Book Review — The Bone Houses

Title: The Bone Houses
Author: Emily Lloyd-Jones
Genre: YA Fantasy
Pages: Hardback, 335
ISBN: 978-0-316-41841-6
Opening Lines: "The gravedigger's children were troublemakers. They chased chickens through the neighbors' yards, brandishing sticks like swords, claiming that the fowl were monsters in disguise."

Rating

"Seventeen-year-old Ryn cares about only two things: her family and her family's graveyard. And right now, both are in dire straits. Since the death of their parents, Ryn and her siblings have been scaping together a meager existence as gravediggers in the remote village of Colbren, which sits at the food of a harsh and deadly mountain range that was once home to the fae. The problem with being a gravedigger in Colbren, though, is that the dead don't always stay dead.

"The risen corpses are known as bone houses, and legend says that they're the result of an old curse. When Ellis, an apprentice mapmaker with a mysterious past, arrives in town, the bone houses attack with a new ferocity. What is it that draws them near? And more importantly, how can they be stopped for good?

"Together, Ellis and Ryn embark on a journey that will take them into the heart of the mountains, where they will have to face both the curse and the deeply buried truths about themselves. Equal parts classic horror novel and original fairy tale, The Bone Houses will have you spellbound from the very first page."

~ Jacket copy

Bānhūs is a kenning in Anglo-Saxon literature meaning "body".  It is one of the many kennings made famous by Beowulf.  When the title of this novel caught my attention while I was teaching Beowulf to sophomores.  (It was not actually during the middle of class.  Rather, Viking and I were wandering through Barnes & Noble, and I squealed with excitement while repeating  "bānhūs" over and over again . . .)

Book Review — Hunted

Title:  Hunted
Author:  Meagan Spooner
Genre:  YA fairy tale retelling, fantasy
Pages:  Hardback, 374
ISBN:  978-0-06-242228-6
Opening Lines:  "We always know before the change comes.  When the storm approaches, we feel it in the thickness of the air, the tension in the earth awaiting the blanket of snow."

Rating

"Beauty knows the Beast's forest in her bones—and in her blood.

"She knows that the forest hold secrets and that her father is the only hunter who's ever come close to discovering them.

"But Yeva's grown up far from he father's old lodge, raised to be part of the city's highest caste of aristocrats. Still, she's never forgotten the feel of a bow in her hands, and she's spent a lifetime longing for the freedom of the hunt.

"So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. Out in the wilderness, there's no pressure to make idle chatter with vapid baronessas . . . or to submit to marrying a wealthy gentlemen.

"But Yeva's father's misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he'd been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance.

"Deaf to her sisters' protests, Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory—a curse valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva's heard about only in fairy tales. A world that can bring her ruin—or salvation.

"Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast?"

~ Jacket copy

One of my coworkers suggested this book over winter break.  Unfortunately, despite teaching English, it is hard for me to sit down and commit to a book.  (Is it possible to lose my love of reading because of my job?)  Even though I have been reading through horror—slowly!—my husband suggested taking a break before I hit burn out.  Somehow, this book kept coming back to the forefront of my mind.  

For those of you who know me or have been following this blog, fairy retellings are one of my guilty reading pleasures.  However, many of them seem to follow similar tired tropes found in ever other retelling or YA romance and never dare to try something new.  Even though this is a Beauty & the Beast story, Meagan Spooner takes on elements from Russian fairy tales to add depth to her story.

In many ways, Hunted is like any other retelling—merchant father loses his fortune and ends up in the clutches of the Beast.  As a way to save her family, Beauty ends up becoming the Beast's prisoner and falling in love with him.  That is where the similarities end.  Yeva—to her family, Beauty—is her father's daughter.  She loves to hunt and craves the freedom found in the wood.  Despite the hardships it will mean for her sisters, Yeva is secretly happy about the loss of her father's fortune.  It means living in her father's hunting cabin in the woods. 

When her father's faithful hunting dog fails to come home without him, Yeva casts off all vestiges of status to become her father's savior.  However, she find something she does not expect—the Beast her father has talked about throughout her childhood.

At the onset, Hunted is a slow-burn.  Spooner does a wonderful job setting the stage for everything to follow; however, for fans of fairy tales, it is sometimes hard to slog through the known and familiar.  Hunted also lacks world building.  It relies on the character development of the Yeva and the Beast. 

The ending, while beautifully written, was expected due to the hints dropped by the author.  However, despite that, it was an amazingly rich story. 

