Fairest – Levana’s Story by Marissa Meyer is a prequel to her fairytale reimagining series The Lunar Chronicles. It provides the backstory to series antagonist Queen Levana Blackburn of Luna. If you are new to The Lunar Chronicles, PLEASE don’t start with this book – go read Cinder, Scarlet and Cress and then come back to it. It will be more engaging in that way. This book is a very focussed character study of Queen Levana and how she turned from a naive, self absorbed young girl into the tyrant our heroines are trying to depose. There is little in the way of worldbuilding or major plot development. It remains mostly confined to the Lunar Royal Palace. What I liked Character development. This is the focus of the book and is excellently done. We follow Levana’s progression from a self absorbed, naive young girl to the vicious despot of the later books. I appreciated how each step and decision she took along that path was small and logical at the time but each developed her character as it turned out to be. I found her an interesting character, and at many points she gained my sympathy for what she went…
The big news this week is that I have finally managed to track down a Kindle Voyage to purchase – yay! It’s not available in Canada, and it’s been out of stock on Amazon.com for weeks. I managed to order one from Best Buy so this weekend I will be making my yearly pilgrimage across the border to pick it up. It does really annoy me that Amazon always delays selling it to Canada when the UK and German markets get it at the same time as the US. Anyway, that’s my rant this week. I have chosen to pay extra this time and include 3G connectivity. The main reason I’m doing this is because I read on my Kindle a lot away from home – busses, cafes, the break room at lunch – and I’m missing the fact that it doesn’t then update my reading progress. This means that Whispersync for Voice doesn’t always update and work the way it should. I’m hoping that the 3g always on connectivity will help with that. Yes, I know, I could always connect to a WiFi network but I don’t always bother if I”m just having a quick 10 minute read….
Now that it’s 2015, I would like to share some of my most anticipated books of 2015. Let’s get started! The first of these is Fairest: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer. This is a prequel to the three books currently published and tells the backstory of series antagonist Queen Levana. For those of you who don’t know the Lunar Chronicles, they are sci-fi retellings of classic fairytales. The characters are kick ass, the world building is fantastic and they are a brilliant read. I’m really looking forward to Fairest, which is released on January 27th 2015. The final book in the series, Winter, is due for release in the autumn of 2015. I’m also excited for A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab. I loved Schwab’s Archived and the premise for this one sounds interesting – parallel universes, with certain people having the ability to travel between them. Sign me up! A Darker Shade of Magic is released on February 24th 2015. One book I’m surprised I’ve not seen on more Most Anticipated lists is The Skull Throne, the four book in Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle. I’ve loved the previous books in the series and find…