Alanna: The First Adventure

It has been so long since I have read anything about Alanna, Jon, Gary, and George. When I first read it years ago, I disliked reading. I was on the verge of hating it. Whenever I was called on in class to read aloud, my stomach would fall through the floor. I had very little practice and found nothing of interest in the fiction books we were forced to read in school. But these simple books, for they are simple, helped me find a joy I didn't know. 

Reading through it a second time, I realized just how blunt these books were. It is, in the end, a short book. It moves very quickly to keep the attention of the youth. The point of view was third person omniscient, and jumped from a person's head to another. I didn't remember this when I read it on 2005. This can be a difficult way to write without it appearing odd or obvious. But, the fact that it's quick makes it very appropriate. There is very little subtlety so then the junior high kids don't miss the important things--which was super helpful to me when I was in junior high. 

The setting is cliched, your typical fantasy world with magic and knights. But when you got youth how don't know it's a cliche, it works. 

But really its the the characters that I loved and they still have a special place in my heart . George is the one who introduced me to thieves and romanticized them for me. I wouldn't have loved Six of Crows if it hadn't been for George. Some of my favorite characters where probably basses on him. George. *sigh* The other characters are good, too, they are rounded and individuals without over doing it. Their attributes are simple and Tamora Pierce is good at reminding us who is who and that they are individuals. 

This is a good story for young girls who want to be unpowered, I think. But it also shows that boys are good too. It is about embracing who you are while not criminalizing others. 

The second book in the series is In the Hands of the Goddess.


P.S. I feel as though I have to add the 2002, Atheneum Books hardcover edition because it was the one that I originally read and enjoyed so much. I had to because my heart demanded it. 

Traitor to the Throne

Traitor to the Throne is the sequel to Rebel of the Sands. I would recommend when you read this, make sure you read the first book right before you read this one. There are lots of little things that correlate between the two books that I had a hard time remembering, because I read the first one last year. 

This is about Amani and the Rebellion that wants to dethrone the Sultan. They are in full blown rebellion mode when their camp gets ambushed and they are forced to flee. A few of the rebels follow her out. While there, and after a fight with Jin, she gets knocked out and finds herself waking up in the Sultan's Palace as his prisoner. But he doesn't want to simply lock up this Demji (forgive my spelling if it's wrong) whose power he can use, but he wants to show her off. Placing her in his harem, not to be touched by anyone. 

Surrounding her are "ghosts of her past," almost literally, and betrayal is around every corner. She doesn't know who she can trust and ends up being somewhat sympathetic to the Sultan, the man whom the Rebellion is trying to over throw. I know I was sympathetic to him at points in the story. 

If you can stand the info dump in a few places, especially toward the beginning, you will enjoy the book. 

The main characters are very strong individuals. They have strong presences and make them believable people. Not everyone is solely bad or completely good. I do wish the side characters were more fleshed out. They blended together and sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. This hindered parts of the story especially when certain ones die. One of Amani's "ghosts" dies and I cried for this character. I felt her/him. But when other of the rebellion die, named and named, I have much harder time feeling for them. I hope in the next book, we get more background for these characters, especially if they are going to die on us. 

The world building is amazing. Hamilton spent a lot of time developing the stories and backgrounds of different people and mythologies. But she tends to info dump to get a point across. That can be jarring and send you out of the book. 

Some of the betrayals I didn't see coming, others I did. The plot was very well thought out, even for a second book in a trilogy. It felt like a sequel, but it held its own for the most part. 

I was really put off by the abrupt ending of this book though. It is in set up for the third book, but I was initially thinking that it was only a two book series. I was mistaken and disappointed in a way. I was prepared for it to end, but it left me hanging. 

The next one is Hero at the Fall.

Mistborn: Secret History

Second review: I've decided this is my favorite Brandon Sanderson story. Even beyond The Emperor's Soul. I don't often cry in books, but even though I knew it was coming, I couldn't stop the tears from flowing. I laughed, I cried, I enjoyed reading it so much, and it makes me want to reread the Mistborn series again with all the others Cosmetic books.  Brandon Sanderson writes so well that, for this one in particular, it strums my heart strings.

*****

Mistborn: Secret History made me cry. If you're read the other Mistborn books by Brandon Sanderson, it explains so much where there seemed to be holes. If you haven't read them DON'T READ THIS ONE YET!!!! This has so many spoilers. I'd suggest reading it after Bands of Mourning or at least Hero of Ages. There are too many awesome things that will just be spoiled if you get to far ahead of yourself.

So if you haven't read Mistborn yet, don't read this one. Stop your reading of this post right now, otherwise I'll call you a cheaterpants.

******

This is Kelsier's story after he dies in the first book. The Lord Ruler kills him and he finds himself talking to Preservation, the God of their world, as we find out throughout Hero of Ages. Kelsier is able to stop himself from going to the Beyond and ends up imprisoning himself at the Well of Ascension. There he comes to figure out who Ruin and Preservation are as well as the fact that he knows nothing of the world or the cosmere. He meets up with a certain "witty" man whom we've come to love and adore throughout all of Sanderson's books. And he actually kicks Kelsier's trash.

