Fantasy – Page 28 – Home | The Blind Scribe

It’s Monday again bookish people! That means it’s time for another book review. Today I’m going to be uploading the book reviews for all the books I read last weekend for the Becca and the Books (YouTube) 48 hour Bookopolathon. Starting with my first read which was for the prompt of dark cover and that was Ever Cursed by Corey Ann Haydu. As usual I will give star ratings for four categories and I will write a little about each of these. I will try to keep it as spoiler free as possible. I hope you enjoy my book review.

A friend of mine gifted me this book (and many others) and the blurb interested me a lot, especially because it’s a very short book for a fantasy so I was excited to get to read it. It didn’t quite live up to my expectations of it, I enjoyed it but I thought it could have been better.

Plot:

I felt the plot of Ever Cursed had the potential to be a great fast paced fantasy novel that would have flowed smoothly and captured my attention. In my opinion the plot did not reach it’s full potential in this way. It had wonderful elements such as the witch giving a curse (and a very unique type of curse that I hadn’t seen in a book before) and the quest for the cure. These elements ultimately made the story enjoyable for me but they felt like they were missing something. I’ll talk a bit more about this when talking about characters but I was underwhelmed by the plot of this novel.

Characters:

Again, I felt that the characters in this book had the potential to be great but I wasn’t invested in them in the way I had hoped I would be. The book is told in the switching POVs of Jane, one of the cursed princesses, and the witch that cursed them. I find this an interesting dynamic, getting to see both points of view but neither of the characters make me root for them, I didn’t feel the need to see what happened at the end to either of the characters. Also in this book there is the tiniest inkling of a romance but it’s such a small part of the plot it doesn’t seem connected to the story and personally I think the book would have been better without it.

Dialogue and Writing:

This is one section I really enjoyed in this novel. If you’ve read any of my previous book reviews you will know how much weight I put on the dialogue in a book. It can really make or break my enjoyment of a book. I enjoyed the conversations between the princesses in this book, it was the only time I felt the other princesses became proper characters rather than 2D people. The dialogue also gave most of the information, it was a telling not showing situation in this book which isn’t something I usually like. The writing style itself I thought was good, it was easy to follow and didn’t feel clunky.

Overall:

Overall I can only give this book three stars. I enjoyed it but not as much as I thought I would and I didn’t think there was enough urgency or character development given to the book.

Blurb/Synopsis:

Damsel meets A Heart in a Body in the World in this incisive and lyrical feminist fairy tale about a princess determined to save her sisters from a curse, even if it means allying herself with the very witch who cast it.

The Princesses of Ever are beloved by the kingdom and their father, the King. They are cherished, admired.

Cursed.

Jane, Alice, Nora, Grace, and Eden carry the burden of being punished for a crime they did not commit, or even know about. They are each cursed to be Without one essential thing—the ability to eat, sleep, love, remember, or hope. And their mother, the Queen, is imprisoned, frozen in time in an unbreakable glass box.

But when Eden’s curse sets in on her thirteenth birthday, the princesses are given the opportunity to break the curse, preventing it from becoming a True Spell and dooming the princesses for life. To do this, they must confront the one who cast the spell—Reagan, a young witch who might not be the villain they thought—as well as the wickedness plaguing their own kingdom…and family.

Told through the eyes of Reagan and Jane—the witch and the bewitched—this insightful twist of a fairy tale explores power in a patriarchal kingdom not unlike our own.

That’s it for this book review, I hope you all enjoyed it! If you’ve read this book what did you think of it?

Hello bookish people! Happy Mother’s Day to everyone! Today I’m bringing you a book review for The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater, the first book in The Raven Boys four book series. I thought this book was okay, it was an enjoyable opening book to a series. In this book review I will give star ratings for four categories and I will write a little about each of these. I will try to keep it as spoiler free as possible. I hope you enjoy reading my book review!

This is a well-written, enjoyable opening novel to the series. It introduces the characters and has a contained conflict as well as an overarching conflict for the rest of the series. It has a unique and interesting premise that made me want to pick up this book. It cuts between the POVs of multiple characters including that of Blue, the main protagonist, Gansey and Adam.

Blue has spent the majority of her sixteen years being told that if she kisses her true love, he will die.

Plot:

This novel has an interesting plot. It is a well planned, well-written and intriguing plot that keeps you reading on until the end, and I felt the ending was satisfactory to complete the story for this book while still managing to set up an intriguing story for the second book in the series, particularly because of the final line.
However, I felt there were too many little stories happening at the same time which made them hard to follow, and they didn’t all get solved within this first book. Also, it felt like an opening novel rather than a novel with a very defined plot, it seemed to centre around introducing the characters and their relationships (which I don’t think is a bad thing), that’s why I can only give the plot three stars.

Characters:

I thought that the characters in this novel were brilliantly engaging. One of the high points for me was the dialogue between them, particularly between Blue and Gansey, it is interesting and well-written. It makes me like the characters. I find I am very much a character-based reader, I enjoy their interactions and the things that add to the plot I find are the things that are revealed through dialogue or the lack of it. The main characters in this novel (Noah, Blue, Gansey, Adam and Ronan) are all clear characters, each with their own conflict. I would have liked this novel to explore Noah and Ronan more than it did as I found their characters lacking compared to the others but overall I thought the characters were a highlight in this book.

Dialogue and Writing:

I don’t have much more to say about this, as I’ve mentioned it in the previous two categories but I could only give this category three stars because I felt that the writing in the beginning may have been a little slow to actually delve into the story and because of this the writing in the second half felt too rushed for my preferences.

Overall:

So, overall I’m rating this book three stars. I enjoyed the book and I definitely plan on reading the second book in the series (I’ve heard that’s the best one? so I’m looking forward to it). I am invested in the characters and their relationships but I couldn’t give a higher star rating because I wasn’t all that invested in the plot but I was at the same time – that probably doesn’t make much sense. I enjoyed it, but I probably won’t reread it any time soon.

Synopsis/Blurb:

“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.”

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before.

Tag: Fantasy

Ever Cursed by Corey Ann Haydu Book review

Book Review: Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys