Review: Cloak of Night

Cloak of Night by Evelyn Skye
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The conclusion to Evelyn Skye's second YA fantasy duology picks up pretty organically where its predecessor left off, working to stop the existential threat we were left with last year before it can subsume the kingdoms across the sea. This time, of course, the stars of our show have a few more secret powers on their side - namely, Daemon's newfound ability to well and truly be one with the wolves, even if it may come at the cost of his humanity. Though the story runs a tad bit slow at times, it's a damn fine ending if ever there was one, bittersweet - but sweet for sure in all the ways, even when Skye raises the stakes into the stratosphere right at the last minute. To this series, I now say ave atque vale, and hope to see more awesomeness in the future from one of the Bay Area's best and brightest.

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Review: Aru Shah and the Tree of Wishes

Aru Shah and the Tree of Wishes by Roshani Chokshi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I feel kinda bad that I've now read two Rick Riordan Presents titles out of publication order, having gotten around to Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe first. But this here third book of the Presents lineup's third series proves to be just as rollicking and awesome a Hindu-rooted adventure as its two predecessors, and with a much less foreboding title after the scary ones of the first two - though you know Chokshi isn't going to slacken on the stakes in the second half of her series, not by a long shot. Not when there's only a few days to get to the Tree of Wishes, not when there's the threat of betrayal from within, and not when...yeah, she done did cliffhang us readers again, and something fierce this time. That last line, more than any other, sticks with me and makes me unable to wait for the fourth and final novel next spring...

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Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ten years on from the release of Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins has returned to the world of The Hunger Games with the long-awaited prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - a prequel that, I'm sure none of us have forgotten, provoked a storm of controversy when it came out that the protagonist of this one would be a much younger Coriolanus Snow in the year of the 10th Hunger Games, rather than the Haymitch-centered prequel most of us (myself included, not gonna lie) were hoping for.

Review: House of Earth and Blood

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, it's been a minute since Sarah J. Maas gave us a good book to read - which is for the best considering how much she kinda burned herself out around 2015-18 or so with as many as 1500 pages of content each year. Now, she's back with her first book in a year and a half, and her first explicitly aimed at an adult audience - this, of course, despite how ACOTAR was an NA series that ended up on the YA shelves because NA fantasy pretty much doesn't exist. It's also her first urban fantasy as opposed to her previous high fantasy settings, set in a totally fictional city that reads like Gotham by way of The Dresden Files, with our protagonist being half-Fae and surrounded by pretty people of all sorts of supernatural persuasions. So, really not a lot different from a lot of Maas's previous books, but the high-stakes mystery elements - and the pretty well-done slow-burn romance, one of her best yet (I say this as someone whose ships were, in all her previous series, torpedoed with extreme prejudice) - help the 800-plus pages fly by pretty fast. And at least those 800 pages, I read in ebook format this time since my library was closed - which also means no none of those stupid Bible-thin pages. Hopefully Maas won't burn herself out trying to write the inevitable sequel to this one by 2021...

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Review: The Last Odyssey

The Last Odyssey by James Rollins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first time I'm reading a Sigma book in electronic form, due in large part to the pandemic shutting down all the libraries. But perhaps having the ebook helped me savor this one a little more strongly, and boy, does Rollins deliver as awesomely as ever on this, the fifteenth novel of his signature series. Scarily apocalyptic as we focus on a new group of villains bound and determined to reawaken the horrors of the past, The Last Odyssey upends all the rules of history and exploration, showcasing theories that perhaps the Greeks, as well as the great societies of medieval Islam, got to explore a hell of a lot further than the Mediterranean around which they first sprung up. As far as Greenland, with the possibility that Tartarus may have been hidden in a near-isolated corner of Morocco's High Atlas Mountains...and all that time, the scientific advances of those societies have been waiting to be rediscovered. If only forces like the Apocalypti weren't coming for them. The stakes have never been higher for Sigma before, but holy God, nothing beats that terrifying cliffhanger right at the end...

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Review: Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe by Carlos Hernandez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sal and Gabi return in Carlos Hernandez's second gloriously geektastic, multiversally madcap misadventure under the Rick Riordan Presents lineup, and no cacaseca (I seriously can't get enough of that phrase, judge me), it's just as cuckoobananas bonkers fun as the first book and then some! Everything I could've ever wanted in a book when I was Sal's age - and, let's be honest, I kinda still do. Heck, there are scenes I've written in my own YA, or even adult, projects that can rival a page or two of Sal's narrative in the toilet humor department, but this book defeats them all with a talking toilet that even deploys amazingly well-timed BLEEP!s to censor all the cussing, whether it's in English or Cuban Spanish. And that's just one aspect of this Into the Spider-Verse grade wild story, guaranteed to thrill readers of all ages. But especially the kids. They're gonna need those thrills.

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Review: Docile

Docile by K.M. Szpara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A couple of the higher-ups at my work recommended this book to me, and remembering a queer vampire short story that Szpara wrote once before that I thought was pretty good, I decided to give it a shot. And seeing a lot of my friends' reviews here, and others, I think I'm...going to give this one as middle-of-the-middle a rating as I can. Quite honestly, I'm really torn. Don't get me wrong, Szpara does make some good points about the nature of consent, and the insidious ways capitalism keeps itself up generation after generation - hell, that the very premise of this book is that there's a whole industry of people forced to sign themselves up as slaves to clear their parents' debt, and that their parents may have been Dociles themselves...oh, and of course the idea that there's a 1% of the 1% who use Dociline to make the other 99% of the 1% their friends too, that's pretty sickening. Of course, there are also reviews from black readers criticizing the use of slavery as a plot device (not to mention the fact that one of the most prominent black characters is named Onyx, like...seriously, Szpara? Then again, as much as I hate to say it, the reason I read Szpara's vampire story was because it was recommended by the notoriously messed-up Tristina Wright back when I was foolish enough to follow her on Twitter...) Honestly, I think what this book really boils down to is that it's a slavefic (and I think I saw someone say somewhere that it's basically a Harry/Draco slavefic, which is soooooooo not my ship), and I'm just too vanilla for that, I guess. Even though it did make good points, especially about consent. But it's just not five star worthy for me, I'm sorry to say.

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Review: The Kingdom of Back

The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let's try a little something different from Marie Lu, one that's definitely not sci-fi but still gets speculative with a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane kind of story. To read the author's note, though, and see that this was Lu's first attempt at writing, and the story that got her her agent, it's very nice to see the seeds of where she began her career. And while this book may not have made her name the way Legend did in 2011, 2020 would be an even better year for The Kingdom of Back, that fantasy kingdom invented by Nannerl Mozart, sister of Wolfgang (or Woferl, as she calls him.) I kinda get a few vibes of S. Jae-Jones' Wintersong duology as well, but less reliant on romance because of its emphasis instead on a unique sibling bond. Given how well Lu's written sibling bonds before - just look at Day and Eden - it's no surprise that Nannerl and Woferl prove to be such close children, two sides of one coin. And yet, chances are you probably didn't know Nannerl existed until you read this book. God knows I didn't, which is a shame - and precisely Lu's point. It's for sure an unusual work from this author, and yet it still makes all the sense that Lu was the one who gifted us with it.

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