Kelsier, being a spirit-like person, gets to move through the world differently after he is released from the Well, alongside Ruin. He meets Khriss from White Sands and is able to find other people from Elantris (which I haven't read yet, my bad) in hopes that he can save Preservation from being killed by Ruin. But when Preservation dies he hopes to take His power to defeat Ruin. It doesn't work out so well. Ruin has been at this for too long and is able to speak to the people he is controlling. Kelsier can only speak to madmen or to people in their sleep, which makes things very difficult.

He ends up helping Vin and gives up his power to her so she can defeat Ruin, as Preservation had planned when his mind wasn't broken.

OOOOOH it made me cry. Revisiting Dox, Clubs, Vin and Elend! I just about died. Again. So sad, but so happy at different times. I continuely love Sazed and Spook. I feel for them all!

Read it. Enjoy it. Love it!

It is a fantastic novella that answers so many of the Cosmere questions as well as gives insight to Wax and Wayne in Mistborn Era 2. So many answers yet so many secrets.

Bands of Mourning

A breath of fresh air. I was really excited to read this book because I love Wax and Wayne, Steris and Marasi. They are fantastic and I can't wait for the next one, though it will be a longer time in coming than I want--Fall 2018.

Bands of Mourning in Mistborn: Era II starts with Steris' and Wax's wedding. Of course it goes awry, but Steris has prepared for that. She makes lists of everything and is well aware of whom she is trying to marry. I've grown to love her throughout the book, as many have through others reviews I've read and heard.

They get an assignment to go out to the outer provinces and find the spike of a kandra who was half blown up and has now gone slightly crazy. There are things out there with strange glyphs and carvings that lead them to believe this kandra found the Bands of Mourning, the Lord Rulers Metalminds where he stored all of his Feruchemy powers. They are some pretty powerful weapons that make you practically a God. But they also know Suit is looking for them and probably has the kandra spike as well. Wax is also aware that Suit has his sister, Telsin, and is holder her captive. If he can find Suits hideout, save his sister, brings Suit to justice, find the Bands of Mourning, and the Spike it'd be a really good day. Of course, because it is Wax's life, not all things go to plan like Steris would want. Murder happens, a lot, train robbery, new gadgets that have strange powers, and odd masked people appear. What are those things in the sky?! Awesomeness that's what's up there, not just Steelpushers.

It was a great book, written well, in a world that I've come to love so much. The Cosmere is an amazing universe full of so many ins and outs that it is hard to keep track of them all. Hooray for the coppermind.net  where you can keep things straight, at least for a while until more secrets are revealed. "There is always another secret."

Drop of Night

I tried. I tried really hard to get through this book, but it took forever to get going anywhere.

A Drop of Night is about a group of supposedly super smart teens being whisked away to France so they can explore this super amazing house and the untouched underground labyrinth under it.

They spend a lot of time getting there and introducing characters. But what really dragged for me, which had the potential of being done awesomely, was that it jumped between "present day" time and "French Revolution" time. The house's labyrinth was built to keep away the revolutionaries and keep the nobles safe. Makes sense, yes? But why ask teens to go down first? Why the mystery and cloak/dagger-ness of their host? (These questions are addressed in the beginning, but not expounded upon.)

Suddenly their host goes berserk, they wake up in the labyrinth under the house, and one of them gets insta-killed. Why? Because... They run away from their host and his associates further in the maze and almost get beheaded like they do in the movie Ghost Ship--all wires moving really fast. Then suddenly there is a zombie/ghost dude walking about and mention-ish of a demon thing that took over the original owners mind... or something. I don't even know. Or really care.

Supposed to be good, but I couldn't find the wanting to keep reading. 100 pages before getting down there and another 50 of jumping times was annoying. The shifting between times gave no real tension. It was all super high tension and no relief to let us breath. It reminded me of the book series  Maximum Ride by James Patterson. SO much jumping. Too much jumping with chapters sometimes not even two pages long. That's okay if there are longer chapters for most of the book, but when most of them are maybe three pages... It feels like all I'm doing is turning pages, not actually reading anything.

Overall, I didn't care for it. Characters were wanting. All the boys were pretty much the same personality from what I could gather or they were stereotypes. I didn't care for them at all. I'd probably read it to see who died in it, but not much more than that. I'm not going to be picking it up again. Sorry, but blah.

Bloody Jack

Bloody Jack by L.A. Meyer is about a girl who dresses as a boy to join His Majesty's Navy to take down pirates. Coming off of the streets with nothing but the clothes she took from a dead friend, she starts her new life as a Sailor Boy who assists those who are actually in the Navy. She can't let her secret of actually being a girl get out, otherwise who knows where they will drop her off and leave her. She has dreams of being a sailor and seeing far off places and going on adventures, so she hides herself in plain sight as a small boy on a big ship.

