Book Description:In The Bone Witch, Tea mastered resurrection―now she’s after revenge…
No one knows death like Tea. A bone witch who can resurrect the dead, she has the power to take life…and return it. And she is done with her self-imposed exile. Her heart is set on vengeance, and she now possesses all she needs to command the mighty daeva. With the help of these terrifying beasts, she can finally enact revenge against the royals who wronged her―and took the life of her one true love.
But there are those who plot against her, those who would use Tea’s dark power for their own nefarious ends. Because you can’t kill someone who can never die…
War is brewing among the kingdoms, and when dark magic is at play, no one is safe.
Review: Due to happy scheduling chances, I was able to read “The Bone Witch” and “The Heart Forger” pretty much back to back. Not only is this always a fun way to read books and their sequels, but it’s especially nice with stories that have complicated world-building and non-linear storytelling. “The Bone Witch” was a beast of a book, with tons of detailed descriptions of the world, magic system, and a past/future POV character. The “Heart Forger” pretty much picks up immediately after the events of the first book, and doesn’t hesitate to expand even further on its own world, while also adding a healthy dose of increased action to the mix.
Newly-minted bone witch, Tea, has a lot on her plate at the start of this story. Her beloved mentor is still slowly perishing due to her lost heartglass, Tea’s brother’s love life has presented some political complications, her own crush on Prince Kance continues, there’s a murderous woman in the dungeons who promises great power and to reveal secrets about the elder Asha if only Tea would listen, and now a sleeping sickness is making its way through the royal family, in a direct line towards Kance himself.
This says nothing of the future Tea’s story, which has gone from zero to sixty from the last book to this. No longer is the older Tea content to live her life banished on a desolate beach, raising her daeva beasts from the dead. Her mission has started, and alongside her newly-raised beloved, Kalen, she sets out to conquer nations, all in a greater quest whose origins and purposes are still only vaguely hinted at.
Between all of this, the increased action is probably the most notable aspect of this sequel. If there was one fairly common complaint about the last book, it was that it was perhaps a bit too slow. I enjoyed it quite a bit, as I like reading books that focus on detail and slow character development. And given this one’s fast-paced story line, in retrospect, the time and effort that was put into place laying the foundation for this world, this conflict, and the characters who take part in it, were well worth the effort. Our characters quickly travel from one location to another, surviving and battling against multiple city-wide sieges and more slinky, sinister hidden antagonists as well. I particularly loved the increased action for Tea’s dragon-like daeva. It was all very “Dany and her dragons” esque.
The political intrigue was also ratcheted up to a new level. With the sleeping sickness spreading between the royal families, tensions are high and everyone is looking for someone to blame. And the only man who might have the answer, the titular Heart Forger, is no where to be found.
In the future, an older Tea is fully committed to her plan, whatever that is. From what we (from the bard’s POV) can tell, it looks a lot like raising armies of the dead to attack entire countries. We get further insights into Tea’s vengeance, something about secrets that the elder Asha have been hiding, and a larger plot by this world’s ever-dangerous arch enemies, the Faceless. But for all of battles, both large and small, we still know very little about Tea’s reasons as a whole. There are numerous references to her having killed some woman, but we don’t know who this was or how it happened. In the end, there were almost too many question left unanswered for my taste.
One of the things I most enjoyed was the developing romance between Kalen and Tea. At the end of the first book, we saw Tea raise him from the dead and welcome him as her beloved. But at the start of this book, the younger Tea is still fully enthralled with Prince Kance. Her slow realizations about her feelings for Kalen and their relationship’s progression were very enjoyable and probably best took advantage of the solid foundation that was built between these two in the first book. I really dislike insta-love romances, and this was a particularly good example of how to avoid that, and instead have a strongly built and developed romantic story line.
For all of these good things, I did struggle with this book a bit more than the first one. For one thing, the first book spent a lot of time with all of the details and rules of this world. But then, here, we see numerous exceptions and loopholes built into the world, all seemingly used to simply move the story the way the author needed it to go. At best this was distracting as I tried to work out how these exceptions made sense in the larger scheme of things, and at worst it felt like blatant deus ex machina moments where the author’s hand was all too visible.
Further, there were a few characters who made decisions that seemed completely nonsensical and out of character even. In particular, some of the “revelations” in the future story line really seemed at odds with the characters. People keeping secrets for no reason, and then revealing them when the story would be best served for a dramatic moment. But why then keep them in the first place? I have a hard time when suspense is built in a story at the expense of consistent and rational characters
And, while I still enjoy the juxtaposition of the future and past story lines of Tea, the devise itself is starting to feel like its hindering the story. The secrets thing that I just mentioned is largely a problem because they’re needed to prop up the suspense of the future story line. And, by the end of the book, there are still too many question that were left unanswered. The older Tea has said several thing that sure, sounded cool, but don’t particularly tie-in very well to the events taking place with past Tea. In my opinion, the story has out grown this structure and that trying to maintain it was starting to actively work against this book. I hope that in the next the two story lines quickly meet up and we move forward with a single plot.
All in all, however, I still very much enjoyed “The Heart Forger.” The increased action made it a fun read, and now that the characters have all been established, it was a joy to follow all of their individual plot lines. Further, the romance between Tea and Kalen is one the best I’ve read recently. “The Bone Witch” is required reading for this book, but if you liked that one, than you’re sure to enjoy this one as well!
Rating 7: Action packedwith a sweet romance to boot, but became a bit bogged down by its own writing device with the past/present dueling story lines.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Heart Forger” is a newer title, so isn’t on many Goodreads lists, but it is on “Asian MG/YA 2018.”
Book Description: An idealistic young student and a banished warrior become allies in a battle to save their realm in this first book of a mesmerizing epic fantasy series, filled with political intrigue, violent magic, malevolent spirits, and thrilling adventure
Everything has a spirit: the willow tree with leaves that kiss the pond, the stream that feeds the river, the wind that exhales fresh snow . . .
But the spirits that reside within this land want to rid it of all humans. One woman stands between these malevolent spirits and the end of humankind: the queen. She alone has the magical power to prevent the spirits from destroying every man, woman, and child. But queens are still just human, and no matter how strong or good, the threat of danger always looms.
With the position so precarious, young women are chosen to train as heirs. Daleina, a seemingly quiet academy student, is under no illusions as to her claim to the throne, but simply wants to right the wrongs that have befallen the land. Ven, a disgraced champion, has spent his exile secretly fighting against the growing number of spirit attacks. Joining forces, these daring partners embark on a treacherous quest to find the source of the spirits’ restlessness—a journey that will test their courage and trust, and force them to stand against both enemies and friends to save their land . . . before it’s bathed in blood.
Review: This is another book that I snagged after getting to meet the author waaaaaay back at ALA 2017. Seriously, this is how long it takes me sometimes to get to books, even ones that I know are going to be amazing! Book scheduling, I tell you! There are trials and tribulations there. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about! Anyways, I’ve read a few other books by Sarah Beth Durst, and while some of them have been misses, overall, I enjoy her writing style and her strong female characters. When I heard her speak about this book, I was struck by the completely original fantasy world setting and another heroine who sounded bad ass but also real and flawed.
In Daleina and Ven’s world, everything around them is made up of spirits set on destroying them. Air, water, fire, ice, tree, and earth, all wanting nothing more than to create with abandon and destroy humanity. The people’s everyday existence is one fraught with a balancing act that is delicate and completely dependent on the strength of the land’s Queen, the only person with the power to hold this malicious, wild strength in check. And when a 10-year-old Daleina’s tree-top village is destroyed, and only her small family is saved by her own burgeoning powers, Daleina’s life changes forever. Now she must work to prove her worth and her ability to become a Queen’s heir, one of many powerful young women who must be ready at a moment’s notice to step into the role as Queen should anything ever happen to their ruler. Alongside her, Ven, a disgraced champion, will work to stave off a looming disaster that has been slowly revealing itself over the years when the Queen’s power seems to slip, as happened with the destruction of Daleina’s beloved home.
As I remembered hearing when Durst spoke at ALA, there are quite a few things that make “The Queen of Blood” standout in the vast expanse of “Queen of something” books that proliferate fantasy fiction nowadays. First off, as I stated, is the world-building. I loved the exploration of this world that we get through this story. The entire civilization seems to live in the trees, with only brief time spent on the ground (it’s more dangerous on the ground level). The Queen, and to a lesser extent, the other young women who train as heirs, all have control over the spirits and, through them, are able to manipulate the vegetation and trees to grow into elaborate structures and bridges. For long distances, a terrifying, but thrilling-sounding, wire system is set up for travelers to hook onto and speed through the trees.
I was pretty much picturing Lothlorian from “Lord of the Rings” the entire time.
The spirits themselves were equally beautiful and terrifying sounding. There were the expected descriptions of several spirits looking vaguely human-like, beautiful, and wispy. But there were others made up of animal aspects, or simply the elements themselves. There was one particular earth spirit that sounded especially terrifying, and another bird-like air spirit that sounded pretty awesome. But beautiful or otherwise, it was endlessly clear that all of them were wild, capricious, and only just contained from unleashing disaster on everything around them.
The other unique portion of the story is the way that it unfolds, both as a story and with its characters. The book begins when Daleina is only ten years old and concludes when she is near her 20s. To manage this, there are several significant time jumps ranging from only a few months to up to five years. But all of these jumps are done with care and each time, the characters and story are re-introduced with such precision and detail that it’s not jarring at all. I actually really loved this entire concept, as we got to experience Daleina and Ven’s entire existence over this fraught period of time. Particularly for Daleina and her schooling. Through these jumps in time, we get to see Daleina’s entire progress from completely untrained young girl to soon-to-be heir and grown woman. We see the steps of her process, but never linger too long on the ins and outs of her day-to-day life. It’s a difficult balance to strike: getting enough information in each glimpse to never lose sight of characterization and story, but also not getting too bogged down in any particular period of her life.
The characters, too, were both unique. Daleina, as the main character, was particularly well-rounded. She is the opposite of the “special snowflake/chosen one” and it is made clear that all of the accomplishments that she makes are through sheer determination and hard work. The hard work and training, in particular, are over and beyond what the other students must put in as Daleina doesn’t have the natural control or power over the spirits that the others do. I especially loved that the author never stepped back from this. Daleina never suddenly powers up or “discovers” some new unique thing about herself. She continues plowing forward in the face of many telling her that she can’t, and even in the face of her own understanding of her limited abilities comparative to her peers. Further, while she must work to find her own strengths, she doesn’t mope or become jealous of those around her. Instead, the story is made up of Daleina forming strong and powerful friendships with the other women around her.
