Bookstagram – Page 18 – takes two to book review

Review: Nocturna by Maya Motayne

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Alexis:

I hate to say this, but I didn’t love Nocturna by Maya Motayne. However, Nocturna gave me a great writing idea, and Motayne even responded to me on Twitter! She’s super sweet and I think she has a lot of promise.

Nocturna has a great set up: a prince and a girl who can steal faces team together in a Latin-inspired world.

But here’s the thing: I’ve read this book before. Maybe not specifically this book, but all of the elements that tie it together. I found the magic system to be pretty generic: a mix of bending from Avatar: The Last Airbender and the magic from Harry Potter, only with Spanish verbs instead of Latin.

I’ve also read this plot over and over. Alfie, the prince, releases a darkness in order to save his best friend and vows to fix his wrongdoing to save his kingdom from destruction. He and Finn, the face stealer, team up in order to break a girl out of prison to help them.

My other biggest issue with the book is that it’s too “tell-y.” You know, the “show don’t tell rule.” Well, unfortunately, the first half of the book tells way too much. The dialogue sounds stilted because every character talks in chunks of exposition. While the beginning of the book was promising, the book starts to drag pretty quickly. At least 100 pages could’ve been cut from the book to make the plot flow faster.

The dialogue got better as the book went on, but it still wasn’t great. I think “quipped” is now my least favorite dialogue tag.

I also think that “maldito,” or “damned” in Spanish, was really overused.

I liked Alfie as a character, but other than that, I had a really hard time caring about the characters. For that reason, I found myself skimming the last ¼ of the book.

Unfortunately, this book wasn’t for me. But I have high hopes for Motayne, and I hope she grows as a writer for the next book in the series.

VERDICT: 2 stars

Review: My Sister the Serial killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

June 20, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Anna: My Sister the Serial Killer is as addictive as everyone promised it would be. Both the book and chapters are incredibly brief, but Braithwaite still manages to pack a huge punch. I had fun with this picture, because the contrast between sweet appearances and deadly intentions is an important player in this book.

The book examines the lengths that sisters and family would go to protect each other. Set in modern day Nigeria, it opens as Korede gets a call from her sister, Ayoola, who says she’s accidentally killed her boyfriend and asks Korede to help her clean up. We learn that this happened before, not only once, but two times. The book goes on to examine the relationship between mental health and social media, the long-term effects of physical and mental abuse, and women’s roles in a patriarchal society. I also loved the twist at the end!

Check out the book for yourself! I highly recommend it:

VERDICT: 4 stars

Review: Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson

June 16, 2019June 17, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

This is a beautifully written, important book that deserves more attention. When Mary was eight, she killed the baby that she and her mom were babysitting…allegedly. After she’s released from jail as a teenager, Mary lives in a group home where she is harassed endlessly by the other girls. Meanwhile, she can’t remember what happened that night that baby Alyssa died- the night that landed her in jail for years.

This book is about a lot of things. It’s about a mother’s responsibility to her child, it’s about the corrupt prison system and the state, it’s about the mistreatment of blacks in the justice system. I loved Mary as a character who wants to take the SAT and go to college, who loves her mother and finds the strength in her to trust those trying to help her despite everything that’s happened to her.

Sometimes I find it hard to connect with YA because it can be superficial. This is not the case at all with Allegedly. Mary is a character in a position where she can’t even attend high school or afford an SAT prep book. It’s a perspective I’m not used to reading in YA. This is a heartbreaking and eye-opening read that I recommend to everybody.

VERDICT: 5 stars

Book Mail!

June 10, 2019June 10, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Alexis: We love book mail! We’re so thankful to have won We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faaizal and China Dream by Ma Jian through Bookstagram giveaways.

I’m roadtripping to my grad school city tomorrow to finalize my apartment. I can’t wait to have my own space and get a ton of writing done!

I’m looking forward to cracking one of these books open on the drive.

Review: Swamplandia by Karen Russell

June 8, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

This book was on my TBR for a while, and it was one of the many that I picked up in the $1 section of The Strand when I lived in New York. Unfortunately, Swamplandia and I didn’t get along.