This was okay though I was hoping for more. There are a whole bunch of books in this series full of all kinds of adventures so I'm assuming it gets better. It starts out with her turning maybe 12 (faking 10 year old boy) and supposedly two or three years passes. It didn't feel like that too me. There was no mention of time until almost the end of the story and the rest of it felt glossed over. It was written in a past tense, which is normal, but as if written by someone much older while at the same time the accent that is used in the writing shows that it should be more present tense or at least closer to the actual time it occurred. I guess what I'm saying is that the narration is very distant from what is going on in the story.

At the times of high intensity, fighting the pirates and whatnot, I was never scared for her--this possibly had to do with the narration style, maybe something else which I can't put my finger on.

Half way through the novel, when one of the boys finds out that she is a girl, the story turns to them necking the whole time. Every moment they could get they held hands or kissed or touched each other or something. I felt like I might as well have put them in a hallway of a high school or something. That was all it was about for the longest time and I got bored. It was a good thing she got in fights with her other crewmen and pirates, otherwise I would have put it down.

I did enjoy the some of "Jacky's" quirks and the fact that she doesn't see herself as brave. She becomes Blood Jack because she kills a pirate to save a friend. She survives being on an island on her own for a while. I even liked the reality of when she is finally discovered that these gentlemen sailors treat her like a girl of privilege even though she was a beggar off the street at the beginning. Of course to keep her "safe" they put her in the brig (as there is really no other place they could put her, so they say) and have guards on her 24/7, which is excessive in my opinion. If there was a lady that they had saved from pirates, they wouldn't have put her in the brig. So why Jacky? The whole ending was weird. And the awkwardness of suddenly realizing she is female was never really mentioned. Sure they treat her different, but none of them mention any awkwardness or weird looks. I'm sure that would have happened.

The setting was kept simple but we were given enough information to make a guess as to what was going on. Though I kind of wish there had been a tad more where we could have learned more about ships.

Aside from Jaimy and Jacky, most of the characters were kind of flat to me. We weren't give backstories to many of the others. Super brief glimpses maybe, but not enough to give them more than a stereotype.

I think the story has a lot of potential, but right now I'm kind of disappointed. I'll read the next one, but if it doesn't pick things up greatly, I won't read more of the series than that.

Deep Blue

Deep Blue by Jennifer Donnelly was dripping in cheese. I am actually fairly surprised that there isn't a copy in the children's section when the childishness would be appreciated. For a children's book, like sixth grade, no higher than eighth grade, would be okay. They would enjoy it. I did not. I even read another review, hoping that it would get better, but she had the same complaints I did and said it didn't get better.

Donnelly used cliches which weren't actually cliches. Such as: Money = currensea, girlfriend - merlfriend, a family tree = coral tree, and candies are weird things like "cillawondas, bing-bangs, janteeshaptas, and zee-zees." It also has paragraphs like "the others set off and she followed at a little bit of a distance, watching Neela, swim with Ling, and Ava with Becca. ... But as she watched her oldest friend, and her three new ones, swim ahead of her, she felt surer and stronger about facing what was to come." (Two lines of brief dialog followed by a new chapter. I wrote like that when I was in high school--I was alright, but not good enough to get published, at all. I remember having filler words like "at a little bit of distance." Why not say "behind" or even "at a distance"? The book is very wordy and takes a long time to get anywhere. 

It takes a while because most of the book is an info dumb. I get that there needs to be explanations, and exploring this world, which isn't a cliche fantasy world, is important. She needed to set the environment, but I could easily skip paragraphs, almost whole pages, and not be hindered. The world was well thought out, but poorly executed on the page. 

By page 77 I was bored and I only got to 150 before I gave up. The inciting incident finally happened, but not until page 95. 95!! There was too much set up in her perfect palace life with minor dramas between her and a cliched cheerleader like figure. Again I had one in my high school stories. My character Daisy served the same purpose as this one did, filler of possible backstory. But then suddenly everyone in the capital city is dead or being held hostage by the bad guy--somehow that happened. She and her friend run, er swim, but then get captured and talk to the villain of the story. He's charismatic and condescending and threatens to kill everyone if he doesn't get his way (like another one of my characters from high school, they are really good at throwing tantrums). They escape, find the rebels and are suppsoed to save the sea from the bad guy and his evil plan.

The characters didn't develop at all throughout the first half of the book. Neela is SUPER childish at 16 years old and is always gorging herself on candies. All the relationships seem... fake? They are weird. I felt nothing for any of the characters when they died--maybe their are dead, we don't know for sure because nothing was definite about many of the ones who died. I should have felt something, especially if you are going to spend 150 pages of info dumping.

The plot was extremely cliche. You have a strange dream because you're the chosen one. You don't want to marry the guy you re betrothed too--because you're a princess. You are on your own, because what YA novel has your parents as being a big role during your adventure? Because you're the chosen one you must stop the bad guy and releasing doom and destruction on the world. There are magical objects you need to find. Oh and those mythical creatures you thought were mythical, they aren't. Moral you learn is probably friendship, because boys are dumb in this book. P.S. Girls rule and save the seas.

The only thing I think this book had going for it was the mermaid thing, but the cliches killed it for me. There are three or four other books, but I'm not going to be finishing this one let alone the others. Jennifer Donnelly, you disappointed me.