I have to get better at keeping up with these reviews, especially since I have highly ambitious plans for the number of books that I want to read this month (June). I will do my best to write as comprehensive of reviews as I can but time and potential information overload may make some of these reviews a bit more surface level.
Once again, Inkstone chose a winner for their quarterly subscription. In this world, every child is tested at a certain age (9, if I remember correctly) for the ability to perform magic. If they possess this ability, they must attend a magical school until they learn control because without control they pos a serious threat to just about everyone, including themselves. This world also has a strict social hierarchy which places those without magic – called hollows – at the bottom, below it if they
could. The main character falls in an incredibly odd place. She tested as a mage but has been stuck at the lowest level of the school because she cannot access her magic at all. Others derisively call her the “Hollow Mage.” The plot begins to ramp up when they main character encounters a wizard, someone with an immense amount of magical prowess and not just any wizard, one of the most powerful if not the most powerful living. In a last ditch attempt to avoid banishment from the school this wizard takes on the main character’s training, discovering that her supposed inability to access magic hid a far greater power that puts them all in danger. I loved how Campbell wove together the different plot lines and relationships in this story. She also created a brilliantly fascinating world that I cannot wait to return to.
I’m not sure what the author intended with this attempt at a middle grade horror novel. The main character witnesses her friend going missing while on a scout troop camping trip and is sure that some sort of cryptid monster took her. No one believes the main character, of course, so she decides to solve her friend’s disappearance (which no adult seems to take seriously) by joining another troop going on their camping trip in the same woods only a week or so later. Seriously?
Consider the suspension of disbelief stretched extremely thin. Now add in a creepy man following the troop, campfire scary stories that feature a cryptid whose supposed appearance matches what the main character saw that fateful night, and blatant skepticism from the troop leaders and one ends up with an unconvincing attempt at a scary story. Although I will not give any details (to avoid spoilers), I felt that the resolution felt both strange and anticlimactic. I know that horror books sometimes leave things unexplained but if the suspension of disbelief has already stretched this far, a little resolution goes a long way
I continue to love the fantasy/mystery blend, especially with the duo Bennet has created here. Book two did not quite live up to book one – a difficult task for sure – but I still really enjoyed it. Bennett continued to develop the two main characters through this new mystery and hinted at the possible addition of recurring characters to the cast. I genuinely hope that Bennett continues this series for quite a while.
The authors intended to create a unique take on the Parent Trap idea in this book where two girls, both adopted, end up meeting at the retirement home of the grandmother of one of the girls. Even though they barely know each other, after one in-person meeting and a weekend of secret texts, they decide to switch places to learn about each other’s lives and if their families knew about the identical twin situation before a grand reveal at the
retirement home’s Christmas pageant. The authors really want the reader to believe, for example, that one of the girls, who spends a good part of the first quarter of the book trying to convince her non-practicing Jewish family to have a real Hanukkah would – just as her parents agreed – want to switch places so that she could experience Christmas because apparently her family does not do anything for that holiday either. The authors tried to make a tough sell but did not find a buyer in me.
This book was powerful and incredibly unexpected. (A little bit of that comes from the fact that I do not read the synopses of the books I am reading for this professional development project prior to reading the book.) This book opens with the main character and her mom escaping from what the readers – but not the main character – can see is a high control cult. The main character cannot understand why her mom would do this and desperately wants to return to the only
thing that she has known as home. O’Shaughnessy does such a careful job leading the character to see all the troubling signs while also showing the reader both the danger of these sorts of groups as well as the consequences of this sort of brainwashing – how difficult it can be at any age to retrain your brain. This is an excellent read.
I picked this up on the spur of the moment after watching Bre from Loc’d Booktician discuss it in a recent vlog. I have had this book on my general tbr since seeing it on the 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards list for non-fiction. It is so heartbreaking to see how the Congo has been used and abused for centuries for their enormous amount of natural resource wealth. This book makes an excellent and compelling follow up to Adam Hothschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. For more nuanced thoughts on this book, I highly recommend Bre’s discussion in her flog.
The conclusion of this series, unfortunately, did not redeem the story for me. In fact, it led me to go ahead and unhaul book two. I will keep book one and consider it a standalone. The tight knit plotting and unique pacing that made me enjoy the first book so much seems to have drifted into wider ambitions and a bit of aimlessness that ended the overall macro-plot in a completely different place than book one would have the reader expect. I wanted to found family of book
one but instead of returning to that here, Kaner, instead, shoehorned two different romances that I don’t think any reader asked for. I finished the book fairly disappointed which brought down my rating. This is not a bad book but it’s definitely a poor way to end a promising series.
I think this book had all the pieces for a cozy, heartwarming mystery. Unfortunately, I think some of the pieces got lost in the attempt to hypothesize about possible sentience for the house. This house was supposed to be the completely rooted in the real world design of the main character’s grandparents yet the author gave the house a perspective in the story and some agency as well which if the author had bene willing to lean into the fantastical might have
worked. Ultimately, this left me feeling a bit dissatisfied with the direction of the plot and the resolution to a premise with a lot of potential.
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