#popular ya fantasy

[annafromuni]

The Red Scrolls of Magic is a Cute Shadowhunter Adventure

The Red Scrolls of Magic has been out for years, but I never got around to reading it until now. Why it took me so long, I don’t know, but what I do know is that this is an absolutely adorable addition to the Shadowhunter universe. There are so many parts of this novel that made me so happy, so let’s get into it. Set following City of Glass, The Red Scrolls of Magic follows Magnus and Alec’s…

[asha-mage]

I feel profoundly bad for every rpg yet to come out this year that now has to compete with Metaphor: reFantazio.

[thetypedwriter]

Children of Anguish and Anarchy Book Review

Children of Anguish and Anarchy Book Review by Tomi Adeyemi

This book was so horrible. 

No one is more disappointed than me to say that. 

I’ve gone to two of Tomi Adeyemi’s book signings, including a recent one for Children of Anguish and Anarchy.

Tomi Adeyemi herself is absolutely wonderful. She’s so intelligent, hilarious, addictively charming, and can work a room like no other. The book signing was fantastic. Too bad the book couldn’t hold up to the event itself. 

Children of Anguish and Anarchy follows as the third and last installment of the Legacy of Orisha trilogy, but doesn’t read like that at all.

Other than having the same four main characters of Tzain, Zelie, Amari, and Inan, nothing about the book concludes any issue, plot story, or character development from the previous two novels. 

A completely new villain is introduced, someone we haven't heard about as a reader in the last two books whatsoever, and obliterates any of the conflict and tension that Adeyemi worked so hard to build in her previous stories. 

Gone is the tension and literally hundreds of years of in-fighting between the Maji and the monarchy, gone is the civil war and its repercussions on Orisha, gone is even one of the main characters from the last novel, Roen, who was a significant love interest for Zelie and who has been completely disappeared in this new book all together (like, what???). 

It was incredibly lazy writing to wipe away everything the first two books created in order to “unite” against this new enemy. The sentiment is nice, but it’s not the finale we wanted or needed. 

I desired answers to Amari and Zelie’s broken friendship, closure to the Inan and Roen love triangle, a verdict on how Orisha would rebuild and who would rule. 

We get none of that. 

Instead Zelie and the others spend half their time in the book on a ship with very strong slavery parallels, and the other half in the introduced land of New Gaia.

While I thought the descriptions of New Gaia were beautiful (albeit very similar to Avatar), I was dissatisfied because the whole series at this point has been focused on Orisha and Orisha’s problems, not New Gaia and not the Skulls. 

While the plot was bad and aggrieving, the characters were even worse. 

None of the characters were interesting. They were carbon copies of each other in which all they talked about was avenging their fallen Orishan people, killing the Skulls, and protecting loved ones.

Rinse and repeat. It was boring as hell to delve into four different characters’ minds only to find that they all sounded exactly the same. 

I often had to go back to the start of the chapter to tell whose internal thoughts I was reading because they were so interchangeable and self-righteous and dull.  It is never a good sign when you can’t automatically tell who’s POV you’re reading based on their internal dialogue and tone. 

Lastly, the pacing of the book was atrocious. Everything happened so goddamn fast that I felt like I never had the chance to properly digest or internalize anything.

Oh they’re on a ship? Moving on from that. Zelie got some sort of medallion shoved into her chest?? Moving on. Wait, Maji and Titans and the monarchy are all working together after two full books of them killing each other??? Five pages and it’s done with. 

It was outrageous and insulting. 

The pacing made everything feel shallow, unimportant, and unnecessary. More than most of the plot were action scenes, while difficult to write and interesting in their own right, in this book it was so repetitive that characters killing other characters 90% of the time became egregiously tedious. 

And speaking of the action, I also found it incredibly violent and graphic for a YA book. As someone who is not a fan of gore and blood, this book had so many explicit details for no reason other than being gratuitous.

For example, at one point Zelie shoves a chicken bone through someone’s cheek. I found it repulsive and it was also incessant. 

I know some people can handle brutality, but I can’t, and found it a huge turn off and made me dislike the book so much more, especially as this was a majority of the book to boot. 

Disappointment can’t even contain my full feelings for this story. For such a wonderful trilogy to succumb to such a terrible end is a tragedy. I wish the best for Tomi Adeyemi and success for her future, but I will not read another book by her again. 

