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review

Review: Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge 
young adult fantasy published by Balzer + Bray on 28 January 2014
first book in the Cruel Beauty Universe series

Since birth, Nyx has been betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom—all because of a reckless bargain her father struck. And since birth, she has been training to kill him.
Betrayed by her family yet bound to obey, Nyx rails against her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, she abandons everything she’s ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, disarm him, and break the nine-hundred-year-old curse he put on her people.
But Ignifex is not at all what Nyx expected. The strangely charming lord beguiles her, and his castle—a shifting maze of magical rooms—enthralls her. As Nyx searches for a way to free her homeland by uncovering Ignifex’s secrets, she finds herself unwillingly drawn to him. But even if she can bring herself to love her sworn enemy, how can she refuse her duty to kill him?
Based on the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Cruel Beauty is a dazzling love story about our deepest desires and their power to change our destiny.

THE RATING


THE REVIEW

I was almost fully taken with Cruel Beauty. Almost. Despite having been thoroughly intrigued by the enchanting prose, I found something to be amiss from the story. A dark, intricate tale with a gorgeous cover, and raving responses; Cruel Beauty managed to deliver, but not all the way. 
Once, the kingdom of Arcadia was fairly ruled by the heirs of Claudius. But then one night, the Gentle Lord descended upon Arcadia. The Sundering confined Arcadia to exist under a parchment dome for all of eternity. Adorned with a sun that doesn’t come close to the real one and demons that lurking in every shadow to keep the fear instilled, the only hope of Arcadia is Nyx Triskelion.
Leonidas Triskelion struck a bargain with the Gentle Lord and it turned out to be Nyx’s undoing. The bargain left him without a wife and two daughters; out of which one’s fate was sealed from birth. Brought up with a mindset to marry the Gentle Lord, Nyx has been taught the unusual Hermetic arts to nullify the hearts of four elements hidden in the castle, in order to collapse the castle.
But Nyx is indecisive and that indecisiveness goes a long way in overshadowing everything else about her. She resents her father for never loving her, loathes Aunt Telomache for involving herself in their lives, and envies her clueless sister, Astraia. So in her yearning for love, the barest of attention that Shade bestows on her is enough for her to get taken with him. 
Trapped into living a life she didn’t ask for, Nyx spends her days exploring the castle looking for the hearts. However, the haunting castle never stops magically changing its inner layout which I found quite enthralling. Her failed attempts to kill Ignifex has only intrigued him to the point of respecting her efforts. He sees the malice in her heart which weakens Nyx. Haunted by his own demons with no memory of how he got there, Ignifex is enchanting but only to a limit.
Cruel Beauty promised to be dark and vicious with a blend of Greek mythology with a fairy tale retelling. I enjoyed reading the intricate details despite a very complex plot. But I found Nyx to be more clingy and repetitive than wicked and the romance to be off putting. Between an overwhelming world-building and an underwhelming ending, Cruel Beauty turned out to be a majorly bland read with some truly exceptional parts.

THE QUOTES

‘And you. Leonidas’s sweet and gentle daughter, with a world of poison in your heart. You fought and fought to keep all the cruelty locked up in your head, and for what? None of them ever loved you, because none of them ever knew you.’
‘They said that love was terrifying and tender, wild and sweet, and none of it made any sense. But now I knew that every mad word was true.’

Review: No One Else Can Have You by Kathleen Hale

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KHNOECHY

ABOUT THE BOOK

No One Else Can Have You by Kathleen Hale
young adult contemporary mystery published by HarperTeen on January 7th, 2014

Small towns are nothing if not friendly. Friendship, Wisconsin (population: 689 688) is no different. Around here, everyone wears a smile. And no one ever locks their doors. Until, that is, high school sweetheart Ruth Fried is found murdered. Strung up like a scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield.

Unfortunately, Friendship’s police are more adept at looking for lost pets than catching killers. So Ruth’s best friend, Kippy Bushman, armed with only her tenacious Midwestern spirit and Ruth’s secret diary (which Ruth’s mother had asked her to read in order to redact any, you know, sex parts), sets out to find the murderer. But in a quiet town like Friendship—where no one is a suspect—anyone could be the killer.

