Chloe’s older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can’t be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby’s friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. London might not be dead after all, Ruby is hiding deadly secrets, and something in the reservoir wants to find Chloe…

First, a slight disclaimer. Nova is a friend(ly acquaintance) of mine, and she actually mentioned this book to me in passing ages before it was finished up or sold. Since she’s very close with her younger sister and knows that I’m very close with my older sister, she mentioned to me she was writing a book about, well, sisters. And at its heart, all fantastical elements aside, that’s what Imaginary Girls is: a story about sisters.

That’s the level where the book got me. It’s narrated by Chloe, a younger sister who was essentially raised by Ruby, her older sister — and oh yeah, did I mention they live in a tiny town in upstate New York? Just like my sister and I did, growing up? So for Chloe, Ruby has always been this larger-than-life figure, a celebrity in their home town. Chloe’s internal struggle between wanting to be herself, not just Ruby’s Little Sister, but also wanting everyone to know about her connection to Ruby and how she’s Ruby’s favorite person, were so spot-on that it ached (and frankly it astounded me that this book was written by an older, not younger, sibling). And all the identifying I did made the book’s escalation extra-eerie, as it builds up and becomes clear that Ruby doesn’t merely seem larger than life, she’s actually got some kind of powers that bend the world to suit her.

I will say, the major strengths of the book are the relationship between the girls and the book’s tone, which is creepy but beautiful, and more literary than most of what I read. Aside from the girls’ relationship, the book also has some fantastic world building. There’s a slightly claustrophobic, small town feel, which just feeds into the creepy tone of the whole book as the town falls more and more under Ruby’s spell; and there’s Olive, the other tiny town — the one that was drowned when the reservoir was built. I shudder just thinking about it.

The book’s actual plot (the dead girl who won’t stay dead, and how no one notices but Chloe) is a little bit secondary to all that. I pretty much guessed the major twist from the get-go. But it also feels to me like the plot in Imaginary Girls exists mostly as a peg to hang Chloe and Ruby’s relationship on. Generally, something that’s not plot-driven is a pretty big problem for me, and because of that, it actually took me a few chapters to get into it. But I’m aware that that’s totally a your-mileage-may-vary thing, and the book definitely seems to accomplish what it wants to do, and does those things very well.

That conflict, between my love of plot and fast paces, and the fact that those things are just not what this book is about (not to mention the fact that I think the writer is awesome) makes it really hard to rate, but I’m going to give Imaginary Girls four cupcakes.

Cassandra prides herself on being ready for anything, but she’s not ready for the Symphony of Smells – a strange chest full of vials that once belonged to a magician, and that appears one day at her grandfathers’ antique shop. With her new friend Max-Ernest, Cass investigates the magician’s disappearance – and finds herself battling an ancient society, the Midnight Sun, that is seeking the key to immortality. Soon Cass and Max-Ernest join the benevolent Terces Society along with their new friend Yo-Yoji, but the plots of the Midnight Sun grow ever more diabolical, and the mysteries surrounding our heroes grow ever more complex.

There’s a lot to like about these books. They are a blatant Lemony Snicket ripoff, true, but unlike many copycats, Bosch apes the style well. They’re engaging, the mythology is fresh and interesting, and the main characters are all likable. For the most part, I really enjoy reading these books, and did they not possess a couple of troubling elements, they’d probably run a strong four cupcakes. But those elements are so problematic that they overshadow the basically decent core of the books:

1. There are supporting characters in the series, most prominent in the second book, If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late, called the Skelton Sisters. They’re a pair of twins, Romi and Montana, who are actress-singers with a huge media empire. They are most directly a parody of the Olsen twins (which is weird enough on its own, because the target audience for this books is not old enough to remember the Olsen twins at their tweeny peak), but more generally a parody of tween girl culture and marketing, with a nod towards Hannah Montana.

Just on the face of it, that’s problematic because Bosch is mocking things targeted at tween girls, and all the tween girls who like those things, and that’s half of his audience, so I’m fairly uncomfortable with the Skelton Sisters to begin with. But the bigger problem is the issue of food. The Skeltons are members of the semi-immortal Midnight Sun and thus don’t need to eat – and don’t eat, thus making themselves so skinny that they are described as grotesques. However, they’re obsessed with food and at one point force a 12-year-old girl to eat a cupcake so that they can watch (after first trying to build up her resistance by telling her she’s a fat pig).

So, first of all, issues of eating disorders and food consumption are extremely complicated, especially for women. In a culture where girls are told they must be thin at all costs, the problem is with the culture and not the girls. So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be mocking people struggling with eating disorders? Eating disorders aren’t fun or funny. People don’t have them for kicks. They are serious medical issues. And since there are plenty of fat jokes in these books too, maybe these conflicting, poisonous messages shouldn’t be fed to the 10-year-olds who are going to be reading these books? “You must be thin without trying to be thin, or you’re a bad person,” is a pretty shitty moral for a kids’ book.

But more specifically, the Skelton Sisters are a very, very obvious parody of the Olsen twins. And Mary Kate Olsen’s eating disorder is public knowledge. So Bosch isn’t just making fun of eating disorders generally, he’s publicly making fun of one particular real life human being with an eating disorder.

And I don’t care if the kids today don’t know about Mary Kate’s medical issues or if Bosch didn’t really think through what he was saying. It’s reprehensible.

2. This Book Is Not Good for You features a little girl named Simone who is stolen from her family on the Ivory Coast and brought to America, where she’s kept in a cage and forced to taste chocolate. The climax of the book takes place at a cacao plantation, where the villains force presumably stolen African or African-American children to dig through monkey feces in order to find cacao beans that have been digested by the monkeys. At one point, the Skelton Sisters grab one of the little boys and try to take him home, because they’re very good with pets. Later, Cass discovers a sculpture of that same little boy.

