Review: CITY OF GHOSTS by Victoria Schwab

Review: 3.5/5 stars

This book is a fun ghost-filled middle-grade story that takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland.

I picked this book up because I want to read all of Victoria Schwab's books, but also it sounded really cool. Cassidy Blake's parents are getting a TV show about them traveling to the most haunted places around the world and the first stop is Edinburgh. Cassidy tags along with them--and so does her ghost best friend, Jacob. Ever since an accident that happened when she was little, Cassidy has been able to see and talk to Jacob and pass through the Veil into the ghost realm.

City of Ghosts definitely felt like a Schwab book. It had her special brand of paranormal, which I loved. I really enjoyed the setting of Edinburgh too because I've been there and it felt very genuine to me. As Cassidy explored the city, it felt like I was reliving my study abroad there because I went to a lot of the same places she went to, and that was so much fun.

I loved this story's focus on the friendship between Cassidy and Jacob. They are always helping each other and supporting each other, and it was so nice to see a wholesome friendship depicted so well.

I did find the plot to be a bit basic, but as this book is middle-grade, that's understandable and forgivable. I also wish Grim, the cat on the cover, had been in more of the book and maybe gone on adventures through the Veil with Cassidy, because we all know that cats can see ghosts, but he was just a tertiary character that didn't really have any impact on the story. That felt like lost potential to me, but maybe he will become more prominent in future books. I can hope!

Overall, City of Ghosts was a fun and slightly creepy ghost story that I really enjoyed and would recommend to Schwab fans or those interested in chill adventure stories involving ghosts.

Review: THE POPPY WAR by R. F. Kuang

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

The Poppy War is a dark and gritty military fantasy inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking. The story involves the use of shamanistic magic to call upon the gods for power during the brutal wars.

Rin is our strong female protagonist, but she’s not invincible, which I appreciate. She cried multiple times throughout the book and was both physically and mentally hurt a lot too. She had to struggle and learn, and even then still made mistakes. It was nice to see her grow into herself over the few years we follow her in this book.

One issue I had, though, was that Rin was one of only three characters who I felt had a real story in this book. Besides the secondary characters of Altan and Jiang, and maybe Nezha, everyone else felt flat to me, one-dimensional tertiary characters. This is definitely not a character-based story as each character’s arc, even Rin’s, could have been more developed and gone much deeper. I will note, however, that I’ve seen many reviewers claim the opposite, that the characters in The Poppy War were dynamic and have complex relationships, but I honestly did not feel that way at all.

I do not have a good understanding of Chinese history (history was always my weakest subject) so I have no idea how similar this story was to true Chinese history and culture. And frankly, I don’t care if it follows it to a tee or not because I liked the story. It’s clear that Nikan is supposed to represent China and Mugen is supposed to represent Japan, but that’s all the parallels I was able to draw with my limited historical knowledge. I’ve seen a few complaints that this book got some aspects of Chinese history wrong and portrayed things in a bad light (such as how Mugen is fully evil and there’s nothing good ever mentioned about that country), but guess what? The Poppy War is fiction. It doesn’t have to be 100% historically accurate. I thought it was a good story regardless.

At less than fifty pages in, I already started seeing similarities to Red Sister—a young orphan girl goes to an academy to train and becomes super strong and cool. Except I didn’t care for Red Sister while I at least marginally enjoyed The Poppy War. (I’ve also seen this book compared to The Name of the Wind, among others, because of the school setting, but I have yet to read that book so I can’t make those comparisons.)

The Poppy War is divided into three sections. Part one was my personal favorite as it had the warrior school setting and things were a little more lighthearted; I loved reading about Rin at the Sinegard. Part two started to get darker as the war started and strategy tactics and battles were introduced. Then part three got really dark and was almost depressing to read at times. By the time I was a few chapters into part three, I was really wanting to be done with this book to move on to a fantasy that’s not as gritty. I normally like to jump right into sequels without waiting, but after the events in The Poppy War, I’m going to read some other things first before starting The Dragon Republic.

Although I enjoyed my time reading this book, I also found myself wanting to be done with it. Epic fantasy books like this take me a long time to read for some reason, so it felt like I spent forever in this story and I just wanted to move on to something else at times, for example when I had spent hours reading and only managed to get through forty pages in all that time, I knew I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I was at the beginning. I also prefer my fantasy to be a little bit more fantastical than this story was—Rin’s a shaman and can call upon the power of the gods, so we get to see the supernatural plane of gods and monsters, but there’s not really any form of magic system in this book, which I wanted there to be. It mostly felt like a historical fiction book for most of the story until the shamanistic bits became too unrealistic to not be considered fantasy (catching yourself on fire or walking the spirit plane to call upon the Phoenix god for power, for example).

Maybe this book was just too dark for me, I don’t know. I haven’t really read any military fantasies before so maybe it was all the wars and fighting that I didn’t care for. I can’t really put my finger on what exactly it was that made me not love The Poppy War, but I know that I expected to like it more than I did. I have read so many five-star reviews for this book, people claiming it was the best fantasy debut of 2018, but there are definitely better books out there in my opinion.

If you enjoy dark military stories with a dash of fantasy, lots of gore, and a school setting then you will likely enjoy The Poppy War. It wasn’t the best thing I’ve read but I do still plan to finish the series because I liked it enough to continue on with the story, and I respect stories like this one that bring light to some historical events we may know little to nothing about. This book also made me want to read more Asian-inspired fantasy.

