Tag Archives: young adult

Tina Connolly

Book Review of Ironskin, by Tina Connolly

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IronskinI borrowed Ironskin, by Tina Connolly, from the library.

Description from Goodreads:
Jane Eliot wears an iron mask.

It’s the only way to contain the fey curse that scars her cheek. The Great War is five years gone, but its scattered victims remain—the ironskin.

When a carefully worded listing appears for a governess to assist with a “delicate situation”—a child born during the Great War—Jane is certain the child is fey-cursed, and that she can help.

Teaching the unruly Dorie to suppress her curse is hard enough; she certainly didn’t expect to fall for the girl’s father, the enigmatic artist Edward Rochart. But her blossoming crush is stifled by her own scars, and by his parade of women. Ugly women, who enter his closed studio…and come out as beautiful as the fey.

Jane knows Rochart cannot love her, just as she knows that she must wear iron for the rest of her life. But what if neither of these things is true? Step by step Jane unlocks the secrets of her new life—and discovers just how far she will go to become whole again.

Review:

So much potential in this plot, all reduced to, “Wah, wah poor me. I’m not pretty.” And “Oh, woe is me, I’ve been cursed with rage…or, well, at least mild irritation.” (I certainly never sensed any more than that.) With a romance that boiled down to “Mr. Rochart is never here. I wish he was here because it makes his daughter happy when he is. Oh, I love Mr. Rochart.” It came out of nowhere! Not least because Mr. Rochart was completely flat as a character. Jane was a bit better, but not by much.

Sure the book has a creepy atmosphere. And it really is an interesting premise. Unfortunately, I think all that potential was just smothered under all the self-absorbed angst. I’m afraid being a retelling of Jane Eyre was enough to salvage this. I’ll not be bothering with the sequels.

Saltwater Secrets

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

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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

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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*)