Book Review: Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1)

Release Date: August 9, 2016
Author: Jay Kristoff
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Length: 429 pages
Source: Purchased Book

In a land where three suns almost never set, a fledgling killer joins a school of assassins, seeking vengeance against the powers who destroyed her family.

Daughter of an executed traitor, Mia Corvere is barely able to escape her father’s failed rebellion with her life. Alone and friendless, she hides in a city built from the bones of a dead god, hunted by the Senate and her father’s former comrades. But her gift for speaking with the shadows leads her to the door of a retired killer, and a future she never imagined.

Now, Mia is apprenticed to the deadliest flock of assassins in the entire Republic—the Red Church. If she bests her fellow students in contests of steel, poison and the subtle arts, she’ll be inducted among the Blades of the Lady of Blessed Murder, and one step closer to the vengeance she desires. But a killer is loose within the Church’s halls, the bloody secrets of Mia’s past return to haunt her, and a plot to bring down the entire congregation is unfolding in the shadows she so loves.

Will she even survive to initiation, let alone have her revenge?

    

Review:

Protagonist: Mia Corvere lost her family in one night due to her father's failed rebellion, now she needs to get revenge on those that killed her father, but she cannot take on this task without training first. Mia seeks out the Red Church, a school for assassins where she needs to be honed to a razor's edge. I love Mia and all the shades and shadows that make her a great morally gray character. Mia's not a good person, sure she has a bit of a heart, but she won't let anything stop her from getting the revenge she feels she rightly deserves. Mia's a complex character that I just love to read from, she's a bit unpredictable, which always makes for a good time, and she has a lot of something I feel more and more protagonists are lacking and that's common sense. Mia's smart and practically already an assassin when this story begins, yet I never felt like her character development was held back because of that, this is more about honing Mia's skill and her journey to avenge her familia and discover the secrets of what she is.

Romance: One of the things I loved about the romance in this story is that it doesn't infringe on the rest of the story, sure it matters, it has its place in the story, and it's not shoved toward the back or the front, it's just there and how it plays into the rest of the story I felt was brilliantly handled. Mia's not exactly a warm character so it was really interesting to see how she approached the romance she has in this story. There is a bond between the couple and I really enjoyed seeing that explored. Everything felt so natural, I mean, it was almost unreal how natural the two characters feel together and how natural their romance and relationship progresses in the story.

World Building: The world building in this tale is incredible. All over this story are footnotes that give additional information on the world and the mythos of this dark fantasy world. Well, I say dark but really this world hardly sees a truedark, most of the time it's day, and that's only the base surface of this world. I'm a huge sucker for a school or test setting where a group of characters is brought together and only a few will succeed in the task set before them, and this is probably the best version I've ever seen of that trope. Plus there's a murder mystery aspect to the story that blew me away, what else did you expect to happen at a school for assassins? This story is a bit dense towards the beginning, it took me a while to really find my groove with the story but once I got the hang of things, everything went a lot smoother. I will also say that I listened to all of this story as an Audible audiobook and I'd warn if you're thinking about listening to this story as an audiobook, I'd follow along for the first couple of chapters because it goes back and forth in time quite a bit and it's harder to follow on the audiobook at first.

Predictability: I don't think I predicted a single thing in this story, not even joking, there was this one moment where I thought the story was going in one direction, I thought that something pretty tropey was happening, and in the space of a couple seconds everything changed and the story barreled on in a different direction and it was glorious. With some of the twists I'd play around with the truth, but things never truly made sense until minutes before the reveal, if not seconds. Also, I listened to this story in six chapters at a time, so I don't know if it's that or how the story is told but it's so complex that I'll forget about plot points at certain times so I never really had a lot of time to truly consider what would happen when certain things were revealed.

Ending: The end of this tale is glorious. I mean, action scene after action scene, amazing twists, possible foreshadowing to bigger things and a LOT of death, what more could you ask for? I can't even really just talk about the final climax because there were a few different climactic moments toward the end and all of them need to be praised because that is some of, if not the best, action scene writing I've ever read. I was completely sucked into the story, into the carnage and death all around, soaking it in. Then, when the dust settled and losses counted, there was one of my favorite things to see in books, an epilogue, and this epilogue was truly something. It gives a lot of closure on the events of this story and teases what's to come for the next book, or at least I hope it does, and while this story doesn't leave off on a cliffhanger, I'm desperate to know what happens next.

