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saraeli's reviews
234 reviews
Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn
3.0
I really enjoyed this book. A very light, easy YA fantasy with some surprising and weird twists. Three stars since the plot and characters could have been more polished - it holds together well but at some parts it felt like the author revising the plot on the fly rather than cleverly reaching plot twists. I'm excited to read more by this author.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson
3.0
It took me over a year to read this because it jumps around to much that I had a hard time staying engrossed in it for longer than a few days at a time. Full of interesting trivia though, and presented in a hilarious and poignant fashion, just a bit more rambling than I would have liked.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4.0
I enjoyed this much more than I expected to, in spite of how preachy it gets at times. The characters of the girls and the scrapes they get into were wonderful and entertaining. That said, I kind of wish I had stopped reading after part 1. Part 2 was rough. The book lost its status as a peek into the life of family and became a lovely but awkward and sad wrapping up of the story of each girl. I'm still not sure how I felt about the ending.
A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park
5.0
Wow. This is a kids' book, but I'm not sure children could really get into this story since it goes into a lot of detail about pottery. This was a wonderful and sad story and a very easy read.
Archangel by Sharon Shinn
4.0
This book owes a huge debt of gratitude to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight - the plot and characters are pretty much the same, though the setting and timing are slightly different and the characters are also a little different. Unlike Lessa in Dragonflight, Rachel doesn't really seem to grow as a character over the course of the story, and I sometimes found her tantrums pretty obnoxious. However, I really enjoyed this book and will probably read it again, along with the rest of this series. And I may go back and re-read the Pern series, too. :)
Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn
2.0
This book was disappointing. I kept waiting and waiting for something to happen - the author did a nice job of world-building and had some interesting political plot threads going, but she never got around having anything climactic happen. Throughout the book, the main charcter became more and more of a "Mary Sue" character, all=powerful yet vulnerable, blah blah romantic heroine. The love story was totally unbelievable, and the secondary characters at the end of the story all suddenly pulling for the romance seemed completely out of character. It was like she got to 400 pages and was not sure what to do so she just tacked on a weird ending she hadn't planned on. On the positive side, the writing was fine, and kept me interested enough to finish the book although I was surprised that the book ended without resolving anything whatsoever.
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones
4.0
Diana Wynne Jones has an odd style and it always takes me a while to get into her books. She writes children's stories but uses a straightforward adult style to tell them, so it's difficult to decide where these books fit as you're going along. What keeps me coming back to this very prolific author is that any of her books is always guaranteed to be entertainingly creative about the magic in the stories. In this case, I read the first 50 pages a couple of years ago and lost interest because I couldn't figure out where the story was headed at all by that point. However, I tried again recently and found shortly after that point that I couldn't put it down. This book is really two books in one, the first one an introduction to the world and character of Chrestomanci and the second a prequel that explains the origin of one of the characters in the first story. The first story was charming and had a very likable main character in Cat, but the second book was wonderful, a very sweet magical story of good vs evil.