Book Review — A Court of Thorns and Roses

Title:  A Court of Thorns and Roses
Author:  Sarah J. Maas
Genre:  YA/New Adult Fantasy, retelling
Pages:  Hardback, 416
Publisher:  Bloomsbury USA Childrens
ISBN:  978-1-61963-444-2
Opening Lines:  "The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice."

Rating

"When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a breast-like creature arrives to demand retribution. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she knows about only from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not an animal but Tamlin—one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once rule their world.

"As Feyre dwells on his estate, her feelings for Tamlin transform from icy hostility to a fiery passion that burns through every lie and warning she's been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But an ancient, wicked shadow over the faerie lands is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it . . . or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever . . . "

~ Jacket copy

If you haven't guessed it by this point, I suppose it is only nice to tell you . . . I am back in a retelling kick.  Wasting Spending time on Pinterest, I stumbled upon a great list of retellings.  It told me that "they are a must read', so—as any good reader should do—I decided to find them at the local library.  And—ding, ding, you guessed it!—this book was near the top of the list.

At its basic level, this is a re-imagining of Beauty and the Beast with the "evil" faeries as the backdrop.  Young Feyre is out hunting for food during the long, grueling winter.  Spying a wolf about ready to take her quarry, she decides to kill it before it has the chance.  It doesn't hurt anything that she is convinced it is one of the Fae rumored to sneak through the Wall and hurt people.  After killing it, skinning it, and then selling its fur for a pretty penny, a large beast bursts into their house demanding penance.  According to a treaty signed by the humans and Fae, her life is forfeit.  Offering her an alternative to death, Feyre is taken to live across the Wall in Prythian.

Before I start, I loved this book!  It kept me up reading into the night, kept me anti-social during my lunch breaks, and consumed all of my time once I got home from work.  I could not put it down, nor did I want to finish reading it.  That being said, however, I could not give it five skulls . . .

Within the first few pages, I wanted to put the book down.  Feyre's voice is insipid and whiny.  Yes, she was the only person willing to feed her family; however, she spent more time complaining about her lot in life and a promise she made to her mother than much of anything else.  In addition to which, the attitude taken toward her sisters was infuriating!  It was understandable . . . To a point.

Aside from setting the stage, I felt that the story didn't truly start to come into its own until after she was taken into Prythian.  The audience wasn't given too much of her backstory until she started relating things to Tamlin and having moral quandaries with leaving them.  In addition, the scene was better written and fleshed out once she crossed the Wall.  That could have been an intentionally planned writing tool; however, it made everything before seem lackluster and unimportant.

The characters in the book were quite interesting, and the author really could have done some amazing things with them.  Sadly, she really failed to make them very three dimensional.  I felt that Lucien was one of the better characters.  He had a great presence in the book and tended to just fill the room with it.  Tamlin was our typical Byronic hero—broody, tall, dark, and handsome.  He was not a beast nor did Feyre truly transform him out of a beastly alter ego.  Despite my better judgment, I did like Tamlin and found myself really cheering for him . . . Even though he was a two dimensional shell of a cliche character.

She could have been a complex, sinister evil queen.  Maas has all the markings of a remarkable villain; yet, she failed to grasp onto that and run with it.  She was so cold and malevolent, it was jarring.

The ending and how Maas has set up the next book with Rhys upsets me.  Going into it would ruin the book.  That being said, for me, it negated the premise of this book entirely.

All in all, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to other people.  Maas had an intriguing idea to bring a classic story into the realm of the Fae.  She did a wonderful job bringing some things to life and adding a new spin on the story.

(As a side note, I did find it interesting that this is a New Adult novel!)

Book Review — Cuckoo Song

Title:  Cuckoo Song Author:  Frances Hardinge Genre:  YA fantasy, horror, historical fiction, mystery Pages:  Hardback, 408 Publisher:  Amulet Books ISBN:  978-1-4197-1480-1 Opening Lines:  "Her head hurt.  There was a sound grating against her mind, a music-less rasp like the rustling of paper"

Rating

"Following a mysterious accident that left her sopping wet, Triss awakens to a world that's eerily off-kilter. Her memories are muddled, her sister despises her, pages have been stolen from her private journal, and her appetite is insatiable. Confusion quickly turns to dread as she begins to see and hear things she shouldn't. Her dolls reveal themselves to be deceitful, living creatures; she's suddenly and inexplicably afraid of scissors; and when she brushes her hair, out sprinkle crumbled fragments of leaves.

