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I'm linking up to Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post!
I'm linking up to Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post!
Logen Ninefingers, infamous barbarian, has finally run out of luck. Caught in one feud too many, he's on the verge of becoming a dead barbarian -- leaving nothing behind him but bad songs, dead friends, and a lot of happy enemies.Nobleman, dashing officer, and paragon of selfishness, Captain Jezal dan Luthar has nothing more dangerous in mind than fleecing his friends at cards and dreaming of glory in the fencing circle. But war is brewing, and on the battlefields of the frozen North they fight by altogether bloodier rules.Inquisitor Glokta, cripple turned torturer, would like nothing better than to see Jezal come home in a box. But then Glokta hates everyone: cutting treason out of the Union one confession at a time leaves little room for friendship. His latest trail of corpses may lead him right to the rotten heart of government, if he can stay alive long enough to follow it.Enter the wizard, Bayaz. A bald old man with a terrible temper and a pathetic assistant, he could be the First of the Magi, he could be a spectacular fraud, but whatever he is, he's about to make the lives of Logen, Jezal, and Glokta a whole lot more difficult.Murderous conspiracies rise to the surface, old scores are ready to be settled, and the line between hero and villain is sharp enough to draw blood.
Adult fantasy has been a genre I've enjoyed since high school, but I rarely read it since getting into YA. I've been experimenting with Grimdark for the past year or so and a friend has been on my case to read Joe Abercrombie with her, so we finally picked up The Blade Itself when I got it for Christmas.
While I was very excited to get into this universe, I have to say it didn't quite live up to my expectations. This story follows four main characters: Logen Ninefingers, Jezal, and Glokta. They start their stories separately going about their normal day to day lives. Logen is traveling through the North to meet up with Bayaz, Jezal is training for a fencing tournament, and Glokta is doing his inquisitor thing. And that's that. For the vast majority of the book.
Of the characters, Jezal was the one I cared least about. His chapters are all about training, women, and what a shitty person he is in general. Logen was a bit more interesting, but I got bored of his chapters fairly quickly. The most interesting of the main characters was Glokta by far. His backstory was fascinating and I enjoyed his inner monologue a lot of the time. There are also several side characters who are important to the story, and some others who even get their own POV chapters. There are a LOT of people to keep up with.
There isn't much to say about the plot because there really isn't one. Nothing happens to move the story forward until nearly the very end, which is when it finally begins to pick up. It feels like the Lord of the Rings except it's the story of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli before they even get to Rivendell. The book ends just as they're setting off on their quest, which we know nothing at all about.
I finished this book with more questions than I had going in. I don't know what any of the character's motives are or what their mission is. I don't know what Bayaz's goal is or where they're all going. This could have been condensed into a 100 page prequel a la Robert Jordan, but instead it's dragged out to 500 pages.
Like I said, I enjoyed some of the characters and the ending made me want to see what would happen next. People assure me that I'll love the second and third books because they really take off, but after such a long book of backstory it's going to be awhile before I give this another go.
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Chef Ashna Raje desperately needs a new strategy. How else can she save her beloved restaurant and prove to her estranged, overachieving mother that she isn’t a complete screw up? When she’s asked to join the cast of Cooking with the Stars, the latest hit reality show teaming chefs with celebrities, it seems like just the leap of faith she needs to put her restaurant back on the map. She’s a chef, what’s the worst that could happen?Rico Silva, that’s what.Being paired with a celebrity who was her first love, the man who ghosted her at the worst possible time in her life, only proves what Ashna has always believed: leaps of faith are a recipe for disaster.FIFA winning soccer star Rico Silva isn't too happy to be paired up with Ashna either. Losing Ashna years ago almost destroyed him. The only silver lining to this bizarre situation is that he can finally prove to Ashna that he's definitely over her.But when their catastrophic first meeting goes viral, social media becomes obsessed with their chemistry. The competition on the show is fierce…and so is the simmering desire between Ashna and Rico. Every minute they spend together rekindles feelings that pull them toward their disastrous past. Will letting go again be another recipe for heartbreak—or a recipe for persuasion…?In Recipe for Persuasion, Sonali Dev once again takes readers on an unforgettable adventure in this fresh, fun, and enchanting romantic comedy.
I just finished Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev and I LOVED it! Part of Dev’s Raje series from her twist on Jane Austen novels, this book takes us through Ashna Raje’s life. I don’t like to have spoilers in my reviews so I won’t add any. However, I will say that the description of this book on Goodreads is misleading. This was not the lighthearted, romantic comedy I was expecting. This book explored some very hard and serious themes and that made me like it all the better.
