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erika_briggs's review against another edition
3.0
This book is rally good. It's about...well, can't tell you. Alls I can say is that there is a girl named Miranda with a curse that she must break before the devil comes to Roanoke Island. Or is he here already?
laurafalls's review against another edition
3.0
Roanoke is one of those great mysteries of the United States' history. We know very little about the people that sailed over to start the colony, and, to this day, we still don't know exactly what happened to the same colonists some months later. Honestly, we'll probably never know. But Gwenda Bond and doesn't let that stop her.
Bond has created a mash-up of history and fiction in her debut novel Blackwood/ The current Roanoke community, in modern times, deals with the weird and unexplained as two of their younger brethren, Miranda and Phillips, try to learn exactly what's going on, and how they can stop it.
The world that Bond created was new and exciting. I do have to admit, however, that I was somewhat confused as I read through the story. In the end, though, everything snapped into place and I felt that things were drawn up in a nice, tight bow. The plot moved quickly, and there was little downtime. I felt like the last 3/4 of the book were a constant thrill ride, one that I had to get my breath back from.
Bond's characters were believable, which was nice, considering the different subject matter. Phillips was a troubled teen, who masked his confusion behind a bad-boy persona. Miranda was the girl that never had close ties to anyone, mainly because no one wanted to get near her "bad luck."
I don't want to give much away about the plot, but I thought the new spin on alchemy and those who practiced it was clever and new.
I suggest you read this book. When you do, though, be prepared to go slow and steady (and don't rush, like I did...) so you can truly grasp everything that happens as the book goes along.
I received an e-galley courtesy of Strange Chemistry and NetGalley. This in no way impacted my review of the book.
Bond has created a mash-up of history and fiction in her debut novel Blackwood/ The current Roanoke community, in modern times, deals with the weird and unexplained as two of their younger brethren, Miranda and Phillips, try to learn exactly what's going on, and how they can stop it.
The world that Bond created was new and exciting. I do have to admit, however, that I was somewhat confused as I read through the story. In the end, though, everything snapped into place and I felt that things were drawn up in a nice, tight bow. The plot moved quickly, and there was little downtime. I felt like the last 3/4 of the book were a constant thrill ride, one that I had to get my breath back from.
Bond's characters were believable, which was nice, considering the different subject matter. Phillips was a troubled teen, who masked his confusion behind a bad-boy persona. Miranda was the girl that never had close ties to anyone, mainly because no one wanted to get near her "bad luck."
I don't want to give much away about the plot, but I thought the new spin on alchemy and those who practiced it was clever and new.
I suggest you read this book. When you do, though, be prepared to go slow and steady (and don't rush, like I did...) so you can truly grasp everything that happens as the book goes along.
I received an e-galley courtesy of Strange Chemistry and NetGalley. This in no way impacted my review of the book.
samcarlin's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book. My husband and I had recently been discussing Roanoke and how we would love to know what happened there. When I saw the subject of this book, I couldn't resist! It was an interesting read and, while some things slipped into place where I thought they would, others did not and kept me guessing.
serendipity_viv's review against another edition
5.0
I went into this book rather blind to the story. I hadn't read any reviews, I didn't even read the blurb on the back. I was basically led by the rather attractive cover and I thought would let myself become absorbed and see if the story could unravel itself within the first couple of pages so that I would have a fair idea of what the story was about. From the first paragraph which I have quoted at the top I was drawn into the story. I felt the first few lines were powerful enough to make me read on. Once I discovered that the book revolved around a well known legend I was smitten. There is nothing more I enjoy than losing myself in a story that is based on truth, which leaves you with that questioning mind at the end where you wonder what really happened in the first place.
I had never ever heard of the Lost Colony legend and I didn't realise it was true until it was pointed out to me on Twitter, so I searched the internet for evidence which I discovered here. Blackwood was insprired by the original legend and I really do feel that the author has created a fascinating and thrilling story with the legend glistening as the centre piece.