Ven, our secondary lead character, was also quite a unique character to find in a book like this. For a story that seems to largely read like YA fantasy, Ven is a middle aged man who meets a young Daleina when he is already at the height of his skills. Throughout the story, and his own disgrace and redemption, Ven’s story is one of a mentor and grown man who is having to confront the realities of those he has always esteemed. Given his age and role in Daleina’s life, there is never a hint of romance (thank god), and instead a strong, steady mentorship bond is built and explored. I was there for all of this!
Throughout this all, Durst never backs down from the harsh realities and consequences of the world she’s built and the story she is telling. The action is built on true danger and violence, and no character is safe from the fallout of these fights with the spirits. The last third, in particular, took some pretty crazy and brave turns, as far as storytelling goes. I was honestly shocked by the follow-through on some decisions (in a good way!) and the ending was definitely not what I expected.
This book, and series, seems to have been skating along largely unnoticed and that’s such a shame! Durst has built an extraordinary world and peopled it with compelling and flawed characters whom you can’t help but root for. I strongly recommend it for any fans of fantasy fiction!
Rating: I loved it! The storytelling is bold and riveting, taking surprising twist and turns and committing to the tale that is unfolding.
Book Description: A healer who cannot be healed . . .
When Zivah falls prey to the deadly rose plague, she knows it’s only a matter of time before she fully succumbs. Now she’s destined to live her last days in isolation, cut off from her people and unable to practice her art—until a threat to her village creates a need that only she can fill.
A soldier shattered by war . . .
Broken by torture at the hands of the Amparan Empire, Dineas thirsts for revenge against his captors. Now escaped and reunited with his tribe, he’ll do anything to free them from Amparan rule—even if it means undertaking a plan that risks not only his life but his very self.
Thrust together on a high-stakes mission to spy on the capital, the two couldn’t be more different: Zivah, deeply committed to her vow of healing, and Dineas, yearning for vengeance. But as they grow closer, they must find common ground to protect those they love. And amidst the constant fear of discovery, the two grapple with a mutual attraction that could break both of their carefully guarded hearts.
Review: I was very excited to receive a copy of this book in the mail for review. I had seen it bouncing around on a few review sites, but generally it seemed to land fairly unnoticed. Which, now having read it, is quite a shame! “Rosemarked” is a powerfully simple story of invasion and colonization, hope in the face of loss, and the resilience of two characters who are set with an impossible task.
Zivah, a young healer, finds herself with the unwelcome task of caring for a troop of Amparan soldieres who fall ill with the dreaded rose plague while passing through her home. While her people have arranged a peaceful treaty with these forces, their lands is still regularly plundered and their people harmed. But Zivah knows her duty. She saves as many as she can, including the commander of the guard, but finds herself now cursed with the plague herself, doomed to die in a few years when the fever returns. But her life is not over. She finds herself drawn into a plan to infiltrate the Amparan capital to better learn what their plans are for her homeland. Now, alongside Dineas, a young solder who only recently escaped the dungeons of the city he now marches back towards and who still carries mental and emotional scars from this time, Zivah has a chance to use her knowledge of poisons and healing to save her people.
The story is told with alternating view points between Zivah and Dineas. This worked particularly well due to the vast differences in not only their personalities, but also in their life experiences and how these have shaped their worldviews. As a healer, Zivah struggles with her new reality, doomed to a short life in which even her vast knowledge cannot save her. Further, as she is highly contagious, her entire vocation has been lost to her. In this new mission, she is asked to bend and manipulate her own oaths as a healer to do no harm. What is “harm” when the balance is between individuals and nations? Where is the line when using her knowledge of herb lore and poisons?
Dineas, too, has a powerful arc throughout the story. After his time in prison, he is too broken to return to the capital as he is, not able to put on the performance necessary to convince the Amparan soldiers that he is one of them. Instead, Zivah uses a complicated potion to take away his memories. With this act, the story ultimately ends up with three characters: Zivah, original Dineas, and the Dineas who has no memory. This new Dineas, freed from his memories of torture and hatred, forms a close relationship with the healer who “saves” him. However, as their mission continues, the old Dineas must be brought forth routinely to report on what new Dineas has seen. This leads to much inner confusion and tension as he imposes his own memories, fears, and prejudices onto the actions and emotions of a self who has been freed of his difficult past. Both versions of Dineas’ are soldiers to the core. But through their two perspectives, one jaded and one naive, they each struggle with the harsh realities of warfare and the knowledge that soldiers on either side of any war are ultimately people themselves, with their own loves and lives.
The rose plague plays a large part in this story, not only through the massive impact it has on shaping Zivah’s now shortened life, but in the portrayal of this world as a whole. The plague kills the majority of those it touches. A small few recover but are doomed to live solitary lives in plague villages, waiting for the return of the fever that will claim them. And an even smaller number recover completely, the rose-colored marks on their skin browning, resulting in their being known as “umbertouched.” Through Zivah’s eyes, we see the half-life that those left with this in-between portion of life are forced to live. Cut off from society, the rosemarked are shuffled out of sight into grimy, lawless colonies, similar to a leper colony. They can not interact with loved ones, for fear of passing on the disease. And they have no future, living only on borrowed time. What’s worse, for the majority of them, society prefers to pretend they simply no longer exist. Zivah, and all the others she meets who are rosemarked, are living life in a very different want than the average person. They know their time is limited, and with this in mind, their mental calculus of risk and reward is very different.
Also, for a fantasy novel, there was practically no magic in this story. Really, other than the fact that it is set in a made-up world that is pestered by a fictional plague, this book could read as historical fiction. I quite enjoyed the lack of magic in this story, and the slow, methodical way the plot plays out. The story is simple and straightforward, relying heavily on the strength of its two central characters and their individual arcs throughout the book. For some readers, this may read as a bit slow and dull. But for readers who enjoy character-focused stories and who can appreciate a fantasy novel with very little magic, “Rosemarked” is definitely a book worth checking out! It’s the first in a duology, with the second, “Umbertouched” set to release next fall.
Rating 7: A character-driven story that perhaps lacks depth, but still touches on important topics of vocation, one’s role in the world, and the horrible decisions that ongoing warfare brings upon a people.
Publishing Info: Scholastic Paperbacks, January 1999
Where Did I Get this Book: own it!
Book Description:It’s time for the Animorphs to acquire some cold-weather morphs. The Yeerks are at it again, and they’re causing trouble near one of the coldest places on earth: The North Pole.
Narrator: Marco
Plot: So, all I remember about this one is that somehow, someway they end up at the north pole. And they were very cold. And that was much of the story.
The Animorphs in this book. And also me, reading this book. Um, spoilers? It wasn’t my favorite. (source)
The story opens with the usual listing of what’s really happening, we can’t tell you our names, etc etc. But, more importantly, Marco has a date. With Marian. The hottest girl in school. But unfortunately the date is for a trip to the orchestra. Worse, Marco discovers about halfway through that he is thoroughly not into the orchestra. So much so that he falls asleep and Marian ditches him. At school, as he is regaling Cassie with the tale of his terrible date, when Erek, the friendly Chee, shows up. Never a good sign. He informs them that the Yeerks are trying to set up a Kandrona ray broadcast system using satellites which would allow them to turn any ordinary swimming pool into a Yeerk pool.
The Animorphs all meet up with Erek at Cassie’s barn to discuss their plan. The Chee don’t know the location of the Yeerk base that is working on this project, but they do know Visser Three plans on visiting it soon and the location of his new feeding pasture. The plan is obvious: they need to hitch a ride with Visser Three from this pasture on the way to the site. But they still don’t know the location of the base, so to deal with what might be a prolonged absence, Erek and three of his Chee friends agree to pose as Marco, Jake, Cassie, and Rachel while they’re gone.
The next day they fly to Visser Three’s meadow, spot him, and one-by-one land in the woods surrounding him. They then morph fly, and Marco notes that they waste half an hour trying to find each other in the meadow cuz fly senses aren’t that great. Per Ax’s knowledge, the decide that the best way to intercept Visser Three without him seeing is to fly up beneath him and try and land on his underbelly. They all manage to land, and Visser Three boards his ship. As they get ready to depart, they overhear some bad news: the flight time will be 3.5 hours long.
As they contemplate what to do, the Bug Fighter lands in the Blade ship. They overhear Visser Three ask if all of the Venbar are on board, and Ax becomes very excited, only to then say he must has misunderstood. Time passes, and they wait, still on Visser Three’s belly while he works on his computer in his personal cabin. Marco passes the time by telling terrible jokes, but eventually they decide they need to do something to allow them to demorph. Ax, using his best Visser Three impression, yells out for guards to come into the cabin. He does this a few times, each time resulting in Visser Three becoming more irate at being interrupted. Finally, he becomes so mad that he charges out of his room and the Animorphs bail off him. They quickly demorph and try to remorph, but Marco highlights how exhausting the entire process is, comparing it to a 200 yard dash. Everyone gets through but for Ax and Marco when a Taxxon barges into the room. Ax takes it out with his tail blade, but now they have a problem as it will be clear that something else happened here.
All now back to flies, they buzz out of the room. They plan to head to the storage bay, hoping it will be empty, when Visser Three returns, sees the Taxxon, and calls for guards. They manage to make it, but Cassie notes that the Yeerks know about their bug morphs and could flood the place with insecticides, so they all demorph. Marco quickly notices a long line of tall cylinders each containing some type of new alien, ones with silver bodies slashed with streaks of red and blue. They’re all frozen. Hesitantly, Ax says they look like Venbar, but that they have been extinct for thousands of years. The most notable thing about them was the fact that they lived on an ice moon in below freezing temperatures.
They feel the ship landing. Marco wonders why Visser Three would land, knowing the “Andalite bandits” are trapped on his ship. They morph their battle morphs. As they land, three of the bay doors open: they are surrounded by Hork Bajir warriors and Visser Three himself. Marco realizes that the fourth door hasn’t been opened, and that’s the door to the outdoors. They guess that Visser Three won’t fire lasers in the room for fear of hitting the canisters, so Marco goes for the control panel to the door outside while Rachel slams into the nearest canister. As he frantically tries to pry open the door, tiger!Jake is overwhelmed by Hork Bajir, and wolf!Cassie is thrown past him, obviously injured. Rachel finally mages to break open a canister, releasing the freezing mist that freezes any body part of the Hork Bajir it touches. Marco gets the door open, and they all bail. Visser Three calls for the ship to take off, but the manage to jump out when it is only 20 feet up. The Blade ship, following Visser Three’s orders, continues to rise.
