thebookbin's reviews
498 reviews

Stories of the Saints: Bold and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage by Carey Wallace

3.0

Beautiful book, but doesn't balance it's heavy nature with the storybook format. Picked it up because I think the Catholic flavor of religion is interesting and the idea of saints novel. But the prose is childish (the book is for children) yet at the same time every story ends with the saint's brutal murder. Sometimes they get beheaded or cut open or set on fire. All described in a level of detail that is a bit surprising, but at the same time dances around topics like rape and slavery. I think if it had just embraced the violent history of Christianity and taken its readers a bit more seriously, even if they intended those readers to be children, the book would have been more successful. Very pretty, though.

All The Hidden Paths by Foz Meadows

adventurous challenging mysterious 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

To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose

adventurous challenging inspiring 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? It's complicated

5.0

This might be my new all time favorite book, and the type of book we need more of in the world. 

Fantastic world building. The importance of stories. The non western narrative. Romance on par. Dragons fascinating. Navigating racism tough but illuminating 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism

This book features Native American characters living in a colonized world and one of the major themes is struggling for self-affirmation and the right to self-governance. They face racism of all kinds over the course of the story from mild to violent.

Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans

adventurous medium-paced

King's Shield by Sherwood Smith

adventurous emotional 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? Yes

5.0

The Fox by Sherwood Smith

adventurous emotional tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Inda by Sherwood Smith

adventurous challenging dark tense slow-paced

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

5.0

 It's easy to tell when certain traits are passed on through family. One of my oldest friends has the exact same sarcastic laugh as her brother. Another friend has a daughter that does the exact same expression of puppy eyes when she wants something. Me? Well, my mom buys stuff off instagram ads like nobody's business. While I don't do that exact same thing, I am easily influenced. 

So when I came across a tumblr post by @aplpaca about one of her favorite childhood series, I was cautiously intrigued. Then, while waiting for one of my other holds, I discovered my local library had the entire quartet, so I grabbed a copy of Inda, which I read in a single sitting, and I have no regrets (justice for Dogpiss). 

Where to even begin? One of my all time favorite tropes is books with child narrators when the books aren't necessarily for children (see: Ender's Game, This Tender Land, Dear Edward). I think children are such an underutilized point of view in books not aimed for children and Sherwood Smith manages it all so well, it's almost like there are two stories happening at once: one in the idyllic world of children and the other harsh light of adulthood. 

Inda (who gives Kaladin vibes for the Stormlight Archive fans) is such a singular title character. This first book focuses on his childhood from a bright-eyed second prince to an exiled privateer on the high seas, this book takes you places. Inda, while clearly the main character, is not the only POV character by far. The world Smith builds is fascinating, queernormative, and expansive. It's hard to encompass everything this book is in one short review, so I'll try and hone in on a few specifics. 

Smith is such a master of her craft that even the main antagonist, Aldren, most commonly referred to in the book as the Sierlaef, feels tragic. As a young boy with a disability and a distant father, it's so easy to see how in his desperate search for validation, he reaches for the poisonous influence of his uncle. No child should have to bear the weight of such responsibility, distance, and aloofness. As he grows and the adults around him fail him, and he rebuffs all pivotal moments of redemption and his inevitable descent into villainy becomes a tragedy. Just the right word here, a genuine friend there, and the Sierlaef would have grown to be a noble man, if not a good one. Instead, by the end of the novel he goes from misguided, angry teen to a selfish, dangerous, obsessed man. 

This book made me laugh, it made me cry. (Yes, I did cry real tears for a character named Dogpiss by his fellow child soldiers). The love depicted in this book—familial, friendship, duty—is exquisite. There aren't really any romantic relationships I can point to in this installment, most marriages are marriages of convenience or politics and romance isn't a factor. This is a book of loyalty, bonds, and destiny. I can't recommend it enough. 

