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A review by skylarkblue1
Queen of the Tiles by Hanna Alkaf
5.0
PRODIGIOUS
14 points
adjective: wonderful or marvelous
Trigger warnings: Indepth conversations about grief, trauma, dealing with the death of a loved one. Cheating, manipulation, detailed panic attacks, on-page death.
This book first and foremost is about learning how to live with grief, how that is different for everyone, and how each person's grief effects them and others around them. This book has a wonderful authors note right at the start detailing this and it says "I trust you to know if you can handle that today. And if you can't, there's always tomorrow." and I love that. Please take this note seriously however, the book is very explicit on each character's journey with grief and the mental toll it takes.
The myster however, oh my *god* the mystery element. For most of the book it's simmering under the surface, still there but just slowly building up until the climax of the book. And then all hell is released at once. But even then, it didn't really feel like a bad sudden shift. It felt like a total 180 suddenly with how active it suddenly got, but thinking back to previous foreshadowing (that I've noticed, I'm sure on a second read I'll notice much more hehe) it all just clicks into place perfectly.
Reading through the climax and the ending, I didn't have any "wait that was sudden" or "that didn't make sense", the motives and character changes felt understandable. And for a mystery book, that's just perfect tbh.
And if you where like me and where weary about the use of scrabble and the "gimmick" of rarely used words and such, it's done very well. Najwa's commentary is written like a typical teen would speak, however her main grounding technique is to pull related words to the situation from her scrabble dictionary and go over the definition of them and focus on the word for a bit. Each of the words are clearly defined so you won't need to have a dictionary open on the side aha! Honestly it also fits her personality very well, it's something that keeps her grounded to what's happening and is self-soothing.
14 points
adjective: wonderful or marvelous
Trigger warnings: Indepth conversations about grief, trauma, dealing with the death of a loved one. Cheating, manipulation, detailed panic attacks, on-page death.
This book first and foremost is about learning how to live with grief, how that is different for everyone, and how each person's grief effects them and others around them. This book has a wonderful authors note right at the start detailing this and it says "I trust you to know if you can handle that today. And if you can't, there's always tomorrow." and I love that. Please take this note seriously however, the book is very explicit on each character's journey with grief and the mental toll it takes.
The myster however, oh my *god* the mystery element. For most of the book it's simmering under the surface, still there but just slowly building up until the climax of the book. And then all hell is released at once. But even then, it didn't really feel like a bad sudden shift. It felt like a total 180 suddenly with how active it suddenly got, but thinking back to previous foreshadowing (that I've noticed, I'm sure on a second read I'll notice much more hehe) it all just clicks into place perfectly.
Reading through the climax and the ending, I didn't have any "wait that was sudden" or "that didn't make sense", the motives and character changes felt understandable. And for a mystery book, that's just perfect tbh.
And if you where like me and where weary about the use of scrabble and the "gimmick" of rarely used words and such, it's done very well. Najwa's commentary is written like a typical teen would speak, however her main grounding technique is to pull related words to the situation from her scrabble dictionary and go over the definition of them and focus on the word for a bit. Each of the words are clearly defined so you won't need to have a dictionary open on the side aha! Honestly it also fits her personality very well, it's something that keeps her grounded to what's happening and is self-soothing.