They land on ice in the freezing air. Quickly, those who are injured try to demorph and remorph. Gorilla!Marco’s skin sticks and peels off on the ice. Tobias spots a base or town in the distance, and tries to morph himself, his hawk body not handling the cold. But before he can, he collapses. Rachel grabs him and curls herself around him as she re-morphs grizzly. Above them, the Blade ship heads for the base. Still, they know they need to get out of there. They take off running, but don’t get very far before Ax starts to stumble. Without good cold weather morphs, Jake tells Ax and Tobias to morph fleas and hide in Rachel’s fur. The remaining four continue to run. Throughout it all, the cold bites and hits them all hard. Marco begins to become confused and disoriented.
They find a cave and do an assessment. None of their morphs are equipped for this level of cold, but wolf!Cassie and grizzly!Rachel are managing. Marco slumps to the floor, his thoughts becoming muddled. The others frantically try to get him to demorph, and he only comes to when grizzly!Rachel punches him in the face. They decide that the wolf morph is best, so the other three join Cassie in that form. Cassie says they may be able to use the wolf morph to survive, but they’re barely functional and will need to avoid fights. Looking out of the cave, they spot a pair of the Venbar sliding around on their ski-like feet. They realize that the Venbar are using echo-location to find where they are. The Venbar turn towards them and fire canon like weapons, bringing down the cave walls around them. The Animorphs take off, running along the shoreline of the half-frozen ocean.
After running for almost their allotted two hours, the manage to lose the Venbar and proceed circling each other as they, one-by-one, demorph and remorph. They continue on their way, desperately looking for shelter as it begins to get dark. Behind them, every once in a while, they get a whiff of the Venbar still following them. Suddenly they get a new scent: a polar bear. They continue to run, with the polar bear meandering to their side, but eventually they decide they need to stop for the night and dig themselves a snow lair. Overnight, they continue their miserable rotation of demorphing and remorphing.
As they wait through the night, Ax tells the history of the Venbar, how they were wiped out by another race called The Five, who then also disappeared to history. He theorizes that the Yeerks have been able to retrieve some frozen DNA from Venbar corpses and combined it with other DNA and used it to grow the Venbar now chasing them. Even more disturbing, Ax suggests that it is likely human DNA that was used as a patch.
The night is terrible, and only the morphing ability which restores them to full health each time, saves them from freezing to death. Morning comes, and outside they spot the polar bear out on the ice fishing for seals. Starving, they do what they have to and gorge themselves on the remainders of the bear’s leftover seal. After eating they spot a pair of baby seals, ideal cold-weather morphs. Cassie and Marco morph dolphin and quickly nab one of the babies for the others to acquire. They all morph seal and relish in finally being warm.
Suddenly the Venbar turn up and start shooting. As they all flop towards the sea, they realize that the Venbar must have seen them morphing and now know the truth about them. They now have two choices, not allow the Venbar to return to the Yeerk base or destroy the Yeerk base itself. As they swim towards the base, a pair of orca whales attack. Chaos ensues, but the Animorphs manage to get back on top of the ice and demoprh into less-appealing meals. But as they’re standing on the ice, they realize that an Inuit man has been watching them from his boat. He asks whether they are animal spirits.
“My grandfather used to talk about animal spirits all the time. I just thought he was crazy.” He spun his finger around his ear in that universal gesture of insanity. “But I always told him, ‘Yeah, that’s right, Grandpa.’ “
What follows is a very bizarre scene with the Inuit guy (Derek) thinking the Animorphs are animal spirits, handing them seal skins to wear, and discussing how mad he is at the “Star Trek guys” who are shooting the seals with lasers. Turns out he knows quite a lot about the Yeerk base and the space ships he’s seen there. Also doesn’t seem to think much of conversing with an alien (Ax) and a talking bird (Tobias.) What’s more, Derek has been following around Nanook (the polar bear) for days and can lead the Animorphs back to him. Grizzly!Rachel and gorilla!Marco go in together to try and subdue the polar bear and manage to pin it to the ice so the others can acquire it. After this action, Derek just takes off and they all morph the polar bear.
They make their way back to the base once again, just as a storm winds up. Darkness begins to fall and they sneak up on the base. The Venbar are working away on building the satellite, but they don’t see Visser Three’s Blade ship anywhere. They slowly sneak towards the base, until a woman finally spots them and raises the alarm. Another Controller shouts to program the Venbar to attack quadrupeds. The Venbar attack, nearly taking out Jake and Tobias, but also opening a convenient “door” in the wall of the hanger that the rest pile through. Ahead of them, they see what remains of the Venbar that went through the wall: it was a biological computer. In the warmth, the Venbar chasing them desolve, but they follow their programming and continue to come in. Boarding a Bug fighter, the Animorphs watch as all of the Venber destroy themselves. They demorph. Ax takes the flight controls and Marco covers the guns. This isn’t the first time they’ve been in a Bug fighter, and it helps them fly this one now. Using the ship, they destroy the satellite and the entire base.
As they turn to fly away, the see the Blade ship moving to intercept. They fly as far as they can south, then set the ship to auto-destruct and fly away as birds. It takes them two more days to finally get home, flying and hiding out on trains and trucks. Back home, Marco luxuriates in a lot of hot showers.
The Comic Relief: Well, this was a dud for a Marco book. Up to this point, Marco books have been some of my favorites. Not only is his internal voice one of the strongest, but he has a good point of sustained drama and emotional tension with the situation with his mother as Visser One. Here, not only did we get none of that, but the story itself didn’t play to Marco’s particular narration strengths. In fact, this book wouldn’t have played well to ANY of their narrative strengths. There was simply no heart to it. Marco’s telling of this story could have been anyone’s telling of this story: it was cold and it sucked. The end. The one real moment of “Marco-ness” we got, other than some of the jokes in the beginning about his date, was when they were realizing they would need to eat a seal to live:
If I had to be the jerk in this situation, that was fine. I was used to it. I was usually the first one to state the obvious, no matter how ugly it was. Just call me Mr. Ruthless.
This was a pretty good character beat, and in line with what we know about Marco. Too bad it came from such a nothing moment.
Our Fearless Leader: Jake comes up with his usual good plans, remains the steady leader they need, and notably has a few self-sacrificial moments. When they first end up in the cold, Jake lasts the longest in his tiger morph, never complaining even though he was suffering as much as the others. When they attack the base in the end, he fights off the Venbar with Tobias as back up telling the other to go on without him. They are small moments, but good ones to show how well Jake holds up even under the most strange of circumstances.
Xena, Warrior Princess: Early in the book, when they’re first escaping the Blade ship amidst all of the freezing gas, grizzly!Rachel walks into the mist to save an unconscious wolf!Cassie, and when she walks out…she leaves a foot behind. First of all, yes, this is another great example of Rachel always being the first to sacrifice herself to save her friends, braving anything to get to them. But also…WHAT IS WITH RACHEL LOSING PAWS IN HER BEAR MORPH! I swear, this is at least the third time it’s happened. First, in book #7 when they attack the skyscraper with the Kandrona. Second, in Megamorphs #1 when she has amnesia. And now again, here!! And I can’t remember if she also lost a paw during the jungle craziness in Jake’s book #11? Either way, this seems to happen to her a lot!
Also, Rachel…and polar bears…and now all of the sobbing.
A Hawk’s Life: Tobias, with Ax, ends up spending the majority of this book in flea morph. Which just raises the question about why more of them didn’t do this. Have maybe two of them stay as wolves for the two hours, the rest go flea, and then alternate. Seems like this would limit the time each member would actually need to spend in the freezing cold.
In the beginning of the book when they’re all in battle morphs on the Blade ship, it’s starting to feel more and more ridiculous that Tobias’s “battle morph” is his original hawk body. I mean, really? It made sense when he couldn’t morph, but now that he can it’s just crazy that he wouldn’t use something with more fire power in moments like this. Particularly after this book, he’ll have a polar bear morph to use and yet he’ll continue with the hawk. It’s just weird.
Peace, Love, and Animals: Early in the book, when they’re all morphing on the Blade ship, there’s a mention to Cassie demorphing from her fly morph in a matter of seconds. This seems like an error (I’m going to start blaming ghost writers for everything, now that that’s at thing.) Yes, it is referenced that Cassie morphs more quickly, but I don’t think that it went down from 3-4 minutes to her being able to do it in a matter of seconds? But maybe I’m wrong.
She also has this to say in the face of Marco’s skepticism about whether or not she’d be on board for eating seals:
Do you guys think I’d put an animal’s life over yours? Or mine, come to think of it?”
“I don’t know,” I started to say.
“You don’t know? When did you start thinking I was some kind of fanatic? We’re freezing, we’re starving, and I’m going to go all tree-hugging, never-eat-anything-with-a-face on you?”
It is a nice sentiment, and it does make sense for her. But there have been books in the past where she seems to have this EXACT thought! I can never quite get a feel for where her moral lines really are. They seem to change quite a lot from one situation to another with little explanation. It makes her unpredictable and also a bit less real seeming, as if her character is just there to present whatever moral lesson is needed in whatever moment.
E.T./Ax Phone Home: Ax recognizes the name “Venbar” when they hear Visser Three mention it on the Blade ship, but then doesn’t inform the others about it until much later. Presumably to build tension in the story, but it mostly just reads as false. Jake would immediately call him on it and get him to explain. Later, when he does explain, this turns out to be a subject that he did pay attention to in school, and he is able to give a pretty thorough history of the species.
The best part for Ax (and arguably the entire book) is the running gag joke between him and Marco about Ax’s tendency to refer to time as “your minutes.” Two examples:
“Ax, I really think you can just deal with the fact that they aren’t our minutes. They are everyone’s minutes.”
and
“About twenty minutes,” Ax replied. “Of your minutes,” he added, with what I swear was deliberate provocation.
It’s a joke that has come up repeatedly throughout the series, but they really go all-in on it in this book, and it plays pretty well. Especially in a book that really is a snooze fest in most other ways.
Best (?) Body Horror Moment: There were actually quite a few disgusting moments in this book. Marco’s bird morph early on describes his fingers growing back out of his shoulder blades and twitching around back there. Ick. And then when the Taxxon walks in on them in the Blade ship and Ax swipes it with his tail blade, we get a lovely description of it eating its other half. And then later, the description of the polar bear hunting the seal pulls no punches. It catches the seal through a hole, but the seal won’t fit back up, so…shredded seal. Very gross.
Couples Watch!: At one point, Marco blatantly calls Tobias and Rachel’s relationship out, when flea!Tobias is, according to Marco “all nice and warm in his honey’s back fur.” Rachel is shocked, but Marco shrugs the whole thing off, noting that it’s not like it’s a big secret. More examples of the fact that Tobias and Rachel’s relationship seems to be more of an accepted thing than Cassie and Jake’s ongoing awkward flirt-fest.