★★★★★ JUSTICE FOR DOGPISS STARS 

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley

informative medium-paced

2.0

 Is there a point in every girl's life when she is obsessed with disasters? I remember accidentally pulling an all-nighter watching tsunami videos only a few years ago. Maybe it was the fact that when I was in kindergarten when 9/11 happened, that year and every year after our teachers, media, and government set out on retraumatizing us every year, forcing us to watch videos of it, watch documentaries of the people who jumped to their deaths, forced us to revere the men who went to war to traumatize a whole new generation of children. And I've lived through a few disasters of my own. I survived Harvey in 2017. I survived getting caught in a tornado. Who wouldn't be curious? It's that curiosity that drove me to pick up The Unthinkable and in the end to be disappointed by its lackluster offering. 

Fundamentally, I think this book suffers as a product of its time. Published in 2008, and surely years in the making, this book cannot escape the perverse fascination of a post 9/11 world and all that it entails. Ripley spends an inordinate amount of time on the World Trade Center, survivors, and Ground Zero stories. Despite claiming to be interested in the average person, Ripley almost solely focuses on soldiers, policemen, and special forces stories and studies, and only scales her research to a white western audience, which she tacitly acknowledges.

Despite feeling a certain kinship with Ripley over our interest in disasters and how people respond to them, I found myself almost disgusted with how uncurious she seems to be about the most interesting questions she poses (and then abruptly brushes aside). At her core, Ripley is a bioessentialist and a skeptic. She believes in a rigid and inflexible binary that colors everything. You are the sum of the labels foisted upon you. Altruism is nothing except an evolutionary biproduct of breeding rituals: looking like a hero makes you appeal to the women around you—a woman being a hero? We don't do that here—and if you die being heroic then the women in your family will get more attention and therefore breed and make more babies ensuring your genetic material lives on. 

Ripley briefly acknowledges that men are more likely to be labeled as "heroes" as a by product of them having more dangerous jobs in general, or being more prone to engage in risky behavior but is so dispassionate about exploring the reasons why. Combined with her hero-worship of the people who do the most harm in this world: soldiers, police, and special forces, it seems like Ripley is trying her best to appease a male audience who won't take her seriously unless she engages in the imperialist circle-jerk of the military industrial complex. 

Ripley is also incapable of removing herself from the narrative, even though she claims to be a journalist. She dedicates an entire chapter to, bizarrely enough, the size of her amygdala. Instead of acknowledging her own humanity as a subjective and connective force of her storytelling, Ripley feels the need to insert herself into the narrative alongside the survivors she interviews, despite not being a survivor herself (or acknowledging herself as one). She's like a child at a birthday party, incessantly reminding everyone else it's her birthday next week. We can indulge you once or twice, but after that "Honey, it's not your turn. Let someone else have a go."

This is an ambitious work that falls short of its goal. Despite its claims it did not introduce me to my "disaster personality" nor did it pose any questions that I had not already asked myself as a person with an interest in disaster, who has survived one or two of her own. I can't quite tell if this work suffers as a product of its time, or if Ripley was simply a poor messenger for its delivery

★★ sad, uncurious stars 

Prince and Bodyguard by Tavia Lark

lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes

3.5

 I honestly didn't know this book was self published until I came to write this review, but in hindsight this explains a few things about the book. This book is #4 in the series, and I have not read the first three, but that didn't dampen my experience with the novel at all. This is definitely a "you can just jump right in" kind of novel. 

The worldbuilding and magic system are unique and fascinating. I was captivated from the moment I read the prologue. The problem is, right after the prologue, we get a 14 year time-skip. If this author ever decided to reframe her works, she would be a high fantasy writer that was a household name. This book could have so easily been A Taste of Gold and Iron or A Strange and Stubborn Endurance but it falls a just short. With the focus being primarily on the relationship, a few things fell off to the wayside, namely this really cool magic bond that Vana and Daromir seem to have evolved. First of all, sharing each other's pain is the best setup for a hurt/comfort story that I ever heard. Then, for some reason that isn't really explored in-universe, their bond changes and they also share pleasure, which makes for interesting hanky-panky. Besides causing some slight relationship angst when Vana has to tell Daromir about the change in the bond, but that's it.

