Review: Voyage of the Damned

Voyage of the Damned by Frances White
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Sorry to say that this book, after all its immense hype from the BookTok machine among others, was a very quick DNF for me. I could only get about 30-40 pages in before I figured out I wasn’t gonna vibe with it, especially thanks to Ganymedes as the protagonist. I get that this is a society full of privileged little shits, and he’s the least privileged, from the least of the twelve lands, dealing wuth a father who hates everything about him from his weight on down, with no actual Blessing (because everyone’s doing the Encanto thing these days), but still, he’s so bloody obnoxious with his attempts at being a First Person Smartass that it makes it impossible for me to care about him. I will give him credit where it’s due and compliment his use of bisexual finger guns on the very first page, but that’s about as much grace as I can extend this book, because after that it was too much of a misfire for me to continue.

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Review: Spell of the Sinister: A Fairy Godmother Novel

Spell of the Sinister: A Fairy Godmother Novel by Danielle Paige
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though the fairytale retelling trend in YA has largely died out since its 2010s heyday, leave it to Danielle Paige to keep it alive. And it'll probably have a resurgence in the coming years thanks to the success of Wicked (though let's be real, Dorothy Must Die should've had a movie adaptation first.) But here, Paige brings her latest fairytale retelling to its conclusion with a fast-paced dual-POV-rivals story that, while not specifically Ozian, nevertheless wears its Wicked influences on its sleeve as proudly as one can expect from Paige. She's stuck to her stylistic guns pretty well over the years, and I'd really love to see where she goes next after this, because she's one of the few YA authors I'm still regularly keeping up with these days for many reasons.

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Review: Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A coworker at my new job recommended this one after he saw me reading some Brandon Sanderson. I'd heard of Steven Erikson before, but never really paid attention to his work up till now. Here, I can see that he's sort of the missing link between Guy Gavriel Kay's parallel worlds, inspired by real history, and the diverse but grimdark fantasy settings of the new millennium. Thankfully, this book isn't really all that grimdark, but I can sort of see where it serves as a blueprint for the likes of Mark Lawrence or Joe Abercrombie, even more so than the obvious GRRM influences. It is decidedly...mid, overall, but the worldbuilding (helped by Erikson's professional experience in anthropology) is very interesting, with the different regions in this empire paralleling real world history but not exactly on a one-t0-one basis. I've already got the second book on order at the library in Vancouver, so we'll see how much further I get in this series in this new year.

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