Tag Archives: fantasy

#BookReview ‘The Queen of the Tearling’ by Erika Johansen #fantasy #Tearling

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The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen is a ripping adventure story which feels like a medieval tale except for the occasional references to plastic surgery, Harry Potter and mascara. For a debut, it is skilfully handled. Erika JohansenThis, the first of a trilogy, is a dystopian society, post-something [an un-named event] which caused people to feel their homeland [an un-named country] in The Crossing [across an ocean, as a boat was lost] to their new land of the Tearling [on an unspecified continent]. Behind them they left science, books, medicine, education, art, television, you name it they left it behind. They fight with knives and swords.
Into this context is thrown a 19-year old girl, raised in secrecy by an elderly couple in rural seclusion. She must become queen of her mother’s nation or it will be lost to the evil ruler of the neighbouring state. Kelsea Glynn had a studious childhood, learning history, mathematics, languages, and how to trap and skin a rabbit. She reads a book a day [including The Lord of the Rings], not something your usual heroine does. Add treachery, slavery, corruption, prostitution, child exploitation, and all sorts of other dastardly deeds, and you will see why this is a page turner. Kelsea, the girl-turned-Queen is thrown into the middle of this and expected to fail. But she doesn’t.
There is more to this than just a thriller, the world of the Tearling has been meticulously constructed by Erika Johansen with its own history, myths and customs. It has the makings of a classic fantasy series.

Read my reviews of the other Tearling books:-
BENEATH THE KEEP #PREQUELTEARLING
THE INVASION OF THE TEARLING #2TEARLING
THE FATE OF THE TEARLING #3TEARLING

If you like this, try:-
‘The Magicians’ by Lev Grossman #1THEMAGICIANS
‘The Ship’ by Antonia Honeywell
‘In Ark’ by Lisa Devaney

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING by Erika Johansen via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p2ZHJe-19P

#BookReview ‘Allegiant’ by Veronica Roth #YA #fantasy

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The tone of Allegiant, the third in the ‘Divergent’ trilogy by Veronica Roth, is different. Tris lives in Chicago where every citizen belongs to one of five factions, each representing a human virtue. But Tris doesn’t fit in and is searching for a new world. Veronica RothKey to the change of tone in this book is a change in point-of-view, which is split for the first time; between Tris and Tobias [Four]. Getting a male perspective is interesting, and I guess Veronica Roth took this approach to add more tension to the storytelling. It certainly highlights the lack of communication between the two. But at times, I lost track of whose thoughts I was reading.
The book is full of strong female characters, but not strong in a good way. Evelyn, head of the factionless; Edith Prior, Tris’s ancestor, whose mystery hangs over this third book. The world Tris knew in Divergent and Insurgent has been shattered by violence so she and Tobias set out beyond the fence to find a new world. Except the new world is not green fields, but just as violent and unequal as the world they are escaping.

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in this series:-
DIVERGENT #1DIVERGENT
INSURGENT #2DIVERGENT

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear and the Nightingale’ by Katherine Arden #1WINTERNIGHT
‘Dark Earth’ by Rebecca Stott
‘The Secret Commonwealth’ by Philip Pullman #2THEBOOKOFDUST

And if you’d like to share a link:
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#BookReview ‘Insurgent’ by Veronica Roth #YA #fantasy

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Insurgent, second in the fantasy trilogy by Veronica Roth, is action-led and the pace fairly trips along. Everyone living in the post-dystopian city of Chicago belongs to one of five factions, each represents a human virtue. When the factions disagree, there is a struggle for power. Veronica RothHeroine Tris is a complex mixture of two factions: her upbringing in Abnegation [considerate, selfless] and her adopted faction Dauntless [brave, daring, reckless]. This dangerous mixture gets her into trouble and that drives the story along. She is confrontational, brave, but often makes questionable decisions. She distrusts Four’s father and believes he is misleading them: ‘…sometimes, if you want the truth, you have to demand it.’ Demand, not ask: this tells me more about Tris than about Four’s father Marcus.
As this is the second novel of the trilogy there is more time for characterisation, we see more of Tris’s inner world in Insurgent compared with Divergent. She is maturing into her divergent personality, ‘I drift off to sleep, carried by the sound of distant conversations. These days its easier for me to fall asleep when there is noise around me. I can focus on the sound instead of whatever thoughts would crawl into my head in silence. Noise and activity are the refuges of the bereaved and guilty.’ And she is both.
I had difficulty keeping track of the huge list of characters and longed for a cast list. But more importantly is the lack of clarity about the main enemy: who is it? There’s lots of infighting to keep track of too, petty squabbles some of which have carried forward from the first book and which I had forgotten. I made the mistake of not reading the books back-to-back which would have really helped.
Tris’s confusion reminded me of my teenage years, confusion is universal: ‘Sometimes I feel like I am collecting the lessons each faction has to teach me, and storing them in my mind like a guidebook for moving through the world. There is always something to learn, always something that’s important to understand.’ Like all young people, Tris must learn there is no cut-off date by which she will have learned everything, adults continue to learn until they die.

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in this series:-
DIVERGENT #1DIVERGENT
ALLEGIANT #3DIVERGENT

If you like this, try:-
‘Beneath the Keep’ by Erika Johansen #PREQUELTEARLING
‘Children of Blood and Bone’ by Tomi Adeyemi #1LEGACYOFORISHA
‘The Rose Field’ by Philip Pullman #3THEBOOKOFDUST

And if you’d like to share a link:
#BookReview INSURGENT by Veronica Roth via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Po

#BookReview ‘The Lost Girl’ by Sangu Mandanna #scifi #YA

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I admit to never having heard of The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna until seeing it mentioned in ‘favourite read’ lists on a few blogs. I ordered it purely on that basis and had no idea it was a YA novel. It is a romantic story of love and loss, grief and identity, set in the UK and India, with sinister echoes of Frankenstein. Sangu Mandanna Eva is an ‘echo’, a non-human ‘woven’ by a mysterious organization called The Loom which makes copies of real people for their family in case the loved one should die. The idea is that the ‘echo’ slips into the dead person’s shoes so minimising the family’s loss. Of course it is not that simple. Mandanna handles a difficult subject well, not avoiding the awkward moral issues which litter the dystopian story premise. The world is disturbingly almost normal, littered with everyday familiar references. Eva, who lives in the Lake District, is the echo for Amarra from Bangalore. I found it quite an emotional read, not just Eva’s situation but her guardians, her familiars, and Amarra’s friends in India. What seems a simple premise at the beginning, done with the best intentions, becomes increasingly dark as the story develops and the true horror of Eva’s situation is explained.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear and the Nightingale’ by Katherine Arden #1WINTERNIGHT
‘The Magicians’ by Lev Grossman #1THEMAGICIANS
‘The Queen of the Tearling’ by Erika Johansen #1TEARLING

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LOST GIRL by Sangu Mandanna via @SandraDanby https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-4b7