City of Devils - Diana Bretherick

This book won an award and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why.  City of Devils is a historical mystery placed in Turin.  Murray (whose first name I cannot remember--James?) shows up to apprentice himself to Professor Lombroso, who is the pretty much the authority on criminology.  Coinciding with his arrival is a string of murders, with the victims all having an association with Lombroso and found holding notes that say "A Tribute to Lombroso."  Lombroso himself doesn't want to investigate; one faction of the police wants to pin the murders on him, the other feels he's innocent.  To figure out what's what, Murray and his fellow apprentice Ottolenghi decide to join the investigation of Tullio, the man who believes Lombroso is innocent or at least wants to investigate the matter scientifically.

 

As a murder mystery, I found this one juvenile.  It didn't engage my interest at all, it wasn't particularly twisty or turny, and while the murderer isn't entirely obvious, neither is it entirely surprising.  The writing was entirely bland.  None of the characters are really fleshed out.  I feel the most realistic one was Sophia, who at least had an interesting character background, but who seems to have been included solely because Bretherick wanted a sexy love interest for Murray.  She brings nothing by mysterious babble to the story itself.  If you're going to have a sexy love interest in a mystery, at least give her something useful to do other than play damsel in distress.  Even Dan Brown's Heroine-Of-The-Book usually has something to do with the mystery other than look sexy and hint at things that she knows but doesn't care to reveal.

 

The investigators themselves, Murray included, were a bunch of bumbling idiots.  Lombroso's brand of criminology is one that is laughable nowadays, which makes him hard to empathize with because it's clear that he's just making stuff up, and that Ottolenghi, Murray, and company buy into it makes it hard to take them seriously.  They stagger about, every now and then asking someone a few questions, but ultimately never figure anything out.  Nothing would have ever been figured out if the killer hadn't chosen to reveal himself.  Indeed, the story would probably have ended very much the same whether Murray was involved or not.

 

Bretherick is clearly setting this up as the first in a series of books, but I have absolutely no interest in reading the rest of them.  This one was barely tolerable, and I'm astounded it's gotten the acclaim that it has.

1.5 stars out of 5.

Dead of Winter - Kresley Cole (Arcana Chronicles #3)

So, after finishing Endless Knight, I rushed off and bought Dead of Winter to continue devouring the series.  I had to know what happened between Evie and Death!  What would she do?  Would she allow him to coerce her?  Would he go through with it?  I had to know.  Well, I certainly found out.

Unlike the connection between Poison Princess and Endless Knight, there is a gap of several days between the end of Endless Knight and the beginning of Dead of Winter, and we don't immediately find out what happened between Evie and Death--though we can gather that, because Evie's riding off to join her alliance alone, it didn't go too well.    She arrives at the newly-built Fort Arcana to find Selena and Finn severely injured, Matthew crazy as ever, and Joules' alliance also in residence.  She immediately sets about planning for how to rescue Jack from the camp of the Army of the Southeast.  The army, as we learned last time, is led by Vincent and Violet, otherwise known as the Lovers, the Duke and Duchess most perverse--our newest cards.  The Archpriestess is also nearby, waiting to pull people down to the depths of a newly-formed river, and poses her own problems.  Still, Evie embarks on the rescue mission, and they (of course) get Jack back...just in time for Death to show up in pursuit of Evie.  And this is where the love triangle gets intense.

Oh boy.  I was going to count Endless Knight for my "love triangle" book for the Popsugar reading challenge, but I feel like it needs to be counted in conjunction with Dead of Winter because it's so much more intense in this one.  Death and Jack have to work together, or it's predicted that Evie will die.  To make matters worse, Vincent and Violet kidnap Selena, and they have to rescue her.  The twins are the main enemy for this book, and the group spends most of the story trying to reach them.  Along the way, Death and Jack snipe for Evie's attention, because she's agreed to choose one of them when they get back to base.  The other one will leave her alone.  You can imagine how well this goes, and you can imagine even more when Evie's interactions are heavily weighted toward Jack, with a single one-on-one interaction with Death on the other side.  Which was terribly, terribly disappointing, because Death is such a better character than Jack is.

Again, the pacing in this one is intense--one thing after another after another, which makes it a very fast read.  I tore through it in just a couple of hours, and I feel the quality was much better than the first two books, because the character development is infinitely better.  We get to see Jack and Death actually grow as characters, something that they--particularly Jack--had been severely lacking until now.  Finally seeing some of this is great, and it made the conflict between Evie and Jack and Death more real...though Death is still better.  I'm totally Team Death on that one.  He's just so much better in pretty much every way.

