Ricky Pine's Blog, page 61

Review: Circle of Shadows

Circle of Shadows by Evelyn Skye
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another ARC found at work, and another story greatly enjoyed.

The latest from Evelyn Skye gets a lot of comparisons to the works of Leigh Bardugo and Renée Ahdieh, but I'm also going to offer up some comparison to Julie Kagawa's recent feudal Japanese-inspired dark fantasy, Shadow of the Fox. Especially since both books highlight main characters with some kind of affinity for a certain canid beast. And since both involve some seriously n...

Review: Seven Tears at High Tide

Seven Tears at High Tide by C.B. Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wish this book wasn't so hard to find. But eventually my library did get it, even in ebook form, so I've finally gotten to spend a night devouring it all. And while I'm reading it on a cold winter's night, as cold as it gets in the Bay Area, it's a perfectly sweet summertime tale of adorable fairytale love between two queer boys who very much deserve it. In a world where What If It's Us gets all the attention, this is the m/m YA...

Review: The Plotters

The Plotters by Un-su Kim
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Starting off my 2019 reviews on a low note, I'm sorry to say. I mean, at least I finished this ARC, but I've now returned it to the pile in the office at work in the hopes that someone else will pick it up and enjoy it more. I guess I was a little disappointed in how cerebral this book really was when the very premise came with a more John Wick-like promise. But I suppose not for nothing is Un-su Kim an international prize-winner, and I will...

Review: The Women's War

The Women's War by Jenna Glass
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: rape, institutional sexism.

For this ARC, the last one I finished in 2018, I'm going to give it a 2.5 and generously round it up to a 3. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot going for it, especially with its promised #MeToo and #Resistance-era political relevance. But it does have this unfortunate and persistent feeling of half-bakery underlying the whole thing for a ton of reasons. Namely, the generally slow p...

My 2018 Favorites: The Fourth Annual Pinecone Awards!

Welcome back, Pinecones, to the latest in my annual end-of-year Pinecone Awards! As always, it was a real roller-coaster of a pop-cultural year, with more than a few surprises in store as I worked to compile the rankings. Though I thought I'd be keeping the Special Salute back and saving it for more of an every-three-years thing - since I introduced the Special Salutes with the Third Pinecones last year - I had to bring them back, because they make it so much easier to honor more deserving cr...

Review: Queen of Air and Darkness

Queen of Air and Darkness by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I do believe Children of Blood and Bone has finally been brought down from #1 to #2 on the Pinecone Awards list, and that's on the strength of this book, the biggest one Cassie Clare's published for us yet. Almost 900 whole pages! And as the conclusion to her best series yet, The Dark Artifices, it's also every bit what we expect a big-name YA finale to be. I'm talking on a level with Deathly Hallows, Mockingjay, or Allegian...

Review: Words of Radiance

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Almost four years after my first read of this book, I'm now back with my second read-through of Words of Radiance - or, as I'm tempted to call it after its working title, and one of the other in-universe big holy texts, The Book of Endless Pages. Taking thirteen days in total to read through this book instead of (somehow) speeding through it in three like I did before was, as with the first book, a major boon. Now I get to remem...

Review: Skyward

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The latest from Sanderson takes us back into the YA sci-fi realms he visited for three whole books on The Reckoners - this time playing out a little more like Ender's Game, if Ender were a girl and instead of Battle or Command School, Spin's got an entire planet to defend already. If she weren't so afraid, not only of having to deal with her father's cowardly reputation, but also that her own fear will sink her chances of defending her peop...

Review: White Cat

White Cat by Holly Black
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think I've finally found a Holly Black book I super-enjoyed the first time around...and I think a lot of that owes to the fact that this one would make a great comp title for my own literary agent querying. That is, if I query again. I seem to have run out of literary agents, though there could be more that I haven't tried yet.

But the point that I'm really trying to make here is that there's quite a few surface similarities between this book...

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse - Hate To Say It, But Did Sony Actually Get One Right?

***THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW.***

Well, this was a terrible movie to watch...
...on a day when I'd been fighting off some kind of tension headache.
What, did you think I was going to do what a small number of assbutts did by contributing to the loss of this movie's perfect 100 on Rotten Tomatoes? Perish the thought. Though the two Amazing Spider-Man movies remain my favorite Spidey-films ever purely because of how much Andrew Garfield mirrored my own personality - and because of how much...