If Only Visser Three had Mustache to Twirl: First thing of note: when they’re on the Blade ship in Visser Three’s quarter, he has a collection of torture equipment on his walls. Cuz of course he does.
Second, it seems like a huge miss that he let the Blade ship even get close to landing when he was trying to trap the Animorphs in the loading bay. How many times have they escaped him by jumping out of windows? You’d think he’d learn his lesson on this by now.
Adult Ugly Crying at a Middle Grade Book: The baby seals of the dead mommy seal the polar bear kills!! Though the moment does, again, provide Cassie an opportunity to highlight her inconsistencies. Because here she says a very nice bit about how you can’t feel bad for the deaths of baby seals without feeling bad for the deaths of baby polar bears and baby whales who would die without hunting them. Right, yes, that makes sense Cassie! Tell me again about the part where Tobias was terrible for killing a baby skunk? I WILL harp on this until the last! #NeverForget #NeverForgive
What a Terrible Plan, Guys!:
Basically this:
We had a plan. The four fateful words that usually end up meaning a lot of yelling, screaming, mayhem, and madness.
Most of their plans were fine here. I mean, there’s no way they could have known about ending up in the north pole, so I’ll give them a pass on this. I still think they could have managed the cold better with more people going flea, but who knows, the psychological bit about being more alone in the cold for the one or two who had to remain as wolves might have been even harder.
Favorite Quote:
“No, no, no votes,” I said. “Jake decides. Then if it goes bad we can all blame him.”
They’re all pretty good about not blaming Jake for decisions, but as we’ve seen in other books, there is a distinct element of panic when he’s not around to make calls for them.
Scorecard: Yeerks 6, Animorphs 11
For all that I thought the book was a dud, and the fact that the majority of their time is spent shivering in caves, they do manage to take out the satellite Kandrona system that would have turned all pools of water in Yeerk pools. This is a pretty major win. Too bad it’s couched within this story.
Rating: Not great. I remember liking this book more the first time around. Probably because as a kid, adventures in the north pole sounded exciting enough for me. In this re-read though, I was majorly bored for much of the time. Which is really surprising for a Marco book, as he is usually able to salvage other duds of story lines purely on his strength as a narrator. But, really, no narrator is going to make hours of sitting around freezing entertaining to read about. Beyond this, I’m more bummed that we didn’t get more pages devoted to their return journey! It took days! They had to have run up against some adventures there, and it’s really the first time we’ve seen them run into a major time issue with their missions. So it seems like a huge missed opportunity. Remember, they’re still kids, for all of this war stuff. And now they have to “Homeward Bound” it all the way back to their city!
I also question the use of the Inuit man who shows up. I don’t quite know how to feel about it. It kind of walks the line on some offensive stereotypes about animal spirits, but I don’t think it crosses it. It also seems strange that the Animorphs wave it off so easily that he knows the truth about them being humans. The guy has clearly been snooping around the Yeerk base since he knows all about it. Chances are good he’s going to get caught one of these days and infested. So it seems like a weird inconsistency that this was swept aside. Further, the whole point of meeting him was so that he could lead them back to the polar bear. As they’ve run into the polar bear multiple times on their own already, there’s absolutely no point of this! They could just run into him again, since he’s nearby. Just remove the guy altogether and you lose any question marks about representation or inconsistencies with their secret.
All in all, this was my least favorite Marco book yet. I did still like some parts of it, but overall, it was pretty boring, giving me too much time to fixate on little things.
Note: I’m not going to rate these books since I can’t be objective at all! But I’ll give a one sentence conclusion and you can take from that what you will!
Book Description: Olivia Brownlow is no damsel in distress. Born in a workhouse and raised as a boy among thieving London street gangs, she is as tough and cunning as they come. When she is taken in by her uncle after a caper gone wrong, her life goes from fighting and stealing on the streets to lavish dinners and soirees as a debutante in high society. But she can’t seem to escape her past … or forget the teeming slums where children just like her still scrabble to survive.
Jack MacCarron rose from his place in London’s East End to become the adopted “nephew” of a society matron. Little does society know that MacCarron is a false name for a boy once known among London gangs as the Artful Dodger, and that he and his “aunt” are robbing them blind every chance they get. When Jack encounters Olivia Brownlow in places he least expects, his curiosity is piqued. Why is a society girl helping a bunch of homeless orphan thieves? Even more intriguing, why does she remind him so much of someone he once knew? Jack finds himself wondering if going legit and risking it all might be worth it for love.
Review: I’ve only read the original “Oliver Twist” once and it was quite a while ago, so I was intrigued when I ran across this gender-swapped retelling of the classic tale. However, in the end, I felt a bit misled by the book description and had a few problems with the characterization of our leading lady.
Olivia grew up on the streets and it is only through a chance of luck that she now finds herself leading the life of a society lady. But even here, amidst the gossip and sparkle, she can’t escape her past. Especially when said pasts presents itself polished up in a dashing suit and shooting her wicked grins. Jack MacCarron is more than he seems, and his history with a younger “Oliver” is only the start of what will tie these two’s future together.
What I did enjoy about this book was the writing style and historical setting. I’m particularly prone to enjoying books featuring lords and ladies circulating around ball rooms and snarking wittily at each other. The story was also quite fast paced, jumping into the action mere pages into the story. Olivia and Jack are introduced to each other very quickly, and through some well-placed flashbacks, readers are able to begin putting together their history. What also makes this fun is Olivia’s extra knowledge of their shared past, as she was only known to Jack then as a young boy named Oliver. From what I can remember from the original book, the author also does a good job at tying together the two stories in creative and sometimes unexpected ways.
However, I had a lot of trouble with a few aspects of the book. My biggest problem was not being able to suspend my disbelief about the situation that our two main lead characters find themselves in. Somehow, magically almost, both are raised on the streets but then easily slip into lives as gentry after only a few years. What’s more, they are welcomed in with very little struggle or gossip. Part of my problem with this could be the same fast-paced-ness that I praised above. In the very first chapters we’re introduced to Olivia, a lady now living the life of a society woman. But then in some quick flashbacks, we see the abject poverty and limits of the world she grew up in until she was a pre-teen. And yet, there was no evidence of this in her current manner as a lady.
I don’t want to go all “My Fair Lady” on this, but…really? Not only would I have found Olivia’s story that much more compelling had her arc included more about the ongoing struggles she had to face living this life full of politics and rules, but it was frankly unbelievable to see her navigate the ins and outs of a society that was notorious for confusing and strict rules of conduct. Many other historical fiction works set in this time narrate on and on the challenges that even women who grew up to this life encountered when living life in public society. To simply buy that Olivia, a woman who grew up without an education, without parents, and, what’s more, as a boy, would be able to simply fall into this role was just too much to swallow. The same goes for Jack, to a certain extent, but as the rules are less strict for men of the time, I was able to let this go a bit more.
My second major criticism comes with the first line of the book description and the reality we are given. Right there, in the very first sentence of the summary, we’re told that we’ll be getting a character who is not a damsel in distress. The reality is exactly the opposite. In the first few pages, we get a very unfortunate reference to the “beauty leads to rape” myth when a man instructs a midwife to raise Olivia as a boy since if she turns out to have the looks of her mother, her life will be more rough. That alone is pretty bad. But as the story goes on, Olivia repeatedly makes terrible decisions, finds herself threatened with attack and assault, only to be saved by Jack. This happened repeatedly. Not only do I never appreciate repeated threats of sexual assault as a driving force in any story, but to combine that with the first chapter’s reference to it being at all affected by a woman’s beauty and the fact that we were promised the exact opposite of a damsel in distress in the book summary, makes the whole thing very upsetting.
This all added up to a fairly disappointing read for me. The romance and chemistry between the two leads was charming, and I still enjoyed many aspects of the historical setting. But I couldn’t get past the suspension of disbelief issue or my increasing dismay with regards to the use of assault as a plot point and Olivia’s role as a repeated victim in need of rescue. I do think this book will still appeal to many other readers, perhaps those looking for a bit more of a fluffy romance read, but unfortunately it wasn’t for me.
Rating 5: The intriguing concept and strong romantic chemistry weren’t enough to distract me from an unbelievable leading damsel who too often found herself in distress.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Olivia Twist” is a new title and so isn’t on many relevant Goodreads lists, but it is on “2018 YA Historical Fiction.”
Publishing Info: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, January 2018
Where Did I Get this Book: bought it!
Book Description: Jude was seven years old when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.
To win a place at the Court, she must defy him–and face the consequences.
In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. But as civil war threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.
Warning: This review contains a lot of ranting, and because it’s so popular on Goodreads and other places, I know this will be an unpopular opinion. But it’s mine. It doesn’t have to be yours and, while I think that even those who like this book deserve better, especially as far as the romantic interests go, everyone’s tastes run differently! And that’s ok! That’s why we have libraries packed full of options for everyone! But if it’s hard for you to read negative opinions on things you love (which I totally understand), it’s probably best to just pass on this review now.
Review: This was one of the few books that I broke down and bought without having read it before. Sadly, it is also further reinforcement for why I have that general policy to begin with. But I was beguiled by the beautiful cover and a book description that was right up my alley. Perhaps also the hype, which really should have been my warning sign, as I’ve found that very few books that are super hyped in the fantasy YA community these last couple of years actually turn out to be my cup of tea. Alas.
As I said, there is a lot to love in this book description. I’ve always loved stories about Faerie courts. I also love stories about sisterhood. And, of course, political intrigue. What should have been my warning was the concept of the cruel prince himself, Cardan. My bookclub comrade, Alicia, was also reading this book when I was and asked what I thought about this book when I was only 50 pages in or so. At the time, I said that I was enjoying it but that the main character had better not get together with the titular “cruel prince.” And Alicia just looked at me and laughed. Well…yeah…touche, I guess!
I like to try and say positive things about all books I review on here, and this book in particular seems to be getting a lot of raving reviews, so I know there must be things here that many people are liking. But honestly, I just don’t see it. The writing was technically good, I guess, and the Faerie court was appropriately capricious and beautiful, but that’s about all I have.
Though even with these aspects, Black wasn’t introducing anything we haven’t seen a million times before with fantasy like this! Yeah, yeah, beautiful food that is actually rotten. Faerie folk who have animal aspects like hooves and wings. Dancing. Mermaids. And this speaks to one of my first problems: the world-building and storytelling. If an author is going to write a Faerie court book, the fact that there a million others out there should serve as a motivation to put extra effort into plotting and characters. You already know you’re playing in a very full sandbox as far as the world itself, so you need to challenge norms in other areas. Unfortunately, Black does not. Instead we get a long checklist of YA tropes being ticked off one by one.