The characters were extremely well written and very strong in temperament as they took on basically everyone in town. The story is told from the dual perspectives of Miranda and Phillips and it really helped to see it from both sides. Miranda and Phillips were viewed by most of their town as the type of kids you didn't really mix with, each one boosting a reputation that neither lived up to in reality, proving that rumours do escalate. Both are very wary of each other to begin with and it takes time for Miranda to really trust that Phillips has her best interests at heart. She has been let down by so many in her past, she isn't quite ready to give all her trust. Gradually as the story progresses Miranda realises just how much Phillips is willing to sacrifice for her and they begin to appear like a modern YA version of Bonnie and Clyde as they dodge everyone in authority in order to discover the truth.
As always, the dog was my favourite character! Add a lovely and loyal canine companion and I will always be captivated by the story. Sidekick is simply gorgeous and I was desperate to rub behind his ears.
John Dee was an interesting interpretation of the real person and his unhealthy interest in Miranda gave me the creeps, especially considering who he was portraying his feelings through.
The plot was absorbing and gripping and reminded a little of the recent TV series Alcatraz. I was totally hooked throughout the book. I really love how the author has interpreted this piece of history. An excellent debut where the author has taken a true story and completely made it her own by adding elements of magic and paranormal activity.
I had never ever heard of the Lost Colony legend and I didn't realise it was true until it was pointed out to me on Twitter, so I searched the internet for evidence which I discovered here. Blackwood was insprired by the original legend and I really do feel that the author has created a fascinating and thrilling story with the legend glistening as the centre piece.
The characters were extremely well written and very strong in temperament as they took on basically everyone in town. The story is told from the dual perspectives of Miranda and Phillips and it really helped to see it from both sides. Miranda and Phillips were viewed by most of their town as the type of kids you didn't really mix with, each one boosting a reputation that neither lived up to in reality, proving that rumours do escalate. Both are very wary of each other to begin with and it takes time for Miranda to really trust that Phillips has her best interests at heart. She has been let down by so many in her past, she isn't quite ready to give all her trust. Gradually as the story progresses Miranda realises just how much Phillips is willing to sacrifice for her and they begin to appear like a modern YA version of Bonnie and Clyde as they dodge everyone in authority in order to discover the truth.
As always, the dog was my favourite character! Add a lovely and loyal canine companion and I will always be captivated by the story. Sidekick is simply gorgeous and I was desperate to rub behind his ears.
John Dee was an interesting interpretation of the real person and his unhealthy interest in Miranda gave me the creeps, especially considering who he was portraying his feelings through.
The plot was absorbing and gripping and reminded a little of the recent TV series Alcatraz. I was totally hooked throughout the book. I really love how the author has interpreted this piece of history. An excellent debut where the author has taken a true story and completely made it her own by adding elements of magic and paranormal activity.
princess_starr's review against another edition
2.0
I’ve heard a lot about Gwenda Bond from the various authors that I follow online, but she was always an author that I’d read the synopsis of her book and just end up putting back on the shelf. I don’t know what it is, but there’s always something about the synopses that just turn me off on the book. And having read Blackwood, I’m still unsure if I want to give Woken Gods a shot. (I will also admit to being incredibly busy this month, which is why it took me so long to get through this book. Amongst other reasons, but there’s a good chunk of “Yeah, can’t read two books right now.”)
This is one of those books with a strong concept, good characters, and terrible plot execution. The first quarter of this pulled me in with the sudden new disappearances on Roanoke Island, and I was curious to find out the meaning of the black ship and how it ties to Miranda’s family, but by the time Phillips returns to Roanoke Island, the plot momentum screeches to a halt and drags on until the last quarter. And in the last quarter of the book, the climax and resolution are so completely ridiculous that I wasn’t sure what I was reading. I could almost excuse the meandering middle part of the book where Miranda and Phillips are discovering Deep Dark Historical Secrets if there was a good payoff for the ending. Instead, we get death by drowning because of curse limitations. (And when I thought about that ending, technically it shouldn’t have worked.)
