Ricky Pine's Blog, page 99
March 24, 2017
Review: The Forever Song
The Forever Song by Julie KagawaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Finally, three years after this book comes out, I've read and enjoyed it and, for now, I'm all caught up on the complete bibliography of Julie Kagawa. I'm sure if I look back at some of her earlier Iron Fey books, I'd see her remark on how her readers' tears feed her muse, but now this is the earliest I've seen her acknowledge this fact that I remember. And while those tears may be a powerful energy source, they mostly go towards powe...
March 23, 2017
Review: Clockwork Prince
Clockwork Prince by Cassandra ClareMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Well, well, well. Ms. Clare is truly in fine form now! As notorious as she is for her Draco Trilogy fanfic (which is basically the Grindelwald to My Immortal's Voldemort), Clare is one of my favorite authors, and it is all because of this ever-expanding universe of wildly awesome fantasy novels.
Why do I like these books so much? These characters are a most wonderful Victorian set of equivalents to the TMI (haha) character set. I lo...
March 22, 2017
Review: The Darkest Magic
The Darkest Magic by Morgan RhodesMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I've enjoyed all the Morgan Rhodes books I've read to date, but this one, the middle entry in the Spirits and Thieves trilogy, suffers from a bit of Sophomore Slump. It's a surprisingly slow read, with a lot of POV switches that are sometimes hard to keep track of unless you go back to the headings at the start of each chapter, and a pretty convoluted story that leaves me scratching my head quite often. But the cast of characters in...
March 20, 2017
Review: The Eternity Cure
The Eternity Cure by Julie KagawaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
My reread of Blood of Eden continues, and I'll be reading the third book very soon, because this time, not only did I finish The Eternity Cure, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I did the first time around. Sure, the book did have a bit of a disjointed, slapdash feel at times, but it keeps Allison Sekemoto's story going into some really weird and messed-up territory as a new, and of course, deadlier plague (the source of the book's ti...
March 19, 2017
Review: Clockwork Angel
Clockwork Angel by Cassandra ClareMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
*finally posting my old review to my blog, with some minor edits*
And so it begins, the prequel to Cassandra Clare's (deservingly) glorified fanfic story.
Tessa Gray (who thankfully has no relatives - that we know of! - named Christian), teenage American in the Victorian days, travels to London to see her brother - and ends up imprisoned by a pair of creepy old ladies. You know things are not what they seem when the globe in their hou...
March 18, 2017
Review: Silver Stars
Silver Stars by Michael GrantMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I speak a lot of how I sometimes have trouble finding good YA historical fiction, mostly because last year, I read a couple of examples - Razorhurst and Salt To The Sea - that just didn't cut it for me. I keep forgetting, however, that Front Lines exists - and now, so does Silver Stars.
Michael Grant's series continues in its exploration of an alternate history where women got to fight in World War II...and make no mistake, this brick of...
March 17, 2017
Review: Aftermath
Aftermath by Chuck WendigMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
So I went into this first Aftermath book having read maybe...one Chuck Wendig book before, and having not really liked it. That said, this book, as Star Wars novels go, isn't half-bad, but I can see why it gets a lot of bad reviews. Wendig goes for a somewhat George R.R. Martin-esque storytelling approach - not in terms of killing your faves off, but in terms of short, choppy chapters that jump around between multiple POVs, many of which are...
March 16, 2017
Review: A Conjuring of Light
A Conjuring of Light by V.E. SchwabMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This one was a little low on my current library-haul TBR pile, which has ballooned to a pretty massive size since I'm currently done with school, but thanks to Aimal Farooq's urging, I bumped it up and decided to read it before tackling Star Wars: Aftermath.
I think I made the right choice.
The first two books in this trilogy, I liked them but didn't love them. Compared to The Archived, The Unbound, and Vicious, I thought they were g...
March 15, 2017
Review: Mistborn
Mistborn by Brandon SandersonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I've been wanting to explore this section of Sanderson's Cosmere for a while, but it's been hard to get ahold of the books because my library has a way of losing them. After getting reminded by my friend Aimal (though she wasn't so impressed with the book herself), I finally ordered it from another library, and now I've read this first book and judged that maybe Aimal was right - the book's a little bit overrated, though not bad at all....
March 13, 2017
Logan: My Feels Are NOT OKAY!
***THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW.***
Two movies, two days, two movie reviews. Yesterday was an explosive funfest with Kong: Skull Island, and now I'm here to review Logan, the latest extension of the often quite tangled threads of the X-Men movie 'verse. Like last year's Deadpool, Logan is pretty damn different from all the other X-Men movies, to its benefit, and is not only among the best in the entire franchise, but also one of the best superhero movies of all. (Though you kno...
Two movies, two days, two movie reviews. Yesterday was an explosive funfest with Kong: Skull Island, and now I'm here to review Logan, the latest extension of the often quite tangled threads of the X-Men movie 'verse. Like last year's Deadpool, Logan is pretty damn different from all the other X-Men movies, to its benefit, and is not only among the best in the entire franchise, but also one of the best superhero movies of all. (Though you kno...