Rating:

This is by far one of my favorite books of all time, I loved the complex characters, the intricate and detailed world building, a romance that felt just right, and a mystery and path of revenge I cannot wait to continue following!

Book Review: The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn #1)

Release Date: May 12, 2015
Author: Renée Ahdieh
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
Length: 404 pages
Source: Gifted Book

One Life to One Dawn.

In a land ruled by a murderous boy-king, each dawn brings heartache to a new family. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, is a monster. Each night he takes a new bride only to have a silk cord wrapped around her throat come morning. When sixteen-year-old Shahrzad's dearest friend falls victim to Khalid, Shahrzad vows vengeance and volunteers to be his next bride. Shahrzad is determined not only to stay alive, but to end the caliph's reign of terror once and for all.

Night after night, Shahrzad beguiles Khalid, weaving stories that enchant, ensuring her survival, though she knows each dawn could be her last. But something she never expected begins to happen: Khalid is nothing like what she'd imagined him to be. This monster is a boy with a tormented heart. Incredibly, Shahrzad finds herself falling in love. How is this possible? It's an unforgivable betrayal. Still, Shahrzad has come to understand all is not as it seems in this palace of marble and stone. She resolves to uncover whatever secrets lurk and, despite her love, be ready to take Khalid's life as retribution for the many lives he's stolen. Can their love survive this world of stories and secrets?

    

Review:

Protagonist: Shahrzad could do nothing as the Caliph of Khorasan married her best friend and killed her come dawn, but she won't let him win. Now as his new bride she plans on not only surviving but figuring out why her friend had to die, and killing her new husband. Shazi is a very strong-willed character who never lets someone else tell her what to do. she has a barbed tongue that will lash out whenever she wants and usually is some spectacular ways. Her development over the course of this first installment was done really well. Ever since Khalid started killing his brides Shazi has had one point of view on what must be going on inside the palace but given time she comes to understand things in a new light, but her search of the truth can get the better of her at times.

Romance: So going into this I knew Khalid and Shazi were going to have a romantic relationship, I mean, come on it's a retelling of 1001 Nights, but what I wasn't expecting is for Shazi to have an established romance at the beginning of this story that wasn't Khalid, and honestly I wish she didn't. Don't get me wrong, I'm never immediately opposed to established romantic relationships or love triangles for that matter, but here it just didn't work for me because I could never take Tariq, Shazi's childhood love, seriously as a contender. While I did like Shazi and Khalid's romance a lot, in fact,  it was one of those "hate to love" romances I can never get enough of for some reason, it wasn't without its problems, mainly that Khalid has killed his previous wives and Shazi, as well as the reader, doesn't know why. Still, while I wish there wasn't a love triangle, mainly because it doesn't feel necessary, nor was there enough time given to flesh out Shazi and Tariq's relationship in any meaningful way, I still wound up enjoying the romance between Khalid and Shazi and can't wait to see how everything plays out in the end.

World Building: While I do love that we get shifting third-person points of view and that we do get to see outside the palace walls, I still felt like there wasn't all that much to see in this world. Don't get me wrong the palace is described beautifully and there was nothing about the world building that was confusing to me, it's just that, especially with Shazi's maidservant and friend, Despina being from a Greece-like country, I wish we had just seen a bit more of the world.  This world never felt flat to me, I feel like the author did a fantastic job of letting the reader know how everything looked, it just felt very isolated and I feel that with the main focus being on Shazi, who spends nearly all her time in this story within the palace, It just never felt as full as it could have.

Predictability: With this being a retelling, albeit an interesting retelling that changes up the main character's main motivation and gives her a more hardened persona, it was pretty easy to see where things were going. There were a few good twists here and there and I really did like how the answers to the main mystery were revealed over the course of the story. Looking back while there is a solid storyline through this book, there weren't a whole lot of subplots that really felt like they mattered beyond a certain point, I mean there are definitely things happening behind the scenes and in the shadows, but because the focus was on Shazi, whose story, since it was a retelling, didn't feel all that in jeporady or high stakes, nothing that happened with the other characters really felt like it mattered, or in one instant didn't make all that much sense until, maybe, the end.

