Celebrate the love for books
A Gathering of Shadows is much more intense than A Darker Shade of Magic. Schwab has a way of putting words to a page that is incomparable to other authors. The wit that underpins her snarky characters is first class, and Lila is a prime example. What makes it so great is that Lila doesn’t try hard — it’s who she is. A Gathering of Shadows increased my love for her, Kell, and Rhy manifolds, and also sucked me right into the spheres of Alucard and Tieren.
With Malice kept me up at night because I couldn’t sleep without knowing how it would end. Of course, the job of a psychological thriller is to keep readers up long after everyone’s gone to sleep, so it should be the expectation when picking up such a book.
Revolution presented the obsession with music and 18th-century France in the face of post-traumatic stress disorder and mental illness. The combination of these added so many layers, I was immersed in Revolution for the entire duration of the audiobook. Living in contemporary times, Andi’s grief over the loss of her brother was palpable as she and her mother had completely fallen apart.
If I had to sum up The Conspiracy of Us in two words, I’d say, fun mystery. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a crime mystery that takes you from Minnesota to Paris to Istanbul. It hits hard where it has to in terms of inevitable violence. I say inevitable because that’s what villains in crime novels do — they resort to violence. As much as it is a mystery book, it doesn’t stray too close to thriller territories, so if you’re the squeamish kind, you need not worry.
Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t count among my favourite fairy tales. In fact, I have no fondness for it at all. That’s why I was hesitant about about reading Scarlet when I found out that the retelling was based on that fairy tale. Amazingly, I thoroughly loved Scarlet — even more so than Cinder.
