Before I get started on the review, I just want to let everyone know that this is going to be my last review. For details on why I've stopped blogging, see here.
Title: The Devil You Know
Author: Adrian W. Lilly
Rating: 3.5 stars
The Plot
Julie is unhappy that her parents are making her move from her life in Chicago to her father’s home town in Michigan’s Upper Penninsula. She doesn’t want to leave her best friend Marie-Do, and she knows that the lack of swim team at her new school will kill her chances for swimming in college. But when her mother explains that her father is dying, Julie has no choice but to give into her family’s desires. But she only has to spend a few days in the UP before she realizes that something is seriously wrong with this town. The other children in school are Children-of-the-Corn creepy, and she has no way to make contact with the outside world. As time wears on, Julie realizes that her parents may have brought her here for a far more nefarious purpose than she ever could have imagined.
The Good
The Devil You Know was more horror-y than what I usually read, and it did that effectively. At every turn, I didn’t know what was going to happen to our characters, whether they were going to escape or fall victim to the clutches of the evil. The set-up was quite scary. Julie’s parents were in total control of her life and were able to block off every method of communication with the outside world, including any physical way to leave the town.
The Bad
I had a hard time finding The Devil You Know as plausible all the time. The story definitely has an atypical setup: parents plotting to kill their children. I wanted there to be a more complicated dynamic going on, like where one of the evil people has a more complex emotion, like regret over killing own children. But it was pretty much straight up horror without the emotional complexity. Which is fine for the genre, I guess.
I also found the book to move rather more slowly than I would have liked, especially at the beginning. We go through every day in Julie’s life from September 29th until the sacrifice on October 31st, and important stuff doesn’t happen on all of those days. And then when we get toward the end, she often does very little on these urgent days. And I keep wanting to know why she isn’t spending more time trying to GET THE HELL OUT OF DODGE. But, then, I guess it’s not horror if the heroine doesn’t spend some time running up the staircase when she should be heading out the front door.
The Romance
Julie meets Paul, the only other normal person in town, and they fell in love in a time frame that can only be described as way too quickly. I do think it was actually more than three days before they were declaring their love for each other, but that doesn’t mean I actually bought it. I did spend much of the book wondering if Paul was going to secretly turn out to be evil, which added a level of interest to the story. And I’m not telling you whether he is or is not. You will just have to read it. Bwahaha.
Will I read more?
The Devil You Know is, I am pretty sure, a stand-alone novel. But I honestly don’t see myself picking up anything more by this author, at least partly because I’m not a huge fan of horror.
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Title: A Matter of Fate
Series: Annar
Author: Heather Lyons
Length: 6665 Kindle units
Rating: 4 stars
The Plot
Chloe is not sure she wants her fate. From her birth, she has been destined to be a Creator and a leader of the Magicals on the seven planes. This makes her unique, but it also makes her a target for the Magicals’ enemies. One day Jonah shows up at her school, and she instantly knows him – She has been having dreams about him her entire life. And she’s about to find out that Jonah and his twin brother Kellan have more to do with her destiny than she ever imagined.
The Good
So I got the review request for this book, and it was like “Girl with supernatural powers has dreams about a cute boy she discovers is real. And he has a twin.” This is, like, my book kryptonite. I cannot turn it away. My friend says that if The Ring featured a YA novel instead of a video, this would be the plot, as that would be the best way to maximize readership. I realize this trope has been done lots of time, but, really, the only thing that could make me want to read it more is if the twin were evil. But not really evil. Just misunderstood.
A Matter of Fate did not disappoint, and it actually managed to be a better book than the cliché format implied. Chloe lives in an interesting magical world full of people with all kinds of different powers. Chloe herself is brave and caring. Her parents are not as supportive as she would like them to be, but she forges a family out of the people around her. She is a strong, albeit overemotional, girl who is doing her best to live up to the future that has been mapped out for her.
The Bad
I find I don’t have too much to say that’s bad about this book. It was on the long side and dragged a bit in parts, but that wasn’t that big a deal. So why, you may ask, have I detracted a star from the total. Well, that was mostly to do with
The Romance
A Matter of Fate was definitely a book that was heavier on the romance than the plot. I mean, the last plot-relevant thing happened with still a quarter of the book left to go. That’s not a bad thing, though. My bigger sort of issue was that on some levels this book was about how much love sucks, and the overarching feeling I had coming out of it was one of sadness.
One of the themes of the book was that you can’t fight your fate. At the beginning of the book, I expected the story to be about a girl trying to choose between her destiny and her desires. But really it was about her realization that accepting the fate that everyone had planned for her was for the best. Chloe has known Jonah in her dreams for her entire life, but because of what seems to be chance, she talks to his twin Kellan first and starts to date him. But she and Jonah have what is called a Connection, which means they are destined to be together. And thus a love triangle of no good outcome is born.
Will I read more?
I’m not sure where the next book in the series is going to go. There are a lot of potential directions. I could even see the book being about one of Chloe’s friends rather than Chloe. I think that might make me more willing to read it. It’s not that A Matter of Fate was bad. It’s that I can’t watch Chloe emotionally abuse poor Kellan anymore. I know she doesn’t mean to be cruel, and he lets her do it. But. It was just so sad.
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Title: The Orphanage of Doom
Series: The Grimm Chronicles
Author: Isabella Fontaine & Ken Brosky
Previous Books in Series: Prince Charming Must Die!, Happily Never After, Revenge of the Castle Cats
Rating: 4 stars
Length: 3640 Kindle units (includes fairy tales)
Refresher: Alice must save the world from corrupted fairy tale creatures with the aid of a magical pen and an invisible rabbit named Briar.
