poisonenvy's reviews
844 reviews

There's a lot we don't know about Captain Hook, like how he came to Neverland, and why he hated Peter Pan as much as he does. Christina Henry's book seeks to answer those questions. What if Captain Hook didn't always hate Peter Pan? What if he used to love him? What if he used to be one of Peter's lost boys? 

I wasn't quite sure how I felt about the prose when I started this book. It was a little simplistic for my tastes, but it quickly grew on me. This book is brutal and dark, and honestly everything I didn't know that I wanted. I enjoyed every minute of it. The pacing was great, the characters were great, and Jamie's -- the soon-to-be Captain James Hook -- slowly evolving frame of mind was really great to see. 

I half read this book and half listened to the audiobook and the audiobook was also quite entertaining. 

It is no secret that I'm a big fan of Marissa Meyer. I have, in fact, read every novel with her name on it.  I enjoyed Instant Karma (though it was probably my least favourite of Meyer's novels) and was happy enough to pick up the sequel, With A Little Luck. 

With a Little Luck tells the story of Jude, the twin brother of Pru, who was the main character of the last book. Like Instant Karma, it's a teen romance but with just a little bit of magic thrown in the mix to help our protagonist find love -- in Instant Karma, Pru is able to wish, well, Instant Karma on anyone, whether that Karma is good or had. I'm With a Little Luck, Jude -- artist and nerd, who DMs D&D games with his friends -- becomes supernaturally lucky after finding a mysterous D20 in his family's record shop. 

It's, you know, typical romance. There's no twists, and everything is pretty predictable. That doesn't make it any less fun though, and I had a lot of fun following around Jude on his adventures. This book is generally pretty wholesome and sweet. And there was ONE delightful surprise for me, and I'm just going to come right out and say it (don't worry, this isn't a spoiler):

I often read books with both the audio, when I'm doing things like working or doing chores, and by sitting down and reading when I can. And if I hadn't, I would have never realized that the audiobook was, well, altered for listeners. Some of it is small (there's a fourth wall break where Jude acknowledges the reader is listening to an audiobook, rather than reading a book), but some of it is really quite phenomenal. 

Throughout the book there are comics that are drawn by Jude. They're pretty cute. Obviously comics don't translate so well to audio format though, so in the audiobook you get bonus music and sound effects for them, as well as extra description. I took a lot of pleasure, any time one of them popped up, in reading the comic along with listening to the audio descriptions of them. It really helped fill out each scene. It was a really delightful touch that enhanced my reading experience by a <I>lot</I>. 

Thanks for another great read, Marissa Meyer. 

Am I vaguely ashamed that as a self-proclaimed book worm, and lover of Regency/Napoleon era fiction, it has taken me until my mid-30s to ever read any Austen at all? Yes, vaguely.  But I'm glad I finally did it! 

The writing is dense, but not displeasing to read, and while I knew in broad strokes some of what happened from cultural osmosis (namely Mr Darcy's initial terrible proposal), I have managed to steer clear of enough spoilers these last 30 years that I was still surprised by a lot of what happened (I did t even know that Bingley was courting Elizabeth's sister and not Elizabeth herself!). 

Anyway, this was a lot of fun, and while I may not be picking up more Austen immediately, I'm excited to read her other books (and to *finally* be able to read all the billions of published Pride and Prejudice fanfiction, like Miss Bennett's Dragon, which I've had in my audio library for like, a year now) 

I read LitJoy Press' special edition of this book, and the illustrations were really quite beautiful and really enhanced the experience. 

4.5*

I have a lot of thoughts about this novel, but I'm not really sure, exactly, how to articulate them. 

This novel follows the lives of three Nigerian women, two twins and their mother, who have been estranged for some time. The story is meandering and disjointed (this is NOT a bad thing by any means, the story is woven together in a way that it really works), and is told in a non-chronological order that really worked for me. 

I'm a white, queer Canadian women, and while the story was so clearly a story of these Nigerian women as they lived abroad and lived at home, there were still a lot of pieces that I could relate to, especially in Taiye's story. I guess that just shoes that some human experiences are universal, no matter what your background. But even the stuff that I couldn't directly relate to was told brilliantly, and I was intrigued throughout the novel. 

I've got a lot of mixed feelings about the end of the story that I won't get into here (especially since this was a book club book and we'll be discussing it on Monday; don't want to spoil my thoughts for my book club!), but I saw it coming and so it fits with the story, no matter what my personal feelings on the matter are.  

Picked this book up from the library as it is a spin-off series of Annie Bellet's Twenty Sided Sorceress series, which I enjoyed quite a bit recently.  It follows Alek's hitman sister, Kira, who we see briefly in the series. 

This was fun. Kira is vicious, but an excellent character, and I enjoyed following her adventures and her character growth. I hope that we'll see more of this series in the future. 

It's been a long time since the last time I stayed up until 3am to finish a book (but to be fair, I think I've got that ADHD meds insomnia).

I was very excited when I realized that James SA Corey has started a new series; The Expanse had very quickly risen up to my favourite sci fi series, and this book has a lot of the same things I enjoyed from it: casual queerness baked naturally into the world's setting, and found family (though this is still the first book, and the family needs a but more finding. I'm excited to see it happen though, and I trust Corey to make it satisfying once it does).  

There weren't any real twists in this book. Rather, what it had was a gradual peeling back of layers to eventually reveal pieces of the puzzle. That's a clumsy metaphor, but it's the one I'm going with so bite me. Every time I stumbled onto a reveal that made another bit of the story make a new kind of sense, I got very excited. 

I read half the book physically, and listened to the other half on audiobook. This has the same audiobook narrator as The Expanse books, and while I have some issues with him (namely that he doesn't really distinguish between character voices, so it can be hard to figure out who's speaking during dialogue, or to know when one person has finished speaking and the next has begun), it felt like coming home and being wrapped in a warm blanket. 

Overall, I'm very excited for the next book, and hope I don't need to wait too long for it. 

Is this the worst Dragonlance book I've ever read? No, definitely not. But man, I just could *not* get into it. An absolute slough. 

I'm also super confused about how there are so many dwarves that didn't believe in the gods that the entire first third of the book is about religious persecution when the story took place before the Cataclysm. When the gods communicated directly with people, and when they were at their most prominent across the land. Like, in pre-Cataclysm Krynn, knowing the gods existed wasn't a matter of belief, it was a matter of fact. They even had clerics/priests?  

Just a really weird disregard of established lore to set up the plot of half the book. 

Approximately one billion years ago (it like ten years ago, I don't know) I decided I was going to download every free book that BookBub emailed me. Very quickly I had amassed like, 300+ ebooks, which added over 1000 new books to my TBR when I added the rest of the books in their respective series to it. Soooooo I stopped doing that. 

One of those books was Justice Calls. And I'm glad that I did! Over the last two months or so, I've read Justice Calls and the next nine books in the series, and have had a blast reading them. They're hardly fine literature, but they're a lot of fun and the series improves as it goes along.  I'm likely going to add more Annie Bellet to my TBR given how much fun I had with this series (though given the fact that my TBR sits at over 9000 books, idk when I'll actually get to them). 

Thanks for all the fun I've had these last two months! 

Once again a really solid addition to this series, with a particularly lovely passage near the end that I was a big fan of. 

Both sad and excited that there's only one book left!