Book Review: Against Dark Tides (Beneath Black Sails #2)

 

Against Dark Tides

Clare Sager

5/5

The second book in the Beneath Black Sails series picks up nearly immediately after where the first ends. Vice is weak, from iron and from betrayal. She has a loud exterior but she's really dealing with a complicated history of abandonment and lapses in trust that recent events have done nothing to help. Now, she's really not sure where to draw the line and how she can return to the person she thinks that she should be. 

This was even better than the first, it was all about breaking down and being built back up again. Book relationships can be kind of like houses of cards, you often see them stacked up from that first meeting all the way to their declarations of love and whatever comes after that. But there has to be an event that shakes the foundation, it would be no fun if everything went exactly according to plan especially when you're dealing with people like Knigh and Vice that have such turbulent pasts. There was a lot going on in the plot and in them being pirates but the strength of this novel really came from all the issues that were created after the harsh conclusion of the first book. Also a side note I just really need them to commit to being pirates together- like fully committed because every time they fight together you can just tell they're destined to be a less than law-abiding unit.

I think that this book has a lot of comical one-liners but it's a lot deeper than you would assume that it would be. It has a lot of messages on like emotional boundaries, trauma and trust that ring a lot clearer than you might expect from a magic pirate romance novel. I think that it's just beautifully done and such a dynamic read. It's perfect for fans of fantasy romance, especially those who want a book that wins on both the plot and the characters.

Book Review: A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses #4)

A Court of Silver Flames

Sarah J. Maas

2/5

So like I don't think I really need to give an overview cause if you don't know what this book is about by now you're probably not going to and that's totally okay. This series has so much hype and I don't really understand why, I read a lot of indie books and I just think that there are books out there with a lot more substance. But if I had read this book as an indie book I'd probably have given it a lot higher rating and that's just my own recognized intrinsic bias what can you do. I also took forever to read this because my friend and I read it together and we were doing like 30 pages a night so it was definitely a lot. But overall thoughts, it was good on Nesta's character but SJM is really incapable of boosting one person up without tearing down others. I don't think it was all that awe inspiring I think she overwhelmed us with how bad she was to the point that once she got over herself we were so relieved that we just let it slide. Like I do think she was redeemed but I really wouldn't call it a comeback story because we all expected it to happen.

I'm going to break this review up into sections because I feel like there's a ton that I just need to address about it. From this point on like it's going to be written with the assumption that you've read it like I think my first paragraph is a sufficient explanation without spoilers. 

What I Liked

• I liked how she didn't use Cassian as her primary motivator to change her life story, he was obviously important but he didn't really consume her entire arc it was nice and balanced on that front. 
• She didn't let Feyre and Rhysand dominate the narrative but she also was nowhere close to writing them out. Would have preferred if she had just made this a separate series considering the previous three books were narrated nearly exclusively from Feyre in first person (I think) and this one doesn't fit that at all but like whatever.
• The ending was cute without being overwhelmingly predictable. Like I was much angrier throughout pages 1-600 than I was in the last 150 pages so props to her for that. 

What I Didn't Like

• Bro, Sarah, you're worth 40 million dollars and these sex scenes feel like they're straight out of Wattpad. I didn't find them romantic or like even shocking, they were just kind of gross for no reason? The language was incredibly bland for something that has been hyped up as the most anticipated/spiciest book of 2021. Maybe it's just that it gets reductive once you get away from like the fluffy kind of love but really not even those parts felt significant. 
• Nesta didn't teach her sister how to read and that was a big issue for me that I think we forget. I know she was like she didn't know and all but it was just so much backtracking for SJM. She vilified Nesta and Elain to give Feyre a more tragic backstory and make her more of a hero throughout the first three books and then she was like oops people actually want substance from these characters. So we try to blame it on a phantom mother who isn't relevant to the story and we also tear Elain down a bit in the process. SJM can't lift characters up without tearing other characters down and it's just hard to keep track of who we're supposed to like. 
• Same thing happened with Rhysand I don't know am I supposed to like him now or hate him? I don't really think that any of the choices that he made were outside of the characterization that everyone liked in the first three books. You wanted a dude to tear the world apart for the girl who he loves and like he's doing it but like people don't realize that to tear the world apart they make some questionable choices in blind obsession with the girl. He's not like a women's rights activist, but I never thought he was so like whatever. 
• The biggest flaw with this entire world (which is hard to say cause there are a lot of flaws) is the timeline of everything that happens. These people are literal immortals, they've lived for over 500 years so the events of these books are like the blink of an eye. Why does everything have to happen so fast? People having kids and getting married and getting their redemption arcs and learning to read, I think this story started literally two years ago and some characters have already died and been brought back twice over. I don't know how I'm supposed to find anything realistic when everything is so rushed in the grand scheme of things. 