And again, this one ends in a cliffhanger, with the emergence of a new card and a new crisis.  I'm very upset that the next one isn't out yet, because this new card--the Emperor--is hinted to be Evie's arch-nemesis in the series, and I just can't wait to see how this one pans out.

4.5 stars out of 5, because Jack is seriously still a contender?  Seriously?

Endless Knight - Kresley Cole (Arcana Chronicles #2)

In the sequel to Poison Princess, Kresley Cole continues on with Evie, the Empress of the tarot deck, as she struggles in a post-apocalyptic world while also trying to survive a game in which a number of teenagers try to kill each other to be "the last card standing."  This one picks up right were the last one left off, with Evie having defeated Arthur and being still a little blood-crazy, and with Jack not knowing what the hell to do with this girl who has very suddenly turned out to be something supernatural.

Now, I linked to my review of Poison Princess because I brought up a few points in it that I would like to re-address here, mostly dealing with Jack.  First, I was interested in how Jack's Catholicism would mix in with what is, quite frankly, a very pagan world and game.  And to answer that...they don't.  While Evie wonders about the issue a bit, Cole pretty much just brushes the whole issue aside and never really addresses it.  Jack just loves Evie for Who She Is.  I think this could have really been an interesting conflict, and I'm very disappointed that it was so quickly abandoned.  Second, let's talk Jack again.  Jack isn't in the picture for a lot of this book, because Evie gets kidnapped by Death.  That said, in the first part Jack is...weird...and in the second part, revelations about him reveal him to be just as controlling and stalker-like as he was in the first book.  Not that Death is much better, though he is at least a little more forthright in his intentions.  

Still, putting forth Death and Jack as Evie's two romantic interests feels a little...weird.  She doesn't have a genuinely nice, if forceful, guy to choose.  She just has Jack and Death, neither of whom is a model citizen and both who seem to want Evie for all the wrong reasons.  Jack just wants her, but doesn't actually seem to care about her beyond that, for all that he says he does.  He doesn't trust her and he feels the need to steal things, like her boyfriend's phone or the tape Arthur made of her life, in order to learn about her, because he can't be bothered to ask her, or he won't believe her if she does tell him--because it's so bad that she didn't tell him she's a total supernatural freak, right?  And Death wants her dead, obviously, except he doesn't, and it's all...weird.  His reasons are better than Jack's, but his behavior often isn't.

As the book goes on, more Arcana are introduced, all of whom are weird in their own ways and most of whom want to kill the others.  We get to see the Hierophant, who heads up a bunch of cannibals, as well as the Tower, the World, Justice, the Devil, and Strength.  And Death, of course, who is...awesome.  I loved Death.  I think his backstory is much more complex than Jack's, which made his actions much more realistic, and while he was manipulative, he was blatantly so.  He was up front with Evie, even as he was manipulating her, and I liked him a hell of a lot more for that than I liked Jack, who was just an asshole.

As for plot, Cole dives into this one and goes.  It moves a hell of a lot faster than Poison Princess did.  There's no mucking about with a third of the book being in high school.  Instead, this just goes from one thing to the next to the the next, until Evie ends up at Death's castle, at which point it slows down significantly to allow Death and Evie to get to know each other.  That part did not go quickly, at all, and I didn't really buy the development of their relationship, which didn't really happen until the book was pretty much over.  Cole definitely leaves this one as a cliffhanger, which made me glad the third one was already out, because I rushed straight off, bought it, and devoured it in one setting.

So, overall?  Trash.  But delicious trash.  God, I hate it when they do this to me...

3.5 stars out of 5.

Battle Magic - Tamora Pierce (The Circle Opens #3)

I was so disappointed by this book.  Tamora Pierce is one of my favorite authors, and I had such high expectations for Battle Magic because everything Pierce writes is normally of very high quality.  In this case, however, I feel like she fell very, very flat.  Part of this is the nature of the book.  It's an "in between" book, a book that happens between two other books but is written and released after them; in this case, Battle Magic comes after Street Magic but before Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress.  Now, doing short stories and novellas in between other works is all the rage these days, but Battle Magic doesn't fit that description.  It's a full-fledged novel, at well over 400 pages.  But, having devoured everything Pierce has written, including Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress, I already had an idea--a pretty good one--of what happened in this book.  That didn't deter me.  I re-read books all the time, and knowing what's going to happen isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Good writing an easily compensate for that.  But in this case, I felt that the writing just...wasn't...good.