As I said, I liked the premise. While I ascribe to the tribe integration theory of the colonists, I do like that Bond is trying something different with her premise behind the colonists’ disappearance. I like the concept of “Okay, well, there’s a interdimensional rift where the souls of the colonists are waiting to possess modern day bodies.”; I can run with that. I can even run with the idea that all of the missing were followers of John Dee and alchemists. My problems start with the whole history involving John Dee trying to usurp Elizabeth I with a race of immortal colonists. That’s when my believability meter cracking because yeah no. I could go off on how much this mucks about with Elizabethan history because no. No. John Dee was wandering Europe and communicating with angels at the time of the colony’s founding. That’s just the start of the problems. (Also, saying Raleigh was a favorite of Elizabeth’s =/= they were banging. There’s actually no conclusive evidence of them having an affair.) And then there’s a magical gun that imparts immortality in a two-step process that never really gets explained; not to mention, the gun never actually or metaphorically goes off and plays any importance to the plot.
The main chunk of the book just has some of the weirdest plot points that I just had to put my head down for a few minutes because my brain started hurting from trying to unravel it. For example, Phillips is accused of murdering Miranda’s father by the FBI! Oh no! Except that this plot thread makes NO FREAKING SENSE because it’s outright stated that Phillips wasn’t even in the same state at the time of the murder. I just…what? And their reasoning is that “Oh, well you broke into the funeral home and touched the body! And now the body’s gone!” I…look, lock him up for breaking and entering then. And then we find out that John Dee is possessing Miranda’s father, which NOBODY QUESTIONS. NOBODY. Apparently the only three people in town who recognize the former Mr. Blackwood are Miranda, the town sheriff and the guy who runs the liquor store. I mean, the police are going to investigate all of the missing people, right? No? You’re just going to let them go off to the Blackwood house and nobody is going to question why the dead guy who is well known around town is suddenly walking around and missing a very distinctive birthmark? And let them put on a play? (Yes, this is the climax of the book. The antagonists hold a ceremony at the local town play.)
(And again, the historical fail with a nice heaping pile of DO NOT WANT is that John Dee was apparently in love with Miranda’s ancestor, Mary Blackwood, and thinks that Miranda is her reincarnated. And hits on Miranda while in her father’s body.
Yeah. I'm going let that sit here.)
And to defeat the evil John Dee, Miranda’s big grand solution is to have her father walk into the ocean and drown, because her family’s curse stipulates that a Blackwood can never leave the island. Which 1. Shouldn’t work because Dee’s proven that he can jump into other bodies at will, and 2. Apparently, having the snake birthmark means that Miranda now has the curse, so would that mean her dad is wandering the ocean floor forever until he’s depressurized? Not the immortality gun which Miranda does tamper with, it just does nothing in the climax.
The thing is, I would have given a lot of this book a free pass, because I did genuinely like the characters. Both Miranda and Phillips do err on the side of bland a lot of the time—she’s a small town girl who wants more than her dead end life; he’s the charming troublemaker with a heart of gold (and a daaaark secret). But I found both of them to be endearing and funny and I love that the two have instant chemistry with one another. I really liked Phillips’s relationship with his parents—yes, even though he caused hell for them so he could get away from the voices of Roanoke, they still care a lot for Phillips. Plus I think it does say a lot about how much his father really trusts Phillips to bring him home to help with the new disappearances. The fact that Phillips’s parents know about his psychic abilities is actually a welcome change in most of the YA paranormal I’ve read; they might not believe in it 100% but they acknowledge it exists, their son has to live with this and they’re willing to help him. (Which goes right out the window whenever the murder charges show up, because no, really, that’s the stupidest accusation in the whole book and Phillips’s parents would damn well know firsthand that it’s stupid.)
