Reviews

Review: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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I picked this book up solely based on the hype since I’ve been so far removed from the literary world for so long (I haven’t been a very active reader since I started college about 5 years ago), and I wanted a good entrée back into the YA fantasy genre that I hold so near and dear to my heart. Boy, was this the right choice! Everyone and their brother it seems has read this book, so I have to admit I was skeptical because I tend to be overly critical of books that become that popular. I was so impressed with the character development and world-building in this book to the point that I’m awarding it my rarely-seen five star rating – AND a spot on my metaphorical favorites shelf.

Six of Crows is an arresting novel, if I’m honest – unconventional in its approach, honest in its confrontation of difficult topics, and fully belonging to the characters and the reader. This is a twisty dark clusterf*ck of plot (in the best way possible) mixed with incredible character development and a brave approach to understanding motive and the concept of bravery. I ate this book up and I’m so happy I did!

I have to admit I was a bit intimidated at first when I realized this book has not one, not two, but six POVs – I’m not usually a fan of multi-POV books, and I was really worried I was going to hate it and never get attached to any of the characters. Bardugo is smart here though (especially in her use of third person to tie everything together), and manages to give us an intimate glimpse of the motivations of each character with intricate backstory and their interactions with other characters without shutting off the other characters as the story progresses. Instead of driving them apart, it pulls them together, and feels like a completely cohesive body of work.

These characters, while I’m on the topic, are all incredibly compelling and multi-dimensional in a wonderfully imperfect way. I’m obsessed with Nina and she’s definitely my favorite character, although honestly I feel like every last one of the main six characters has a unique, interesting, and believable storyline and persona. I applaud Bardugo’s ability to create characters that feel like they’re real people – this is a masterclass on character development, y’all.

Six of Crows moves fast, and I’m still in awe of how quickly and naturally the plot spins off itself when things seem to go wrong. Kaz Brekker is a wonder in and of himself to watch, although not without his own flaws and trauma. It was quite magical to read about a trope-y invincible protagonist who is deeply human even in spite of his ability to always come out on top. After all, “a good magician isn’t much different from a proper thief.”

I would recommend this book to anyone who remotely enjoys fantasy and adventure – the writing here is superb, and it moves quickly but not so fast that it glosses over the characters or their motivations. I picked up the sequel Crooked Kingdom as soon as I finished (review coming soon!), and I will definitely be making a point to read the Shadow and Bone trilogy/King of Scars as well!

About the Book: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (2015) is a young adult fantasy adventure novel that takes place in Bardugo’s epic Grishaverse in the sprawling fictional merchant city of Ketterdam. Notorious criminal and gang leader Kaz Brekker and his assembled group of thieves and thugs are hired to perform a heist that could either kill them or grant a massive payoff and save the world in the process.

Review: The Eye of Minds by James Dashner

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This book has been sitting on my to-be-read pile for a LONG time (I’m talking years), so I’m glad I finally had the time to get through it! This is a new(er) book by James Dashner (of The Maze Runner fame). I wanted to like The Eye of Minds a lot, but it definitely had some flaws that kept me from enjoying it as fully as I wanted to. I ended up rating it a solid three stars – I really enjoyed the plot and it moved quickly enough for me, but the character development was so sorely lacking that it completely took away any interest that I might’ve had in this book.

I can’t put it off any longer – good grief, these characters were flat. The development of Michael, Bryson, and Sarah was so lacking that I felt as though I could’ve been following three faceless, personality-less people through the book. I started to sort-of like Sarah toward the end of the book, but it’s really clear to me after reading this book that writing compelling female characters is just not a strength of James Dashner’s. This is something that I was suspect of after reading the Maze Runner series, but this book definitely isn’t any better. (In fact, I was originally so uninvested that I read about 20 pages and then put the book down for over a year last time I tried to read it.) Luckily, the plot of this book redeemed what the characters took away, and that was enough for me to keep reading after the storyline picked up.

I really enjoyed the scale and possibility a setting like this presented to the storyline, which was a needed breath of fresh air after some of the stale exchanges between characters. Something like the VirtNet presents an almost infinite set of possibilities in world-building, which was quite entertaining to read. Dashner’s imagination (and penchant for dreaming up completely terrifying villains) had me guessing through the entire book. Even as much as I disliked reading these characters, the plot twist at the end of the book did genuinely have me reeling – something I love in a good science fiction novel. (Duh!)

While I don’t think The Eye of Minds is a bad book by any means, if you’re looking for a quick read with a compelling sci-fi plot and a unique plot twist, this might be a good pick.

About the Book:The Eye of Minds is a young adult science fiction novel and the first installment in the Mortality Doctrine series. The book follows Michael, a young gamer whose hacking skills have gotten him noticed, but possibly for the wrong reasons. The VirtNet is an expansive and completely immersive universe of technological possibility, but in the wrong hands, it’s devastating. In the wake of a cyberterrorist takeover holding gamers hostage inside the VirtNet, rendering them brain-dead in the real world, Michael and his friends will need to risk their lives to go deeper into the VirtNet than anyone ever has to stop it.

#RereadAndReview: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

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Unlike some, I have to admit I’m quite fond of rereading books, so here’s the natural choice for me – the one and only The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins! This book is one of my all-time faves and I haven’t cracked its spine in a solid few years, so it was a no-brainer as to which book would be my first re-read of 2019.

