24.08.26
Holly Black is a good writer but this was a bit of a mess. The incidental worldbuilding was refreshing - the details (oh, so it's the '90s, oh, so these are the features of faeries) meant there wasn't the usual tedious exposition. But that also made it confusing to work out what was going on - was there even a central plot driving towards a specific goal or really any reason for the characters doing what they were doing?
68%
21.06.26This was marvellous in all senses, with the added bonus of featuring my local city Norwich and its Theatre Royal. It's a strange, hypnotic, poetic fever dream that's certainly a fresh take on, well, everything. But it's let down by wandering too far into the grotesque, and the author's ugly drawings don't do it any favours either.
22.04.26
I've finally managed to finish a Joanne Harris book, but it was still underwhelming. She's a poetic writer, in many genres, but, like the works of Neil Gaiman, this fantasy, though vivid, was emotionally unengaging. And the main character was such an idiot that when he seemed to die near the end I really hoped that was it.
14.11.25
This had an unusual and intriguing premise that was unfortunately fumbled in the execution. Readable enough but too many 'but whats?', 'but whys?' and 'but hows?' to feel like a final draft.
29.04.25
So this is the book that spawned a thousand romantasies. Why? How, when it's so laughably badly written, poorly paced and dull? (And that hilarious map!) Worse, the romance part, such as it was, promoted that trendy misogynist trope of dominant 'alpha' male power dynamics that rendered all the (unsympathetic) female protagonist's relationships frankly abusive. It's concerning that this is the message that young women are being fed.
25.11.24
This was delightful - in fact, not just full of delight but brimming over with many and varied delights. The worldbuilding, the humorous dialogue, the nods to other fairy tales all just worked, and at no time did phrasing make me cringe, which is unusual, frankly. Was it too saccharine? Maybe. Did it end too abruptly? Certainly. But what fun!
17.07.24
And the last of my holiday reads was also the last in this intriguing trilogy. For a romantasy author, Black doesn't shy away from politics and power and the ways they can be manipulated by those who have power and those who don't (yet). And her main character is, interestingly, both skilled in scheming and clueless in relationships. But it was still a bit 'chuck everything at it and see what sticks', and there were a few elements about the ending that didn't quite work.
06.07.24
That difficult second book in a trilogy, the bridge between the intriguing opening and explosive ending. This particular bridge wasn't particularly well designed - functional but more of a route to somewhere else than a journey in itself.
I thought it was about time I read something by the prolific Holly Black and this turned out to be pretty awesome, in all senses: vividly written with fabulous worldbuilding and a complex, intriguing protagonist. It did have confusingly strange pacing, on both a general and line level, and abruptly changed tone when it went all Game of Thrones about two-thirds in, but I was quite happy to be swept along in the court intrigue.
Unusual, intriguing, unflinching, atmospheric, carefully plotted... and totally ruined by the (authorial? editorial?) decision for a British narrator, living in London, to use American English. And it wasn't just the extensive US vocabulary - there were references to graduating high school, to teachers 'failing' a student in a subject and to paying health insurance. Why? Again and again, it jarringly brought me out of the story's world. Surely American readers, brought up on Harry Potter, can cope with British English. Or just set it in America - it wouldn't have mattered much to the story. And the author is actually Australian. It made me so angry that I've deducted 20 points from the score it would otherwise have had. That'll teach 'em!
Since this was on offer, I thought I'd read it before I forgot what happened in the first book. Just as well, as it was even more confusing. Still well written and intelligent, with unusual care and thought given to character development, and not afraid to confront the ugliness of life, but the actual story was still muddled and oddly paced.
Also, the dead rabbit on the cover? Not all that significant.
This was a mess - complicated, confusing and with a timeline that was all over the place. The characters were annoying and didn't communicate like normal people. It assumed that nothing important happened outside the USA. Only one of the various plotlines resolved, and that was in a weird and coincidental way. And yet... and yet, I really enjoyed reading it. Why? Well, because it was well written and also I suppose because it wasn't as worthy and boring as that other hyped "magic college" novel, Babel. This, you just had to take as it came: a wild ride.
49%
My excuse is that I wanted something easy to read while I had the flu and this had a nice cover. Of course, I should know that the cover is not the way to judge a book - in this case, I judge it - yet again! - on the Edwardian characters speaking like modern Americans. Nobody would have used that vocabulary, and clearly the author knows nothing about how Cambridge colleges work. Yes, it's fantasy, but jarring inaccuracies ruin the immersion. Again, I ask, why didn't an editor pick up on any of this? So that irritated me even without the very familiar storyline and unsympathetic characters behaving remarkably irrationally for scientists.
31.03.23
This could have been cringingly cliched. It was slow, so slow - creating more impatience than psychological tension - and the characters didn't behave like real people, and the introspection about storytelling was rather too meta, but the strong world building, clear sense of place and the fact that there was never any question that supernatural forces were at work made it feel like a surprisingly fresh take on gothic / horror / folklore.
22.02.23
This is the eighth book by Novik I've read, and it's exactly what I've come to expect - a prettily written dark fairytale with strong female characters and not enough editing. It started off well - evocative and engaging - but it just went on and on. All the headhopping soon became tedious. We only needed two, maybe three, viewpoints. And surely <spoiler!> the two brave and independent women wouldn't really choose to stay with their awful husbands at the end?
70%
09.03.21
This was terrifically well written, entertainingly inventive and very, very weird. It's probably one of those 'love it or hate it books' - it is, after all, a silly satire on folk horror - but, as outrageous speculative fiction goes, I'm definitely inclining towards the love it.
09.11.20
Beautifully written on a sentence-by-sentence basis, and fascinating from an historical/folklore viewpoint but, even more than its predecessor, also rather fractured and confused, with characters it's hard to care about.
64%