Review: THE QUEEN OF NOTHING by Holly Black

Rating: 3/5 stars

This book (and really this whole series but it is most apparent in this book) felt like a surface-level story. It kind of felt like Holly Black wrote a really thorough outline and that’s what got published, but she never went back and filled it out and made it deeper. Everything about this story could have been more. More world-building, more time spent getting to know each character in-depth, more scheming present on the page (I hate seeing paragraphs that say, “she did a bunch of planning and was able to accomplish the thing” instead of us getting to see what actually happened).

I liked the story but everything was rushed. There was no time spent getting to know the characters, no time spent building the setting (I still can’t imagine what Elfhame looks like), no time spent in each scene before we rushed off to the next plot point, etc.

Basically, I just want more of everything. Each of these books needs another hundred pages to adequately describe everything that deserves to be included. Every conversation was so short that I feel like they reached the point too quickly and the outcome happened too fast. Every scene felt rushed, which caused there to be no tension in this book because conflicts were getting solved as soon as they started.

I like Cardan and Jude together, but also I really wanted to see more of their thoughts and actions regarding each other. I never felt like they really hated each other, nor did I ever feel like they really liked each other. Once again, this story didn’t go deep enough for me to feel a connection to any of the characters, and I’m so sad about that.

Overall I’m glad I read this series—it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it—but I’m also disappointed that it wasn’t better. With how long Holly Black has been writing fae stories, I expected this, her most recent series, to be top-quality writing and that she would have really homed her skill as an author, but somehow she missed the mark here on developing anything about the world of Elfhame. I thought the overarching plot was clever and enjoyable, but I wanted to see more behind-the-scenes actions and political machinations, more time spent developing characters, more details and descriptions to create a richer world, and more pages overall devoted to telling this story. The Folk of the Air was a fun series, but it made me want to immediately jump into a dark adult fantasy, where I know I’m going to get all the descriptions and world-building that I wish for.

Review: A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER by Holly Jackson

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

I had a really fun time reading this book! I was so invested in it that I could sit for hours and read, which is not common for me, as I usually have to get up every 30 minutes and do something else, but that was not the case with this book because I needed to know what was going to happen. I don’t read a lot of mysteries but it’s a genre I want to get into more, so I’m glad this book was this month’s book club pick.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder follows Pippa as she decides to investigate a closed murder case for her senior project. Five years ago, Sal Singh killed his girlfriend, Andie Bell, and then killed himself. There’s no “allegedly” about it; all evidence points to him. But Pip still thinks he’s innocent and plans to prove it.

This book reads like a true-crime story to me. It contains interview transcripts, text message transcripts, and journal logs on top of the ordinary prose. I absolutely love books told in a non-traditional format, and it made me fly through this book even faster. I loved feeling like us readers were able to solve the case along with Pip.

I did have a lot of theories and at one point sort of guessed what the truth was, but then I immediately doubted myself. There are lots of layers and lies and twists in this story, and even if you guess part of the truth, I don’t think you’ll be able to guess the full truth.

One tiny issue I did have with this book is that it felt like Pip came by her sources a little too easily at times. She interviews the murder victim’s younger sister, Becca, at one point, but she won’t reveal any information to Pip, so Pip immediately is like, “Oh, her best friend at the time of the murder was this girl, I’ll just interview her instead,” and she does and gets a plethora of information from her. It was just weird because it felt like we reached a stumbling block and there was tension because she couldn’t interview Becca, and the very next page she’s calling up a person who has never before been mentioned and who provides all the missing information we needed. There were a few instances like that that felt too easy, and a few other times when Pip was not ethical about how she obtained some information, but I’m not even that mad about it because I enjoyed everything else so much. 

With every new detail reveal, I would tell my husband and have him help theorize with me what was going on. He’s very smart and really good at solving puzzles so he always guesses the outcomes of murder mysteries, so I loved talking with him about this book. We had a lot of theories worked out, yet we still managed to be shocked by the ending.

I didn’t end up loving the ending. I thought it was a little too rushed and that Pip was banking on conjectures a little too much. But A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder was still a solid debut! Despite there being a few very minor flaws I addressed above, this was still an extremely fun mystery that really did have me guessing until the very end. Would definitely recommend.


*SPOILERS BELOW*
Pip finds a note in Andie’s day planner that said she was meeting with HH. Pip thought that meant Howie’s House. But then she goes to the Ivy House Inn and meets a Henry Hill, who I instantly thought was HH. And the grandma there—although she had Alzheimer’s—she mentioned seeing Andie a few weeks ago. I thought for sure this lead was going somewhere, especially since Pip just blew it off and thought it wasn’t important. But nope! HH was not Henry Hill, which actually disappointed me because I thought I had guessed a hidden clue. None of that mattered in the end.

I thought when Pippa went to 42 Gravesend Rd. to confront Mr. Ward that she couldn’t be 100% sure that Andie was there and alive inside. But she called the police and told them as much. Then she went inside, knowing Mr. Ward was dangerous and a killer. I don’t know why he let her just stand there and threaten him, why he didn’t try to hurt her or anything. That seems a little unrealistic.

If Becca took Andie’s car and that’s what was seen on the CCTV camera, didn’t it also see Becca walking home later? I guess she could have come home a different way, but I think this should have still been addressed at least.