Book Review: The Glittering Court (The Glittering Court #1)

Release Date: April 5, 2016
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Razorbill
Length: 416 pages
Source: Gifted ARC

For a select group of girls, the Glittering Court offers a shot at a life they’ve only ever dreamed of, one of luxury, glamour, and leisure. To high-born Adelaide, whose wealthy family is forcing her into a loveless marriage, the Glittering Court represents something else: the chance to chart her own destiny, and adventure in an unspoiled, prosperous new land across the sea.

After a chance meeting with the dazzling Cedric Thorn, Adelaide poses as a servant to join the crop of impoverished girls he promises to transform into proper ladies. But her familiarity with upper class life comes with a price: she must hide her identity from her new friends, mysterious refugee Mira and fiery former laundress Tamsin, and most importantly, from Cedric himself—even though she’s falling in love with him.

Everything begins to crumble when Cedric discovers Adelaide’s ruse, and she catches the eye of a powerful young governor, who wants her for a wife. She didn’t leave the gilded cage of her old life behind just to become someone else's property. But nothing is as daunting—or as wonderful—as the potent, forbidden attraction simmering between Adelaide and Cedric. One that, if acted on, would make them both outcasts in a wild, dangerous, uncharted world, and possibly lead them to their deaths.

    

Review:

Protagonist: Adelaide seemingly has everything, power, money, a title, however most of that is just a ruse. The truth is that her family is going broke and in hopes of rectifying that her grandmother has set her up to marry a rather boring man. With her future feeling more like a noose around her neck, Adelaide makes a rash decision and takes her maid's place at the Glittering Court in hopes of having some say over her future. All in all I really like Adelaide, she's stubborn, strong, and at times a rather witty and sarcastic person. Her development over the course of the book was also handled well, as the story goes on, not only does she change both internally and externally, but some of her qualities are heightened and become a lot more dominant as she comes into her own.

Romance: So if there's one thing Richelle Mead knows how to do it's write romance, and for the most part I liked the romance in this book. The chemistry between Adelaide and Cedric is rather apparent and the tension between them goes on for a good long while before anything really happens, but by the time it does I really began to root for them. The pacing of the romance felt a bit off, though I'll get to that later, but after kind of processing I felt like Mead did a fantastic job at creating a romance between these two well balanced characters.

World-Building: So there are some synopses of this book that describe it as a fantasy, and while that's not entirely wrong let me clear up a few things. First off, this is more of a realistic fantasy, meaning that it takes place in an alternate world from ours, laid out differently and based on some historical period from our world, in this case Elizabethan England for Osfrid and Colonial America for Adoria, with some minor alterations here and there, but there's no actual magic or really anything that would classify this as a high or epic fantasy. As this world grew I fell more and more in love with it. At first I just imagined this world laid out much like out own except with different names and titles, however as things developed I began to notice things that I had initially classified as a substitute for one thing actually turned out to be for something entirely different which I liked. This world is richly described and there's a lot to it that it felt almost like this one book was actually three.

Pacing: So normally I don't add this type of section into my reviews but I soon realized I needed to talk about it and didn't have a good enough place to sneak it in. While this book is a standalone, it feels like, in many ways, a trilogy that has been trimmed down and stuck into one book. At first I thought that it was a fluke and that I just found a great place for a first installment to end, but when I found a second one, coupled with how it's really easy to divide the plot of this book into three, more or less equal, portions it was impossible not to mention it. The pacing isn't bad it's just not quite what I expected, the story keeps evolving and things didn't really go the way I expected them to.

Predictability: So yeah, I kind of was in standalone mode when reading this, so all of my theories about what would happen and the twists this story would take were more for a fairly straight laced and traditional standalone. Instead since this book feels more like a mashed up trilogy, things are constantly changing and thus the twists felt like more like ones that would come from a series. However, that doesn't mean that I didn't like where this book went. the twists and turns while normally very unexpected, were really enjoyable and there are still a lot of lingering questions, those secrets will no doubt come out in the two upcoming companion novels.

Ending: So this ending had a lot of things. I mean there was quite a bit that went down in the final climax, which I'm not entirely sure where the boundary for that would go as there was a lot of tension for the last five chapters of the book or so, minus the very last one. I won't go completely into what happens, but it's definitely one of those things that I didn't expect, especially the closer we got to the end. The final chapter is very much a cool down period to wrap up all the loose ends of Adelaide's story, and torture us with what we don't know about the other two girls' stories. I'd say all in all I felt that the story wrapped up nicely and while I would sort of love to know more, like a bonus scene or two, I was very happy with how much this story wrapped up.

