Darth Pedant

I love dressing up and putting on makeup, but I so seldom have the energy for it that I have to live vicariously through shows like Next Top Model and Project Runway. I bought this book thinking it would scratch that itch while also delivering a pretty strong message about how stupid and harmful arbitrary beauty standards are. And it did scratch that itch. It scratched and scratched and scratched and scratched until it stopped feeling good and started to irritate. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I thought the book spent too much time in wardrobes and beauty treatment salons and not enough time on the plot. I was so bored that I almost abandoned the book in the sagging middle, which would have been a shame because it’s a decent plot once it picks up momentum in the last hundred or so pages. I’m interested enough to read the sequel whenever I can get my hands on it (cliffhanger ending, ugh), but it was a slog. A decadent, beautifully-described slog.

The publication of this book was pushed back two or three times over the course of its production, which means that even though I held off on reading the first book for several months, I still had to wait nearly a year and a half for the sequel. It was well worth it. Deathless Divide is about 100 pages longer than Dread Nation and packs a whole lot more punch. Ireland was super mean to her characters, putting them through one rusty existential meat grinder after another, and I love her for it.

I still don’t like present tense, but Ireland’s pretty good at it, and I really enjoyed the addition of Katherine’s POV. I kind of dismissed her in the first book, but getting inside her head and seeing how she uses corsets and good manners to mask her anxiety totally won me over.

On a side note, this makes THREE whole books about zombies that I didn’t hate. Will wonders never cease?

It’s finally happened. I have read a Diane Setterfield book in which I liked the prose AND the plot AND the characters. The third time really is the charm, apparently. Persistence pays off! Sort of!

The story meanders like the titular river, seeming to flow slowly on the surface with hidden currents beneath. I enjoyed the fairy tale theme, but at the same time I found myself wishing that Setterfield had set out to subvert it instead of lean so hard into it. A whole lot of fairy tales and legends hinge on the suffering of women, and Once Upon a River is no exception. In fact, it plays most of the greatest hits, including but not limited to: rape, physical abuse, emotional abuse, abandonment, etc. Rita Sunday’s character journey had the most subversion potential, which is why the way she’s treated made me full-body cringe.

So anyway, yay for Setterfield with her beautiful prose finally writing a book with a story that interested me. Though I have to admit, after Bellman & Black that bar was really low.

It was probably a bad idea to read a crime novel set in a dying, drought-stricken, rural Aussie town when half my state is on fire and dozens of non-fictional towns are literally running out of water, but oh well. Can’t blame a four-year-old novel for being painfully relevant to current events. Depression practically oozed off the pages, and I couldn’t help thinking that if Kiewarra were real it would be cinders by now.

Depressing realism aside, I thought this was a well-written novel with a decent mystery and an interesting main character. To clarify, the present-day mystery was decent. The past mystery was a disappointing collection of violence-against-young-women tropes. Still, I’m interested enough to seek out more by Harper. I’m undecided if I want to read the sequel, though. Aaron Falk is an interesting character, but he definitely belongs to the class of crime novel protagonists in desperate need of a good therapist. I don’t know if I want to read a few hundred more pages of him not working through his abandonment issues. I hear Harper’s third book is a standalone and also pretty darn good. Maybe I’ll just skip to that one.

Not quite as fun for me as Ireland’s other MG Star Wars novel (Spark of the Resistance), but still pretty cute. I’m all for increasing the badass space princess population, and Rinetta definitely steals the show. I’d happily read more of her adventures.

This is an entertaining historical novel that hits all the right tropes for me. Agnes Resolute is your typical Victorian pseudo-feminist protagonist. She’s a plucky orphan searching for her long-lost mother, and no matter how rough and sexist the Victorian world is, nothing is going to keep her down. Much adventure (and some romance) ensues. Huzzah!

There wasn’t anything I didn’t like . . . except for the framing device of a present-day woman coming home to take care of her ailing mother and finding a letter written by Agnes’s long-lost mother. Even though the book starts in the present-day woman’s point of view, I never connected with her and I found her chapters to be jarring interruptions. I ended up skimming them. Honestly, I skimmed the letter as well. It’s a bog standard tragic romance, and it wasn’t nearly as interesting as Agnes’s adventures.

In a nutshell: I quite liked Stars Across the Ocean, but I would have liked it even more if Freeman hadn’t tried to pull a Kate Morton and interest me in multiple timelines.

This is probably the most middle grade of all the MG Star Wars novels I’ve read to date. It’s cute, it’s fun, all the blasters are set to stun (hey, that rhymed!), but the teeth of the larger, more deadly Minfarian fauna are most definitely NOT set to stun, so there’s still a respectable body count. (RIP, dozens of nameless Stormtoopers.)

It was fun to see Rey and Poe butting heads a bit, and I’m always up for more porg content. Also, this book has about 9000% more Rose Tico than The Rise of Skywalker (the movie, not the book, which isn’t out at the time of this review), which I consider a huge benefit. Since the movies are consistently dropping the ball with their most interesting female characters, I appreciate that there are books like this to help pick up the slack.

I feel only slightly let down that the author promising murder bunnies in some of her book promo didn’t net any actual murders committed by bunnies, but this is a middle grade novel and I have to keep things in perspective. So what Disney needs to do is let Ireland write a more adult SW novel so she can REALLY deliver on the murder bunnies. That’s my takeaway. ;)

Near perfection. Minus one star for trying to kill me. (Not really.)

Happy Hogswatch, everyone!