"Then she stumbles across evidence that hedr beloved brother, killed in the war, is actually alive—and she begins to suspect that the secrets lurking within her home are even more shocking than her twisted new reality. Is Triss going mad? Or did her accident trigger a nightmarish chain of events? In her quest to learn the truth, Triss ventures from the shelter of her parents' protective wings into the city's underbelly. There she encounters strange creatures whose grand schemes could forever alter the fates of her family."

~ Jacket copy

One of the joys of my current job is the bi-annual book fairs!  On my short lunch breaks, I would take the time to just wander through the displays of books.  Some of them really didn't look appealing.  Others, however, really caught my attention.  This was one such book.  Sometimes YA horror can be awful and painful to read, so I was curious whether this one would be different.  Honestly, the cover also really drew me in.  Imagine my surprise when I saw it sitting on the shelf at the local library several months later!  And thus began my journey with this book.

Hmm, that is truly a hard question to answer.  The jacket copy does an amazing job giving tantalizing details without giving away the huge twist of the book.  At a basic level, it is about a family torn by the death of their son during WWI and how they cope.  However, it is so much more than that!  It centers around Triss—the sick daughter of well-to-do parents—and her struggle with her identity, the strange occurrences after her accident, and her relation with her family (especially her younger sister, Pen).

This book was excellent!  It has all the elements of a fairy tale while using the guise of post-WWI England as it's backdrop: the start of the post-war feminism, the birth of Jazz, and the very real effects of war and loss.  In addition, it also has all of the workings of a Gothic novel: gloomy settings, supernatural creatures, curses, and heroes.    
One of the things that really struck me in this book is the fact that the author didn't pull any punches.  She tackles a lot of major and complex issues.  Not only is she dealing with a family struggling hard to maintain the last vestiges of what they once were after an intense loss, but she dares to even show the socio-economic crisis after the end of the war.  In some ways, while the Jazz clubs seem lively, they are shown as escapism in the very real face of things like hunger.  It is also fascinating that the author uses a lot of the terminology from that time period, locale, and culture.  In addition, spurning the typical YA romance and veiled references to sex in favor of a strong relationship with her little sister was a very surprising and welcome addition to this story.  
It is really hard to fully address everything in this book without giving away Triss' full plight and the mystery surrounding her accident; however, it is definitely worth the read.  Despite the gloomy, war-torn setting, this book is beautiful and full of hope and wonder.  Even though Triss is only 13-years-old, this book has very complex themes, so it does not ostracize adult audiences.  Do not pass this one up!

Book Review — Tiger Lily

Title:  Tiger Lily
Author:  Jodi Lynn Anderson
Genre:  YA fantasy
Pages:  Hardback, 292
Published:  July 3, 2012
Publisher:  Harper Teen
ISBN:  978-0-06-200325-6
Opening Lines:  "She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house."

Rating:

"Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily doesn't believe in love stories or happy endings. Then she meets the alluring teenager Peter Pan in the forbidden woods of Neverland and immediately falls under his spell.

"Peter is unlike anyone she's ever known. Impetuous and brave, he both scares and enthralls her. As the leader of the Lost Boys, the most fearsome of Neverland's inhabitants, Peter is an unthinkable match for Tiger Lily. Soon, she is risking everything—her family, her future—to be with him. When she is face with marriage to a terrible man in her own tribe, she must choose between the life she's always known and running away to an uncertain future with Peter.

"With enemies threatening to tear them apart, the lovers seem doomed. But it's the arrival of Wendy Darling, an English girl who's everything Tiger Lily is not, that leader Tiger Lily to discover that the most dangerous enemies can live inside even the most loyal and loving heart."

~ Jacket copy

When this book was first announced, it caught my attention.  Who hasn't been captivated and enchanted by the story of Peter Pan, a boy who never grows up?  Even at a young age, Tiger Lily has always been an interesting character to me.  The idea of a book dedicated to the Native beauty was appealing.  Unfortunately, even though it sat on my wishlist for a long time, I had completely forgotten about it.

After being found under a tiger lily by the tribe's medicine man, Tiger Lily has always been viewed as an oddity by her tribe and with a little distrust.  She was always more independent and like the boys, strong, and brave.  However, after going against the tribe's council and helping a shipwrecked Englishman, Tiger Lily is forced to marry one man she hates, Giant.