As I said in the beginning, there was a lot to this book that I was looking forward to. I liked the concept even if my inner history geek was crying in corner and I really liked the main characters. But…look. I can handwave a lot of things if there’s good plotting that makes sense within the book’s context. I have no idea what happened to the plot in this book. The way things are explained and revealed seem so happenstance and it comes out of nowhere, and the way Bond introduces conflict is kind of insulting to the parties involved. (Seriously, the whole making Phillips a fugitive. What was that. You had a perfectly good reason to lock him up, we didn’t need murder charges.) The ending has a plot hole big enough to drive an eighteen wheeler through it.
I really don’t want to say that “Oh, well, the reason I never picked up Gwenda Bond before is that my instincts are right!” but I am less curious to check out Woken Gods. I do want to see what else she can do, but I think it’s going to take a lot more for me to check out her books now.
This is one of those books with a strong concept, good characters, and terrible plot execution. The first quarter of this pulled me in with the sudden new disappearances on Roanoke Island, and I was curious to find out the meaning of the black ship and how it ties to Miranda’s family, but by the time Phillips returns to Roanoke Island, the plot momentum screeches to a halt and drags on until the last quarter. And in the last quarter of the book, the climax and resolution are so completely ridiculous that I wasn’t sure what I was reading. I could almost excuse the meandering middle part of the book where Miranda and Phillips are discovering Deep Dark Historical Secrets if there was a good payoff for the ending. Instead, we get death by drowning because of curse limitations. (And when I thought about that ending, technically it shouldn’t have worked.)
As I said, I liked the premise. While I ascribe to the tribe integration theory of the colonists, I do like that Bond is trying something different with her premise behind the colonists’ disappearance. I like the concept of “Okay, well, there’s a interdimensional rift where the souls of the colonists are waiting to possess modern day bodies.”; I can run with that. I can even run with the idea that all of the missing were followers of John Dee and alchemists. My problems start with the whole history involving John Dee trying to usurp Elizabeth I with a race of immortal colonists. That’s when my believability meter cracking because yeah no. I could go off on how much this mucks about with Elizabethan history because no. No. John Dee was wandering Europe and communicating with angels at the time of the colony’s founding. That’s just the start of the problems. (Also, saying Raleigh was a favorite of Elizabeth’s =/= they were banging. There’s actually no conclusive evidence of them having an affair.) And then there’s a magical gun that imparts immortality in a two-step process that never really gets explained; not to mention, the gun never actually or metaphorically goes off and plays any importance to the plot.
The main chunk of the book just has some of the weirdest plot points that I just had to put my head down for a few minutes because my brain started hurting from trying to unravel it. For example, Phillips is accused of murdering Miranda’s father by the FBI! Oh no! Except that this plot thread makes NO FREAKING SENSE because it’s outright stated that Phillips wasn’t even in the same state at the time of the murder. I just…what? And their reasoning is that “Oh, well you broke into the funeral home and touched the body! And now the body’s gone!” I…look, lock him up for breaking and entering then. And then we find out that John Dee is possessing Miranda’s father, which NOBODY QUESTIONS. NOBODY. Apparently the only three people in town who recognize the former Mr. Blackwood are Miranda, the town sheriff and the guy who runs the liquor store. I mean, the police are going to investigate all of the missing people, right? No? You’re just going to let them go off to the Blackwood house and nobody is going to question why the dead guy who is well known around town is suddenly walking around and missing a very distinctive birthmark? And let them put on a play? (Yes, this is the climax of the book. The antagonists hold a ceremony at the local town play.)
(And again, the historical fail with a nice heaping pile of DO NOT WANT is that John Dee was apparently in love with Miranda’s ancestor, Mary Blackwood, and thinks that Miranda is her reincarnated. And hits on Miranda while in her father’s body.
Yeah. I'm going let that sit here.)
And to defeat the evil John Dee, Miranda’s big grand solution is to have her father walk into the ocean and drown, because her family’s curse stipulates that a Blackwood can never leave the island. Which 1. Shouldn’t work because Dee’s proven that he can jump into other bodies at will, and 2. Apparently, having the snake birthmark means that Miranda now has the curse, so would that mean her dad is wandering the ocean floor forever until he’s depressurized? Not the immortality gun which Miranda does tamper with, it just does nothing in the climax.