Score: 2/10

Recommendation: Read Children of Blood and Bone, a magical story that will inspire and entertain you. Read Children of Virtue and Vengeance if you really need something else, but even this book I wouldn’t recommend picking up.

Do not, I repeat, do not read Children of Anguish and Anarchy. It will leave you feeling dismayed and disheartened beyond redemption.

Bonus: Here's me, my fiance, and Tomi Adeyemi at her book signing!

[egglygreg]

Ok, so I had this dream last night right? And it was mostly nonsensical and weird and silly, but there was this moment...

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Every teenage girl has:

a) a society telling her constantly that the only thing she should be interested in is love and BOYSSSS!

b) a frustrated lust for violence

And the societal role of YA fantasy/sci-fi fiction is to act like it's just conforming to the former, while in reality appealing pretty transparently to the latter.

[safirefire]

The Ash Princess Trilogy by Laura Sebastian is perfect for ya fantasy lovers who love a warrior princess trope and there’s really interesting world building in the later books. Every country has its own system of government, customs, technological advancements, and relationship to magic. The main character, Princess Theo, is a prisoner of the invaders who took over her land but she is patient, fiercely protective of her people, and stronger than she’s ever known. If you liked Aelin Galathynius but wished her story was less like it was told from the colonizer’s point of view, the Ash Princess trilogy is perfect for you. The main character goes through incredible character development and the series touches colonialism better than a lot of ya fantasy. Also the cover art is so gorgeous.

[preparetobemildlyentertained]

I wonder if I’ll ever be done fighting the “just because it’s about a young woman doesn’t mean it’s YA” fight

[maddie-grove]

Honestly I’m not really familiar with booktok so I’m not prepared to say any one book popular in that milieu is bad. They just seem to be mostly contemporary romance, which isn’t usually my thing. And actually I think it’s good for books to depict explicit sex. Like it might not always be well-written or fit the work as a whole or be to an individual’s taste, but it’s a positive that there are books that are sexually frank.

[moxymaxing]

dead mom gang rise up

[tea-ink-pages]

i think about this post all the time but aligned with the virality and sales in YA fantasy through popular books like powerless. its baffling to me that the blandest worldbuilding, cookie cutter character archetypes and recycled 2010's plots with nothing new to say are seen as amazing YA. there's a lot of actually *good, well-written ya fantasy these days that regrettably isn't at this level of popularity and its aggravating

[annafromuni]

Clockwork Prince - My Favourite Cassandra Clare Book

The title speaks for itself, but it wouldn’t be a good book review if I didn’t note a few things. Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare is the second in the Infernal Devices trilogy, following Clockwork Angel and leading up the the riveting finale Clockwork Princess. It has the action of a good ya fantasy novel with the setting of a beautiful historical fiction book and a romance plot for the ages…

[wakingupnexttoyou]

4.5⭐

I fell in love with these boys. Especially Ronan. I would Kill for a book series about him!!!! (As I'm writing this I go back to see what other books she's written and find this is already a thing. Consider these added to my tbr right away!!)

I still have a lot of questions but I suppose that is the nature of books like this. I almost always feel like I've been in a fever dream when I finish them lol.

[thetypedwriter]

Curious Tides Book Review

Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle Book Review 

This book has so many things to love. 

Too bad I disliked almost all of them because of other glaring issues in the book. 

I still give Lacelle so much credit. Her book had so many dreams (literally) and tried to tackle so much for a debut YA novel. However, I really think she could have benefited from a more succinct editor, by changing up her timeline, and by shearing off a good 200 pages or so. 

This book’s plot is ambitious. It switches POV’s between two main characters: Emory and Baz. Emory, a student at Aldryn College, specializes in healing powers. Used to being mediocre and constantly standing in the shadows of her best friend, Romie, Emory is suddenly the recipient of every power after a near death experience that leaves several dead, including Romie.

However, in the aftermath of the event, Emory learns that she’s a mythical tidecaller. Baz meanwhile, is an eclipse-born, a person who receives his powers from being born on a lunar eclipse.

Known for their horrific and “evil” powers that combust in an event called “collapsing”, Baz is ostracized and alienated by the other students at Aldryn, but also the world at large for his incredible, but frightening ability to control time (another big issue that I won’t even get into). 