This book is a case study in “telling, not showing” writing. We are simply informed of most of the plot points with very little build up, no clear arc, and characters who behave and say things simply because they must, but without any written character support for their choices. We’re told that Jude wants to be a Fae Knight, and there is some hand service to her wanting to gain power, but none of this is set in any concrete character position that we are consistently shown throughout the story. At one point early in the book, we get to this grand tournament, an event she’s been training for her entire life and where she can exhibit her skills…and I’m pretty sure we get this exact line: “I fought harder than I ever had before.” End scene. Great. She’s a fighter whose been telling us for pages how important this all is and how much she’s trained (again, we’ve seen none of that) and then the moment comes! And we’re just told she fought hard. How intriguing! I’m definitely invested now! It’s sheer laziness of writing and the kind of things that drives me crazy.
And this bland writing is paralleled in bland characterization. Throughout the entire book, I never understood Jude. What’s really important to her? Why did she do one thing here and another there? How is she growing, learning, and reacting to pretty big events happening around her? There was just nothing consistent going on with her character that readers could latch on to.
What’s more, most of her story is directly contrary to the message that I thought this book was going for, and the one thing that could have really given Jude depth as a character. She saw her parents murdered before her eyes and then was raised by the man who killed them and in a land where she and her sister are systematically abused and terrorized by those around them. This is the set up for a strong story of resilience and of reclaiming one’s own power. At its most basic level, you could get a pretty good revenge story out of this.
But no. Jude is every YA heroine we’ve ever read. We’re told she’s bad ass, despite never seeing it. She makes horrible decisions with apparently no sense of self-preservation, and worse, no sense of the fact that her choices also result in harm to others. We’re told she’s terrified by those around her, but she still wants to be one of them. She’s thoughtless and impulsive, with no foundation to speak of that would explain why she does what she does when she does it. Her thoughts on Faerie and its people are completely dependent on what the story needs her to do, or feel, next.
With all of this, Jude’s own Stockholm-syndrome-esque behavior and her sister’s passive victim hood, I thought the book was building up towards some sort of commentary on the effects of bullying, terror, and abuse. But nope. There’s nothing there: like the Faerie food, it looks beautiful and complex, but at its core, it’s nothing. It’s honestly confusing. Was this just a coincidence, that the author set up all of these factors around abuse and victim hood? Did she do it on accident while trying to write a fairly typical YA fantasy story? Because, as it stands, its as if she honestly didn’t realize that that’s what she had written for all of the attention its given.
And, worst of all, we have yet another YA love interest who is the epitome of abuse and bullying. And I am absolutely sick of this persistent and pernicious trope of authors creating a character who does despicable things, giving him “a past,” and then hand-waving away his own behavior (especially if he’s done it because secretly he’s kind of into the heroine). This is not a message we should be sending to young women. Yes, people can survive terrible things, and often those who commit them had darkness in their past. But they are still responsible for the terrible things they do, and while you can pity the circumstances that brought them to that point, they ARE NOT love interest material. They need help. Professional, practical, and ongoing help.
I’m completely fed up with this, and it is disheartening to see it continue in YA fantasy books and have those books receive rave reviews. In a year full of #metoo and terrible stories about women being subjected to horrendous behavior by men in power, the fact that we are still reading about YA heroes who outright abuse the heroine but are then presented as potential love interests just makes me sick. This is not ok. Even the final twist of the book doesn’t save this from what’s been set-up: multiple love triangles between victims and their bullies.
Ultimately, this goes down as my first major disappointment of the year. I’m not sure why this book is as hyped as it is or how it is receiving all of the positive reviews it is. At best, it’s presenting a pretty familiar story with all the elements we’ve come to expect: a story that is told to us, not shown; a heroine who has no clear characterization and whose decisions are nonsensical at best and outright stupid at worst; and a love interest who has no right being a love interest at all. I don’t recommend this book. Instead, if you want to read an amazing Faerie court book that’s come out recently, check out “An Enchantment of Ravens.”
Rating 2: A major disappointment. I expect more of YA fantasy. And, at this point, we have a responsibility to those who suffer from real life abuse and bullying to put away this notion that cruelty in any form, for any reason, can be “sexy” or “charming.”
Where Did I Get this Book: copy from the publisher
Book Description: Tea is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy makes her a bone witch, who are feared and ostracized in the kingdom. For theirs is a powerful, elemental magic that can reach beyond the boundaries of the living—and of the human.
Great power comes at a price, forcing Tea to leave her homeland to train under the guidance of an older, wiser bone witch. There, Tea puts all of her energy into becoming an asha, learning to control her elemental magic and those beasts who will submit by no other force. And Tea must be strong—stronger than she even believes possible. Because war is brewing in the eight kingdoms, war that will threaten the sovereignty of her homeland…and threaten the very survival of those she loves.
Review: First off, thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book to read and review! It now has a loving spot on my bookshelf, so that should give readers a clue about my thoughts on this book!
A young Tea has just learned she is a Bone Witch, a rare Asha who can raise and control the dead. Her kind are especially needed for their abilities to raise and banish daeva, fearsome beasts who will escape their graves on given intervals and rampage the countryside if they are not put back to rest. But an older Tea is the one telling us this tale, and through her we see that life has not been what she had expected when she first was trained. The elder Tea is banished, living on a forlorn beach surrounded by monstrous beasts, and she has her own plans. With these dueling perspectives, Chupeco weaves together a world full of magic, mystery, and darkness, and one girl’s story that has already happened and is also about to begin.
My first point of praise goes to the narrative set-up of this book. I love stories that are told from a past/present point of view. Through the elder Tea, we get a sense that things have gone wrong, but we don’t know why, how, or what her plans are now in response to those events. The younger Tea, whose story takes up the majority of the book, is as new to much of this world as the reader and through her we see innocence, wonder, and fear of what her growing abilities really mean. Both narratives draw from the other, dropping little clues here and there that tie neatly between the two, but also raise more and more questions. The elder Tea is definitely not rushed in her story-telling, or willing to simply give the end away. There were excellent surprises planted throughout both storylines, and it was exciting seeing how they interconnected.
The world-building was probably the strongest point in this book’s favor. It’s been compared to a fantasy version of “Memories of a Geisha” and this is spot on. It did walk a very fine line of being almost a little too close to that book for my taste at times. Some of the characters involved, the miserly older woman who runs the house, the successful and beautiful older Asha who is in the prime of her abilities, and Tea’s own slow rise from servitude towards a spectacular debut. However, the magical elements and complicated history and politics of this world did enough to pull the story away and into its own place. I absolutely loved the magical system of this world, especially the way proficiency in these magical arts combined in a variety of ways. Asha are not only excellent performers who serve as entertainers (here’s where the geisha-like comparisons come into play), but they are also warriors, healers, and politicians.
Tea, as a Dark Asha, or Bone Witch, walks a slightly different path. Dark Asha are rare, and, while their abilities are the most necessary of them all, it is not surprising that the common people fear them. Through Tea’s experiences, and that of her mentor Mykaela, we see the fears and superstitions that they must deal with, all while performing the challenging and necessary work of the land.
So far we have a complicated past/present narration style, a magical system that has intricate workings and specific challenges for our main character, and a geisha-like system that incorporates entertaining, fighting, and politicking. On top of all this, there is also the world itself, made up of many different kingdoms each with their own cultures, ethnicities, and views on Asha and the ongoing fight with the daeva and the Faceless who control them. One of my biggest criticisms comes in this part. If ever a book needed a map, it was this one. There is simply too much to keep track of in this book to expect readers to navigate the terrain as well. Even by the end of the book, I was still confused about the layout of the world and how these various different kingdoms worked together.
With all of these details, this book is definitely heavy on descriptions and works with a slower pace. I love immersive writing like this, but I do think the book will have varied responses based on this fact. There is action, but in small bursts slotted between pages of the average day for Tea learning to be a Dark Asha. It’s not until the very last part of the book that the action really picks up, but when it does, man is it exciting!
And, since the second book is coming out shortly, you’ll have a safer time reading this one now than earlier, as the ending is a bit of a cliffhanger. By no means are all of the mysteries resolved; if anything, I had even more questions at the end than I did at the beginning, and it felt like the story was cut off right when things were really starting to get moving. I’m fine with that, since I can pick up the second one right away, but it’s something to keep in mind when you’re scheduling your reads (doesn’t everyone schedule their reading order??)
So, while all of the complicated elements of the world and story did leave me confused at times, the strong central character and the huge set up for book two were more than enough for me to thoroughly enjoy and recommend this book. If you’re a fan of fantasy with a darker twist, definitely check this one out.
Rating 8: Immersive and detailed, there is no loss for world-building in this book. If anything, it’s overwhelming!
Publishing Info: Scholastic Paperbacks, December 1998
Where Did I Get this Book: own it!
Book Description:The Yeerks are not the only invaders of Earth. Meet the new enemy: the Helmacrons. Cassie finds their miniature spaceship and donates it to a toy drive. Big mistake. The Helmacrons are tiny, but they’re far from helpless. They have the technology to shrink other creatures to their size. And until they get their spaceship back, they’re taking hostages. The Animorphs must find a way to send these pests back into space — before it’s too late.
Narrator: Cassie
Plot: Oh man, here we go. The first introduction of the Helmacrons. I had totally forgotten that they showed up in a Cassie book, which are already not my favorites of the series. So…yeah…
At the beginning of each chapter, we get an entry from the log of the Helmacron ship, Galaxy Blaster detailing their exploits on planet Earth. Humble these guys are not.
The story opens with Cassie doing chores at home, as always, this time collecting junk to send to Goodwill. And Rachel begging her to do something about her fashion choices, as always. She’s also trying to convince Cassie to join her on a trip to the mall and then the beach, when she notices a toy space ship in Cassie’s junk pile. Cassie says she found it perched on the pump, which, coincidentally, is where she hid the blue box. Tossing it back on the junk pile, she gives in and agrees to join Rachel and enjoy the day.
Cassie hates the beach (seriously, what is wrong with this girl??), but she’s glad that Rachel is having a good time. They walk home in their swimsuits, and Cassie is mortified to see Jake waiting for them. Jake, too, is embarrassed and it’s all very twee. Cassie suddenly notices another toy aircraft perched on the pump. But it’s not the same one. Worse, it suddenly rises and flies away. Jake announces that the weekend has been cancelled, and they need to gather their forces and figure out what’s happening.
