Gideon the Ninth, but after the horrifying twist ending to that one, where could she go next? Why, into even deeper levels of instability, of course. Harrow the Ninth now gets into the head of the young princess of the Ninth House, now one of the Emperor's new Lyctors, but the ending of the first book has left her with a ...

Review: Felix Ever After

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: transphobia, allusions to homophobia, allusions to deadnaming, assorted bullying, catfishing.
There's a lot of YA contemporaries in recent years that I'll give a 3.5 and either round up or down. This one, I'll round up because of how much Felix Love, as a Black, queer, trans teen, needs the love. Yeah, I know, bad pun, bad Ricky...but I'm sure Felix would approve.Okay, I'll be ...

Review: Something to Say

Something to Say by Lisa Moore Ramee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much like her debut novel, last year's A Good Kind of Trouble, Lisa Moore Ramee's Something to Say is a pretty sweet, and pretty important, MG contemporary with lots of on-point commentary about social justice. Especially in a year when Black Lives Matter, and protests of the kind seen in Ramee's first book, have come into sharper cultural focus than ever before - and, pretty presciently, this book deals wi...

Review: The ​Crow Rider

The ​Crow Rider by Kalyn Josephson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Last year, I was lucky enough to get an ARC of The Storm Crow, and now I get to complete Kalyn Josephson's debut duology - which, while (I know it's a bit wearing of me to say) I still don't understand why duologies have become such a thing in YA, especially, it's a pretty well-done conclusion here in The Crow Rider. (Though let's be real, that crow on the cover looks stressed as hell, though it also reminds ...

Review: The Empire of Gold

The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm so glad that this is one of a small handful of books I've been able to acquire in physical form since California got locked down - and that I found my way to the right place to get a signed first edition from Chakraborty herself, courtesy of Interabang Books in Dallas. The Empire of Gold, a green and gold brick of paper clocking in at over 750 pages, wraps up the trilogy in such amazing fashion that I...

Review: Clap When You Land

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: parental death, stalking, sexual assault.
Elizabeth Acevedo returns to the novel-in-verse style that helped her debut so amazingly in The Poet X and once again brings us a literary experience unlike any other. This time, she splits the book between the POVs of two Dominican girls - Yahaira, living in NYC, and Camino, living on the island - and how their lives unexpectedly i...