The setting of this book is a world based on the idea that people receive abilities depending on the moon they were born under. There’s lore galore, colleges dedicated to honing special abilities, rituals, language, and mythology–all based on the tides and the moon. 

The details that Lacelle includes in this is really interesting, as is the concept of magic based on the moon phases itself. A dark academia setting based on the tides and lunar alignments? I love it.

However, the magic system was needlessly complicated and Lacelle spent way too much time describing events, world-building facets, and societal elements that had nothing to do with the plot and only succeeded in making the book longer instead of pulling me into the story more deeply. 

In addition, a lot of Lacelle’s writing was incredibly repetitive. She hit the same points over and over and over again: eclipse-born are evil and everyone hates them, everyone loves the moon, Kieran is hot, Romie is great, Baz’s memory of his father’s printing press blowing up, Emory feeling inadequate compared to Romie, and Baz thinking or describing the children’s book Sorrow of the Drowned Gods. 

No joke, the items I listed up above were about 75% of the book. The remaining 25% was action, too-in depth details about the college that didn’t matter—like what all the different halls were called and what they looked like in each dormitory, more flashbacks of Emory and Baz’s past, and interactions between the characters. 

Even though Emory and Baz are at a college, their classes don’t matter whatsoever. Honestly, I have no idea why they’re even at a college other than to have them all in one place. Emory’s classes are described once, briefly, and we see her go to about two classes. Otherwise, it’s not mentioned at all. 

The characters themselves were okay. Not great. Just…okay. Lacelle tried way, way too hard to give her characters depth, but only succeeded in telling instead of showing.

Instead of me figuring something out about Emory, Lacelle would have a huge, descriptive paragraph of Emory realizing that she compared herself to Romie too much and that she had her own self-worth. Moments like this aren’t bad per se, but they were way too frequent for my liking. 

Let me, the reader, figure things out about the characters and come to my own conclusions. Don’t spell out every single detail for me and hold my hand. It’s tedious and it’s boring. Lacelle did this constantly. 

In addition, for a nearly 600-paged book, about four characters mattered: Emory, Baz, Kieran, and Kai. Emory and Baz are the main characters so it’s hard to discount them, even though they’re not that interesting due to having every single personality trait of theirs spelled out and analyzed by the author itself. 

Kieran and Kai, although important characters, were very one-dimensional. Kieran’s power-obsessed manipulative personality was not a secret whatsoever.

Lacelle reveals his “true” nature at the climactic end, even though the signs showing his megalomania were painfully clear to a ten-year-old. 

I liked Kai the most, but he’s in very little of the book. We see him mainly in flashbacks and then at the very end. Lacelle, why lock up your most interesting characters and hide them away for most of the novel?? She does this with Romie too, a more egregious error. 

Romie dying is the catalyst for this whole story. It’s what changes Emory and makes her a tidecaller, it’s what invigorates Kieran and sets him on his master plan, it’s what influences Kai to collapse—the whole story starts with Romie dying at Doveremere Cave. 

Yet…Lacelle starts the story after this event. Why would an author do this??? It’s excruciating. Your most important part of the whole novel isn’t even included in the novel. She inserts it later as a flashback, but I don’t want a flashback. I want the real thing. 

The book should have started with Romie and Emory going to Dovermere and then 

progress from there. It easily could have been the first chapter and it would have introduced us to Romie’s character more, set up Romie and Emory’s friendship, and acted as the catalyst for the whole story. 

Even better, it could have even started with Baz’s memory of his father’s printing press blowing up, then the three of them starting at Aldryn, them going to Dovermere, Romie dying, and thennnnn continuing.

That already would have been a better book. It wouldn’t even have to be longer. By cutting out all the repetitive and useless bits that I already mentioned, Lacelle would have had plenty of room to include these essential moments. 

I truly don’t understand the choices she (or her editor) made about the plot timeline and pacing because they were all terrible.

This is a true injustice when you take into account how original and fascinating the initial concept is and how much time and effort she put into the world and its lore. 

Recommendation: This book had all the right ingredients for something truly great, but fell short due to verbose, albeit beautiful writing, a slow plot, choppy pacing, predictable characters, and too dense world-building that added nothing to the story.

If you want dark academia, look elsewhere like If We Were Villains or the Atlas Paradox. These stories have much better plots with much more interesting characters and it doesn’t take 600 pages to get to the end. 

