Tag: coming of age

Review: Red Demon by Sill Bihagia

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An ARC package of Red Demon sits on a wall

Alexis:

Happy October 1st! 🎃

Thanks so much to author Sill Bihagia for sending me this beautiful ARC package.

Red Demon was released on September 16th! It’s a science fiction/fantasy book with found family and themes of coming of age, resilience, and redemption. It has a mystery woven throughout and some really interesting worldbuilding.⁣ The bioengineering concept was fascinating. 

Overall, I enjoyed this one and appreciated Jesse’s resilience and will to survive. I liked reading from his POV, and my favorite part of the story was him forming a connection to his adopted brother, Asher. 

My main critique is that the pacing in the first half dragged, as Jesse growing up and finding his new family took up a large part of the book. I love a good coming of age story, but since this was advertised as a fast paced book, I expected just a little more action and for the plot to move along faster; the actual plot didn’t start until the second half of the story. Additionally, the ending felt too abrupt.  

VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐/5

I have several more ARCs to read, and I look forward to digging into them this fall!

If you want to learn more about Red Demon, check out the synopsis below.

Synopsis:

On an isolated planet where unity is as engineered as its people, Jesse seeks the truth behind the slaughter of his family-starting with the immortal who spared him.

A century ago, two human lines nearly wiped each other out rather than acknowledge their shared humanity. But when Jesse’s mining town is slaughtered under mysterious circumstances, it’s clear ancient bigotries are still alive, and rebels have access to some magic or tech capable of wide-scale genocide.

The Red Demon bloodied her swords in that massacre-a bioengineered immortal left over from that century old war. Jesse expected her to be upholding his empire’s fragile peace, not killing her own. But Jesse is too optimistic and stubborn to break. Better days are coming, and he’s willing to take on an immortal to protect the life he’s rebuilt among the ashes.

Faruhar, the so-called Red Demon, is not the mastermind Jesse expects. Her fragmented mind is ravaged by guilt over crimes she cannot remember committing, and a code impressed on her by a few kind people she cannot forget.

Review: The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward

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Trigger warnings for sexual assault, drug and alcohol addiction, and domestic and physical abuse

“They are not ours, the stars/and have never been.”

Anna: Let me just say that when I bought this in the $1 section of Strand, I didn’t know that it was a memoir told through poetry. I am not a huge fan of poetry, but The Terrible blew me away. Most of it is told through narrative style poems, which helped make it less scary for newbies like me. But there were some really beautiful poems in here that were much more experimental in form than I was not expecting to enjoy. 

Yrsa grew up with her ultra religious grandparents in Northwest England. We follow Yrsa’s childhood, her troubled relationship with her mother, her love for little brother, and her journey into adulthood and ultimately finding herself as a poet and a person. Be warned–this is extremely dark and in some ways is largely the story of Yrs’s struggle with drug addiction. I could not stop reading and flew through it. I especially loved her relationship with her little brother. My only complaint is that I think the final poem tied everything together a little too nicely.

Maybe I’ll read more poetry now?

VERDICT: 4 out of 5 books

Review: The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister

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Alexis: The Scent Keeper is my kind of book: character-driven, lyrical, unique, and full of sensory imagery. 

The story centers around Emmeline, who grows up on a remote island with her father, and she has never seen another living soul. Her father has a magic machine that can capture scents, and he stores these scents in bottles. But after a life-changing event, Emmeline has to face the outside world, her past, and her family. 

Bauermeister’s writing is beautiful, and often leans towards magical realism. I love how she writes about scents and Emmeline’s relationship with scents: “The smell of cardamom preceded the woman into the room, soft and comforting. A memory opened–one of the scent-papers from a red-wax bottle, with the fragrance of a sultry place that had wound itself around me, kissed my skin. Cardamom, my father had said. They hide like treasure” (66). 

This is a coming-of-age story, and I really enjoyed learning about Emmeline as she learned about herself, too. I especially enjoyed reading about her connection to the natural world around her and here struggle to connect with other people and find her place in the world. But as I said, the star of this book is how the author fashions a world that revolves around scents. 

My only critique is that I wish the ending had come more full circle; it felt a little abrupt and unfinished. 

I highly recommend giving this a read!

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VERDICT: 5 stars

Review: Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

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Anna: Read 12/13/18

I have mixed feelings about this book. I really enjoyed the beginning, which follows siblings Rachel and Nathaniel after their parents mysteriously leave them in the care of a guardian. I love a good coming-of-age story. The beginning is also when the relationship between the characters had the most tension and intrigue.

I then struggled through the second half of the book, which focuses on Nathaniel uncovering his mother Rose’s backstory. This is where I lost interest, as the narrative completely lacked the suspense of the first half. The complete lack of characterization of Rose, coupled with the lack of empathy we feel for her as a reader in the first half when she leaves her children without explanation, made me uninterested in her life and career.

Something that surprised me about this book, and something that I liked, is the fact that it is set in the near-immediate aftermath of World War II. Going into reading this, I had assumed it was set during the war. I enjoy World War II fiction, but feel that this is an important and overlooked time period, especially since none of the characters were soldiers so it featured no war scenes.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed this more if the second half mimicked the dark and atmospheric half of the first. I just didn’t connect with any of the characters, besides Nathaniel. I just couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, feel any connection to their lives. And I particularly disliked the twist about the Darter near the end. The story also left a couple loose ends, which felt like an attempt at depth; however, it just further highlighted how undeveloped the characters felt to me.

VERDICT: 3 out of 5 books