INTERNATIONAL GIVEAWAY! WIN a Pre-Order of Wonder Woman: Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo

She will become one of the world’s greatest heroes: WONDER WOMAN. But first she is Diana, Princess of the Amazons. And her fight is just beginning. . . .

Diana longs to prove herself to her legendary warrior sisters. But when the opportunity finally comes, she throws away her chance at glory and breaks Amazon law—risking exile—to save a mere mortal. Even worse, Alia Keralis is no ordinary girl and with this single brave act, Diana may have doomed the world.

Alia just wanted to escape her overprotective brother with a semester at sea. She doesn’t know she is being hunted. When a bomb detonates aboard her ship, Alia is rescued by a mysterious girl of extraordinary strength and forced to confront a horrible truth: Alia is a Warbringer—a direct descendant of the infamous Helen of Troy, fated to bring about an age of bloodshed and misery.

Together, Diana and Alia will face an army of enemies—mortal and divine—determined to either destroy or possess the Warbringer. If they have any hope of saving both their worlds, they will have to stand side by side against the tide of war.

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Book Review: Ruin and Rising (The Grisha #3)

Release Date: June 17, 2014
Author: Leigh Bardugo
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Length: 422 pages
Source: Purchased Book

The capital has fallen.

The Darkling rules Ravka from his shadow throne.

Now the nation's fate rests with a broken Sun Summoner, a disgraced tracker, and the shattered remnants of a once-great magical army.

Deep in an ancient network of tunnels and caverns, a weakened Alina must submit to the dubious protection of the Apparat and the zealots who worship her as a Saint. Yet her plans lie elsewhere, with the hunt for the elusive firebird and the hope that an outlaw prince still survives.

Alina will have to forge new alliances and put aside old rivalries as she and Mal race to find the last of Morozova's amplifiers. But as she begins to unravel the Darkling's secrets, she reveals a past that will forever alter her understanding of the bond they share and the power she wields. The firebird is the one thing that stands between Ravka and destruction—and claiming it could cost Alina the very future she’s fighting for.

    

Review:

Protagonist: Alina almost killed the Darkling, taking herself along with him, but she was saved and now she's weak and broken and holed up in the company of the Apparat who treats her like a child who knows nothing. She plays along waiting for the day when she can escape with her friends and complete her quest to take down the Darkling and regain full control over her powers. After all that's happened it's hard to imagine that Alina still has such a great amount of character development to go and strength to achieve, but she does and it was handled spectacularly. There are many tough decisions Alina has to make and if not for her support system and the trials and tribulations she's undergone in these three books, I'm not sure she could have ever made them.

Romance: So did I miss something in the last book? Because it seems like both Alina and Mal are resolute that she's going to end up with Nikolai, should he be alive, when this war with the Darkling is all over, and I don't remember having such a final conversation about it. However that being said there's still a bit of a love triangle in this book, though it's no where near as annoying or aggravating as the previous installment. In fact by the end I would have been happy with whoever Alina chose, which rarely happens with me and YA love triangles, but it did and I was very happy with how this romance concluded.

World-Building:So, usually in trilogies, the bulk of backstory surprises are saved for the second installment, however, for some reason I felt like this book had way more backstory than the last book did. In this book we discover more about Ilya Morozova and his connection to certain characters in this series. We learn a bit about the Darkling's past and why he is so obsessed with the amplifiers. There's a lot still to discover about this world and series, and thanks to the newly released Six of Crows I'm excited to find out more.

Predictability: For most of this book I pretty much knew what was going to happen, in a very vague sense, I didn't know details or anything, just normally cliched inevitabilities of a series. however, as the story progressed certain things started getting more and more complex from how I predicted them, and soon enough I was utterly shocked with how this story and the final battle ends.

