Ricky Pine's Blog, page 52

Review: There's Something About Sweetie

There's Something About Sweetie by Sandhya Menon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sandhya Menon is one of those YA rom-com writers who never fails to get all the laughs out of me, and There's Something About Sweetie, her long-awaited follow-up to her debut novel, is no exception. In many ways opposite to When Dimple Met Rishi, here we get a hotheaded guy and gentle girl instead of Dimple and Rishi's deliberate inversion of gender stereotypes. But oh, how they both get some character dynamism over th...

Review: The Dragon Republic

The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

R.F. Kuang debuted last year with a historically-inspired piece of dark, violent, terrifying fantasy in The Poppy War, and now that we've moved past this timeline's analogue to World War II, the analogue to Mao's Revolution takes center stage. With Rin knowing that Nikara's present leadership can't be trusted, of course she aligns with a charismatic new force in the Dragon Warlord, who promises to overthrow the corrupt empire in favo...

Review: A Crash of Fate

A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not the first piece of EU fiction that Zoraida Córdova has blessed us with, but this first tie-in to Galaxy's Edge (am I the only Star Wars fan who hasn't been there at Disneyland yet, though?) is a pretty sweet first official Star Wars novel of hers. Reminding me a lot of Claudia Gray's Lost Stars, A Crash of Fate takes us to Batuu in what I can only presume to be the gap between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, in which we...

Review: The Calculating Stars

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This year's Hugo winner for Best Novel, and oh so very well-deserved it was - and oh, how I'm going to start reading every Mary Robinette Kowal book I can get my hands on now! A brilliant piece of alternate history that reads like the love child of Deep Impact and Hidden Figures, Kowal's novel takes us to a 1952 where a meteorite impact off Chesapeake Bay wipes out the East Coast, plunges the world into a nuclear winter,...

Review: Soul of the Sword

Soul of the Sword by Julie Kagawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The ARC I got of the first book lists the title as Demon of the Blade, but GR has something different...either way, I'm just super psyched this book is coming!



And super mad that I have to wait after that bloodydamn cliffhanger from Book 1!



(Edit: No, I didn't get an ARC of the second book, that was a silly slip of the type on my part!)

But after reading this second book, I'm very glad it came out less than a year after Shadow of the Fox,...

Review: The Rise of Kyoshi

The Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While we're waiting another calendar year for F.C. Yee to give us the long-awaited sequel to The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, now Yee has started up another epic crush of a series centered on a kickass girl who needs to work a little extra-hard to realize her destiny is approaching faster than she expects. Only this time, Yee is building the origin story for a character we know pretty well, except perhaps less so than we thought until now: A...

Review: Return to Zero

Return to Zero by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The final book in the series?

Of this entire story universe?

I'm sad about that. Truly, I am. But after an entire decade, it's only fitting that this tenth book of the franchise is the last one, and they go out on some pretty high notes for sure. To be fair, this book is a little bit on the long side, maybe more than it needs to be. But it finally brings a lot of story threads full circle, and brings back a few of my old faves - nice to...

Review: The Kingdom

The Kingdom by Jess Rothenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Blurbed as it was by Dhonielle Clayton, I'm a little surprised that this new piece of YA sci-fi has slipped under the radar as well as it has. And a little disappointed in the community for not hyping this one up a little more like it deserves. Set around the end of the 21st century, it's kind of a YA Disneyland meets Jurassic Park meets Westworld, a magic-kingdom-type theme park story where there are so many cloned animals (because by...

Review: Finale

Finale by Stephanie Garber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I honestly think that Caraval would have actually been better off as a single book. Don't get me wrong, there's enough to keep me entertained in both Legendary and Finale, but there's also enough to make me feel increasingly that this series has had nothing but diminishing returns. The ridiculously overpowered nature of Legend himself does not help, though at least it's clear that as awful as he is, there's far worse in the other Fates. And...

Review: Birthday

Birthday by Meredith Russo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: homophobia (including repeated use of slurs), transphobia (including internalized transphobia and - often unintentional on the characters' parts - misgendering), gender dysphoria, alcohol abuse, parental death, attempted suicide by overdose.

Meredith Russo debuted strongly with If I Was Your Girl a couple of years ago, and with her new novel Birthday, she blows it out of the water. Once again a relatively short...