Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Title:  Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Author:  Laini Taylor

Genre:  YA Fantasy

 

From Goodreads: Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil’s supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she’s prone to disappearing on mysterious “errands”; she speaks many languages–not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she’s about to find out.

When one of the strangers–beautiful, haunted Akiva–fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

 

What I thought:

Let me start out by saying how much I truly enjoyed this book.  The writing is fabulous and the story is captivating.  I couldn’t put it down and read it in a day!  Now, I happened to be recovering from bronchitis at the time and couldn’t move or even speak without coughing so I didn’t have much that I could do besides reading!

Karou lives in two worlds.  She is a 17 year old art student in Prague who entertains her friends and classmates with the magical world she captures in her art journals.  A world that is filled with fantastical creatures and magical stories of the WIshmonger and the wishes he trades in.  Except this world isn’t imagined at all but the world orphaned Karou grew up in with these fantastical creatures as her guardians and family.  Karou travels through magic doorways between the human world and the chimaera world until one day these doorways are all destroyed, cutting her off from her family.

I love Karou.  She is just fun!  She lives this magical life (blue hair that grows out of her head that way, wish beads that she wears around her neck, her drawings of another world) and has mastered the art of telling the truth without telling the truth!  It is fun to watch.  She is the perfect heroine for this story.  Independent.  Sarcastic.  I love her.

Akiva is wonderful as well.  He is a beautiful warrior angel who finds Karou in the streets outside one of the doorways into the chimaera world.

The one and only thing I struggled with in this book is the quick change in directions the author took in the developing relationship between Karou and Akiva.  One moment they are enemies and fighting in the streets of Prague with the intent of killing each other; the next they are in love.  I would have liked to see a bit more time taken to develop trust and a relationship.  I think one might need more time to trust a man that just stabbed you!  That said, it really didn’t detract from my love of the story.  I can’t wait to read more!

Review – The Raven Boys

Title:  The Raven Boys

Series:  The Raven Cycle #1

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

Genre:  YA Paranormal

Source:  Library Digital Audiobook

 

From GoodReads:  “There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.”

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before

What I thought:

I know we have been told not to judge a book by its cover.  However, when I saw this book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, I knew I had to read it.  Once I read the cover, it was done.  I struggled over wanting to buy the book because I was there to pick up a school book for one of my children and this one was not in the budget.  But after a search on my library’s digital website, I found an audiobook and immediately downloaded.

I love audiobooks but I find the narrator makes or breaks the book.  This narrator was perfect.  He had exactly the right voice and style to make listening to Maggie’s magical words a treat!

Maggie Stiefvater has written a very detailed novel with a complicated, layered storyline that is full of mystery.  Throw in a long list of characters and I often find myself lost and flipping back though previously read pages to figure out what I missed.  This is a task impossible with an audiobook.  However, I didn’t need it!  Somehow Maggie managed to not only write her story beautifully but also clearly.  I never felt lost or confused at who a character was.  Maggie’s characters are so unique and well developed that it was easy to keep them straight.

Blue Sargent comes from a family of women psychics.  She lives with her mother, Maura, and aunts, Persephone, Calla and Neeve.  While Blue herself isn’t psychic, she somehow acts as a magnifier for others’ psychic abilities and phenomenon and is often brought along for this reason.  Which is how she finds herself at a small church on the “corpse road” with Neeve on St. Marks’ Eve, waiting for the soon-to-be dead to walk by, and it is also how she, a non-seer, sees her first spirit, an Aglionby boy named Gansey, who falls to his knees in front of her.   Blue has been told her entire life that she is destined to kill her true love with a kiss, and she learns that the only reason she should be able to see a spirit on St. Mark’s even is that he is either her true love or she will somehow kill him.

Blue soon finds herself involved with Gansey and his fellow Raven Boys, as students of Aglionby Academy are known, as they follow an obsessive quest of Gansey’s involving ley lines and a long dead king.  Blue’s friendship with the four boys is sweet one.  Elegant, wealthy Gansey, Adam, the scholarship earner who is keenly aware of the affluence of his friends, dark mysterious Ronan, and quiet Noah, all invite Blue in and include her in their adventure.  The hint of romance takes a back seat as friendship and trust grows which I love as way too many YA books careen into a desperate love at first sight pace.

I completely enjoyed this book and upon finishing, immediately went and downloaded the sequel, The Dream Thieves, also on audiobook.  I’m interested in seeing where this story goes!