 

THE RATING


THE REVIEW

No One Else Can Have You is a weird book with a strikingly odd main character, Kippy Bushman, who lives in a safe, small town of Friendship, Wisconsin. I am aware of all the did-not-finish, what-a-slut-shaming-main-character, what-the-hell-is-this-book responses out there and you know what? All that coupled with a healthy dose of unease is a vital part of No One Else Can Have You. The reader has to be far out of reach of their comfort zone to read and enjoy it. So yes, I understand why certain readers couldn’t stomach all the weirdness that is this book but I could, I did and it was gruesomely aweinspiring.

The prologue of No One Else Can Have You sets such an eerie-ingly horrifying tone and that it’s hard not to cringe. It’s about a page long and it’s so disturbing that it still lingers in the back of a mind.

Kippy Bushman is equally flawed in her judgements of people and in her awkward quirkiness. She’s obviously had a hard time connecting to people which is painful to read about. Her relationship with her father, Dom, is as bizarre as the turtlenecks that are her standard choice of apparel. Ever since she lost her mother to madness and imminent death, Kippy Bushman has been overly attached to her only friend, Ruth Fried. But now that’s Ruth dead, well, that is enough of a push she needs to spring out of her shell.

You see, despite being her best friend, Ruth did not like Kippy. Sure, she appreciated their friendship but she wasn’t as good a friend as she seemed to be. And to know that your only friend in the world thinks that you’re pathetic to the point of being nauseous and that she was having an affair with a much older man only a few hours before that friend’s funeral is all just too much for Kippy to comprehend. So it’s no wonder that the funeral turns out to be the disastrous of funerals which is only the beginning.

Kippy is torn between her grief and anger over Ruth’s murder. With Ruth’s parents out of town, Dom acting all soft towards her and Ralph being his usual video-game-obsessed-neighbour-slash-second-best-friend, she turns to Davey to express her unease over Ruth’s murder and her alleged killer. Davey is Ruth’s brother back from war in Afghanistan minus one of his fingers. The almost-strangers-to-each-other duo manage to work together for a while before it all goes even further south for Kippy. With an avenging Sheriff, an overprotective father and a sketchy old lawyer, Kippy has her hands full trying to sort it all out but with a history of unintentional violence, it’s only a matter of time before the nice small town of Friendship turns on her for supporting the alleged killer.

No One Else Can Have You is a debut that tests the reader with its endless oddities. Despite being a little wary to pick it up, the disturbing prologue and the engaging mystery soon replaced my wariness. Whilst there are some things that are somewhat ridiculous and a bit exaggerated, they’re dismissible enough to not affect the murder mystery. Guessing and trying to sort out the mystery coupled with a dark and looming tone of the story makes the experience of reading No One Else Can Have You unique. If you are into reading an uncomfortable, character-driven story of a strange girl with her stranger behavior who’s too cool for a town named Friendship, this book is for you.

 

THE QUOTES

‘But I guess I still have this fear that you can catch invisible things from other people. That someone else’s insanity can creep under your skin and fry your brain.’


‘Now that I’m awake, I think of what I’ve lost and tumble between utter remorse and childlike hope, anxiously retracing all my wrong moves and praying for time machines. Part of me imagines clawing through the jungle surrounding this asylum, and crawling all the way to Davey—playing some kind of love song on a guitar outside his window, even though I don’t know how to play guitar—and begging for his company back.’

Review: The Promise of Amazing by Robin Constantine

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RCTPOA

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Promise of Amazing by Robin Constantine
young adult contemporary romance published by Balzer + Bray on December 31st, 2013

Wren Caswell is average. Ranked in the middle of her class at Sacred Heart, she’s not popular, but not a social misfit. Wren is the quiet, “good” girl who’s always done what she’s supposed to—only now in her junior year, this passive strategy is backfiring. She wants to change, but doesn’t know how.