It absolutely breaks my heart to say that, but it's true.  Pierce spent this book fleshing out a conflict mentioned in Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress, between two countries that seem to be very loosely based on China and Tibet.  Gyongxe is like Tibet: a high mountain country that is one of the holiest lands in the world, a place where the gods are closer.  Yanjing is like Imperial China, and wants to take over Gyongxe.  Now, these two countries aren't copy-and-paste representations of their real-world "counterparts," but it's easy to see where the inspiration came from, especially in the beginning.  As the book goes on, Pierce fleshes out the countries more and more (this is something she's so good at) and the differences become more marked, the distance between reality and fantasy wider.  That's as it should be.  Pierce also incorporates a wonderful magic system that we haven't seen before, based on teamwork and shamanism rather than the individual mages featured in her other books.  And all the hallmarks of a great, gritty fantasy are there: an invading force, a defending country, a small group of people trying to make a difference, and such wonderful magic.  But then it just fell apart.

Going into this book, I knew things wouldn't go well.  I knew, for example, that there was going to be torture; Evvy talks about her feet being caned in Melting Stones.  "Wow," I thought.  "Pierce is really getting grown up with this one."  But she didn't.  There's a short torture scene, but I felt it lacked real emotion.  I felt that most of the pivotal scenes in this book lacked the emotion that Pierce is normally so good at portraying.  Big, pivotal moments were brushed over and skipped.  It felt like Pierce couldn't decide if she was writing an advanced young-adult fantasy or one for much younger readers, and that muddle really got in the way of enjoyment.  And the end...which is a literal deus ex machina.  Pierce's characters normally have such agency and direction in her books, and in this one they were just dragged about and didn't really affect anything, especially at the end.  Without them, everything would likely have been pretty much the same, and that was disappointing.

This was most definitely not Pierce's strongest work, and considering that I waited so long to read it, I was extra disappointed.  Some of the settings and magic were lovely, and we actually get some scenes from Rosethorn's perspective, which was nice, but so much was just...missing.  I'm very, very sad about this.

2 stars out of 5.

Stone Devil Duke - K.J. Jackson (Hold Your Breath #1)

Historical romances frustrate me more than any other genre, because in no other genre do I find such a wide array of quality with so few indicators as to what's going to be good and what's not.  Why?  Because they all look the same.  I am a sucker for a girl in a pretty dress (even if the dresses are hardly ever period-accurate) and so whenever they come up, I continue to fall for them. Every.  Single.  Time.  As for this one?  Well, it fell pretty much in the middle, quality-wise.  Let's go!

The plot follows Aggie and Devin.  Devin the titular "Stone Devil Duke," as he is widely known throughout the ton, though there isn't really a reason for him to be known as such.  At one point, it's said that it's because of something he witnessed when he was younger--but then it's said that pretty much no one knows about that, so why it would be such a widespread nickname, I have no idea.  Aggie is a young lady of quality who spends her nights dressed as a cabbie and loaded down with pistols as she hunts for the men who killed her father and scarred her.  She doesn't usually pick up fares, but Devin ends up in her cab and gets pulled into the mess and then, of course, finds himself completely unable to leave.

I didn't find Aggie and Devin's relationship plausible.  Characters in historical romances often have near-instantaneous connections, but this one felt off even when taking that trope into consideration.  Aggie wants absolutely nothing to do with Devin, and yet when she finds herself stuck with him, she suddenly surrenders pretty much her entire quest to him because their relationship is, very abruptly, more important to her.  She has no real reason to think that Devin will actually follow through on his promises to her, as he's done nothing to show that he would.  In fact, given that she sees him talking to one of her attackers at one point, she should have every reason to suspect that he might be in on the whole thing--what a plot twist that would have been!  But no, Devin and his compatriots are nothing but what they appear to be.  For his part, Devin basically marries Aggie because he has to-slash-because he wants to have sex with her.  Fair enough, I guess.  But still, I didn't think these two had any real connection until after they were married, at which point they proceeded to have hot sex (which was well-written, I felt) and the mystery which occupied so much of the first part of the book abruptly fell by the wayside, only to be neatly tied up in the space of two chapters later on.

The mystery was the other thing that bothered me.  When the background for it finally comes out, it makes sense--but it takes forever until that background comes out.  Additionally, there's no real "mystery" to the component of Aggie's brother, who is gone and then just reappears without anyone having any success at figuring out what happened to him--not even a little.  Not much of a mystery if there aren't any clues.  And then the villain... In my view, a mystery should provide you with clues to figure out who the villain really is.  This didn't.  It just suddenly comes out, and everyone is like, "Oh, it's him," and then they go on with their lives.  Blah.

