Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo

Book Title: Rule of Wolves

Author: Leigh Bardugo

Series: King of Scars #2

Date Started: August 6th  2024

Date Completed: September 20th 2024

Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Romance

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

As part of my quest to finish the unfinished book (and TV) series on my list, I picked up the second book in the King of Scars duology having left it behind after the first book came out. I'm glad I did; this book was a nice ending to the saga that began with Shadow and Bone, appropriately bittersweet with a feeling of real weight and accomplishment within the world.

King of Scars wasn't my favourite, and seemed to wander around various places, characters and themes and struggled to decide what it wanted. Rule of Wolves similarly had its focus on a few too many places - particularly with merging two series like the Netflix adaptation decided to do. There were several references and cameos that didn't amount to much, and it's fun but actually ends up making the world feel so much smaller. That all being said, it was nice in the moment and this second book definitely had a better-realised plotline and resolution.

I wouldn't mind visiting Ravka again, but I would love a story that doesn't feel the need to incorporate existing books and characters and can breathe by itself. I very much look forward to whatever Bardugo has cooking up that is new too.

Blue Door Venture, Pamela Brown

Book Title: Blue Door Venture

Author: Pamela Brown

Series: Blue Door #4

Date Started: June 30th  2024

Date Completed: July 25th 2024

Genres: Adventure, Mystery

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

My saga of finishing off childhood book series continues, this time with a classical and beloved one: the Blue Door Theatre books. These stories, like Ballet Shoes and Malory Towers, sustained me as a child on magical dreams of the theatre and performance. It was a joy to revisit the world - and poetically at a time when I had finally been able to fund a creative passion project with a team of wonderful people; arguably the thing these stories had persuaded me to do all those years ago.

I loved the road-trip mystery plotline, it felt fresh from what I remembered of the series. Touring around all these places in the UK, many of them now familiar to me, as the characters discovered them for the first time was a lot of fun - and of course incredibly wholesome. As with a lot of old-fashioned ensembles, the characters blur a bit and end up divided into the boys and the girls. But Brown has such a respect for all kinds of hard work that the relationships and drive of the friends and siblings felt genuine and inclusive. For a book from the 40s, it holds up impressively well.

While it was a shorter story in the series, I massively enjoyed reading it. I can't believe there's only one left (she says after not reading this book for a decade) - and with Maddy, the only real protagonist, no less.

Godkiller, Hannah Kaner

Book Title: Godkiller

Author: Hannah Kaner

Series: Fallen Gods #1

Date Started: June 23rd  2024

Date Completed: June 30th 2024

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure

Quality Rating: Five Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Star

Final Rating: Five Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you to NetGalley for this ebook for review ◆

Simply put, Godkiller is the most fun I've had with a fantasy adventure in ages. While it started off feeling like a gender-bent Witcher-y story (no harm in that), it quickly fell into its own stride and become unputdownable.

There are compelling characters with solid motivations and unravelling stories; such lush, grim and spectacular worldbuilding; each scene hums with a special little magic. This book envelops you almost instantly and stretches as far as the eye can see. But the one thing that warmed my heart the most was some of the best diverse representation (featuring diversity as normal, beyond a token character trait) I've ever read.

The final twist I did see coming, but even so the ripple effect it had across the ensemble retains its impact. I cannot wait for the second book (I already bought it before turning the last page of this), and hopefully more to come down the line to spin this tale even further for us to enjoy. There's a lot still simmering away and as Kaner puts it in her acknowledgements, this is just the beginning.

The Phoenix and the Firebird, Alexis Kossiakoff & Scott Forbes Crawford

Book Title: The Phoenix and the Firebird

Author: Alexis Kossiakoff & Scott Forbes Crawford

Date Started: June 15th  2024

Date Completed: June 23rd 2024

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Historical

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you to NetGalley for this ebook for review ◆

The Phoenix and the Firebird is charming, enjoyable and good fun. A welcome addition to the pantheon of children's fantasy, it weaves traditional storytelling from Russia (our protagonist's homeland) and China (where the story is set).

While the inspiration is directly explored through various mythical creatures from Chinese and Russian folktales, I wouldn't say the cultural identity was necessarily pivotal in these story elements; they could just as well have been any other fantastical creature or even completely new inventions and have served the same purpose. It also felt like we learn a lot more about Russian myth than we do about Chinese. It was a shame that the unique roots and meanings of the creatures were lost in the action, but didn't take away from the fun of the story.

