I have thoughts.

Review also available on Goodreads here:  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6460920760 This book stuck in my brain like a caramel in my back tooth, and I couldn't tell you entirely why. Some combination of the cover, the pitch, and the writing made me love it and reach for it over several other similar and/or more popular books. The book is marketed as a war story romantasy, but in practice most of the book plays out like a political drama with a romantic subplot. Which is awesome for me, because I love fantasy political drama. SPOILERS AHEAD. The titular Hurricane Wars end around the one-third mark in the book, which threw me for a loop. For a brief period the book felt aimless, but that period ended pretty quickly when our main character Talasyn/Alunsina suggested they head for the Dominion. After that point the book scooped me up and swept me along in a current of political intrigue and manipulations and maneuvering and magic, all peppered with the irresistible attraction th

Review also available on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6436741002 Thanks go to NetGalley and Penguin Group for providing an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest review. THE TL;DR: This is a solid read that struggles from some book one blues before picking up like a rollercoaster at the halfway mark and not letting up until the end. 3.75* Recommended. THE SPOILER FREE REVIEW First things first: Forget the "Avatar" comp title. I don't know who picked it, but the only thing that reminded me of it is in the spoiler section of this review. "Naruto" is a better comp, if only for the training sequences. Now, on to the meat of the review. A. A. Vora credits her editor in the acknowledgements for the focus on the character relationships, and that paid off. Those relationships and interactions are what carry the book through some significant pacing issues and what I can only call major "book one of a trilogy" vibes. It's thanks

You can also read this review on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6457188067   Note: I read this as an audiobook. Please excuse any misspellings, I did not see the spelling. Much like with A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES, I picked this up not expecting to enjoy it all that much. To be completely honest, I picked it up *because* I didn't expect to care much if I missed chunks of it. I've been afraid to get into audiobooks because I worry about spacing out and missing a lot of it, and this book sounded like fun without being so serious that I would worry about that. So I picked it up, and plugged in my earbuds, and started listening. I really enjoyed this book. This may be surprising given that I gave it only three stars (3.5, but Goodreads doesn't have half stars). I honestly really struggled with the rating when I got to that point, and eventually I settled on this. I worked out my rating using a reader's journal, so I'm going to break up my review

Review also available on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6379404624?book_show_action=false Disclaimer: this is a review in progress (edit: this is now a DNF review) and is based on an eARC provided by NetGalley. I am still very early in the book, but even now I can't honestly say that I think this book can get better than one star from me. And when I say early, I mean my Kindle app says I'm 2% through. This book needs at *least* a full editing pass, and a couple rounds of line edits besides. Some of the missing spaces may be due to it being a PDF and not an EPUB, but I can only review the book I got, and there were enough missing spaces that I stopped marking them. The book is poorly formatted, scene breaks are not clear, and so much has already happened that I can't keep track of it and frankly just don't care. It's happening too fast and with no emotional context and even when the character is supposed to be feeling tortured and trapped, I fe

Note: This is going to include spoilers for Blood of a Fae by Briar Boleyn, and for Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. You've been warned. As I'm reading the Blood of a Fae series and currently fairly early in book two, it occurred to me that outside of our love interest, there's very little in the way of shades of moral gray. It's very much a world where the bad guys are sadistic evil bastards and the good guys are their antithesis in every conceivable way. This occurred to me because I know one character I'm already just waiting to see die. I don't have many hopes for her to be redeemed. This author excels at making horrible villains who you're excited to see die, and then excels at the payoff. It's like a slasher movie without the horror. Right on the heels of this thought, I was listening to Fourth Wing on my commute home, and Jack Barlow died horribly. Fourth Wing excels at making villains you hate, but up until this point, most of them hadn't had t

Review also available on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6381729007?book_show_action=false I honestly wasn't expecting to love this book. I watch some BookTubers who have less than stellar feelings about SJM and her works. So I went into this with low expectations. And for the first few chapters I thought that those expectations would be met. I ended up skipping chapters 2 through 4 (I eventually came back to them) because I was bored and wanted to get to the fae. Good news: I stopped being bored pretty fast once we met them. This is a beautiful story. The imagery is beautiful. The themes are beautiful. The characters are described as beautiful. And it hit me during an early scene when Feyre goes outside into the gardens that I really wanted more beautiful things in my reading. I didn't read this for the most groundbreaking, mind-blowing prose I've ever seen. The prose is serviceable. It does its job. It functions. That's all it really needs to do,