Of course, their first plan of action is to ask their resident alien, Ax. Unfortunately, Ax, rather per the usual at this point, has no ideas, so they morph seagulls to try and track down the other ship that Cassie’s dad had toted away to Goodwill. Once there, they convince the Goodwill clerk to let them in the back to search for the ship. They find it, but before they can do much, another small ship zooms into the loading bay and “attacks” Jake with two tiny laser beams. Rachel, typically, gets mad, even more so when they blow off a few strands of her hair, and takes a bat to the ship that’s flying around. But Jake insists they back off for a bit, and they see the ship link up to the other, presumably giving it a jump start. They then hear a thought-speak voice in their head demanding they hand over the power source and they will then be allowed to live as slaves. Cassie quickly guesses that they must mean the blue box.
Cassie tries to speak to them calmly and peaceably, saying she’s sure they don’t mean to be threatening. They correct her; they very much DO mean to be threatening. They shoot her with their tiny lasers and blow back out of the door. Jake has Tobias follow them, suspecting they are heading back to the farm and the blue box. They morph birds and discuss the bizarreness of the entire situation as they fly back. On the way, they see Tobias up ahead being attacked by the Helmacron ship. Against Tobias’s much smaller size, the ship could actually do some damage and it looks like they are trying to shoot at his eyes. Rachel is pissed and quickly attacks, followed by the others. They managed to fight them off, but the Helmacrons zip away even faster towards the farm.
They manage to intercept the Helmacrons again just as they are beginning to pull up the blue box with a tractor beam. But their bird morphs aren’t made for endurance flying, and the fight takes it out of them. Cassie demorphs as quickly as she can and chases the Helmacrons and the blue box they are towing into the barn. The Helmacrons issue more threats while Cassie tries to talk them down. Then they shrink her. Tobias flies in after her and they get him too. Marco, too, comes in and gets hit by the ray, but manages to yell over his shoulder to warn the others away before he gets too small. They do, and Jake informs them that the other Helmacron ship took off after Rachel hit it with a brick.
Cassie, Tobias, and Marco stop shrinking, but are now tiny, about the size of a small fly. Strangely, Tobias is still around the same size as each of them, rather than proportionally being smaller. (Part of me feels like this would be just as weird as the rest. From Cassie and Marco’s perspective, Tobias is now a MASSIVE bird.) Ax and Jake try to convince the Helacrons to give back the box and reverse the shrinking, pointing out that as “primitive” as they may think it is, Rachel’s brick did pretty good work of their other ship. They manage to snag the blue box, but both ships still escape, leaving Marco, Tobias, and Cassie in their tiny forms.
Ax theorizes that the Helmacrons used the power of the blue box to shrink the others. Cassie and Marco can’t be heard by the others, their voices too small, but Tobias can still thought-speak with them. Cassie tries to morph to see if that will reverse it, but when she tries to go osprey, she shrinks even further and quickly reverses her morph.
Cassie’s dad shows up and isn’t impressed by Jake and Rachel’s story of looking for Cassie. He’s even less impressed by human!Ax. After kicking them all out of the barn, he begins walking around and manages to bury tiny!Cassie under a tablespoon of dirt he kicks up. Cassie and Marco discover that, similar to ants, they have increased strength for their size, easily moving massive, to them, pieces of dirt. As they debate what to do next, the Helmacrons arrive, and now that they, too, are small, those laser beams are much more of a threat. Luckily, the Helmacrons get caught up in a bit of inter-ship politicking, debating who gets to capture Cassie, Marco, and Tobias, until the other Animrophs show up in towering, gigantic cockroach morphs. Ax has come in a wolf spider morph and is even more terrifying than the others. But they quickly realize the mistake of this when the Helmacrons cripple and seriously injure spider!Ax using the lasers from their ship. Worse, he can’t demorph to heal himself without crushing Marco, Cassie, and Tobias. Cassie insists that they surrender and escape later.
She and Marco let themselves be taken onto the Helmacron ship, and the aliens bring them to their leader. Thing is, the captain is very, very dead. Worse, it looks ritualistic, the Helmacron captain chained to the floor and speared with several swords. Once again Marco puts Cassie to shame in the “make things up” category, reminiscent of their time on the Area 51-like base. Cassie is still a terrible liar. The Helmacrons put a stop to Marco’s display of “groveling” and insist they tell them where the blue box is. They turn on their view screen and Cassie sees the others, safe back in their regular forms, with tiny!Tobias sitting on Rachel’s shoulder. Cassie and Marco claim that none of their friends know where it is, but the “other one” does. The Helmacrons reveal that their sensors can tell who has morphing capabilities, so they will find this “other one.” Cassie quickly comes up with a plan.
“There’s no point trying to hide him from the Helmacrons, Marco,” I said. “There is only one other morph-capable creature on Earth. And the Helmacrons are just going to have to destroy him.”
Suddenly, the light went on in Marco’s head. “Visser Three?”
I nodded, feeling very pleased with myself. “Visser Three.”
It turns out the Helmacrons already know about the Yeerks, and for some reason this causes a division in their ranks, with one group attacking and killing a few of the others. Cassie and Marco also learn that all of the Helmacrons they have met so far have been females when a much smaller, more docile being enters and is addressed as a male. He explains that the captain must be dead because how else could they ensure she would never make any mistakes? He informs them that they are now slaves who must obey the female Helmacrons, and then leaves.
Shortly after, they are lead back to another bridge where the Helmacrons pull up a view screen showing the Blade ship. They can sense Visser Three in a Bug Fighter that is heading back to Earth and follow it. They watch the Bug Fighter descend into an abandoned restaurant that opens its ceiling to let the ship in as a limo pulls up in front of it. Visser Three climbs in in his human morph. The Helmacrons chase after the car, firing at it with their mini lasers. Human!Visser Three roles down the window and spots the tiny ship; it is clear he recognizes what they are. The Helmacrons shoot him in the face with their lasers and another Controller pops out of the sunroof and starts shooting at their ship with a gun, a huge weapon against their small size.
The fighting continues and the Helmacrons veer into the other lane, almost getting hit by on-coming traffic. Cassie and Marco have had enough and decide to get the heck out of there. Their only option is to get even smaller and morph flies. (On this, you’d think they’d have some concerns about their Z-space mass considering what happened in Ax’s book with the mosquito morph. Yes, the passing ship was what pulled them through, but having it happen at all, you’d think it at least would be thought of when they’re now morphing something even tinier.) Once morphed, they are too tiny for the Helmacrons to catch, but they also can’t get anywhere, being too small to cover any distance. As they try to hide, the ship starts to come apart and they realize that a Yeerk Dracon beam must have hit it. Completely disoriented with no way of knowing where they are or how far up they are or anything, they decide to try and slowly demorph and get a sense of things. They find themselves on someone’s head, specifically Chapman’s.
Just then, Tobias shows up. He informs them that Rachel managed to smash the other ship with a tire iron and Jake clamped it in a vice in Cassie’s barn. He says they have things figured out, that the Helmacrons gave them their leaders to hold hostage. Cassie and Marco immediately freak out, knowing that all their friends have are dead Helmacrons. Worse, Tobias tells them that they’re currently at a meeting of the Sharing where Visser Three is doing show and tell with the destroyed Helmacron ship he hit with the Dracon beam. And Ax is there too, outside with the blue box in an attempt to get the Helmacrons to come with them and unshrink the others. Cassie and Marco quickly realize that the Helmacrons are planning on letting the Yeerks and Animorphs duke it out while they escape with the blue box. Just as they think of this, they see the remaining Helmacron ship appear, towing the blue box with them, and aim its lasers at an unhappy Visser Three, shrinking him, too.
Chaos erupts. Visser Three is shrinking, screaming at the Yeerks to grab the blue box. The other Animorphs show up in morph, also trying to get the blue box. And all the while, the Helmacrons blather on about their own power and might. Cassie and Marco can’t tell what’s going except for what they hear through thought-speak. Rachel gets hit by the shrinking ray and the others are still trying to nab the box. Cassie tells Marco to moprh, that they need to get even smaller and have the ability to thought-speak with the others. She calls to Tobias to come pick them up and he nabs skunk!Cassie and mole!Marco in his talons. Cassie has figured out that if, when they morph smaller, they get relatively smaller to their current size, than if they morph bigger, the same thing should apply. They land on the the Helmacron ship, and Cassie has them all morph bigger: Tobias to his human form, and her to her humpback whale form. This way, they will weigh down the ship, essentially disabling it.
Her plan works and the ship begins to sink under her weight, but as it does, a Controller reaches out and grabs the ship. Ax manages to cut off the Controller’s hand with his tale and grab the ship himself. They learn that Jake and Rachel, along with Visser Three and several Controllers, have all been shrunk and are currently having a standoff on one of Ax’s legs. Ax runs away, carrying the ship and blue box. Through this all, they overhear Jake and Rachel fighting Visser Three in some new alien morph along with all of the other shrunken Controllers. Cassie tells Ax to morph a bird, carry the ship and blue box in his talons, and fly to the Gardens.
But as he morphs, the way his body melds leaves everyone all together: Cassie, Marco and Tobias, but now also tiger!Jake, grizzly!Rachel, Visser Three and the rest of the shrunken Controllers. Quickly, Cassie and Marco morph their battle morphs so the Yeerks don’t see them as humans. They prepare to do battle, but then the Helmacrons show up and they all unanimously decide that they should be dealt with first. But before they can do anything, Ax informs them that they have arrived at the Gardens and Cassie tells them all to jump off bird!Ax.
They leap and land on something furry. Cassie quickly begins demorphing, explaining that she thought that maybe a newly acquired animal wouldn’t be affected by the shrinking (something something original DNA was shrunk but not new DNA). And for their new morph she’s chosen an anteater. Visser Three shows up and quickly sees what they’re doing, but the Animorphs are all well on their way to becoming regular-sized anteaters. Once morphed, anteater!Cassie quickly nabs a few dozen Helmcrons with her sticky tongue. Cassie begs them to surrender, not wanting to kill them, and Visser Three, who has also morphed an anteater, sneers at her.
<Sentimental Andalite fool,> Visser Three said. He had copied our trick. He had also morphed the anteater. <You can’t kill a Helmacron. They’re a fungible species. Kill one and its mind, if you can call it a mind, is absorbed into another. They never die. Even when they’re dead, they’re not dead. But when it comes to Andalites . . .>
His tongue flits out and nabs tiny!Tobias as he tries to fly away. But before he can do anything, normal-sized!Ax presses his tail blade to anteater!Visser Three’s throat. The three-way stalemate ends with the Animorphs getting control of the shrinking ray and using it to unshrink everyone, letting the Yeerks go. Visser Three is willing to concede that being shrunk again is unappealing, and it’s best to fight another day. They also convince the male Helmacrons that they should fight back against the females, and presumably they all get so caught up in this that they…leave?? The end.