This book gets a solid (and rare) five stars for me without question. This is actually the first book I’ve ever read that features a main character who reads as asexual/aromantic, and although I have my own feelings about how that story ends up… *eye roll* …the first book is a stunning foray into the beginnings of the recent dystopian fiction craze in YA fiction.

Representation aside, this book is still one of my favorites because of Collins’s ability to write a character who is supposed to be utterly unlikeable and still make readers root for her. Katniss is flawed, deeply, and that’s precisely why she’s so easy to relate to. It’s easy for a lot of readers to see something in Katniss that we also see in ourselves, and that’s part of the magic of a great protagonist. Collins does this masterfully. (On more than one occasion – the stuck-up Effie Trinket and belligerent drunkard Haymitch Abernathy are both equally as likable as Katniss herself, which makes this novel a joy to read.)

Just as compelling as the character development in this book is the setting in which it takes place. While this isn’t my absolute favorite job of world-building that’s been done in a work of fiction, it’s certainly a damn good job. Collins is a master of the “show, don’t tell” skill set, to the point that I was actually angry watching the movie adaptation because I had imagined exact details of different locations while reading and they weren’t exactly the same on screen as they were in my head. It’s so easy to get sucked into the Hunger Games universe, largely because of the digestible and illustrative writing.

***SPOILERS BELOW!***

As far as faults go, there are relatively few here for me. Honestly, although this doesn’t become a problem until further on in the trilogy, the biggest drawback of The Hunger Games for me is its insistence that Katniss participate in a romantic relationship. While the public appeal of romance was necessary to the plot (I’m talking staying alive-necessary), Katniss’s feelings about it after the fact certainly were not mutual and it was quite clear that this was the case. I felt really slighted by the fact that her character somehow couldn’t just… be aromantic. Even if it wasn’t “official canon,” it’s VERY plausible that she just. wasn’t. interested. All of the subsequent romantic subplots felt very contrived to me, and it really only gets worse as we keep going in this trilogy – but we’ll get to that another time.

Even so, The Hunger Games is (still) one of the most satisfying, can’t-put-it-down, masterfully written dystopian YA novels of the 21st century. Even after reading and re-reading this one over and over, it still retains the charm and heart-pounding magnetic pull that it had the first time around.

About the Book: The Hunger Games is a dystopian YA adventure novel that takes place in a futuristic nation called Panem, in the ruins of what was once North America. The sadistic government keeps its citizens in line by choosing one boy and one girl at random from each of the twelve districts for an annual televised fight to the death. The story focuses on 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen from District 12, whose life will be forever changed with the results of this year’s reaping.

Review: Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

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Now, I’m not a huge fan of historical fiction – so if you told me before the New Year hit that the first book I’d read in 2019 would be a Geraldine Brooks novel about the higher education system in colonial America, I’d have laughed in your face!

Nah, I confess, this book was assigned to me for a reading review for one of my classes in grad school. (I’m studying Higher Education and Student Affairs, so this was a natural pick for my professor.) Caleb’s Crossing is not something I typically would’ve picked up on my own, but I still have some feelings about it.

Overall, I rated this book three stars – I liked the narration and writing enough, and while I recognize that Geraldine writes historical narrative very well, I really just could not get past some of the dry, hard-to-follow dialect she used. I also have LOTS of feelings about the staging of the book and the impact of colonization on both the narrative and decisions made in the storytelling… woof. This book pissed me off pretty frequently, sometimes for all the wrong reasons.

I think the biggest issue I had with Caleb’s Crossing is that the book is essentially not about Caleb Cheeshateaumuk at all. I was completely shell-shocked when I struggled to read through the first chapter just to discover that our narrator is a young settler girl by the name of Bethia Mayfield, and not Caleb himself. While Bethia is a really likable character and ends up being a good foil to Caleb in terms of comparing lived experiences of both characters, this book falls short in centering the indigenous experience that Caleb’s story is proof of. Whether this was foolish or wise on Brooks’s part, I have yet to decide – if it’s even my place to decide (I identify as white, so who’s to say here). On one hand, I want to respect Brooks’s decision, since she is a white woman, to tell this story from a lens she can speak to, especially since she tells the novel in the first person. I can’t lie, Bethia made a great narrator, and I appreciated the relatively progressive gauntlet of internal grappling with privilege (for that time) that Brooks writes her into. On the other hand, though – I have yet to see an indigenous character whose story falls center, even when the story rotates around the indigenous experience. Maybe this just wasn’t Brooks’s story to tell.

This book also takes a while to get to the point, and I found myself wondering when the plot was going to pick up and deliver our characters to the setting that we readers were promised by the book summary and our knowledge of Caleb’s actual personhood. I thought the descriptions of the book’s plot were pretty misleading, and I feel like if I hadn’t read them before starting the book, I would have appreciated it a lot more.

Overall, this was a tough read but not a bad one. Caleb’s Crossing tells an important story and one that deserves plenty of reflection and discussion, but falls a bit flat when it comes to meeting expectations.

About the Book:Caleb’s Crossing is a fictionalized retelling of the true story of Caleb Cheeshateaumuk, the first indigenous graduate of Harvard College in 1665. The book takes place in mid-1600s Martha’s Vineyard on the occupied land of the Wampanoag nation, off the coast of what is now known as Massachusetts. The story follows young Bethia Mayfield, a preacher’s daughter, and her friendship with Caleb as they grow up together, and eventually through Caleb’s educational experience at Harvard.