While I was intrigued by the Swamplandia theme park as a character, I felt like the whole thing was a big metaphor for mental health that I didn’t understand. There are some parts I did like, like the quirky and flawed Bigtree family and its members, who are all very different from each other. Kiwi’s perspective was my favorite, and by far the most interesting.

I also didn’t like the way Russel handled some aspects of this book…Native American appropriation, anyone? I found much of the plot confusing but also kind of pointless, particularly what happened to Ava in the woods. And can someone please tell me what the red seth represented? Womanhood?!

Ultimately, I felt this is something I feel I didn’t understand and didn’t care to figure out.

VERDICT: 3 out of 5 books

Review: The fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

June 4, 2019June 8, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Recently I was in the mood for some fantasy, and this did the trick! I loved this atmospheric book!

Warning: this book is really confusing at first. It’s hard to explain even after reading it. It plops you right into this strange world and runs with it, and it took me a couple hundred pages to really feel like I had any sort of grasp of what was going on. You don’t know how the different perspectives relate. Enough people warned me of this that I knew I had to keep going, and it was Jemisin’s power of characterization–specifically the fact that I both empathized with and was so frustrated with Essun–that hooked me from the start.

The Fifth Season has a little bit of everything–badass women, love triangles that don’t suck, violence, great worldbuilding, and a prevailing theme of overcoming otherness. This is a book that flips typical elements of epic fantasy on its head–namely its general lack of black, female, and queer characters–all of which have ample representation in The Fifth Season. Specifically, in The Stillness, the people with the power have dark skin and Essun repeatedly feels self-conscious about her lighter, silky hair. The Fifth Season also successful utilizes multiple perspective and different points of view, including the second person, something I never would have thought possible.

This book is fantastically unique and I’d highly recommend it. I’m looking forward to reading the second book in The Broken Earth Series!

VERDICT: 4 out of 5 books

Anna’s Currently Reading

May 28, 2019June 12, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Here’s my current read, Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, and my new couch! My apartment truly feels like a home now. You guys chose this book as my next memoir in the beginning of the month, and I cheated a bit. I loved Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones, so I’m excited to learn more about Jesmyn Ward’s life!

It was super tough going to back to work after that long weekend, wasn’t it? What book is helping you get through this week back?

Review: Gracefully Grayson by Ami Polonsky

May 21, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Book Review: Gracefully Grayson by Ami Polonsky

Gracefully Grayson is a great example of the magic of middle grade fiction. Grayson’s parents died in a traumatic car crash, and he now lives with his aunt and uncle and cousins. Grayson has always wanted to be a girl. He knows that acting this way means getting in trouble and getting bullied, so he just daydreams. That is, until he tries out for the part of Persephone, the lead part in the school play.

This book is heartbreaking because Grayson feels lost both in his gender identity and an outsider in his adopted family. Grayson is caught between many adults who believe they are acting with his best interests in heart. When Grayson’s teacher, Mr. Finn, casts Grayson as the lead female role in the play, his Aunt Sally thinks Mr. Finn overstepped his boundaries. In their own household, Uncle Evan disagrees with his wife’s actions, and hints that Grayson’s aunt and uncle might know more about Grayson than they let on. There are lots of opinions from the adults in Grayson’s life about who he should be, which made me think critically about a parent’s role in their children’s identity.

At the end of the book Grayson is still using female gender pronouns, but wears clothes meant for girls. I can’t speak from experience of course, but I think this is a believable account of a young transgender child’s journey. I say this because I also recently read George by Alex Grino and it had hardly any conflict. Everyone was instantly accepting of George and her transition, which is great, but didn’t feel realistic.

This book is everything beautiful about middle grade fiction and more. Grayson faces bullying, he’s outcast by a friend, and he’s ridiculed for his identity. The end of the book also doesn’t wrap everything up perfectly but points Grayson in a hopeful direction, which I think is important in middle grade fiction for a slightly older audience, like this one.

VERDICT: 4 books

Review: We are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

May 20, 2019May 20, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

“What if I don’t give a shit about the world?”