On one of her respites from the village and the humiliation put upon her by her future mother-in-law, Tiger Lily stumbles into the infamous Peter Pan.  All over Neverland the boy and his band are feared and used as the boogeyman for little children.  However, something about Peter captures Tiger Lily right away, and she starts risking everything to spend just a few minutes with him and his Lost Boys.  Unfortunately, even though he professes his love for her, things change with the arrival of more English.  Tiger Lily is forced to choose between her tribe, loyalty to herself, and Peter.

For starters, the prologue blew me away!  It was magical, tragic, beautiful, and fully engrossing.  It pulled me in right from the beginning and made me desperate to understand Tiger Lily.  After reading it to my husband, I was not surprised to find him wiping away tears.  Unfortunately, even this amazing beginning had to end.

There were many things in the book that had me confused.  I couldn't understand why Peter, the Lost Boys, and the pirates aged.  The reader is told that previous missionaries that came to the island inevitably died of old age, and the island's inhabitants were terrified of it.  However, aside from assuming that the pirates would suffer the same fate, I really couldn't understand why people continued to age once reaching Neverland.  Thinking about it, I could only explain this away because they were not native to the island.  That being said, it was interesting to learn that the island natives would only age up to a certain point and stop.  However, that point was different for each person.

At some level, it kind of upset me that Wendy ended up on Neverland from an English ship.  Also, we never met her brothers.  She mentions them at one point, but they never joined in the adventures with the Lost Boys.

There were some interesting elements to the story, but I found it to drag.  Part way through the book, I found myself losing steam.  The prologue was so beautiful and astounding; however, the rest of the book, at many levels, fell short.  Further, even though the concept of Tinker Bell being the narrator was interesting, it was rather distracting at points.  I would have rather seen the author go a different route for narrator.

That being said, it honestly didn't bother me that Peter wasn't the innocent little boy with the thimble.  It felt as though the author was trying to make this story a little more realistic, especially with her explanation for the boys' flight.

Even though the dragging aspect of the book really made me wonder whether I made a right choice with this, near the end it totally redeemed itself!  I found my heart rending in two for Tiger Lily.  I even had to wipe away my own tears once I turned the final page.  It's issues aside, it was a beautiful and bittersweet story of young love, loyalty, and self discovery.   

Current Pages: 4352
Current Progress:

17/50 books

Book Review — Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Title: Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Author: Laini Taylor
Genre: YA fantasy/urban fantasy
Published: September 2011
Publisher: Little, Brown, and Company
Pages: Hardback, 418
ISBN: 978-0-316-13402-6
Opening Lines: "Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day."
Author Links: Website ♠ Twitter ♠ Facebook
Rating:

 

"Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

"In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grows dangerously low.

"And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war.

"Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she speaks many languages—not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

~ Jacket copy

Thoughts: This book has been sitting on a shelf since I received it as a Christmas present. Before that, it has been on my wishlist since it was first announced. I have no idea why it has taken me so long to read it; however, it was well worth the wait!

When I first read the jacket copy, I was not sure what to expect in this book. After watching Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, part of me wondered whether it would be a pseudo tooth fairy story. There was not way I could have expected the truth about it.

The book follows the 17 year-old Karou, a young art student living in Prague. She spends her time drawing what she sees in her 90+ sketchbooks. Her friends believe the monsters inside are born out of her vivid imagination; however, they would never begin to expect that she is, in essence, a runner for the very same creatures. Trafficking in human teeth and wishes, Brimstone seems an unlikely caregiver and father figure. It is through her connection with her strange family that Karou is brought into a centuries old war. To save her family, she must uncover a past that has been hidden from her and find out whether peace is really worth everything.

This book is beautifully written. The characters, descriptions, and worlds have been masterfully crafted and are rich with detail. Never for a minute did I wonder whether these places were real or not. Taylor did a wonderful job bringing them to life and making me long to go there. I found myself hoping against hope that Poison existed, because I desperately wanted to sit at the coffin tables and eat the famed goulash.

The relationship between Madrigal and Akiva was so real. My heart swelled at the budding of their romance, and I had to fight back tears at their parting. Even the ending of the book, my heart was broken. Through their love and past, I felt that Taylor tackled a lot of huge issues. The subjugating of races as slaves, internal politics, interracial relationships, etc. was masterfully worked into the story. Also, her lesson about wishes and hope. I felt that this book was jam packed full of huge, complex topics. However, she was able to handle it in a delicate and precise way.

Honestly, I think that this book is one of the best I have read this year. I found myself tearing through the book, and then forcing myself to back off in order to forestall the conclusion. I was sorry when I turned the last page. If you're looking for a magical story, this should be at the top of your list!

Pages: 10,907
Current Progress:

34/50 books