Rating:

Okay, so this was very hard to rate. On the one hand I really enjoyed this book, but because of it's odd pacing it was hard to just sort of melt into the story and get swept away. However I am looking forward to the two companion novels coming up, hopefully Tamsin's novel is first since that's currently the one I'm most intrigued by.

Book Review: Soundless

Release Date: November 10, 2015
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Razorbill
Length: 272 pages
Source: ARC from BEA

From Richelle Mead, the #1 internationally bestselling author of Vampire Academy and Bloodlines, comes a breathtaking new fantasy steeped in Chinese folklore.

For as long as Fei can remember, there has been no sound in her village, where rocky terrain and frequent avalanches prevent residents from self-sustaining. Fei and her people are at the mercy of a zipline that carries food up the treacherous cliffs from Beiguo, a mysterious faraway kingdom.

When villagers begin to lose their sight, deliveries from the zipline shrink and many go hungry. Fei’s home, the people she loves, and her entire existence is plunged into crisis, under threat of darkness and starvation.

But soon Fei is awoken in the night by a searing noise, and sound becomes her weapon.

Richelle Mead takes readers on a triumphant journey from the peak of Fei’s jagged mountain village to the valley of Beiugo, where a startling truth and an unlikely romance will change her life forever...

    

Review:

Protagonist: Fei is one of the, if not the, most talented artist's apprentices in her village, because of this she helps record the news of what goes on in the town, such as food deliveries and other notable events. Her position is one of a high rank and prestige, but things are not so great in her village. People are going blind, and dying from malnutrition. To help them Fei travels beyond their mountain village for help, but what she finds might just be more dangerous. I really loved Fei, while she's a bit book smart and intelligent, she has this fire to her and over time isn't afraid to do what needs to be done to protect the wronged. This was an amazing quality and while at first she's a bit too by the book, her rebellious side comes out to play at just the right moments.

Romance: So since this is a standalone and a rather short one at that I was a bit concerned that Mead would have to resort to insta-love tropes to get Fei and her love interest to where they needed to be by the end of the book. However, I was wrong. Mead used a bit of a mix between an established romance, which usually I hate but was done really well here, and a more traditional romance. Fei and Li Wei have a history, a tragic and romantic one that left them at the beginning of this book forced apart. However feelings still linger and while they go on this journey together, even though they shouldn't be together the temptation might just be too much. I know it kind of sounds super cliche and corny, but trust me it's done spectacularly.

World-Building: With this book initially taking place in a world without sound it was very fascinating to see how things were described and how the world is built, at least in the beginning, without descriptions of sound. Then even after Fei gains her hearing things are still told in a very different way. There's no speech in this book because Fei, our first person narrator, cannot decipher the strange sounds we would recognize as words. Honestly the world building of this book is amazing and its correlation with the story and plot is very well executed, however I do have to say I'm a bit disappointed. The description of this book makes it seem as though Fei goes on this fantastic magical adventure, when for nearly the entire book I would have said that this book was realistic fantasy with strong dystopian undertones. Sure eventually there's magic, and technically there was magic earlier, but as I was reading I felt as though I was promised one awesome thing and was given another. The story is still fantastic, just not the kind of fantastic I was hoping for.

Predictability: Like most, if not all, Richelle Mead books this story is heavily foreshadowed, though not in a way that would make the reader angry or annoyed at pretty much learning information, or being able to guess it, beforehand. There is one part though, something that made me really angry, because it was just something that was so obvious yet it had Fei puzzled for most of the book, granted I think she only brought it up a small handful of times so it wasn't like I was being hit over the head with her, ironic, lack of observation, but still I was kind of upset that it took her so long to figure it out.

Ending: So even if this book ended without the epilogue I would have been satisfied with the ending provided, though I doubt many of you may agree. However since we are treated to an epilogue we do get a bit of a glimpse into these characters' future and see how the events at the end of the book have affected their lives. Since this is a standalone things do wrap up pretty neatly, though I did feel as though there was just enough left open for Mead to revisit the world later if she feels like it. The final confrontation itself is pretty epic. I won't say too much because of spoilers but let's just say that that last line of the synopsis about sound becoming Fei's weapon plays a big part in the finale.

Rating:

So I feel like I need to clarify why I'm giving this book four stars when I've pretty much done nothing but gush about how amazing it is, and you know, under a different set of circumstances this book would have been five stars. The fact of the matter is, I felt like I was going in expecting to read one book and came out reading another. I know it's not the author's fault and it's probably more than anything the publisher's fault, but I thought I was going to read a fantastic Chinese fantasy book full of magic and mythological creatures, and it does get to that point eventually, but by that time I had already resigned myself to thinking that this was really just a realistic fantasy novel with dystopian undertones. If I knew then about the book what I know now this would be an easy five star book.