“I’d say that’s pretty fucking sad.”

“Why?”

“Because the world is so beautiful.”

We are the Ants is a difficult book to explain and to “place”. This is technically “science fiction”, and I say technically because it blends reality and fantasy. I love that it defies genres! The reader is left to wonder what is real and what is not. I’d warn potential readers not to the read the book jacket copy, because I want them to enjoy the mystery and surprise.

Trigger warnings for self harm, sexual assault, and suicide. This is a BIG part of the book so please don’t read this if that’s something too close to home.

I felt such a connection to the characters, particularly the narrator and protagonist, Henry, a teenage boy who is faced with a big decision: should he save the world or allow it to be destroyed? When we meet him, he’s overcome with grief over losing his boyfriend. I was so invested in his story as he comes to terms with his grief and mental instability and battles many forms of bullying and harassment. Henry’s grief and mental health manifests itself in a totally original way that I thought worked so well.

This is also just “angsty” enough to be believable but not shallow or stereotypical in any way, a problem I sometimes have “drama” in YA. We are the Ants depicts horrific reality of mental health. This book doesn’t shy away from critically examining the demands our society has on teenagers. The amazing part is that Hutchinson explores all these themes through the unique lens of alien abduction and the impending apocalypse.

We are the Ants is one of the best YA novels I’ve read in awhile! I highly recommend it!

VERDICT: 5 books!

Review: A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas

May 11, 2019May 11, 2019 Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Alexis:

Spoilers Below!

Overall, A Court of Wings and Ruin, the third book in the A Court of Thorns and Roses trilogy, was a 4 star read. It was more along the lines of the first book than it was the second book. However, I did have a list of issues with it that I will explain below!

I’ll start with what I liked. Maas’ writing shines when she writes action scenes. I loved reading the war scenes. I thought she did a great job with their pacing and descriptions.

I also loved that Rhysand fully transformed in the final battle. I was like, “Heck, yes!”

I also enjoyed having all the High Fae in the same scenes. Their histories and abilities were very interesting all pooled together.

As for what I didn’t like as much, for some reason, Maas’ writing is just a little bit worse in this book. She has a tendency to lean towards the occasional cheesy line, but this book seemed to bring her cheesiness out just a little more.

This book felt like Maas had been rushed, that she had a deadline that her publisher wanted her to keep, so she wrote this book quickly. And then it wasn’t edited enough. The pacing felt slow. This book is about war, and war does drag on, but the plot doesn’t flow as nicely as it did in A Court of Mist and Fury. Everything just felt slowed down.

And…the sex scenes did not fit as well in this book as they did in A Court of Mist and Fury. They felt cringey and all of them were basically a carbon copy of each other. There’s also a scene where Rhys tells Feyre, “You smell like blood,” after they fought in a battle. And then they have sex. Hmm. I don’t know about that.

And, my biggest issue. I am all for diversity, but not just for the sake of diversity. Mor’s reveal as bisexual was a complete cop-out from Maas. Mor’s been hiding that she’s bi…for 500 years?? Just so she won’t hurt Azriel’s feelings?? Her hiding this from her family for that long did not feel true to character.

As for the plot, I had issues with the fact that Feyre is insanely powerful and yet she HARDLY FOUGHT. Obviously, Rhysand has significantly more war experience, but Feyre is his equal, so they should’ve fought together. Her mention of, “You know, I don’t really like war,” was not a good enough reason for her not to fight.

As for the whole new cast of characters at the end, this also felt like a cop-out from Maas. When Rhysand asked why they couldn’t find them, their answer was, “Oh, I guess we hid too well, so even our friends couldn’t find us.”

If they had been such good friends/allies during the last war, they definitely would’ve found a way to keep in contact with Rhysand and his crew.

As for my last complaint, Armen should’ve died. Rhysand coming back from the dead made sense, but there’s no way Armen could’ve come back after all that.

Despite my issues, I enjoyed the book overall! I definitely think the trilogy is worth a read, just be aware that it isn’t perfect.

VERDICT: 4 stars