Things aren’t always as they seem. Caraval brilliantly plays off this theme on various levels. Reality warps on a grand scale as appearances shift, time stands still, motives are ambiguous and death isn’t always the end. All these factors and more make for quite a mad ride.
HEARTLESS by Marissa Meyer
Before reading Heartless, I made sure to read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. After all, Marissa Meyer sought to pen a prequel, imagining the tale of the young Queen of Hearts. Growing up, I didn’t read those classics. Like many, I watched movies and TV adaptations. With this retelling on the horizon, however, I decided it was finally time to read the books.
THE INVISIBLE LIBRARY by Genevieve Cogman
Suspense is essential to propel a plot forward. It’s what fiction is made of as readers want to know, what happens next? An effective way to build suspense is to withhold information, make the reader guess, then reveal things later. That’s exactly what The Invisible Library sought to do. However, that for me, also was the downfall of the book. Too much information was withheld, to the point that there was little for me to hang on to. Instead of wanting to know what would happen next, I found myself asking what the point was.
TONIGHT THE STREETS ARE OURS by Leila Sales
Tonight the Streets Are Ours was such a fun read! I enjoyed it tremendously, even though the characters were far from perfect. They each had their flaws and made questionable decisions. I liked that because that’s precisely what made them so relatable. The realism in the book mirrored the craziness of real life and for that I adored it.
THE SQUARE ROOT OF SUMMER by Harriet Reuter Hapgood
The Square Root of Summer is such a quirky book. It contains little illustrations and while it starts off like a contemporary read, it plunges into science fiction through time travel. Time travel in this case doesn’t pertain to fantastical notions of visiting another era. Here things are grounded a bit more in physics, incorporating discussions of the space-time continuum, the speed of light and the effect of gravity on one’s ageing process. If there’s one thing to be said, the main character is exceedingly smart and prides herself in her intelligence.