Grayson Barrett was the king of St. Gabe’s. Star of the lacrosse team, top of his class, on a fast track to a brilliant future—until he was expelled for being a “term paper pimp” Now Gray is in a downward spiral and needs to change, but doesn’t know how.

One fateful night their paths cross when Wren, working at her family’s Arthurian-themed catering hall, performs the Heimlich on Gray as he chokes on a cocktail weenie, saving his life literally and figuratively. What follows is the complicated, awkward, hilarious, and tender tale of two teens shedding their pasts, figuring out who they are—and falling in love.

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Review: Vicious by V. E. Schwab

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Vicious by V. E. Schwab
adult fantasy science fiction published by Tor on 24 September 2013

A masterful, twisted tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers.
Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.
Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

THE RATING


THE REVIEW

What one can expect from a story that begins in a cemetery is not much. It is a place where guilt begs to be buried right along with a body. But this story does not begin in a cemetery because it is no ordinary story. Vicious is something else. From the cover where Victor stands for the last act in the show of his own making to the last page when the curtain is finally, finally drawn.
Yet, certainly, nothing good can come out of Victor Vale making his way through the Merit Cemetery. But then it isn’t about good; it was never about good. Vicious is a battle between bad and worse akin to the quote placed at the beginning of the book; before it all even begins.
Victor Vale and Eli Ever are heroes in their own stories. Perhaps each of us are. But when their stories are blended together, it turns them into villains fighting to end each other. To triumph. To come out as a better villain. ‘One devil to lure another.’
Victor Vale is a keen judge of character; able to distinguish the tiniest deviation. It is due to this keenness that Victor is fascinated by Eli. Eli, who is so good at hiding what Victor recognizes as easily as one does his own reflection. Eli, who is so good at masking his arrogance into charming confidence, his brilliance into intelligence and his sharpness into mere curiosity. Victor wants to know what goes on in Eli’s mind more than he wants to efface the books written by distinguished psychologists, the Vales.
Every misstep brings Eli’s terrible secrets closer to the surface and he is aware that Victor sees that surface more clearly than anyone ever has. But more than that, Eli needs an audience for his brilliance and Victor is willing to deliver. Where Victor brings out the darkness in Eli to feed his own curiosity, Eli makes Victor feel invisible. Not because Victor is always a step behind Eli, but because that makes Victor the first loser.
From then on, it is intriguing to see Eli winning at the game that Victor invented, the goal of which is to leave a mark. They were both damaged from the beginning but that is what made them invincible, intensified their damage, removed their fears and turned them into vicious men because ‘there are no good men in this game.’

The game that ends until only the winner is left standing.

THE QUOTES

‘By the time the first bell rang, signalling the end of Victor’s art elective, he’d turned his parents’ lectures on how to start the day into: 

Be lost. Give up. Give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be lost And then you will not care if you are ever found. 

He’d had to strike entire paragraphs to make the sentence perfect after he accidentally marked out ever and had to go on until he found another instance of the word. But it was worth it. The pages of black that stretched between if you are and ever and found gave the words just the right sense of abandonment.’

‘I watch you, and it’s like watching two people.’

Review: Pawn by Aimee Carter

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ACP

ABOUT THE BOOK

Pawn by Aimee Carter
young adult dystopia published by HarlequinTeen on November 26th, 2013
first book in The Blackcoat Rebellion series

You can be a VII. If you give up everything.

For Kitty Doe, it seems like an easy choice. She can either spend her life as a III in misery, looked down upon by the higher ranks and forced to leave the people she loves, or she can become a VII and join the most powerful family in the country.

If she says yes, Kitty will be Masked—surgically transformed into Lila Hart, the Prime Minister’s niece, who died under mysterious circumstances. As a member of the Hart family, she will be famous. She will be adored. And for the first time, she will matter.

There’s only one catch. She must also stop the rebellion that Lila secretly fostered, the same one that got her killed and one Kitty believes in. Faced with threats, conspiracies and a life that’s not her own, she must decide which path to choose—and learn how to become more than a pawn in a twisted game she’s only beginning to understand.

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