So yeah, I read it for the hype and I finished it to be allowed to give an opinion on the hype. I didn't hate reading it I just hate that it's promoted as such a great example of fantasy when like, the plot is all over the place and the characters are just okay. I might read the next when it comes out to continue providing opinions but like I honestly enjoyed the first book more for it's just straightforwardness in what it was. I will say that I came in hating Nesta a lot and at the end I was just kind of fine with her, so she succeeded in wearing me down there and I really recognize that she's just a product of a bunch more general things that make me mad. 

Book Review: Shielded (Shielded #1)

Shielded

Kaylynn Flanders

4/5

Jennesara has spent her entire life hiding her magic from her entire kingdom to prevent civil unrest. When she is basically bargained away to get more troops for her country to win a budding war, she tries to take it with grace. When her party is ambushed and she is thrown into the wild then into a foreign country where she doesn't have anyone to trust, things get even harder. She has trained her entire life to fight, but finds the reality a lot more daunting. 

Sometimes I get scared that I'm over young adult and then I read a book like this that I really genuinely enjoy and I realize I'm just sick of poorly written characters. Jenna and Enzo and Ren, they all really pop off the pages. It really reminds me of a duology I read a long time ago- Nemesis by Anna Banks. There are a ton of tropes woven through the pages to the point of major cliche but somehow it all just works perfectly and really just pushes you to the end. Some of the tropes include: only one bed, forced marriage scenario, princess who wins every fight she's ever been in on the premise of the force of her will and despite never having been in a fight before, backstabbing world leaders, and some hidden identities of course. 

So the problems were really just on the depth that some of the major plot events were given. Deaths glazed over, traumas just kind of ignored, and kind of a rushed pacing. I didn't hate it at all, but it was a lot more surface level than I would have preferred on some of the issues. I think it had a lot of construction flaws but honestly it deserves the four stars just for being so enjoyable despite that. I don't really know what it was I just think it was just intrinsically fun to read. I read it in one sitting, it was extremely bingeable and I would totally recommend it to people who love to dissociate through reading.

Book Review: The Sunfire King (Of Candlelight and Shadows #2)

 

The Sunfire King

Sylvia Mercedes

4/5

After condemning her husband and his kingdom to the curse she had set out to break, Valera feels lost in the human world. Her sister has risked everything and lost years in her attempts to save her, but she can't make herself feel grateful or stop herself from going back to save him. She has committed to going to the ends of the earth to make things right, which is conveniently almost exactly what she does. 

I like the magical elements of this book. I think it's whimsical and just complex enough to be intricate without being boring. The problem I had with this one compared to the last was just how little the protagonists interacted. I understand the conflict, but I would've appreciated if we could have seen a bit more of that conversation at the end that we all agreed was needed. I'm not mad, I feel like it fell in with the worldbuilding and the length of the book I just would have preferred more. 

Again though, it was a nice and fun read. I think it perfectly fits in with the whole Beauty and the Beast Hades and Persephone fusion that we had going on in the first. I think that this series is going to go on? We have a lot of open elements with her sister and I hope we see a little more of them in the future too. Would recommend if you love the cute Kindle Unlimited reads that are just satisfying to finish.

Book Review: We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya #1)

We Hunt the Flame

Hafsah Faizal

2/5

Zafira is a hunter who has spent the last few years disguising herself as a man to secure food for her village while maintaining their harsh standards. Nasir is the crown prince, also known as the Prince of Death for the assassinations which he commits at his father's requests. Both learn of an artifact which could secure the future of their nation if placed in the correct hands. Like many YA novels before it, We Hunt the Flame throws these two together and sparks fly on the road to their ultimate destinies despite the countless forces trying to tear them apart. 