The modern narration style often found in contemporary children's books (and Young Adult) never fails to ruin the immersion of a period setting. This book does well for the most part of balancing the stakes and threat with an appropriate sense of danger and security. It was only towards the final act when Lucy faced the villain that things just felt a bit too silly to buy into. At the moments when real, genuine danger and fear came into play, the book decides to fall into nursery rhyme rather than accessibly deal with the subject matter.

The True Queen, Zen Cho

Book Title: The True Queen

Author: Zen Cho

Date Started: June 2nd  2024

Date Completed: June 15th 2024

Genres: Historical, Fantasy, Adventure

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Two Star

Final Rating: Two Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you to NetGalley for this ebook for review ◆

I suspected I was going to fins The True Queen challenging; I didn't like the first book despite its popularity, but in my quest to finish as many series as I can this year I decided to try again. Unfortunately, no luck.

It's been a while since I decided not to finish a book - but three sittings and 20% through was enough for me on this one. While the narrative is happy doing its own thing, it's the tone that is all over the place. Are these supposed to be children's books? They have the token 'charm' and confusingly dramatic but unthreatening stakes that I'm familiar with in stories with that audience - but there are lots of things that make me think it's probably intended for an older audience. I can see a lot of similarities with the writing of Diana Wynne Jones, but this just doesn't have that sparkle for me.

With all that being said, these vein of stories show we're clearly fascinated with updating and imaginatively evolving this setting. From Carnival Row to Bridgerton to The Paper Magician, regency (ish) England has become a popular backdrop to introduce diversity and a worldview beyond Europe into old fashioned modes of storytelling. It's an exciting opportunity to see through new eyes that I'm enjoying in some other forms, but this one just feels childish to me.

Queenslayer, Sebastian de Castell

Book Title: Queenslayer

Author: Sebastian de Castell

Series: Spellslinger #5

Date Started: May 5th  2024

Date Completed: June 2nd 2024

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Action

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

The Spellslinger books are always fun and easy reads with enough excitement and political sleight-of-hand to keep things interesting. I got the first two books for review years ago, so it says something that I'm still reading.

Queenslayer takes place in a new corner of this story's world, with Kellen and Reichis mostly going it alone. While this has happened before, I find it quite impressive that de Castell moves his protagonist away from the established ensemble to explore completely new things. It's something that almost never happens, with authors avoiding resetting the narrative, I suppose to stay in their comfort zone with relationships the audience already love. But Spellslinger is more exciting for it - and it's one of the reasons I keep coming back. Each book feels like a new story - properly, rather than the next chapter of the same old thing.

With that being said, I do ironically have to contradict myself by saying that each book's plot does end up quite repetitive - Kellen and Reichis insist they aren't friends until one of them gets attacked and fears for the other's life, Shalla turns up to gloat, we're introduced to the next female interest that Kellen studiously avoids making a love one, and we get roughly 5-6 daring escapes from insurmountable odds. The changing scenery is ultimately necessary to keep a familiar story fresh, but if it works it works!

Waking Gods, Sylvain Neuvel

Book Title: Waking Gods

Author: Sylvain Neuvel

Series: Themis Files #2

Date Started: April 6th  2024

Date Completed: May 5th 2024

Genres: Science Fiction, Mystery

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

I remember really enjoying the first novel in this series when I got it for review a few years ago. It was science fiction but with a strong current of mystery, archaeology and human-centric drama and philosophy. Waking Gods wasn't quite the same experience with me, but I expect this is because it suffers from middle-book-in-a-trilogy syndrome. That and it features the most unconvincing ten-year-old ever.

The transcript style of prose gets old pretty quickly and loses its novelty - it worked pretty well in the first book but I think it loses the story's momentum once the mystery element has gone. The problem with just dialogue is also that you lose a lot of the subtext, and writers are tempted to be far too direct with their characters' intentions. And once you have more than two characters in a scene it becomes hard to follow - not the best for a character-based novel!

The story in general felt like filler; lots of weird mysterious events are introduced but with no real progress on uncovering them. I guess it'll be revealed in the final book of the trilogy, but it's always a frustrating experience to have to read a whole book with no satisfying resolutions and just more questions. I hope the final book balances the action and talking across both the plot and the relationships a bit more, so we get satisfying answers to the alien mysteries and vaguely convincing closure to the characters' arcs.