The thing is, I would have given a lot of this book a free pass, because I did genuinely like the characters. Both Miranda and Phillips do err on the side of bland a lot of the time—she’s a small town girl who wants more than her dead end life; he’s the charming troublemaker with a heart of gold (and a daaaark secret). But I found both of them to be endearing and funny and I love that the two have instant chemistry with one another. I really liked Phillips’s relationship with his parents—yes, even though he caused hell for them so he could get away from the voices of Roanoke, they still care a lot for Phillips. Plus I think it does say a lot about how much his father really trusts Phillips to bring him home to help with the new disappearances. The fact that Phillips’s parents know about his psychic abilities is actually a welcome change in most of the YA paranormal I’ve read; they might not believe in it 100% but they acknowledge it exists, their son has to live with this and they’re willing to help him. (Which goes right out the window whenever the murder charges show up, because no, really, that’s the stupidest accusation in the whole book and Phillips’s parents would damn well know firsthand that it’s stupid.)
As I said in the beginning, there was a lot to this book that I was looking forward to. I liked the concept even if my inner history geek was crying in corner and I really liked the main characters. But…look. I can handwave a lot of things if there’s good plotting that makes sense within the book’s context. I have no idea what happened to the plot in this book. The way things are explained and revealed seem so happenstance and it comes out of nowhere, and the way Bond introduces conflict is kind of insulting to the parties involved. (Seriously, the whole making Phillips a fugitive. What was that. You had a perfectly good reason to lock him up, we didn’t need murder charges.) The ending has a plot hole big enough to drive an eighteen wheeler through it.
I really don’t want to say that “Oh, well, the reason I never picked up Gwenda Bond before is that my instincts are right!” but I am less curious to check out Woken Gods. I do want to see what else she can do, but I think it’s going to take a lot more for me to check out her books now.
truestorydesu's review
4.0
This book was...good - I enjoyed it, but the two main characters lacked chemistry and stuff just sort of happens to them. While clever, it just didn't all quite work out for me. Still, it was nice to have a main female character be a nerd and watch/make references to nerd stuff.
civreader's review
3.0
A 3.5, really. Very strong first half, solid premise and good characters. Nice understated, well-handled romantic side, too.
Part of me wonders, though, how much better it could have been if NOT a YA, and not written as such. This had potential to be SERIOUSLY creepy and suspenseful. That's not meant to diminish how good it is, but... yeah.
Part of me wonders, though, how much better it could have been if NOT a YA, and not written as such. This had potential to be SERIOUSLY creepy and suspenseful. That's not meant to diminish how good it is, but... yeah.
icameheretoread's review
3.0
Unfortunately, this one was not for me. I liked the idea behind the book but I had to force myself through it, never fell into the story spell of reading it, and my favorite character was the dog.
This is not a bad story, it just is not great. I took off one star for overuse of the work "frak". Once would have been hip, too many times was lame.
This is not a bad story, it just is not great. I took off one star for overuse of the work "frak". Once would have been hip, too many times was lame.
gem91's review against another edition
3.0
I don't really know how I feel about this book. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it and I didn't want to put it down in some parts. But some parts were just down right ridiculous.
I feel like I didn't connect with the characters very well. Miranda and Phillips were both likable characters but I didn't feel a connection to them at all.
The story was interesting. And a little creepy at times. But I felt like it was dragged out at the end too much. I did enjoy I though and will probably give another one of Gwenda Bond's books a go at some point
I feel like I didn't connect with the characters very well. Miranda and Phillips were both likable characters but I didn't feel a connection to them at all.
The story was interesting. And a little creepy at times. But I felt like it was dragged out at the end too much. I did enjoy I though and will probably give another one of Gwenda Bond's books a go at some point