Review – Angel Burn

Title:  Angel Burn (released in the UK as Angel)

Author:  L.A. Weatherly

Genre:  YA Fantasy

Pages:  449

 

Synopsis (from Goodreads)

They’re out for your soul.
And they don’t have heaven in mind…

Willow knows she’s different from other girls, and not just because she loves tinkering with cars. Willow has a gift. She can look into the future and know people’s dreams and hopes, their sorrows and regrets, just by touching them. she has no idea where this power comes from. But the assassin, Alex, does. Gorgeous, mysterious Alex knows more about Willow than Willow herself does. He knows that her powers link to dark and dangerous forces and that he’s one of the few humans left who can fight them. When Alex finds himself falling in love with his sworn enemy, he discovers that nothing is as it seems, least of all good and evil.

What I thought:

Angel Burn turns the concept of benevolent heavenly beings upside down.  The angels in Angel Burn are far from the loving guardians or the heavenly warriors that we have come to expect in books where they are featured.  These angels are not here to further the wellbeing of human kind but rather to take from them for their own benefit.  Honestly, I have mixed feelings on the angel turned life energy sucking being feeding off the humans who worship them.  However, even though I like angels to be, well, more angelic, Weatherly did a good job of building a mythology that worked for her story.

Our heroine, Willow, is an independent, competent teen who has come to terms with the fact that she is different.  To start with she lives with her aunt and catatonic mother.  Also she is, and always has been, psychic.  This ability has helped her to earn money to help care for her mother.  While giving a reading to a classmate, Willow learns about the existence of real angels as well as their ‘relationship’ with humans.   And the angels learn about Willow.

Alex is a hired assassin, an angel killer.  Working alone, he receives a call alerting him to an angel that needs to be taken care of.  When he arrives at the given address, what he finds isn’t an angel, exactly.  But she isn’t exactly human either.

I liked this couple.  Rather than the love at first sight that is often a part of YA novels, Alex and Willow don’t hit it off immediately.  They are leery of each other but recognize that, at least at the moment, they need each other.  And I do mean they needed each other.  Willow is not a dependent, whiny girl who needs her guy to fight for her, nor is she a warrior in the body a teenage girl.   Willow and Alex’s relationship is allowed to grow as they learn to trust each other.

While the concept is certainly out of the box, the plot was fairly simple.  There was a number of scenes that contained page turning action, however, there wasn’t a whole lot of twists and turns or jaw dropping revelations that I didn’t see coming.  Still the story was engaging and enjoyable.

Overall, Angel Burn was an enjoyable read.  I liked it enough that I will be adding the second book in the series to my TBR list, although I am not running out immediately to find it.

Top Ten Tuesday – My ‘Gateway’ Books.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week’s topic is:  The Top Ten “Gateway” Books/Authors In My Reading Journey

My childhood (Books that turned me on to reading)

 Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White.  I was given Charlotte’s Web when I was in first grade for Christmas.  I immediately began reading this book to my father, and then my mother, and then anyone who would listen to me.  It was the first book I remember reading ‘by myself’ which probably meant I partner read with the adults in my life.  But I was reading and I was proud!

Judy Bloom’s books  (Tales of a 4^th Grade Nothing,  Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great and the rest of the Fudge Books)

The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis.  I absolutely loved these book!  I read them over and over and over again.  I wanted to ride Aslan!

High School and College Years

The Flowers in the Attic  Books by VC Andrews.  I don’t remember what my fascination was with this books but I read them all.

Stephen King    I loved reading pretty much anything he wrote but I think Pet Sematary and It were the ones that got me hooked.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice.  I got into these books in College and loved them.  Although once Lestat became a rock star, I kinda lost interest.  Rock star?  Really?

As an adult:  (Books that turned me on to different genres)

Harry Potter Series by JK Rowlings.  This was my first trip back into reading children/young adult books.  My kids were still too little for them when I started the series but I really enjoyed them.  I discovered magic and fantasy were fun reads as well.

The Twilight series by Stephanie Meyers  Say what you will about this series, but I really enjoyed it.  It was my next step into YA Fantasy.

The Giver  by Lois Lowry and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins were the books that got me interested in reading Dystopian Fiction.

Garden Spell by Sarah Addison Allen was my introduction to a genre with in adult fiction called Magical Realism.  I love it and have since read a few books in this category but Sarah Addison Allen has stayed my favorite author in this genre and Garden Spells is my favorite book that she has written.

 

It’s Monday, What are you reading? 3/24/14

It’s Monday, what are you reading is a weekly meme hosted by Book Journey.