I would have been so interested to get a story that follows Vana and Daromir from their homeland to Draskora and their blossoming feelings from each other, I would have been in heaven. So much interesting content from those missing 14 years! That said, within the scope of the story this book tells, I think it does a pretty good job. I think the climax could have been a bit higher stakes, and the ending felt abrupt. The premise was so good, all I can really say is that I just wanted more from this novel!

★★★½ fantastic premise stars 

Ravensong by TJ Klune

dark emotional tense slow-paced

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

2.5

 Because Wolfsong got me out of a reading slump, I figured hey--why not? Let's jump right in to Ravensong. I am conflicted. I have feelings. This one definitely wasn't as good. Although, as a sidenote, it's really cool to view a writer at different points in their career and seen how they've grown. This is definitely one of Klune's earlier works. Where Wolfsong feels like a young gay teen's response to Twilight, Ravensong loses some of the nostalgic charm that I felt when reading Wolfsong. 

The first problem with this book is it's scope. It covers a lot of Gordo's childhood, which is very interesting except for when it mirrors Ox's childhood from the first book and it makes Thomas' motivations look insane. Then, we basically get to reread book 1 from a different perspective, which would have been cool, except it left out the bits I am most interested in: namely the aftermath of the first book and Gordo and Ox's reconciliation. I had to slog through all the boring details but then it somehow blasted through that important part again. Once can be written off as you needed to make cuts for word count (although I would have argued different sections deserved to get cut) but twice is just a sin. 

The reason this book feels like it was written by someone in high school is that it always chooses the option with the Most Possible Drama (except for when it doesn't--more on this later) but then when it tries to explain why this particular path was chosen there is no rational explanation so the rationale just falls off a cliff. Thomas goes from the gentle all-knowing patriarch to an unhinged egomaniac. In the first book, Ox gets left behind by the both the Bennetts and Gordo. When we go back in time to Gordo's childhood, we find out that Gordo was tattooed as a child by his father and Thomas' father (and nobody ad a problem with this) but they also left Gordo behind as a child and the intense psychological harm that did him. Which makes absolutely no sense as to why Gordo would turn around and do that same thing to the kid who he grew up with. 

The explanations for all of this behavior were so paltry. They left Gordo behind because humans had attacked wolves and Gordo was a human, albeit a witch. Why did that mean they had to cut all contact? Thomas' explanation: it was "easier." I'm sorry, that's just psychopathic and turns Thomas into a villain. Gordo was like 12 and his mother was just murdered and his father imprisoned. He had no one except these people and they left abruptly and cut all contact. It's unhinged. 

The other thing that made me knock off a star is Gordo losing his hand. Losing a hand adding an amputation and disability isn't the problem, in fact I think it could add a lot of interesting conflict to the story. My problem is Gordo's hand gets cut off and not only is it magically healed but 2 pages later, people are making jokes about it. Asking if he'll "need a hand" at the garage. He just had a major life-altering disability, and it wasn't given the gravitas it deserved. I wanted to witness Gordo's feelings, as someone whose career as a mechanic depends on his hands. I wanted to watch him adjust to life using his non-dominant hand. He lost the hand in the most dramatic fashion, but Klune didn't deal with any of the aftermath, and instead wrote it off. 

With the lack of depth in the story, and the weird scope of the book, retelling the entire events of the first book, and the nonsensical motivations of the characters, I don't believe I will be able to continue the series. While I enjoyed the first book and it helped get me out of my slump, I feel that both the writing style and the plot are just too juvenile for me at this time. 

 

★★½ WHAT IS WITH THE NONCONSENSUAL TATTOOING?! STARS