Peace, Love, and Animals: Poor Cassie. It’s really not her fault that she got stuck with this stinker of a book. That said, I don’t think the book is improved by having Cassie as a narrator. For all that I don’t agree with all of Cassie’s approaches to the war, she is at her best when she is given complicated moral plot lines that allow her to fully explore her unique view on conflict. Without that, her voice is probably just the most bland of all the narrators and thus doesn’t add a lot to a story that desperately, DESPERATELY needs a strong narrator to improve it. Further, this is the first book we’ve gotten from Cassie since the whole David ordeal and it’s jarring to have that not really mentioned. Cassie was the mastermind behind that whole plan and also the one, other than Rachel, who presumably would be most broken up by the role she had to play. So it feels like a huge missed opportunity to have her very next book be relegated to, essentially, a filler story. Tobias’s made sense, he had big things of his own to deal with and also was the least involved with the David mess. But Cassie? No way we shouldn’t be hearing all about how conflicted and torn up she is about a plan that she came up with that doomed a human boy to life as a rat.
And beyond that, like I said, Cassie’s voice alone doesn’t have a lot of uniquely interesting aspects to it, other than her POV on moral issues. So when we’re given a bonkers story line like this, Cassie just kind of …goes with it. And it doesn’t help. Sure, she once again comes up with a good animal morph to solve the current problem, but the end of this story was so full of contrivances and wild leaps of logic that it’s hard to even give her much credit for that. It’s all just kind of bad, and Cassie’s narration isn’t strong enough to distract us from that fact.
Our Fearless Leader: Both Cassie and Marco bemoan the loss of Jake’s decision-making skills when they’re on board the Helmacron ship. It’s a good moment to really highlight how dependent the rest of them are on Jake to make important calls in the midst of chaos. But other than that, Jake kind of just does his thing through most of this book. Cassie talks about how cute she thinks he his, and there’s some fun awkwardness at the beginning when Jake sees her in a swimsuit and becomes extremely stammer-y.
Xena, Warrior Princess: As always my favorite parts of Cassie books are the interactions between her and Rachel. Their friendship is awesome, and through Cassie’s books we see a very unique side of Rachel, the more human, normal, teenage girl side that is our best view of what Rachel must have been like before the Yeerk invasion. The story is nicely bookended by Rachel’s teasing Cassie about her changing opinion on whether or not she likes the beach based on whether or not Jake will be there. Rachel also has some pretty funny moments taking on the Helmacrons with various objects: a brick, a tire iron, a bat. If you need someone to hit things, Rachel’s your girl.
A Hawk’s Life: Tobias is one of the early ones to be shrunk, which is purely for convenience’s sake since tiny!Cassie and Marco can’t be heard using their regular speaking voices. For all of that, he STILL somehow ends up pushed to the side during the majority of the story. Most notably, he isn’t captured and brought on the Helmacron ship with Cassie and Marco.
The Comic Relief: I found myself wishing that this had been a Marco book throughout the entire read. Not only does Marco share in almost all the action with Cassie, but his is the exact sort of narration style that could have possibly saved this dumper fire of a story line. Sure, we get plenty of quips from him throughout, and that’s a huge saving grace, but it would have been so much better had he just had the narration to himself. If you’re going to do nonsense, put it in the hands of your most smart ass character and call it good. Marco is also probably the smartest of the Animorphs (not including Ax, but even there, it’s mostly book smarts), so he would have also been a good pick to be able to make the same leaps of logic that Cassie does. Give Cassie a book that somehow forces her to address the whole David thing, then give this book to Marco. Done! I fixed it!
E.T./Ax Phone Home: So apparently the Andalites haven’t heard of the Helmacrons but the Yeerks have? This seems suspicious, but I’ll just explain it as Ax having not hearde of the Helmacrons, probably because he was sleeping through class. During their first moments with the shrinking ray in the barn, Ax spends a good amount of time “explaining” the science behind it all. It played for comedic value, but then when the story moved on to Marco and Cassie morphing even smaller, and then morphing bigger, and then morphing regular sized, it all got super confusing. I was both too bored to want to understand the “science” of it, but then also very annoyed and confused whenever they were able to twist the shrinking thing to their advantage. It was just dumb. Also, we get another Ax’s-tailblade-to-Visser-Three’s-throat stand off. I should really have a tally for these.
Best (?) Body Horror Moment: Right after Cassie is shrunk, Jake ends up on the ground next to her and she gets a close-up view of his face and we have this description:
His eyes were like brown-and-white swimming pools, huge globes that looked as if they might pop and drain down like runny Jell-0. I stared up, transfixed by this face I had always found attractive. And I found myself staring at a zit bigger than I was.
Couples Watch!: Ok, look, this is why I prefer Tobias/Rachel’s romance to Cassie/Jake’s. Remember in the last book where we got that beautiful line from Tobias about the sight of Rachel in the sunlight making his heart ache? Well, here, the first time Cassie sees Jake, we get a line about how she “likes” him, “you know, like.” And sure, this is how kids talk, but the two of them have been saying not only a variation of this, but THIS EXACT LINE, “you know, like,” for forever now! Given the fact that they’re all living in a constant state of warfare and tragedy, they’ve all matured way past their ages, and this is shown in Rachel and Tobias’s more serious relationship. They simply don’t have the time to be tip-toeing around things. And neither do Jake and Cassie! They might not have the bird problem that Tobias and Rachel do, but they still have the same life or death stakes every day and you’d think that at some point that would push them past some of this silliness. Regardless of what is likely an over-analysis of all of this on my part, I’m simply bored of hearing them say how much they “you know, like” each other. We do get some funny moments with the whole beach/swimsuit thing, but I still enjoyed Tobias and Rachel’s small, but more earnest, moments throughout the book when either of the other ended up in danger.
If Only Visser Three had Mustache to Twirl: So Visser Three does appear in this, but we’ve again got the campy, silly Visser Three ala Cassie book #9 when he gets defeated by skunk stink. The last scene where there is a three way standoff was essentially resolved in three sentences, all summarizing what happened but not detailing any actual action. This has to be because it is completely unbelievable that Visser Three would simply walk away in this situation. Especially because the blue box was SITTING RIGHT THERE!. The whole thing was nonsense. And the fact that Visser Three did in fact know about the Helmacrons before all of this and yet was still just as clueless as the Animorphs about how the shrinking thing actually works, etc. was another glaring hole.
The Helmacrons are technically the villains of this piece, but it’s clear that they were mostly written for comedic value. And, on their own, they were pretty amusing. I thought their power structure with the dead captain was pretty interesting, and their on-going infighting and complete delusions about their own abilities played for some good laughs.
<Do you think to terrify us with your pitiful morphs? We are Helmacron warriors!> They were yelling this as they hustled away at top speed.
But, again, that ending. Nothing we’ve seen so far would indicate that the Helmcrons, for all that they get easily caught up in in-fighting, would so easily just wander off, leaving the blue box behind.
Adult Ugly Crying at a Middle Grade Book: Can I cry at the sheer nosedive in quality the books took between the last four and this one? Cuz that’s all I have for this right now.
What a Terrible Plan, Guys!: Everything. It was all bad plans on everyone’s part. The fact that Ax took the blue box to a Sharing meeting and then somehow (off screen notably!) loses it to the tiny Helmacron ship. Cassie and Marco’s completely nonsensical decision making while on board the ship (“We should stay!” “We should leave!” “Morph small!” “Oh no, we’re too small!”). The entire end of the book! Again, the blue box was sitting out in the open, Visser Three and a bunch of Controllers were there, and the Animorphs decided that now was the time to play fair and unshrink them, just trusting that they’d walk away. Sheer stupidity that only succeeds because it has to for the books to continue.
Favorite Quote: Right after Marco, Cassie and Tobias have been shrunk in the barn and the Helmacrons are poised to shrink whomever walks in next:
“I’m coming in,” Jake said decisively. “No!” Marco yelled in a voice that already sounded like someone breathing helium. “No, Jake and Ax, do not come in!” Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Rachel, you could come in.” <Marco!> Tobias chided. “Hey, the Wicked Witch gets to be full size and I’m down here singing, ‘We represent the Lollipop Guild?’ I don’t think so.”
And Rachel gets a similar jab back later:
“Okay, I’ve had enough of this battle of the alien egos here. I’m counting to three. Then I’m throwing this brick. You little insects either fix my friends . . . and Marco, too … or you get bricked.”
And:
Rachel said it first. “Oh, come on. Like we don’t have enough problem aliens?”
Preach it. No one needs any more of the Helmacrons.
Scorecard: Yeerks 6, Animorphs 10
I’m taking away a point from the Animorphs due to the sheer stupidity at the end, bringing Visser Three and a bunch of Controllers back to their real size while the blue box is sitting out in the open.
Rating: I think it’s pretty clear at this point that I didn’t love this book. Cassie books are never my favorites, but this one failed to even play to her strengths and instead left her with a story line that could have only been saved (maybe) if someone like Marco had been narrating it. The Helmacrons had their fun moments, but the whole plot was muddled and confusing, and the end just made me mad. It was lazy writing all around, and it was only made worse for having come right after four of probably the strongest books in the series. Ugh, and now I just have to dread the return of the Helmacrons, because I know it happens, even if I can’t remember the details.
Note: I’m not going to rate these books since I can’t be objective at all! But I’ll give a one sentence conclusion and you can take from that what you will!
Publishing Info: Kathy Dawson Books, September 2017
Where Did I Get this Book: ARC from the publisher
Book Description: If you could change your story, would you?
Jane has lived a mostly ordinary life, raised by her recently deceased aunt Magnolia, whom she counted on to turn life into an adventure. Without Aunt Magnolia, Jane is directionless. Then an old acquaintance, the glamorous and capricious Kiran Thrash, blows back into Jane’s life and invites her to a gala at the Thrashes’ extravagant island mansion called Tu Reviens. Jane remembers her aunt telling her: “If anyone ever invites you to Tu Reviens, promise me that you’ll go.”
What Jane doesn’t know is that at Tu Reviens her story will change; the house will offer her five choices that could ultimately determine the course of her untethered life. But every choice comes with a price. She might fall in love, she might lose her life, she might come face-to-face with herself. At Tu Reviens, anything is possible.
Review: I have a lot of thoughts on this book, on the book itself (which is of the sort that is probably best appreciated on re-reads) and on the reception of said book by the general reading public. But, without further ado: I, for one, absolutely loved the book and am absolutely baffled by the general reading public’s reception of it.
