Tag Archives: young adult

Saltwater Secrets

Book Review of Saltwater Secrets (Song of the Sea, #1), by Jade Varden

Salt Water SecretsAuthor, Jade Varden sent me an ecopy of Saltwater Secrets for review.

Description from Goodreads:
I always knew who my mother was. I always knew where I belonged. And I always knew I wanted to be on the water, like my dad.

…Until I was forced to go out into the water, anyway. Out there, you feel really lonely. But you’re never alone. There is more life and emotion under the waves than most humans will ever see, more than I could have ever imagined. Down there, it’s an entire world of rage and hate, love and hope. It’s a world of fear.

It’s a world of war.

Once, my mother told me she would sing me a song of the sea. But under the waves, the only music I ever heard was the sound of screams.

Review (spoiler warning):
This was a pretty middle of the road read for me, even if I don’t factor in being burned out on YA.

Actually, lets do factor the YA in for a minute; not me being burned on it, but that the character was supposed to be 15. I found this extremely unbelievable and many, many times throughout the book had to remind myself of it because I kept forgetting. Let’s just list some of the reasons, shall we? And we’ll skip the mystical or paranormal ones.

1) She takes a boat and successfully navigates and sails to Bermuda, stopping and berthing the boat at various marinas along the way. Apparently, no one thought it odd that she be on her own.
2) She walks into a pawn shop in a country she’s never been in and doesn’t speak the language and pawns a handful of pearls for an appropriate amount of money, meaning she knew the value of said pearls and not only how to pawn them, but how to get the owner to giver her dollars, not euros.
3) She walks into a hotel and rents a room, no adult, passport or credit card needed. Again, without speaking the languages.
4) She easily maps a route through Europe that necessitates trains, buses, ferries and taxis and uses all transport without trouble. Again, without speaking the languages.
5) She rides all said transport, crossing several borders and no one bats an eyelash at two youths traveling alone. Same when she catches a plane home. Again, without speaking the languages or having a passport.

Yeah, I had a little trouble keeping her age in mind. On a positive note, I did think the writing was good. There was an occasional tendency to over-use names during dialogue, but mostly it flowed pretty well.

But like the age issue, I also had a problem with the book’s timeline and geography. They swam, yes SWAM across the Atlantic ocean in a matter of days….DAYS…swimming…with her human arms and legs. From Bermuda to the Azores is roughly 2,225 miles, according to Google, and they swam that in a few days, navigating by who knows what and finding an island to sleep on each and every night. Um…………..no. So, there was a fair bit of suspending belief needed to make this story work.

There were also some character inconsistencies. Dylan seemed quite modern and aware of the world when he and Bren met, but about halfway through the book he seemed to lose a lot of that knowledge. Lastly, I was confused on the language issue, and not just how the pair traveled Europe. Why, for example, do merfolk (who speak several land languages) speak English between themselves?

I do have to give the books props for being willing to challenge some engrained expectations though. I won’t leave a spoiler on the biggest one, but a character acts just as you wouldn’t expect and I liked that twist. There is a George R. R. Martin-like event that I didn’t see coming and wouldn’t have expected most authors to brave. Similarly, Varden provides no happy ending here, not even a happy for now. That takes guts in a writer and I appreciated that a lot.

All-in-all, I had some major problems with this book, most of which could be overlooked with enough suspension of disbelief and none of them were enough to truly compromise my enjoyment of the story. Dedicated YA fans would probably enjoy it a lot more than me.

Book Review of No Light (The Dems Trilogy #1), by Devi Mara

No LightI downloaded a copy of Devi Mara‘s book, No Light when it was free on Amazon. (I included both covers because the one I read had the second cover, but I so hate the new one that I wouldn’t have picked the book up if I’d seen it first. Seriously, that blank, innocent look on the MC’s face screams TSTL. I would have run the other direction from it and I didn’t want to post it here as something I would have been attracted to. Petty, I know.)

Description from Goodreads:
“Name?” he demanded. 
“Sarah Mackenzie.” She swallowed hard. She would be like the ones who had fallen, her remains something to be cleaned from the floor. 
“Age?” 
She tried not to tense when he brought his face to her neck and inhaled deeply. 
“Twenty-two.” The lie tried to stick in her throat. 
He pulled back and gave her a dark look. “Try again.” 
“Eighteen,” she whispered, tensing when his lips pulled back from his teeth in a shark smile. 
“A lie, Sarah? How nice that you are not as innocent as you look.” 

In The Corridor, there are the immortal Dems and the human handlers who guard them. When the leader of the Dems gets a handler straight out of training, she is not expected to live beyond her first day. She is everything he hates and he is everything she fears, but an accident permanently binds them together. With corruption growing among the humans and the threat of war, they must escape The Corridor and find common ground in a place with No Light.

Review:
This book was at best OK. The actual writing itself is fine, though it needed another edit, but the story is so full of inconsistencies, insubstantial world-building, poor character development and absent emotional growth that it pains me to discuss it.

I’ll start with Sarah. For 2/3 of the book, she is such a limp noodle, so weak and scared of everything that she literally can’t even communicate in complete sentences, just stutters and apologies. Then for the last 1/3, she miraculously, with no apparent instigation for change, becomes a strong-willed, brave, stand-up for herself and those she loves, fighter and I was left thinking, ‘this is not the same girl.’ Her character was wholly inconsistent.

Then there is Farran. He too has an instant and unfollowable change of temperament. For 2/3 of the book, he’s gruff and unfeeling, hates humans and barely tolerates Sarah. Then, he morphed into an expressive, demonstrative, lovely man. What? How? Why?