I thoroughly enjoyed this most recent installment of The Grimm Chronicles. In it, Alice faces some of the less well known characters from fairy tales, namely the fiddler from The Miser in the Bush and stepmother and stepsister from The Juniper Tree.
Other new developments worth of mention? Alice goes back to school for her senior year of high school, which introduces use to some new characters – including possibly a new boy. Of course, it is hard to think of romance when you’re fighting for your life, and when your last boyfriend turned out to be a homicidal maniac. Alice’s friend Seth is still happy to help out with the creature killing, and we continue to wonder why he is still dating party girl Tricia. Briar has developed an extremely entertaining fear of becoming visible. And it seems that Alice’s parents aren’t going to let her keep her unpredictable demon-killing hours forever.
Other than that, not much to say. It was a good addition to the saga, and I’m looking forward to the next one coming out at the end of December.
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Title: A Spirited Inheritance
Author: Betty Mermelstein
Rating: 3 stars
The Plot
Karen is not looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with what family she has left – her mother, aunt and cousin. But she definitely isn’t expecting two additions to the holiday – her long-dead, multiple-great-grandparents Margaret and Thomas. But after she stares at their pictures for longer than usual, they appear with not only stories about family secrets but also a hidden treasure buried underneath the bathroom tiles – if Karen can figure out how to get it out.
The Good
The premise of A Spirited Inheritance was really interesting. Karen was having a hard time getting along with her mother and relatives, and it was nice to see her be able to connect with some of her family. The way Margaret and Thomas interact with the modern world is often comical, like the way they insist on hanging out in the bathroom because it used to be a sunroom, and how they insist on interacting normally with Karen, even when she is around other people who can't see them.
The story had a good theme that centered on what it means to be a family. Even though Karen’s ancestors were dead did not mean that they stopped wanting to help. And even though Karen and her mother did not always get along did not mean that they did not care about one another.
The Bad
I first need to put in the note that A Spirited Inheritance was definitely one of those works that could have been well-served by having professional editing done. Especially at the beginning, much of the punctuation and word choice was suboptimal.
Other than that, a lot of the story felt forced. Like, why did the hardware store show up in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner to award a prize? At first I thought it was to artificially make everything happen over Thanksgiving weekend, but as the timeline of the story stretched, I didn’t understand why that had been rushed.
I also found most of the characters in the story difficult to like. Karen and her mother seemed to be in a kind of pattern where they didn’t try to understand each other and repeatedly did things just to upset the other. Karen’s cousin was a little brat. The only people I liked were Margaret and Thomas, and they were dead.
The Romance
Sadly, Karen’s only non-familial relationship in the book was with her 8-year-old neighbor the Bug Boy. And he was more the villain of the piece.
Will I read more?
I’m not sure whether A Spirited Inheritance was a stand-alone novella or whether there will be more books in the series, but I think I am unlikely to pick them up either way.
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Title: Arcadia’s Gift
Series: Arcadia
Author: Jesi Lea Ryan
Length: 3601 Kindle units
Rating: 4 stars
The Plot
Arcadia “Cady” Day has a fairly normal high school life. She’s disappointed that her parents are separating, but excited that a cute new boy interested in her. Then her twin sister Lony is hit by a train and killed, and suddenly everything changes. Not only does she have to deal with her own grief and that of her family, but she has developed the power to feel the emotions of people around her. Can she cope with all the changes in her life?
The Good
Arcadia’s Gift was quite well-written. I enjoyed the realistic depictions of Cady’s friends and family, particularly as they related to Lony. We saw how Cady didn’t always get along with her twin, and how her friend thought being assigned Lony as a long-time lab partner was the worst thing that could happen to him. But of course no one wanted her to die. The story also convincingly portrays the grief of a family losing a child. Cady has her ups and downs accepting Lony’s death, and she also has to literally experience the emotions of her emotionally distant father and brother and her mother, who turns to drugs and alcohol to solve her problems.
The Bad
It’s not so much that there’s anything really bad about Arcadia’s Gift. It’s more that nothing happens. I mean, Cady’s sister dies, and it’s sad. She meets a boy, and there is a tiny bit of contrived difficulty. She has a power, and it has mechanics. But there’s no plot. There’s no rising action that leads to a climax. There’s no major conflict that demands resolution. It’s like we got the world-building architecture but none of the story that takes place in the world Which, to be honest, is not that inspiring and kind of boring.
Also, open casket funeral for someone who was hit by a train? That doesn’t sound like something I would want to see.
The Romance
I have a friend who reads the books that I strongly recommend on my blog, and sometimes he comes back that he doesn’t like them because they are what he describes as “too high school.” I have asked him to better explain what he means by this, and it seems to be that the characters have too many melodramatic highs and lows, where the slightest thing sets them off into an emotional tailspin. Using this definition, I think that I found the romance of Arcadia’s Gift a little too high school.
Cady meets Bryan before her sister dies, and he becomes a source of support for her because he has also lost a sibling. They are just friends at first, and then they admit they like each other as more than friends. And then a few days later he admits that he is going to Homecoming with someone else, and Cady goes psycho and won’t let him explain. And I’m like, “There are a ton of possible totally reasonable explanations for this.” But Cady locks herself in the bathroom sobbing. And I pretty much think this is an overreaction.
Will I read more?
Eh. I didn’t really dislike reading Arcadia’s Gift, but I was also not super drawn in. I’m not really feeling like there was enough there to bring me back for a second installment.
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