comebymoonlight's reviews
12 reviews

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

adventurous emotional funny hopeful inspiring tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was supposed to be entertaining trash. It had absolutely no right being this good.

Even plot points which I think bordered on cliche were so well done that rather than rolling my eyes I was struggling to contain my excitement. The entire main cast is great, I was particularly impressed with the main character herself, Violet, who has such a good balance of flaws and strengths that I usually don't find in romantasy MCs. I was equally invested in the plot and characters outside of the obvious and inevitable main romance, which, again, is not normally a strength of the genre.

I especially enjoyed the writing of all the dialog -- the banter between characters felt organic and funny, and I loved the

blurring between book narration and internal monologue as Tairn starts responding to normal paragraphs of text.

DO NOT read the bonus content before finishing the entire book. Despite happening fairly early on chronologically, the alternate PoV results in very significant spoilers for plot points which come up much later.

Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

Keturah and Lord Death presents itself like a fairy tale, especially in the writing style, and sometimes that hits and sometimes it really does not. The characters are for the most part rather flat, each having only one or two traits which they highlight every single time they speak. This, again, feels very typical of old oral-tradition style fairy tales, so I do think it was deliberate rather than a flaw of the writing, but it certainly didn't make me feel attached to any of them. The plot is similarly one-dimensional, but once I'd aligned my expectations to reading folklore I felt much more forgiving of that.

Some things which I felt worked well:

• Any scene involving the great hart really felt like it had that layer of fairy magic over top of it, and was wonderful.
• Despite also being a victim of the very thin characterization, I liked Lord Death a lot, especially
  the overlap between his commanding and begging when he tells Keturah not to ask anything more of him
  .
• Likewise, I loved Soor Lily, the village witch.
• The magic of the story felt very folksy which worked really well with the style
  (her love charm made from an eyeball, or the tincture somebody drinks at the fair which causes all his warts to just fall off -- it was weird, but it felt like something I might read from the Grimm Brothers)
  .

Some things which did not work:

• The first person narrative. Keturah, like any fairy tale girl, is extremely beautiful. We learn this from her complaining about it and it just reads like extremely egocentric humble bragging.
• Keturah herself. No shame on anyone in the real world whose only desire in life is to have a little family of their own, but it does not make for a very compelling character motivation. She is just flat and boring and pure and beautiful and, yeah, that's again very Grimm Brothers but it's also not an interesting read.
• The absolute stupidity of how Keturah spends the first day after meeting Lord Death.
  Sure, she ends up getting a stay of execution, but she wastes all day looking for lemons for a plan that would take several days (until the fair) to materialize, and also does not press the issue of an interview with John to warn him about the plague before she dies. I knew it was all going to magically work out for her because I was aware that was the kind of story I was reading, but that did not make it any less infuriating.
• Keturah's other suitors. 
  I don't care about Ben, but John gets too much "screen time" to the point where he has much more chemistry with Keturah than Lord Death did. He's also just a genuinely good person, and his attempt to protect Keturah from Death kind of soured what was supposed to be the emotional payoff of the book.
• Despite my other complaints, this was the point which made me give a lower rating: Keturah's love for Lord Death was not believable.
  She, apparently, loves him so much she's willing to give up her dream of having a baby (the motivation by which she was previously defined), but her explanations boiled down to "fear of death is what made me love life." That doesn't track for willingly dying. I would have liked more interactions with Death where he opens her eyes up to these things as a character rather than as a concept.

Dune by Frank Herbert

adventurous challenging tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This book was incredibly dense, both in just how much info it's constantly dumping on you and the actual structure of how Herbert writes, so I'm amazed that I still couldn't put it down. It really gripped me from start to finish. Very few characters are uncomplicatedly good -- even the protagonists mostly have their questionable motives -- and I enjoyed the complexity of them. They felt more like people than like characters.

If I have any criticism, it's that the emotional impact of certain scenes felt.. dulled. Sometimes that made sense and I'm sure was intentional, like

Paul's reaction to the news of his father's death and Yueh's betrayal

, but other times did not, like

the portions of that same scene which were from Jessica's perspective instead of his

. It's not that I found characters' feelings unbelievable, it's just that, despite being a massive baby usually, I didn't really feel those feelings myself.

(I did tear up when Paul was talking Gurney down from killing Jessica though.. that hit.)

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances by Alexander McCall Smith

adventurous funny lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Plot seems to happen in between paragraphs, rather than in them. Every time something seemed to be happening, it was instead suddenly resolved.

Every single character in this book gives the impression of being slightly insane.