The plot…it makes no sense. The Dems are imprisoned on what I assume is Earth. They are bigger and significantly stronger than humans. They can see in complete darkness, heal almost instantly and are maybe psychic. But they are guarded by a single person with nothing more than a stun gun. What’s more, they always seemed to be alone with that guard, or at least Sarah and Farran do.

Plus, it’s inferred that Sarah is assigned to Farran because she’s the only day guard in the current training class, therefore the only one available. But what makes a day guard, morning guard or night guard different is never addressed. If it’s just preference for time of shift (and it’s shown guards can change shifts) why does it matter? Even more to the point, couldn’t someone cover the shift long enough for Sarah to at least get trained?

Plus (again), if a Dem has three guards, why is the day guard the only one referred to as ‘his handler?’ What about the other two, do they not count and if not, why not? Nothing about the prison-setting, handler/guard set up makes any sense. NOTHING.

Then there is the Marking (which I suppose is intended as the romance). Farran marked Sarah by accident. That’s right he didn’t mean to and he even actively disliked and was disgusted by her at the time and for most of the book. But that marking, which should take years to develop is unusually strong, but we’re never told why. And in and among all this being disgusted by Sarah and Sarah being terrified of Farran, they’re supposed to have fallen in love. I saw no indication of this until BAM love. But it’s anyone’s guess what it’s based on. She’d hardly even been able to speak to him and he did nothing but snarl and bark at her.

Then there is the world-building…oh, wait, no there isn’t. There really isn’t any world-building to speak of, sorry.

There are also some really cliché scenes. For example, the alternative love interest taking her clothes shopping and changing the ugly duckling into a beautiful swan with the help of his riches and a good sales girl. Meh. This same theme is echoed in Farran picking out Sarah’s clothes for her. Because, obviously, what a girl looks like and how she visually presents herself is sooo important.

Lastly, (or the last thing I’ll mention for fear of appearing to attack a book) some of the plot-devices are extremely obvious. As an example, Farran has no problem understanding humanity or communicating. (In fact, for much of the book I wondered how everyone did communicate so easily—newly arrived aliens even using English when conversing among themselves, for example.) But toward the end he is painfully dense and unable to understand why he’s ineffectively communicated an important point, which leads to Sarah running out and committing the requisite TSTL acts and obviously needing rescue. The set up on that scenario was so obvious I could have provided bullet points before reading it. Similarly, Sarah’s inability to see the obvious so that the author could drag it out as a big ‘Ta-Da’ at the end was worth at least one eye-roll.

The writing does have an appreciable eerie feel to it. I liked Farran’s Colonels. They were funny. I liked that Luke seemed to have a little grey to his character. He genuinely seemed to want to help Sarah, but was in too deep to be able to do it. I liked that the Dems actually committed violence that supported the claim that they were dangerous, as opposed to the reader being told they’re dangerous but never seeing anything to prove it. I’ll even grant that the boook lacked the normal NA angst about sex, for which I’ll thank every literary god there is. So, it’s not that there wasn’t anything I liked about the book. But the dislikes outnumbered the likes by a significant amount. (And the totally sappy ending was my final straw, really. *shudder*)

Book Review of Shadow and Bone (The Grisha #1), by Leigh Bardugo

Shadow and BoneI bought a hardback copy of Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo.

Description from Goodreads:
Surrounded by enemies, the once-great nation of Ravka has been torn in two by the Shadow Fold, a swath of near impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh. Now its fate may rest on the shoulders of one lonely refugee.

Alina Starkov has never been good at anything. But when her regiment is attacked on the Fold and her best friend is brutally injured, Alina reveals a dormant power that saves his life—a power that could be the key to setting her war-ravaged country free. Wrenched from everything she knows, Alina is whisked away to the royal court to be trained as a member of the Grisha, the magical elite led by the mysterious Darkling.

Yet nothing in this lavish world is what it seems. With darkness looming and an entire kingdom depending on her untamed power, Alina will have to confront the secrets of the Grisha . . . and the secrets of her heart.

Review:
About two years ago I finished up my second Masters degree and decided all my tired brain wanted to do was read books that required very little mental involvement. YA books fit that bill perfectly. I subsequently went on a binge. I read a ton of them and bought even more. However, as I recovered my cognitive facilities, I grew bored with all the useless and frankly annoying teenage angst of these books and moved on. As a result I have a backlog of YA books sitting on my shelves (physical and digital) waiting to be read. Shadow and Bone is one such book. I’m not even sure why I picked it up this afternoon. The cover grabbed my eye, I think. (‘Cause it’s a great cover.)

To my complete surprise I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t full of Bella-esque drama and, while I’m not deeming Alina a wonderfully strong heroine, I didn’t find her too-stupid-to-live either. I also appreciated that it wasn’t a full love-triangle. I got scared for a while there, but it passed. The thing is though, while I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it either. I don’t even know that I liked it. And that’s a strange place to find myself. I fully acknowledge that this is a well-written, well-edited, creative book. I consumed it in an evening. It’s wonderful in it’s own way, but also kind of bland.

It’s like a store brand cheddar. It’s a perfectly acceptable cheese. I’ll slice it up and toss it on my sandwich and be perfectly happy with it. But it’s not Brie. It’s not my favourite. It’s not something I’m excited to have gotten to eat and will remember. But I’m also notably not dissatisfied with it. Are you sensing my vacillation and painfully middle of the road feelings, here? Yeah.

Again, very well written. Again, a heroine I didn’t hate. There was also a hero I liked (but didn’t know well), a villain that was truly bad but had hints of multiple layers (but only hints) and side characters that were colourful enough to not just be filler. All good ingredients, mixed into a somewhat blasé whole.