Jane parents died in an plane crash when she was a baby. They decided to sit on one side of the plane, and on that side, everyone died, On the other side, everyone lived. This choice changed Jane’s life, but led her to a happy childhood growing up with her Aunt Magnolia, a marine biologist with a general joie de vivre approach to life. Now tragedy has stuck again with the death of her beloved Aunt, and Jane finds herself aimless and alone, with only her love for umbrella-making to give her any purpose. That is until she is invited to Tu Revien, a house full of mysteries, and once again, there are important, life-changing choices ahead.
It’s hard for me to really get at this book and my reaction to it without wondering whether my prior knowledge of it affected my read. I’d like to think not, but I’m not sure. For one, I had the joy of getting to meet Kristin Cashore at ALA this last summer and hear her speak on a panel. During the panel, one librarian got up and asked if there were pages missing from her most recent book, as the librarian found it very confusing. Cashore said this was exactly what she had worried about when writing it, knowing that it was an experimental style. First, I was very embarrassed for everyone involved in this situation, as the panel was about a completely different topic and not the place for authors to be quizzed about their own works. Librarians should know better! But I won’t rant about that.
Here I am getting my copy signed by the author! A definite highlight at ALA!
Cashore was gracious enough to explain that she started the book as a “choose your own adventure” story, which than morphed into a more traditional novel, in that it is meant to be read in a linear fashion. So, I had this information going in and to a certain extent knew what to expect. However, that aside, I do think that she did an amazing job setting up that this was where the story was headed, with no prior knowledge of this required. As I laid out in my brief plot description, the story starts out with the idea that Jane’s entire life was shaped around a completely arbitrary decision that her parents made, which side of the plane to sit on. Further, Jane and her friend, Kiran, a member of the family who owns the house and the one who invited Jane there, discuss the fact that choices can lead you to very different places in life, and you never know which choice will be the one to make the big difference.
With this premise, the story starts out slowly putting together a great cast of characters, and many mysteries for Jane to follow. This takes about 100 pages or so, which is where I’ve heard the most complaints about it being a slow read. For me, this was completely necessary work for laying a foundation for the rest of the book. In these pages, we get to know Jane, and those around her. We have mysterious disappearing art, rumors of a missing family and their children, a dog that is obsessed with a painting, and the family’s own strange history with the missing first and second wife of the father. From there, Jane chooses.
And yes, those choices have drastically different outcomes! I’m talking, genre-defying outcomes. I don’t know how I’ll categorize this book when I get to posting it, because it’s a bit of everything. We have mystery, we have intrigue, we have horror, we have sci-fi, we have fantasy. You name it! And what makes this even more excellent is the way the story reads, as, like I said, it is still laid out in a linear manner, meaning each section is meant to be read after the last. You aren’t supposed to “pick” which story to read, but go through them in the order they are presented. Through this method, you see the real genius of what Cashore has done: with each storyline, the reader has more knowledge of all the elements at play. We see characters move in and out of a scene and have more knowledge of what is going on than Jane herself, because we’ve seen that side of the story already, through a previous choice. It’s the kind of book that I’m sure is even better the second time, catching all the small details that are woven throughout all of these various outcomes. It’s simply brilliant.
Beyond this, each genre was compelling. I had my favorites, but I was impressed by Cashore’s ability at them all. The horror story line was particularly disturbing. And, not surprisingly, I enjoyed the sci-fi and fantasy plotlines the best. Most of all, I spent a ridiculous amount of timing wondering which choice I would have made, and then dissecting which plot line would be the best to choose in order to increase one’s chances of eventually encountering ALL of the mysteries, but still avoiding the horror one. Seriously, I’ve continued to think about this for like a week even after finishing the book.
And this is why I’m so baffled by the book’s general reception! Cashore’s writing is as strong as ever. Her characters are compelling, and anyone who’s read “Bitterblue,” specifically, shouldn’t be shocked by her more introspective character in Jane. And yet, on Goodreads, there are so many low stars! And look, I’m all for that everyone has their own opinion, and I’m not here to tell anyone that they’re wrong, but I do find it surprising. I think much of it is simply due to the fact that here we have an author who wrote a beloved fantasy trilogy years ago, and everyone’s been waiting with baited breath for her to re-emerge with her newest YA fantasy work, preferably in the same world. And then we got…this. Which is so completely different than the books we all loved from her before. But if an author is allowed only to write what we loved and were comfortable with before, how limiting would that be? If we only expect one kind of book from any given author simply because they wrote a good one in that mode in the past, we are doing not only them, but ourselves, a massive disservice.
I don’t particularly think this result was anyone’s fault. It’s definitely not Cashore’s, who is free to write whatever calls to her. And I can even understand fan disappointment from those who so loved “Graceling” and were wanting more of the same (for the record, I, too, loved “Graceling” and “Fire” and have my hardback copies stored lovingly on my shelves). But I do challenge readers to strive against the tendency to limit authors and our own reading habits to only the “known” and comfortable. You never know what you’re missing out on. And, let me say, had some of those DNF reviews managed to get past the first half of the book that was not the sword-and-sorcery fantasy they had expected, they might have found themselves choosing a path that included its own delightful fantasy world!
Rating 9: A criminally under-appreciated book and the answer to “what would an adult ‘chose your own adventure’ novel look like?”
Book: “A Conspiracy in Belgravia” by Sherry Thomas
Publishing Info: Penguin Group, September 2017
Where Did I Get this Book: bought it!
Book Description: Being shunned by Society gives Charlotte Holmes the time and freedom to put her extraordinary powers of deduction to good use. As “Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective,” aided by the capable Mrs. Watson, she’s had great success helping with all manner of inquiries, but she’s not prepared for the new client who arrives at her Upper Baker Street office.
Lady Ingram, wife of Charlotte’s dear friend and benefactor, wants Sherlock Holmes to find her first love, who failed to show up at their annual rendezvous. Matters of loyalty and discretion aside, the case becomes even more personal for Charlotte as the missing man is none other than Myron Finch, her illegitimate half brother.
In the meanwhile, Charlotte wrestles with a surprising proposal of marriage, a mysterious stranger woos her sister Livia, and an unidentified body that surfaces where least expected. Charlotte’s investigative prowess is challenged as never before: Can she find her brother in time—or will he, too, end up as a nameless corpse somewhere in the belly of London?
Review: So this is the book that I bought when I was only halfway through the first one. That’s how much I was loving what Thomas was laying down in her re-imaging of Sherlock Holmes as a young, “fallen” woman named Charlotte. With this method, I was able to put down the first book and immediately pick up the next, and I think this worked in the books’ favor, though, let’s be real, I would have loved it in whatever manner I had gotten to reading it in.
The story picks up almost immediately after the events of “A Study in Scarlet Women.” Charlotte Holmes is still very much just figuring out what her new life will be like living the charade of marketing her services through her fictionalized ailing brother, “Sherlock.” Of course, there are those who know the truth.
Mrs. Watson, Charlotte’s business partner and roommate. Livia, her sister who remains stuck in their unhappy childhood home and whom Charlotte dreams of rescuing one day through her own financial independence. Inspector Treadles, the police detective who worked with her on her first case, and is less than enthused by the fact that the “man” he had esteemed for so long turned out to be a woman, and that, through this revelation, he’s had to confront the reality that his own wife might also be more than she seems. And, of course, Lord Ingram, Charlotte’s childhood compatriot with whom she has a challenging relationship, due to his unfortunate marriage.
This story takes this already large cast of characters and blows it up even further. Most importantly, Lord Bankcroft, the Mycroft of this world and Lord Ingram’s brother, makes an appearance. In the first book we learned that he had made an offer of marriage to Charlotte in the past. And here, we see that he is just as determined, regardless of her role as “Sherlock.” In fact, as an incentive to her consideration, he provides her with several puzzles from his own work in the field of secrets and mysteries. And of course, one turns out to be more than it had seemed. On top of this, Charlotte has a new client: Lady Ingram.
I’m already halfway through a typical word count for these reviews, and I’ve just finished laying out the bare bones of all that goes on in this story. Not only is the mystery just as compelling and complicated as the first, requiring me to again page back and forth a few times to keep track of things, but the interweavings of all of the characters’ relationships and interactions became even more complicated.
I loved that we got to meet Bankcroft in this book and explore the role that he plays in this world. He also provides a legitimate temptation to Charlotte, offering her a doorway back into “acceptable society.” Even one that could offer her some of the same mental challenges that she enjoys in her current position. Through these interactions and her tackling of this case, Charlotte really has to confront what she expects and wants from her life. It’s not as simple as it could be, either, as Charlotte is not simply thinking of herself, but of her two sisters who are languishing in the unhappy and neglectful home of their parents, and who depend on her for any hope of future freedom.
I also enjoyed the continuing expansion of Charlotte’s skillset. As I said in the first review, I appreciated the fact that this version of Sherlock doesn’t come with all of his/her skills already in place. Too often versions of Sherlock seem so over-powered with their supreme abilities in literally everything that they become practically unbelievable. Charlotte is brilliant, but she still has much to learn. I particularly enjoyed the introduction of self-defense lessons taught by none other than Mrs. Watson herself, who, living a life as an actress in the more seedy parts of the world, has a firm foundation under her belt in this area. Charlotte also begins exploring the world of lock-picking and disguise, two other typical areas of expertise for a Sherlock character.
The mystery was also particularly intriguing. As I said, it was just as complicated as the first, something that I find incredibly satisfying. But because we are getting at these mysteries through more personal connections to Charlotte and those around her, I felt that it was even stronger. The mystery she stumbles upon through Mycroft’s work obviously ties into her interactions and future with him. And the mystery brought to her by Lady Ingram clearly affects her tenuous relationship with Lord Ingram. How can she maintain her friendship and loyalty to one while respecting the secrecy of a woman who has come to “Sherlock,” a man wholly unconnected with her husband?
Obviously this is further complicated by the underlying tremors of romantic feelings that exist between Lord Ingram and Charlotte. This aspect of the story is still gradually building, and as a fan of slow-burn relationships, I have loved this part of the story. The author doesn’t hand-wave away the fact that he is married and has children. He chose his wife completely on his own, and he loves his children, regardless of his failed marriage. The realities of these things are solid and not to be easily done away with simply due to his complicated feelings for Charlotte. I love how the author has handled this so far, and that gives me full faith to trust where she is leading readers in future books.
This is going to go down as yet another book that I’ve read recently that is even better than the first. If you enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories, particularly re-imaginings of the classic character, than this is a must for your next read! I’ve now become quite spoiled, reading both books back to back, so the wait for the next book, due to come out sometime this year, looks like it will be quite tortuous.
Rating 9: Fantastic! Both this, and the first one, are early runners for my “Best of 2018” list already!
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