I have thoughts.

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...

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,...

SPOILER WARNING Review can also be found on Goodreads at this link:  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6434309352?book_show_action=false Note: I received an e-copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for my review. Quotes may differ from the retail text. "In my mind, I whispered words of apology for pushing the power away for so long. I didn't know. I didn't know what you were. I said it to myself, with my heart wrenching. I said it to myself, with a sob in my breast." This quote comes toward the end of the book and hit me so hard I had to stop to take a picture of the page before reading on so that I would remember it. This is book one of a series, and this quote felt like the beginning of the story of this new Morgan LeFay, the start of the tale she will tell for herself. Early in the book I noted themes of agency, both its loss and reclamation; and of family. Here I recognized the third major theme of this book: self. Self-empowerment, self-respect, self...