Ending: I have yet to read a conclusion to one of Ahdieh's duologies, so I don't know much about how she structures her stories and series on the whole, but I do really like how she decides to end things after the first book. Granted, I've only read the beginnings of two of her stories, but it seems like in both there's a big shift that happens, something that opens up the storytelling in a way that there wasn't all that much access to in the first installment. The final climax of this book went about as well as could be expected and honestly while I'm not a big fan of how Shazi's story ends in this installment, I'm hoping for great things come part two!

Rating:

I can't believe I'm giving this book 4 stars, I mean I enjoyed this book a whole lot, but after having some time to think about it, for me at least, the love triangle, while I understand its role in the story, just fell flat for me, and the world felt sort of isolated. Still, though, this is an insanely fun adventure and I can't wait to see how everything comes to an end!

Book Review: Vicious (Vicious #1)

Release Date: September 24, 2013
Author: V.E. Schwab
Publisher: Tor
Length: 364 pages
Source: Purchased Book

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

    

Review:

Characters: Normally this is the part of the review where I take a good look at the protagonist, or protagonists of the story, talk about if I liked them as characters, if they felt realistic and just my overall feelings about the central character. However, even though there is a central character, one that I'd even go so far as to say is the protagonist, there is a whole cast of characters in this book and they don't all fit into "hero" and "villain" roles. There is one character who I feel like wholly encompasses a hero or "good guy/girl" role, but the rest are sort of anti-heroes and anti-villains. They look from the outside like the opposite of what they are, but knowing these characters, their true personalities come to light. I loved the complexities of these characters. It wasn't because they were multi-layered and realistic, which they were, but more that as I said before they don't fall into typical character stereotypes, everyone in this book is flawed in some way and some more than others and it's just fascinating to read.

World-Building: This book is full of flashbacks and time jumps that while I was fine reading it, it could, especially if you speed read, get a bit confusing. With that out of the way, let's talk superpowers. The main feature of this book is the idea that some people, through a certain series of events, can be granted ExtraOrdinary powers. What I really enjoyed about this world is that the whole idea of powers and the like springs forth out of science. There's a perfectly rational explanation for the distribution of these powers and why and how certain powers are given to certain people. Then there were the bits of exposition that tie this story together. For the first part of this story there is very little emphasis put on the present day chapters, they're short and while they can still be entertaining, they sometimes felt more like something to string the backstory chapters together and act as a bit of a drum roll for the second half of the book. The second half of the book mostly takes place over one day, with chapters here and there explaining the backstory of certain characters and filling in holes in the story in a smooth and entertaining way.

Predictability: I don't normally read adult books, and because of that I'm not at all attuned to the different formulas and styles of writing adult fiction. With this book, there weren't really any big twists or "gotcha" moments where something intense or chocking is revealed. Instead this story just sort of chugs along, the various climactic moments just sort of happening without the big reveals I'm used to. Even when things were revealed in this book, it was done without ceremony and just sort of felt dampened and like there was no need for excitement or shock over that last revelation.

Ending: Going into this book I had expected it to be a standalone. However, as I was getting ever closer to that final climax I went to the GoodReads page and noticed that there is a sequel planned for sometime in the future, now that sort of changed perspective on how I viewed the ending. First off, the final climax, which for all intents and purposes felt like the climax of a standalone, had an air of something unfinished added to it. Then there's the actual ending. Now, the ending to this book sort of has a dual purpose feel to it. On the one hand this book wraps up very well and there's no real need to dive into this world again if you don't feel inclined to, but depending on how you look at it, the ending is also a cliffhanger that, if you let it, can grind agonizingly on you until the release of the sequel, so tread lightly.

Rating:

Okay, so this book was very hard to rate. Not only is it an Adult book, which I don't read all that often, but it has got its own unique intricacies that made it very hard to rate. In the end I went with five stars because I really loved this book, its world, and its characters and I won't waste any time picking up the sequel as soon as it's released!