Six of Crows was an intimidating book to go into. I had problems with Shadow and Bone, and liked the sequels in The Grisha trilogy even less. Needless to say, a spin-off series set in the same world didn’t appeal to me. Thing is, I already owned a copy of Six of Crows (bought it before even reading The Grisha), so I tried to downplay the hype in my mind and dove in. Buddy reading with Crini, Elaine and Sana was an added incentive. What came of it? I actually liked the book quite a lot!
CARAVAL by Stephanie Garber
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.
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.
THE GIRL AT MIDNIGHT by Melissa Grey
The overlapping elements between The Girl at Midnight and Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor is uncanny. If you’ve read and loved DoSaB, you may be overjoyed that there’s another book out there with similar tropes. On the flip side, you may not like it at all because DoSaB was built with much more lyrical prose.
A THOUSAND NIGHTS by E.K. Johnston
A Thousand Nights is a magical book. The prose is exceedingly beautiful. If literary fiction were to bridge over to the young adult segment, this book would be a stellar example of the genre. In some ways, I think that if readers were to expect a slow story, magnificent in words over a fast-paced one, then the reviews wouldn’t have come to be as mixed as they are now.