The writing here wasn't bad.  The dialogue seemed a bit stilted in places (a good deal of places) but the rest of it was okay.  The sex was good.  The characters' backgrounds and the setup was good.  I'm just not sure that I really liked how the main story was executed, dropped, and then picked up again; I feel like the threads could have been twined together a bit more artfully.  This was okay, but it wasn't something I devoured, and it's not something I'll be reading again.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Outlander - Diana Gabaldon (Outlander #1)

Oh my stars, I feel like I've been reading this book forever.  Looking at the page count, I can see that's almost 900 pages, so that's not that surprising.  What makes it even less surprising is that Outlander contains one of very few things that will significantly slow me down while reading: phonetic accents.  Let me tell you, phonetic accents are terrible.  I hate them.  When people in the NaNoWriMo community ask about using them, my advice is always one word: Don't.  To me, phonetic accents make your character not only harder to understand, but also less intelligent, like they don't know how to speak properly.  Most of the time, a phonetic accent is not necessary to delineate where your characters are from, and that was especially the case here.  We get it, Gabaldon: Most of your characters in this book are Scots.  This is abundantly clear in everything they do, your constant references to kilts, plaids, sporrans, dirks, etc., calling your main character "Sassenach..."  Need I go on?  You didn't need to make me struggle through 900 pages of phonetically-written dialogue, too.

Okay, that aside...this is a monster of the book.  I mean, 900 pages for what basically boils down to a historical romance.  That is a huge page count.  And it's only the first of seven books.  One wouldn't think that it would take a time-travel romance so long to unravel.  I don't think it took that long to build Jamie and Claire's relationship--which, for the record, I did think was well done.  It's a classic, and some would say trope-y, relationship: the warrior and the healer.  Still, it's classic for a reason.  Those two roles allow the leads to compensate for each other's weaknesses, and I also that their personalities matched well.  I didn't mind the main plot: modern woman gets accidentally sent back in time to the eighteenth century and gets mixed up with a bunch of Scots while being pursued by those who think she's a spy.  That said, this isn't exactly a book one can take seriously, despite the amount of mortal peril that comes up.  Plot holes abound, and the plot just keeps going and going and going long after it seems like it should have stopped.  I almost think I would have preferred to see the separate plot points here split up and made into separate stories with separate main characters.

Also...Claire's married.  And while everyone tells her it's totally cool that she has a husband, she can still get married again and it's not a problem at all, I just don't buy that.  There's no excuse for being unfaithful. Well, okay, there are, but Claire doesn't have any of those because she can go back and chooses not to.  So basically she just buys into this whole thing that everyone, including priests(!) tells her about adultery being okay.  Which, considering how adultery was viewed (another woman is pretty much burned at the stake for it!) seems terribly unlikely.  Also I find it hard to believe that more people didn't think Claire was a witch, all things considered.  And as for her treatment for PTSD...uhm...what was she thinking?

As others have said, this book isn't exactly a literary masterpiece, and I have to think that, all told, it was written for exactly the same reason Fifty Shades of Grey was: housewife escapism.  However, I am interested in one of the books later in the series, which looks like it involves Claire's daughter Brianna as more of a main character, so I might keep reading for that purpose alone.  And this did knock out my category of "A book published the year you were born" for the Popsugar challenge, which is good, too.  Overall, it's like others have said: it's junk, but the kind you want more of in a weird sort of way, just like more "traditional" historical romances are--except you could fit three of those into this.  Which I would have preferred...

Anyway, 3 stars out of 5.

Cress - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #3)

Oh, I love this series.  But let me tell you, I wasn't planning on reading Cress just yet--'til I got the email.  It was Goodreads "New Releases by Authors You've Read" email for October, and when I went to the full page, there it was: Winter.  The final book in Meyer's series.  It was marked as being released on October 13th.  And I went in a frenzy.  I hadn't read Cress yet!  I hadn't read Fairest yet!  I had to read them!  So I scurried off and bought Cress, and absolutely devoured it.  Eager for what was next, I went to check out Winter...and found that it's real release date is not October 13th, but November 10th.  Goodreads had lied to me!  How dare it?  Well, it looks like the first two chapters of Winter will be available for preview on October 13th, and that's what the email referred to--which is a pretty big cop-out, if you're asking me.  Now I have to get Fairest and make its short length last an entire month until I can get my hands on Winter and this series' luscious conclusion.