Last week I finished:

This week I’m reading:

Next up?  I’m not sure…  Maybe:

Or Maybe

Or maybe even something else…

Review – The Glass Casket

Title:  The Glass Casket  

Author:  McCormick Templeman

Genre:  Young Adult, Fantasy

Pages:  352

(From Goodreads)  Death hasn’t visited Rowan Rose since it took her mother when Rowan was only a little girl. But that changes one bleak morning, when five horses and their riders thunder into her village and through the forest, disappearing into the hills. Days later, the riders’ bodies are found, and though no one can say for certain what happened in their final hours, their remains prove that whatever it was must have been brutal.

Rowan’s village was once a tranquil place, but now things have changed. Something has followed the path those riders made and has come down from the hills, through the forest, and into the village. Beast or man, it has brought death to Rowan’s door once again.

Only this time, its appetite is insatiable.

My thoughts:

I picked this book up at the library the other day for no other reason than I liked the cover and the description on the back of the book intrigued me.  It read:

“The funeral should have been the next day.  The town elders would have performed the rites, her body, pale as marble, covered in the funerary shroud.  She should have been laid up on Cairn Hill, stones carefully arranged atop her resting spot.

These were the thing that ought to have been done.  But sometimes things don’t go as planned.”

So with this to creepy introduction to go on, I started reading this novel without any real idea what it was about.  I wondered if it might be a retelling of Snow White, after all she had a glass casket.   Within a short time a number of deaths occurred seemingly by an animal and a young, raven-haired beauty in a red cloak arrived in the village.   Little Red Riding Hood?   While I didn’t know what to expect, the story that followed was certainly not it.  However, it did stay wonderfully true to the feel of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

The Glass Casket started out rather slow. Much of the first few chapters are spent meeting various villagers and setting up the superstitions, customs and beliefs that exist in the community.  Superstitions surrounding fairies, goblins and witches.  In these early chapters, five of the king’s men had been killed in the mountains outside of Nag’s End, Rowan’s peaceful village.  The villagers, with the exception of Rowan’s best friend, Tom, believe that an animal, maybe a wolf, was to blame for the gruesome deaths.

About a third of the way through the novel, the story really takes off.  One brutal murder follows another and no one seems safe; this author certainly doesn’t have a problem killing off endearing characters!  Suspicions and accusations begin to fly in the village and the plot twists keep coming.  I found this to be a creepy mystery, complete with magic, fantasy, suspense, family secrets, and a tragic love story.  The best part was that I didn’t see the end coming!  I love it when an author can weave enough elements through a story to keep me guessing until the very end.

Overall, The Glass Casket is a wonderfully creepy fairy tale that I completely enjoyed!

Teaser Tuesday – The Glass Casket

This teaser comes from The Glass Casket by McCormick Templeman.

“That was were they found the first body.  It took all of Tom’s restraint not to cry out when he saw the snow mingled with frozen blood and bone.”  pg 12

“He kissed her one last time, and then with fingers light as feathers, he closed her eyelids, and lay back in the snow waiting for it not to be true.  Waiting to wake up from the dream.”  pg 109

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.

Review – The Graveyard Book

Review:  The Graveyard Book

Title:  The Graveyard Book

Author:  Neil Gaiman

Genre:  Young Adult, Fantasy

Pages:  312

(From Goodreads) After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod’s family . . .

Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his New York Times bestselling modern classic Coraline. Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, The Graveyard Book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages.

What I thought:

A friend of mine had been encouraging me to read this one for quite some time yet I resisted.  A boy raised in a graveyard by ghosts?  It just sounded too dark for my liking.  Finally he gave me his copy and I had no more excuses.

The book starts out with a toddler who wanders out of his house and into a graveyard, escaping a brutal killer and the fate of the rest of his family.  A ghost couple, Mr. and Mrs. Owens, take the child in and, along with the diverse group of characters residing in the graveyard, raise him as their own.  Little Nobody Owens, or Bod for short, is safe from the man who wants to kill him provided that he remains in the graveyard and under the protection the graveyard and its inhabitants provide.  However, eventually Bod must leave the safety of his graveyard home and go out into the real world.

I think my favorite part of this book is the characters Neil Gaiman created.  Mr. and Mrs Owens were charming.  Silas, Bod’s vampire guardian, and Miss Lupescu, Bod’s werewolf teacher, were among my favorite characters.  And of course, Bod, having grown up among the dead, has a need to seek out the living, which eventually draws him out of the graveyard and into danger once again.

If there was anything to pick on at all I would say that the reason, Nobody and his family had been targeted by the man Jack was not explained as well as I would have liked, however it did feel resolved at the end.  And this certainly didn’t distract from the imaginative and creepy mystery!

This book was wonderful!  It was dark and macabre and still sweet.  I loved it!   I am excited to share this story with my children; I can see this one keeping the attention of my 10 year old!  No easy feat!