My Review of A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab

My summary: (Spoilers for Book 1) Kell and Rhy deal with the fallout of the now infamous Black Night, for which not only the country, but even Kell’s adoptive parents blame him. Lila, now in Red London, manages to get herself hired on a pirate *cough* privateer ship in order to run from …well everything.

Why I picked up this book: Word of mouth. The series is hailed as amazing. I’m just catching up.

What I knew going in: It had actually been long enough since I read the first book that I sort of had forgotten what happened. I knew Kell could go between worlds with rare magic, that Lila reluctantly helped him, and then things went bad.

My response: Truthfully, I was not all that impressed by the first book. I thought it was alright, but while I liked Kell (he’s just my type) I didn’t much like Lila and when I got to the end of the book I don’t remember being very impressed.

Something changed between when I read that book and this. Either Schwab got a lot better at writing or I leveled up a few times in reading between the books. (Or both.) The writing was lyrical and kept impressing me. And the relationships between the characters felt so much more real in this book. I marked several conversations to go back to because I just loved the way the characters talked to each other.

And the story itself felt smooth and natural, which is some of the highest praise I give to a book. It was still a second book (ie, setting up for the third) but it gave me the payoffs I wanted, and several that I wasn’t aware I was looking for.

Do I recommend this book?: Yes.

My Review of Winter by Marissa Meyer

My summary: The final installment of the Lunar Chronicles, Princess Winter of Luna has hallucinations due to not using her Luna Gift of being able to control the minds and/or body of anyone she comes into contact with, supported only by her beloved personal guard. Her Step-mother, Lavana in in the final stages of her plan to marry Prince Kai of the Earth’s Commonwealth, and the characters we met in the previous three books: Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress (along with their bos and Iko) are trying to stop her by raising an army of the mistreated Lunars.

Why I picked up this book: I read the first three a while ago in the hay-day of when these books were popular, but I didn’t quite like them enough to pay for the hardcover of Winter, so I put it off until I could get a paperback version, which just happened now. I picked up the first book in the series because …well cyborg Cinderella. It was a cool idea.

What I knew going in: We had met Winter briefly in previous books, so I knew somehow she was not entirely sane, and that her OTP was a royal guard.

My response: I liked this series as a whole. The world building felt solid, the characters were rather likable, and the story was enjoyable enough. I liked the way she hit the beats of the girl’s respective fairy tales within the story. The only one that ever felt really forced was Cinder’s orange beetle (the car type) that she drove to the ball.

My problem with this series ended up being the powers that the Lunars had. As you read above, most (like 97%) of Lunars have the power of mind control. They can make you see anything they want or take over your body and force you to do what they want, and as far as I could tell there is no way for you to know you’re not seeing something real (without a cyborg implant which very few people have), no way for anyone else to know you’re being manipulated, and no way for anyone else to know someone is doing manipulation. The ‘limitation’ of the power seems to be distance and possibly line of sight. Oh and some people are better at it than others, but in this book the quashed, cast off workers are able to take control of their guards in order to start their rebellion.

I remember reading after the first book that the author wished she had not made the Lunar gift quite so strong. In the first book, there is not a lot of interaction with any Lunars using their powers except the Queen, who is just straight up evil, so I can see where she didn’t thoroughly consider the effects of an entire race having these powers. But the more we interacted with a society where basically anyone could do this, and there was no defense against it outside of being controlled by someone else, I just found myself in disbelief that there were not more insane Lunars trying to control everything. In fact, I’m not even convinced there could be an easy peace between the peoples as the solution at the end of the book is everyone having an electronic device installed in their spines as a protection against being controlled. /shrugs

I don’t know the extent to which the powers were specifically detailed in the first book, but I spent the last half of the book thinking: “She *really* needed to have limited these powers in some other way because it’s just too powerful and there’s even a severe downside to being a good person and *not* using them. At one point, someone without the powers admonishes Winter, the princess who is going insane because she doesn’t use her powers, that she should just make everyone around her see her hair as orange if she doesn’t want to affect anyone in a negative way. And that’s really it. The entire race is built on a foundation of “it’s just easier to use my powers to mislead people than to not.”.

Setting that aside, it made Winter an interesting character in that she was basically schizophrenic. And she still functioned fairly well within the world, and people loved her, and she made friends. I think that was a rather important message, though it didn’t hit me for what it was until the very end.

This was a good capstone to the series, and it wrapped up everything nicely, if not simply in true fairy tale fashion.

Do I recommend this book?: In spite of the above, I did enjoy this series, and I would recommend it. Just, if you’re too hard of a simulationist, be wary about the powers.

My Review of The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

My summary: Moon has two forms he can shift between at will, one that looks humanish and one that is a humanoid flying reptile. He’s been on his own for a long time and uses his humanoid (groundling) form while keeping his other form a secret, and moving on whenever his secret gets out.

When his current home finds out his secret they nearly kill him, but he is saved by another of his kind who takes him back to his colony, where Moon finds out he’s more special than he thought, and his people are dying out.

Why I picked up this book: I saw the second book at World Fantasy Con, and I loved the look of the flying reptiles, but that wasn’t enough to get me to pick it up. I later read about it in an article about books the meld magic and technology. That was enough to get me to order the first book.

What I knew going in: Flying. Reptiles. (But not dragons.) Also, I was looking for the meld of magic and technology.

My response: I really liked the characters in this book, especially Moon, and the way he interacts with the other Raksura. Because they’re a different race, Martha got away with playing around with how the characters interacted with each other outside of normal gender norms in a way I found interesting and surprisingly refreshing.

The world she created also had a rather profound effect on me. It was so open and varied. It inspired me to look back at my own immense fantasy world, Feldoor, that’s been sitting in the trunk for years, and to do far better with the world building. It’s quite the book that I not only enjoy but makes me want to write more.

Do I recommend this book?: Yes. I read that this book series almost didn’t get published because it doesn’t follow normal fantasy tropes, so the publisher didn’t know how they were going to market it, and I can see why, but that in itself makes it so refreshing.