Because that's just what Cress was, just like the Cinder and Scarlet, the first two books in the series: luscious.  The characters, the relationships, the stories, the futuristic setting...It's all just wonderful.  In Cress, Meyer brings in her third heroine of the series, Crescent Moon--the titular Cress.  Cress is our Rapunzel.  She has spent seven years trapped in a satellite orbiting Earth with only an array of computers to keep her company.  A Lunar shell--that is, a Lunar without the gift of glamour, for those of you who haven't been reading along (you should be)--she should have been killed as an infant, but was kept alive by one of Queen Levana's lackeys.  Cress' computer skills are top-notch, and she's been doing Mistress Sybil's bidding for years, hacking Earthen systems and hiding Lunar ships.  Until recently, when a change of heart--or perhaps a realization that what she was doing was wrong--resulted in her switching sides and helping the renegade Cinder and her allies.  All Cress wants in return is for them to rescue her from her satellite and take her to Earth.

Of course, things can't be easy.  The rescue attempt goes wrong.  Cress and Thorne (one of Cinder's allies) end up separated from the rest of the group, castaways in the Sahara desert.  Scarlet ends up a captive of the Lunars.  Wolf is nearly dead.  And Cinder has to figure out how to fix it all and stop Emperor Kaito's marriage to Levana, which would result in pretty much the end of the world.  It's a lot for a teenage girl, even a cyborg princess teenage girl, to handle.  But she does, with aplomb, and you can't help but root for her.  Meanwhile, everything else just gets...worse.  Darker.  Human (Lunar?) trafficking, slavery, torture, and plague all feature in this book, and while it's aimed at young adults, Meyer definitely doesn't pull punches in the telling.

Meyer did something different with Cress' character.  Cinder and Scarlet are both solitary, strong-willed young women who have definite strengths and skills and have been exercising them for a long time.  While they may end up in unfamiliar situations, they're still on their own world (for the most part) and know how to deal.  For Cress, that isn't the case.  An exile for most of her life, her only knowledge of Earth coming through the internet, she's naive and a little immature.  She gets through situations by pretending she's someone else.  She desperately wants a fairytale romance, in opposition to Scarlet and Cinder, who might have love interests but are more concerned with more pressing matters.  Cress isn't as strong as Scarlet and Cinder.  She can't fight.  She can hack a computer, but that doesn't do her much good when she doesn't have one.  She can't navigate, she can't fix things, she has no real knowledge of her new surroundings.  Consequently, she has a very different character growth trajectory than Meyer's other heroines.  Cress has to gain confidence in herself, which is something that Cinder and Scarlet didn't struggle with as much.  It was different, and I liked it.  While Cress is definitely naive, she's not so in a way that made me want to slap some sense into her.  Instead, I cheered for her, watching her grow and develop and come into her own.  Cress isn't going to be a butt-kicker, but she's definitely an asset to Cinder's team and I look forward to seeing more of her.

And Thorne.  God, I loved Thorne.  Maybe that's because, for most of the book, he's not a point-of-view character and you only see him through Cress' perspective, but I loved him nonetheless.  I think Meyer did a great job fleshing him out in this one, making him more than the wacky criminal we'd met previously in Scarlet.

Speaking of Scarlet...I would have loved to see more of her and wolf.  They're greatly lacking in this book, and while I can see why, I still wanted more of them.  Meyer had to separate Scarlet and Wolf for the plot to work and to keep the tension in their relationship.  They got very intense very fast in Scarlet, and I think it might have gotten boring if they had just figured everything out in this one--which they inevitably would have done if they hadn't been separated.  But these are fairytale adaptations, and happily ever after can't come until the very end, so I suppose I'll just have to deal with it.

And Winter!  We got our first glance at Princess Winter here!  So awesome!  I can't wait to see more of her.  How am I going to go an entire month Winter-less?  I don't know.

I only have one complaint about Cress and this series in general.  I love that Meyer adds a new fairytale and a new heroine in every book, but when they're all being added to each other, it means that each one ends up getting progressively less page time.  It means the story has to jump around more in order to cover everyone.  By this point, there is a lot of stuff going on, and while it doesn't get convoluted or hard to follow, none of the girls really got the coverage I would have liked.  This might be a good thing--I liked Cress, but it's possible that too much of her would have driven me away, and the reduction of Scarlet's role sets up for the next book.  But...still.  I felt just a tiny bit like I was getting gipped out of page time with my girls because the book, even at almost six hundred pages, just wasn't long enough to contain the awesomeness of them all.

Here's the thing.  I read many books I like.  I even read a good number of books I love.  But Meyer's Lunar Chronicles fall into a separate category all together: books I will read again and again and again.  They're very different, and they're just good.  I love them, so, so much.  I can't wait until Winter comes out, and then hopefully a box set, because I have the Kindle editions but would love to have these in the flesh (print?).

4.5 stars out of 5.