Ending: So as I said, I did not see this ending coming. It's the type of ending that I've seen before but only like once or twice and so I never expected things to end the way they did and it was spectacular. I mean the final climactic battle was beautiful and how things went down were stressful, heart-wrenching, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. The epilogue was amazing, I may have even shed a tear or two and in classic Grisha series fashion it's told in third person and was just long enough to fill readers in on what the characters have been up to since the final battle. My onlt complaint and this ins extremely minor, is that the cool down between the final climax and the epilogue was a just a little bit too long for me.

Rating:

So I've seen mixed things about the end of this series, however I felt that it was done perfectly. Everything sort of fell where it needed to, and by the end I knew without a doubt that this would be getting 5 stars.

Book Review: Siege and Storm (The Grisha #2)

Release Date: June 4, 2013
Author: Leigh Bardugo
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Length: 435 pages
Source: Purchased Book

Darkness never dies.

Hunted across the True Sea, haunted by the lives she took on the Fold, Alina must try to make a life with Mal in an unfamiliar land. She finds starting new is not easy while keeping her identity as the Sun Summoner a secret. She can’t outrun her past or her destiny for long.

The Darkling has emerged from the Shadow Fold with a terrifying new power and a dangerous plan that will test the very boundaries of the natural world. With the help of a notorious privateer, Alina returns to the country she abandoned, determined to fight the forces gathering against Ravka. But as her power grows, Alina slips deeper into the Darkling’s game of forbidden magic, and farther away from Mal. Somehow, she will have to choose between her country, her power, and the love she always thought would guide her--or risk losing everything to the oncoming storm.

    

Review:

Protagonist: Alina Starkov has fled Ravka with Mal and plans to make a new life far away from Grisha and dark forces, however the darkness isn't too far behind. Alina is once again sucked into the action as the great and powerful Sun Summoner, however this time she's not as naive and won't be someone's pawn in their grab for power. Alina really comes into her own in this book, but not all of her changes are good, she's still a strong character and the "wrong" changes I mentioned are definitely all a part of the author's plan, but even though her development in this books i great I'm far more interested to see where Alina will go in the next and final book.

Romance: Wow, this romance just got complicated and a tad annoying. Now in addition to Mal and the malicious Darkling there's someone new vying for the affections of the Sun Summoner, though in all honesty the Darkling is kind of out of the running as he showed is evil hand. I know I said I grew to really like Mal as the previous book went on, but I have to say that it didn't last very long after I started this book. There's nothing really wrong with Mal, even if he is a bit possessive, but he and Alina seem to just want different things and neither of them really seem to get that until much later in the book. The new contender, Nikolai, is actually a very intriguing and multi-layered character, at first I really didn't like him but he grows to be a very well rounded and interesting character, if not for the romance then for the story and world as a whole.

World-Building: Oh how I missed this world, and I didn't even realize it until I began this book. There's still so much about this world and these characters that I didn't know until this book and plenty more I'm sure to come. So this book begins a bit weird. The whole beginning of this book feels like it's going in hyper-drive like I was reading the ending of a book instead of the beginning. However after that's over it begins to die down and resemble something similar to normal. The plot of this series thickens as characters begin to develop and secrets and histories of this world add to it's richness and grow more and more relevant to this story.

Predictability: So there wasn't really all that much that I was able to predict when it came to large and heavily plot related twists. However I was only truly shocked by these revelations a couple of times while the rest of the time I wasn't expecting it but at the same time wasn't really shocked by the events unfolding. There were a few things I was able to see coming but they were mainly small tropes and plot points that would normally be easy to predict normally.

Ending: Wow, I really didn't expect this book to end the way it did. There is a lot left hanging up in the air as this book comes to a close and while I predicted how this book was going to end, it was only in the most vague and generalized way, the intricacies of the ending were far more shocking and I'm not quite sure where the story will go next but even without a clear cliffhanger I can't wait to dive into the next book.

Rating:

So even though the romance can be a bit aggravating at times and the characters can make some stupid decisions it's easy to see that it's all a part of their growth and the plot is so magnificent that it easily outshines the rest.