Personally, I hated Ashna. She was childish, impulsive, and had A LOT of issues. She also lacked basic communication skills. I found myself wanting to rip my hair out sometimes because of her behavior. And yet, this was still a five star read for me. The story of Ashna’s mother, Shobi, was the star of this book for me. Shobi was a strong, powerful, and amazing woman and her story was impactful. Being an American woman, it can be hard to sometimes remember that women in other countries have it much harder than the women in my country ever will. I’ve found myself going down the rabbit hole on Google doing research on India and how women are treated there and if it hadn’t been for this book, I may not have ever researched it. In both Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors and Recipe for Persuasion, Dev intertwined important current events into her story, such as American healthcare issues and American immigration. Combined with Shobi’s entertaining and strong feminist backstory, I couldn’t put Recipe for Persuasion down.
I’ve never read Persuasion by Jane Austen so I can’t compare Dev’s twist to the original story. In July 2021, Incense and Sensibility, based off of Sense and Sensibility, will be released and it’s about Yash Raje and his run for governor in California. I just received Incense and Sensibility through NetGalley. If Yash’s story goes the way I think it will, I can’t wait to read it and write my review for it!
I'm linking up to Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post!
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This post contains affiliate links. Read more about this HERE. |
This year's PopSugar Challenge has a few categories that truly had me stumped (so it's like most years). As a reader of mostly YA and fantasy it can be difficult to find things to read to fit the prompts, even when browsing the Goodreads group for help. Many of the prompts each year seem tailor made for contemporary fiction, but this year I decided to help out my fellow fantasy lovers! For this list I'll be including YA fantasy and adult books with (I think) crossover appeal. (Note: I have not read and cannot vouch for every book on this list.)
Lesson One of the Scholomance: Learning has never been this deadly.
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.
There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate… or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.
El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.
Five months ago, Valerie Leftman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria. Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertently saved the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create. A list of people and things she and Nick hated. The list he used to pick his targets.
Now, after a summer of seclusion, Val is forced to confront her guilt as she returns to school to complete her senior year. Haunted by the memory of the boyfriend she still loves and navigating rocky relationships with her family, former friends and the girl whose life she saved, Val must come to grips with the tragedy that took place and her role in it, in order to make amends and move on with her life.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t read about books before I buy them. If the title and/or cover looks good, or if I see it around Bookstagram, I buy it. Around Christmas 2019, I was going to bookstores a lot because I knew I’d miss going to them once I moved to Guam, and boy was I right. I picked up Hate List by Jennifer Brown during this time and I finally read it.
Hate List is about Valerie Leftman, who’s boyfriend Nick Levil committed a school shooting in their cafeteria during their junior year of high school. In trying to stop him, Valerie was shot in the leg but because of the Hate List that she and Nick created, the one that determined who he wanted to kill, she was implicated in the shooting and treated as a suspect. Even though she was eventually cleared by the police, Valerie still had to deal with the aftermath of the shooting.
Senior year is supposed to be one of the best years of your high school career, but for Valerie, it required her to face her guilt over the list, the shooting, and Nick. Nick took the coward’s way out - he killed himself so that he wouldn’t have to face the repercussions of his actions. Instead, he left that for Valerie to do.
This is the first book I’ve ever read that had the plot of a school shooting. When I started the book, I thought it would be about what happened and what led up to it. Instead, it was about Valerie and her life before and after the shooting. It’s about her relationships with her family, community, friends, and classmates. It’s about the aftermath of trauma and how different people handle it various ways. This was a very humanizing book. There were times when Val’s character made me want to rip my hair out and burn the book and I’ve seen reviews where people gave the book a negative rating because of how much they hated her. But what I think these people failed to realize is that Valerie was written as a teenager; a 17/18-year-old young woman who went through something extremely traumatic and damaging. Of course her character was going to seem whiny, immature, annoying, self-centered, etc. She is a young woman trying to put her life back together and move on while everyone around her tries to keep her down with who and what they perceive her to be.
At the end of my copy of Hate List was a novella called Say Something. It was about David, a friend of Nick’s who suspected that Nick was planning something bad, but he didn’t have the courage to say anything. And even when Valerie spent their senior year being hated and even threatened for what people thought she was part of, David still didn’t say anything. The novella also talked about bullying practices that were still going on one year later; showing that even after enduring something traumatic, some people never change.
In school, I never experienced bullying nor did I ever witness it, so I can only empathize with what Valerie, Nick, and every other “outcast” in the book went through when they were bullied. It’s emotionally jarring to read about bullying and the impacts it can have on people. I, personally, would love to see Hate List and Say Anything on required reading lists for middle schools. I think it’s a very important book that could help bullies realize that what they are doing to others is hurtful and it can have a dire effect on everyone around them.
I'm linking up to Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post!