Score: 4/10

[the---hermit]

The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

I read this book because I wanted to read a lighter fantasy novel to get me in the mood to actually continue The Witcher book series, plus I was intrigued by how many people love this book. It was not good, I really did not enjoy my time with it. I will admit part of this is on me, because I know that YA isn't usually my jam, but I wanted to give it a try, and sometimes I do like some YAs. This was not the case. Firstly a bit on the plot, although if you have been online for the past couple of years you probably have seen this book everywhere. We follow Jude, a human girl, who was brought to Faerie alongside her twin sister and their older half sister who is part fae. The focus of the book is famously enermies to lovers trope that happens between Jude and Cardan, a young prince of this land. The romance part of the book is very little, which I liked, as the plot tries to focus on the political aspect of things in Faerie. The thing I disliked the most was the main character, I really did not like her. She falls under the not-like-other-girls cathegory and is overall so annoying. Her way of narrating everything was frustrating, she always played the victim in every scenario, it was a painful experience to read. Of course me disliking the MC so much does not help at all my overall opinion of the book, but there's a few more things I didn't like. I felt like the narration sometimes was a bit weird, there was a few descriptions that were confusing. Avoiding spoilers there's one scene for example in which a character is described to be tied up, but then a couple of their movements are described as they if they were pretty much free, and then again it's said that they are bound. And this is just one example. There's also another thing which I realized at the end, so many actions ofthe MC have zero consequences which makes everything even less believable (I'll talk about it under the cut in the spoiler-y section). I liked the idea of a fantasy novel set in a world of faes, there was potential, but this book was overall not for me. What convinces me of the fact that the story had potential is that at the end I am curious to know how certain things will progress in the next two books, although I hated the main character so much. Another thing I really disliked, and that had a lot of potential in my opinion, is having twin characters. That could have started a really interesting narrative exposing how two similar people can react to the same situation in totally different ways. Instead the overall narration seems from the very beginning to yell at the reader that Jude is the superior sister, because she is a fighter (she is impulsive and has anger problems, which could have also been a great thing to talk about because she has all the rights to be angry, but at the end that's only used to make her "cool"), instead her twin is always exposed as weak, in need of protection, not independent, with no explanation of why she might be like that. What I didn't like is that from the very beginning you can tell that the author didn't think much of this twin, who is just there to oppose Jude and make her the cool edgy one, I guess. I could go on on why I didn't like the book, but I'll stop, I would really love to know what were the reasons people who read this book liked it so much, as I said clearly this book wasn't for me, but if so many people loved it there must be something to it I missed.

As mentioned under the cut there's a small spoiler-y section so consider yourselves warned.

I read this book for the twin character prompt of the winter reading challenge

In this spoiler section I want to explain a bit better what I mean when I say that Jude's actions had no consequences. I am thinking about mainly two scenes. Firstly Jude litteraly commits murder inside her house, the house of a general, and no one hears, but whatever. Let's also skip on how she managed to hide a corpes by herself, which seems highly improbable. There are no consequences to this action other than her getting a couple of bruises and her not having Valerian bother her anymore. No one seems to notice one of the sons of Gentry has disappeard, no one. I understand that the reing is going through a lot, but nor his family or his friends seem to give a shit about him disappearing out of the blue, and of course there's not consequences for Jude. Another action of hers that has zero consequences, and to be honest I have yet to understand how that was useful to the general plot of the book (although it may come up on one of the next novels of the series, but I doubt it), is her kidnapping a human servant from Balekin's palace. She gets this girl out of the place and back to her senses, for no reason, when she is supposed to just spy and lay low, and has her kill herself because of the trauma of realizing what happened to her. We are then told that the girl is brought back to life by those who live in the waters, and that's it, nothing happens. No one realizes this servant has disappeard, which is more believable than the Valerian thing, but this girl being brought back to life has no real impact on Jude. When we learn that she is alive again, I expected some sort of confrontation between the two, something that maybe would have endangered Jude's position, but nope, nothing happens. It would have been the same if the girl remained dead, and it would have been the same if Jude had not tried to save her. It's things like these that contributed to me really not liking the book, because at the end of the day it felt like the book wasn't curated enough, and if it were it could have been much better. Anyway I think I dragged this poor book enough, so I'll stop here.

[bookishlyvintage]

this vicious grace [thoughts]

[shrikebrother]

my beautiful wife young adult fiction keeps getting bullied