Hello, yes I know I’ve missed a reading roundup – my apologies for that. I’ve had a lot of shifts at work and was working some crazy hours over the last few weeks. Also I had a virus which left me rather run down. Also, there were some great season finale TV shows on – Game of Thrones and Outlander – which I really wanted to watch. Also LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens won’t play itself. Anyway, enough excuses. Right now I’m in a kind of reading slump. I have many, many books in my TBR, but none of them are taking my fancy. Don’t you just hate that? I have hopes that Snow Like Ashes by Sara Raasch may help ease me out of that slump. Since my last roundup, I have managed to finish a few books, and consign one to my Did Not Finish pile. Sorry The Crown’s Game, you just didn’t grab my interest fast enough. The books I completed were Paper and Fire by Rachel Caine, for which you should have seen a full review go up earlier this week, Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige, one of the ARCs I received at BEA 2016 and…
My last entry talked about my favourite books of 2015, so now it’s time to talk about my most anticipated books of 2016. Passenger is the latest book by Alexandra Bracken. it is the start of a new YA series and is billed as a YA treasure hunt through time. I really loved Bracken’s Darkest Minds series, so this sounds like a real winner to me. The publisher has released a sampler, which I encourage you to check out. Passenger is officially released in just a few days on January 5th 2016. This is the first book in a new series by Mortal Instruments writer Cassandra Clare. It is set in the same world of the Shadowhunters but the action takes place in Los Angeles. At first, I’d been a little sceptical of the setting; the older cities of London and New York seemed a more natural fit for vampires and demons than sunny Los Angeles. However, the last book in the Mortal Instruments series, City of Heavenly Fire, functioned as much as a setup for this new series, introducing characters, locations and possible plotlines in the new series, and I am 100% convinced now. I will certainly be devouring Lady…
Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige was one of my most anticipated reads of the season. I read and loved the prequel – No Place Like Oz – and indeed my desire to read Dorothy Must Die sent me into a reading slump for a while as nothing else hit the spot. Having read it, I can say that, while there was a lot to enjoy about Dorothy Must Die it didn’t quite live up to my anticipation. What I liked The protagonist. I really liked our protagonist, Amy Gumm, and enjoyed following her journey. She is a strong, kick-ass heroine, yet is dealing with her own internal demons and has her own buttons that can be pressed. Coming from Kansas as she does, she is the reader’s inroad to Dorothy’s Oz. Many parallels are drawn between Amy and Dorothy; both are originally from Kansas, both were feeling trapped in their mundane lives with little escape from their farm/small town before their arrival in Oz. Both are sensitive to the magic that is all around in Oz. The worldbuilding. While it’s fair to say that L. Frank Baum did a lot of the heavy lifting in his creation of the…