Listen, it might be on me for reading too many of these in a row recently and over-saturating my own mind. But this just felt like a relatively weak combination of a thousand stories before it. The overarching feel to it felt fragmented, I'm still piecing together what happened and how it all factored into the story but not in a "wow" way more of a "why did we jump around so much" kind of way. It felt like she was picking up tropes then dropping them five seconds later. The conflicts were scattered, the characters were forgettable, and everything just kind of felt faded.

This isn't going to be completely spoiler free from beyond this point but like I definitely won't give away the plot twists. From here on it's really going to be me ranting about the book because I chose it for my book club and have had a lot of time to think about it. 

Not to mention that we had a throwaway character less than halfway through the book. To really pile on the cliches of this attempt at enemies-to-lovers, we have the small town boy who she should have loved who we tragically lost too early to really care about. And the (somewhat creepily older) male protagonist also has trust issues because we peppered in the fact that the girl he thought he loved wasn't actually all that into him. Perfect balance and segue into their obvious romance, right? And we weren't even really allowed to figure that out on our own, every single element was spelled out for us and our feelings on the issues were almost dictated to us. 

The characters new that the events that had befallen them were tragic. I should have felt bad for them, but they had an easy enough time feeling bad for themselves didn't really feel like they needed my help. There are books that you read for the world and books that you read for the characters, most books kind of run the line between the two in a digestible way. This book tried to give us the diverse and beautiful Arabian setting which it started out in but it fell flat as it wasn't followed through on in the subsequent descriptions. The romance wanted to be a great enemies-to-lovers spectacle but we didn't get the time to develop them as individuals and then we didn't have any deep conversations or interactions which would lead me to really get invested in their arc. I also felt more chemistry between Altain and Nasir or Zafira and Yasmine even than I did with Nasir and Zafira so that's an obvious issue.

Two stars because it definitely had potential in the baseline and it wasn't like horribly boring. I wouldn't really recommend it but I can see where there's some appeal. I know this seems harsh but like I also know some people love and swear by it so there were probably tons of things here that appeal to different readers. I also understand that this is a debut so I think there's a lot of potential for future books if things were fleshed out a little better.

Book Review: Of Goblins and Gold (Of Goblins Kings #1)

Of Goblins and Gold

Emma Hamm

3/5

Freya has been told her entire life that goblins are dangerous, talking to goblins can lead to being trapped into a deal and subsequently trapped into their world. When her sister is trapped into such a deal, Freya will do anything and con anyone to get her back. She is given a riddle, tasked with retrieving objects thought to be impossible. But that's not going to hold her back from the only family she has left. 

As a general fae novel, or goblins I suppose, it was pretty good. The riddles were fun and it was well-paced though there were a few info dumps every now and then. I didn't mind them all that much, it just felt like kind of typical for this genre of book. I didn't like Freya all that much, so that made it difficult to be super invested in her success. But it's that kind of frustration that comes from knowing that she's making most of the choices that she should, just not the choices that we want her to make as readers. 

I didn't vibe with the romance if only because it was basically non-existent. I didn't feel much chemistry between Freya and the Goblin King, to the point that I checked the synopsis multiple times because I wasn't even sure if it was supposed to be a romance. I see where it's going but I think this one didn't do a perfect job in getting us invested in that element either. The book definitely has its strengths in the familial ties and the riddles, not so much in the characters or the romance. But it was a nice short read and was pretty entertaining as it went.

Book Review: The Near Witch

The Near Witch

V.E. Schwab

2/5

In a small community in the middle of nowhere, outsiders are resented. Even some of the permanent members of the community are alienated and ostracized for the powers which they have been born with. When children start going missing from their beds, it is only natural that this tight-knit community would blame the mysterious new guy in town. Lexi has lived in Near all her life and knows firsthand how the stigmas can destroy families, so she sets herself to helping this boy and solving the mystery. 

I've liked all of V.E. Schwab's other books but this one kind of fell flat for me. This was her debut novel so it's amazing to see how much she has grown as an author, and maybe this is just a completely different kind of story than the other things that I've read but it was just boring. It feels like it's trying to be a horror story but it's not scary and it's trying to be a romance but the romance is not relatable and insta-love. It didn't invest enough time in developing itself on either front and both things felt half-baked. 

It was hard for me to get through. Maybe if you like more plot-oriented stories or like info-dump types of situations, you'd find this book more enjoyable it just really wasn't my favorite. That doesn't make me love V.E. Schwab any less though because debuts can be super tricky.