Review: The Women's War

The Women's War by Jenna Glass
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: rape, institutional sexism.

For this ARC, the last one I finished in 2018, I'm going to give it a 2.5 and generously round it up to a 3. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot going for it, especially with its promised #MeToo and #Resistance-era political relevance. But it does have this unfortunate and persistent feeling of half-bakery underlying the whole thing for a ton of reasons. Namely, the generally slow pace, brought on by the story's tendency to wallow in long and interminable scenes when we really want to see more machinations. I mean, the book is called The Women's War, but for all the war we get in this book, that title might've been better off saved for one of the sequels.

My 2018 Favorites: The Fourth Annual Pinecone Awards!

Welcome back, Pinecones, to the latest in my annual end-of-year Pinecone Awards! As always, it was a real roller-coaster of a pop-cultural year, with more than a few surprises in store as I worked to compile the rankings. Though I thought I'd be keeping the Special Salute back and saving it for more of an every-three-years thing - since I introduced the Special Salutes with the Third Pinecones last year - I had to bring them back, because they make it so much easier to honor more deserving creations. And what a bunch of deserving creations there were, especially the Special Salutes. And the first-place finishers.

Hopefully this year will be the last that I'll be waiting in vain for my own books to be published alongside the likes of those who win Pinecones year in and year out. But until then, let's start, as is traditional, with the best books of 2018!

Review: Queen of Air and Darkness

Queen of Air and Darkness by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I do believe Children of Blood and Bone has finally been brought down from #1 to #2 on the Pinecone Awards list, and that's on the strength of this book, the biggest one Cassie Clare's published for us yet. Almost 900 whole pages! And as the conclusion to her best series yet, The Dark Artifices, it's also every bit what we expect a big-name YA finale to be. I'm talking on a level with Deathly Hallows, Mockingjay, or Allegiant here. And that was already to be found in the previous series finales Clare's given us, City of Heavenly Fire and Clockwork Princess. Both of those were epic in size and scope and in feels...but here, she's well and truly outdone herself.

Review: Words of Radiance

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Almost four years after my first read of this book, I'm now back with my second read-through of Words of Radiance - or, as I'm tempted to call it after its working title, and one of the other in-universe big holy texts, The Book of Endless Pages. Taking thirteen days in total to read through this book instead of (somehow) speeding through it in three like I did before was, as with the first book, a major boon. Now I get to remember a lot more details, things that had passed out of my brain in the almost half-decade since I first read this one. A lot more of the ongoing missions and travels of Kaladin and Shallan, the impending apocalypse...it's like, how is this gonna be a ten-part series again? What more could Sanderson write in the remaining eight? Well, yeah, it's supposed to be two five-part segments, but still. There's so much more to look forward to, and I'll be reading that which Sanderson's already given us soon - Edgedancer and Oathbringer, of course. And in the meantime, I'll wait and see if my friend at work figures out which book on the table nearest the door is the source of the character of Lift.

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Review: Skyward

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The latest from Sanderson takes us back into the YA sci-fi realms he visited for three whole books on The Reckoners - this time playing out a little more like Ender's Game, if Ender were a girl and instead of Battle or Command School, Spin's got an entire planet to defend already. If she weren't so afraid, not only of having to deal with her father's cowardly reputation, but also that her own fear will sink her chances of defending her people from Formic-esque alien invaders and their jellyfish-shaped ships. I believe this one will be starting another trilogy here? If so, it's off to a bit of a rocky start, I'm sorry to say. The book does move fairly fast for one of its size - it certainly doesn't require nearly as much slow savoring as, say, The Stormlight Archive - but it also tends to feel its length and then some, because the plot is largely very predictable for anyone who's read Ender's Game as many times as I have.

Review: White Cat

White Cat by Holly Black
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think I've finally found a Holly Black book I super-enjoyed the first time around...and I think a lot of that owes to the fact that this one would make a great comp title for my own literary agent querying. That is, if I query again. I seem to have run out of literary agents, though there could be more that I haven't tried yet.

But the point that I'm really trying to make here is that there's quite a few surface similarities between this book and mine. Like, the fact that it's an alternate world with more than a bit of influence both paranormal and X-Men. And that they have two-word titles with the first word being a color. And that the main character is a teenage boy attending a boarding school, with sleepwalking problems, and a hell of a lot of family secrets to discover. For bonus points, Holly Black even writes Cassel as an example for TVTropes' "Ambiguously Brown" page, not unlike how I do with Alex Snow - though Alex's darker skin owes to Moroccan and Maltese blood instead of Indian like for Cassel.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse - Hate To Say It, But Did Sony Actually Get One Right?

***THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW.***

Well, this was a terrible movie to watch...

...on a day when I'd been fighting off some kind of tension headache.

What, did you think I was going to do what a small number of assbutts did by contributing to the loss of this movie's perfect 100 on Rotten Tomatoes? Perish the thought. Though the two Amazing Spider-Man movies remain my favorite Spidey-films ever purely because of how much Andrew Garfield mirrored my own personality - and because of how much he and Emma Stone, as Gwen Stacy, formed the platinum standard for fictional ships for my own writing to aspire to - Into the Spider-Verse, our film debut for numerous incarnations of webslingers including the great Miles Morales, is a smaller, and yet bigger, masterpiece of cinematic awesome.

Also: god DAMN, I wish those kicks of his weren't so spendy IRL.

Review: The Way of Kings

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A pretty good little piece of epic fantasy, this Sanderson book - which so many at my work have been reading lately, and I'm very glad I picked it up again for the first time in almost four years because, frankly, I'd forgotten most of the details up to now. Rereading this first book of Sanderson's magnum opus, though, it's easy to see just how well-thought-out his work really is. Maybe there's a lot of stuff that's a little harder to follow because some characters keep coming and going maybe once every 600 pages if we're lucky. But such is the nature of the genre, and such is the nature of how much this book benefits from not being speed-read - even if I found myself often reading the book while drinking coffee right before work. (Don't kill me, Sanderson. I know that's against your religion, but it ain't against mine, lol.) Next up, tomorrow will begin my first reread of Words of Radiance. Stay tuned.

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Review: The Supervillain and Me

The Supervillain and Me by Danielle Banas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Was it SwoonReads where I first read this manuscript in its original form, or Wattpad? Either way, I'm very happy to see it finally published formally. Though I'm not happy to admit that it took me this long to finally pick it up again after its publication. Probably owing to the fact that my library, for whatever reason, never picked up this book and I had to special order from Sacramento like so many others.

Review: Someday

Someday by David Levithan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the official follow-up to Every Day - notwithstanding the semi-concurrent companion piece Another Day - Someday continues the story of A and Rhiannon and especially of Nathan, with a few new additions - namely, some random POVs of a very diverse group of people scattered here and there throughout the narrative. And also, X. Dear God, X. This guy was such a piece of work, taking A's unique body-surfing abilities and gaining a certain measure of control over them - and also being pretty callous and cruel in his treatment of the bodies he gets ahold of, and those he meets as well. And then he also talks up a good game about needing to maintain one's own humanity in a world where, by his very existence being so transient, he doesn't really get the chance to have any. He almost makes me want to come to his side just because of how much I relate to his feelings of disconnection from any kind of sense of soul.

And then there's A, who may not live in any body for more than 24 hours, but still has the most soul of all. I'd rather grow up to be A for sure.

Review: An Assassin's Guide to Love and Treason

An Assassin's Guide to Love and Treason by Virginia Boecker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel like there's been a bit of an uptick in books rooted in the historical conflicts of Protestants and Catholics in Elizabethan England lately. Earlier this year, Nadine Brandes gave it a magical twist in Fawkes, and now, Virginia Boecker makes her return to alternate-historical YA with a less magical but still pretty fun read. Though Assassin's Guide is a little more slow than I'd like at times, and the two POVs of Katherine and Toby are sometimes a little hard to tell apart, it's got a lot going for it too. Queer rep, for one thing - Toby's bi, and very deep in the closet because of how rampantly phobic pretty much all of Europe was back then. Crossdressing rooted not only in spycraft, but also in the first production of Twelfth Night - and with Shakespeare himself as a major supporting character, possessed of a sharp wit and more than a touch of madness. And of course the big reason, I think, why Elizabethan English religious strife has been so popular in lit and film lately: a reflection of today's bitter political divisions. This book is pretty standalone, but there's for sure room for a sequel, which I'd be happy to read if it ever happens.

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Review: Archenemies

Archenemies by Marissa Meyer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

*sees the cover*

*SCREAMS IN FANBOY*

My favorite cover of 2018. Hands down. No question. Period.