The first half of the book is mostly dedicated to making fun of the English, which, being English, was obviously my favorite part.

A Monsoon Rising by Thea Guanzon

adventurous hopeful mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Yo what the fuck.

This was a solid sequel to The Hurricane Wars and felt like a natural progression of the book that came before, albeit a little spicier. I'm of the probably unpopular opinion that there was too much smut this time around, there were points when it felt like it was just getting in the way of the plot.

However.

HOWEVER.

The final chapter has left me distressed when the fuck is book 3 coming out this is an unacceptable cliffhanger.

The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers

dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

This book is difficult to review because I feel very differently about the first hundred pages compared to what follows.

Part 1 of the book is painfully slow. Almost nothing happens in the main plot, and even the nothing that is happening feels disjointed and unimportant, constantly glossed over with time skips or interjected with short chapters of (for now) completely unrelated snapshots of things happening elsewhere. Rather than break up the tedium they just made the nothing drag on. This author desperately needs to learn better pacing.

Parts 2-5 I thoroughly enjoyed. All those unrelated snapshots finally pulled together, the pacing picked up, and I happily read the last 200 pages in a single sitting. I am a sucker for good world building, and this was excellent, though darker than I expected. That said, it wasn't the book I thought it was when I picked it up. I was expecting a sort of Theseus-descending-into-Hades adventure which it very much was not.

[Spoiler-light thoughts on the conclusion]

There were a couple unanswered questions throughout the story that I kept feeling would be ruined by almost any answer we were given, and I was pleasantly surprised that they were left as questions. Similarly, I was pleasantly surprised the will-they-won't-they romantic subplot didn't magically end up with a happily-ever-after that would have strained my suspension of disbelief.

In the end, I really enjoyed the 240-page story that started at Part 2. Do I think reading the first 100 pages to get there is worth it? I don't know.

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Body horror, Child death, Death, Physical abuse, Violence, Blood, Murder, and Abandonment

Moderate: Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Torture, Fire/Fire injury, and Injury/Injury detail

Minor: Cannibalism

Mrs. Mike by Nancy Freedman, Benedict Freedman

adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I first read this book in middle school, then again in high school, and again in college. I still think about it often, and I'm sure I have not yet read it for the last time. It has stuck with me more than any other book ever has.

Everywhere I look I see this classified as a romance novel and I object to that classification. Yes, Kathy's marriage is an important part of the book, but only in that it is the trigger for every other change in her life. It's certainly not un-romantic, but this story is far more about Kathy and the community around her than about Kathy-and-Mike (don't be fooled by the title). The focus is on her personal growth and the trials she faces along the way.

And just as much it is about the beautiful but capricious Canadian wilderness, which plays such a central role that it feels like a character in its own right.

The authors pull the reader between moments of beauty and love and wonder into scenes of loss and destruction and injustice and then back again at dizzying speeds, and some of the descriptions in this book still haunt me.

Mrs. Mike was written in the 1940s and the events it covers are from the decades preceding. While Kathy herself consistently speaks out (or acts out, when able) against the racism and sexism that was typical of the times, it can still be a very difficult read.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Flawless.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

The narrator (Hastings) is sort of an insufferable idiot but the fact that this is clearly also Christie's opinion of her own character makes it amusing rather than irritating. And I love Papa Poirot.

The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon

adventurous emotional hopeful medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I'm not going to lie, I only bought this book because the edges of the pages were all purple and had moons down the side and I thought it was so pretty. Definitionally judging a book by its cover.

This is an enemies-to-lovers story and it is very tropey. The light vs. dark theme was laid out from the start, but there's also a

super special magical power that nobody else has, a surprise long-lost princess, an arranged marriage, every physical fight the main characters get into pre-romance immediately devolves into them rolling around in a totally not sexual way, and my absolute least favorite "we got so mad at each other we ended up making out"

. Both the main characters are inexplicably obsessed with each other long before they have any reason to be, which I guess is going for a sort of love-at-first-sight(-but-not-yet-because-we-hate-each-other) thing, but I found it irritating. And by far my biggest criticism of the book is that Talasyn's traumatic past seems to only affect her when it's convenient for the plot.

All that said... I immediately bought the sequel upon finishing this one and I'm excited to read it, so I can't pretend I didn't enjoy it. The world building was fun, both the magic system and the politics, and the romance may not be ground-breaking but it's exactly what I wanted it to be. It's a cheesy, obvious, slow-burn romance and it's not pretending to be anything else. Just make a conscious decision not to take it too seriously, and it's great.