I'm gonna break away from trying to do single-paragraph reviews. Hopefully I'll get to the point where I can post some individual reviews in the next few months. I only got to finish books the first half of the month, since I did almost no reading over winter break. (I did end up buying more books, though ...)
Neverwas by Kelly Moore, finished 12/5. I read Amber House last summer, so there was a really big window between books for me. I thought Neverwas was pretty good, and it gave me enough information that I didn't feel lost or that I'd forgotten any specifics from the last book. I loved the concept of how much things had changed from a fairly simple thing that Sarah had done. (I really really wish there'd been a map in the book. I want to learn about their geography soooooo much, and the book didn't give me enough of that.) It's also fairly relevant considering all of the protests recently -- Sarah's inadvertent changes caused segregation to still be an issue in Neverwas, and the protests that Jackson was involved in reminded me a little of the ones recently that are in the news for both Ferguson and New York.
Neverwas didn't really have the same kind of impact that I remember from Amber House, though. It also was a little hard to keep straight what they were trying to accomplish, since the whole plot of the book was basically the two timelines crossing over each other and the two of them trying to fix everything back to how it had been in Amber House. The ending was a little disappointing, too.
In looking at Goodreads, I found a bunch of one-star reviews that didn't explain anything about why they'd rated it so low, but one post did suggest something about controversy with one of the authors. I want to know what happened, but at the same time, I really don't. So keep that in mind I guess.
Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor, finished 12/7. Days of Blood and Starlight is dark. Really dark. Which I guess is to come with the territory of long-standing war and genocide. It was just as good as Daughter of Smoke and Bone, though, if not better with everything that went down. (I haven't read the first book in a while. Keep that in mind.) I really love all the characters, and the book was pretty easy to pick up even without remembering what exactly had happened in the previous one. There are huge content warnings for blood / violence, death, and an attempted sexual assault pretty late into the book. I'm really excited to see what the ending will be like.
The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkoski, finished 12/12. The Winner's Curse was a very ... slow-burning book? It was interesting enough for me to continue reading it all the way through, but there was almost no real action up until the end. And I was okay with that. I liked the slow build of everything. Some people on Goodreads apparently didn't. So don't go into The Winner's Curse expecting anything super duper action-y. Because it's definitely more focused on romance / interpersonal relationships than it is fighting. The ending was super wow, also, which is a lot of the reason why I rated it so high.
All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrell, finished 12/13. So as compared to The Winner's Curse, All Our Yesterdays is action basically from the start. I ended up reading the second half of the book in one sitting because it was more interesting than the internet on a Saturday afternoon. That said, it made me feel really anxious. I've put a considerable amount of thought into what happens regarding time travel, and the time travel in All Our Yesterdays created a pretty negative reaction in me just because of all the tension I felt. I mean, it's a good book, and I would have rated it a lot higher if I didn't feel so shaky for upwards of an hour after I finished the book. So it is a really impactful book -- I just didn't have a very positive experience related to it. I really don't do well with high-stakes situations like what the book was about.
Love and Other Foreign Words by Erin McCahan, finished 12/17. This was actually a really great book to read after All Our Yesterdays. It was just the amount of fluffiness I needed to recover. I also really loved Josie -- her stubbornness, her sarcasm, her commentary on code-switching, everything. All the characters were pretty well thought out. I really had trouble liking Kate and her fiance at first, but that was the point. A big part of the plot is actually Josie's relationship to Kate and how it starts to break down when Kate announces she's getting married to a guy Josie doesn't like. A lot of the negative reviews on Goodreads were mainly because of the characters being "shallow", and while I can agree with that at some points in the book, I think it's a pretty standard amount for a fluffy standalone. And I also really like how Josie's own romantic subplot to the book builds up over the course of the story -- it wasn't her pining over guys, and I really appreciated that. I liked reading about a character that was just as clueless about romance as I am.
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