Now, I’m aware that all of these atrocities are committed by the villains. The book does not condone any of these actions.

It does, however, make light of them.

Simone’s abduction is impossible to separate from its historical context, where African children were taken from their families and forced to labor for Americans. And the plantation is impossible to separate from its current context, where such things actually happen. Bosch even mentions the concept of “blood chocolate” (chocolate made with slave labor), but in a flippant way that completely dismisses and trivializes the issue.

Look, some things just aren’t funny. And joking about the very real, current issue of slave labor normalizes it. It turns an atrocity (abducted children being forced to dig through feces) into a punchline (they throw it at the bad guys! ha ha, poop is funny!). The scene where Cass happens upon the chocolate sculpture, an image that perfectly literalizes the commodification and consumption of third world children, made me sick to my stomach in a way that I doubt was Bosch’s intent.

Again, I’m aware that Bosch isn’t endorsing slave labor, the blood chocolate trade, or stealing children. But the total disregard for the seriousness of the issue and the insensitivity of making characters like Simone minor plot points to add (no pun intended) color to the narrative of his white heroes is appalling.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, The Secret Series is, for the most part, enjoyable. The characters are likable, the prose is funny, and the story is strong. But the problematic treatment of eating disorders and child slavery bring the grade way down. The Name of This Book Is Secret gets four cupcakes, while If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late and This Book Is Not Good for You get two cupcakes each, bringing the series average down to two and a half cupcakes. I’ll probably finish reading the series, but I’ll be doing it through the library and not spending money on the rest of the books.

In order to escape being forced into a politically and emotionally disastrous marriage, Princess Raisa flees her queendom and enrolls in Oden’s Ford, a school that caters neutrally to all of the Seven Realms, under an assumed name. Meanwhile, ex-thief Hanson Allister, having discovered that he is a wizard, also travels to Oden’s Ford to learn the magic he’ll need to protect the clans, the closest thing to a family he has left. When they meet, the attraction that sparked between them once before becomes a relationship, but conspiracy gathers around each of them, and they’ll be lucky to make it out of Oden’s Ford alive, let alone together.

Every time I review one of Cinda Williams Chima’s books, I wind up mentioning that they are overly long and super dense. Guess what? This one is too! So it’s supposed to be about Han and Raisa and their adventures at this school, right? It takes 192 pages to get them both to school. That’s an entire book! They bump into each other two pages later, but then don’t encounter each other again until page 384. That’s another entire book! I just. Like. Chima’s writing is compelling and I really enjoy the characters and the world-building, but Jiminy Cricket there is no reason it should be that long. Someone needs to edit these down to 400 pages.

My other issue with the book is…okay, you know that part in every single Harry Potter book where Harry decides to take advice from a diary or textbook or person or something that is patently evil, and every single one of his loved ones tells him not to, and he does it anyway, and then – gasp! – he is betrayed? That’s how much of this book felt. But Harry gets away with it because he’s pretty young for most of the books, and doesn’t really understand how people work. Chima spends a lot of time talking about how Han used to be a thief and a streetlord, and how he knows people and understands schemes and can’t be surprised and knows how to take care of himself, yet he stills spends hundreds of pages walking into not one but two obvious traps. And I am not good at spotting twists and turns, so if I knew they were traps, believe me, they were obvious. It wouldn’t have bothered me nearly as much if he wasn’t supposed to be so streetwise, but as it was, he wound up looking like an idiot.

All that said, I really, really enjoyed this book. I’ve already covered a lot of what I like about this series, but in short: I like Han and Raisa and a bunch of the supporting characters a lot, and I find the worldbuilding fascinating (although I forgot a lot of what was established in the first book, and could’ve used a quick refresher). I am totally hooked by the romance and even more hooked by the adventure, which is always a good sign. My main complaint is that I have to wait until fall for the next one (unless I manage to snag it at BookExpo for the third year running). In the meantime, The Exiled Queen gets a respectable four cupcakes.

It’s shaping up to be a perfectly boring summer for Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha, until they find a strange coin on the sidewalk that grants wishes…sort of. The coin grants half wishes, so you must wish for twice as much as you want, lest you end up with half a talking cat or half a safe journey home. Figuring out how to double most wishes is simple, but when it comes to finding a happy ending for themselves and their mother, the siblings need something more than just a little arithmetic.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for…oh, probably about two decades now. Seriously, I’ve noticed it in libraries and bookstores all my life and just never got around to picking it up until recently. And it is just as charming as it always looked! I tend to really enjoy mid-century children’s fantasy, with its warm, conversational tone and interesting glimpse into a different era of childhood. This book, published in 1954 but set in the 20s, made me long for streetcars and silent movies and, I don’t know, pinafores and stuff. The prose and the mood were just absolutely lovely.

I really liked the hook of the story – the half-wishes – and I also enjoyed all of the children, who are all very quickly captured in a few words. For example, “Martha was the youngest, and very difficult.” It has the charm of a child repeating what he or she has heard adults say about a sibling, and yet tells you exactly what age Martha is and what her disposition is like. Perfect! I was a bit annoyed that Mark, the only boy, seems to be a lot more together than any of his sisters, but I tried to let it slide as a product of its time.

There are a couple of other elements that I had to let slide as products of their time as well. At one point the children are lost in the desert and encounter “Achmed the Arab,” who promptly kidnaps them. Achmed is a broad and unflattering stereotype, but at least Mark points out (albeit in a clumsy, white-man’s-burden-y fashion) that Achmed’s claim that the coin belongs to his people might be true, and “You know how people used to be unjust to natives in the olden days.” The book is trying, at least. I had a similar reaction to their mother, who we’re told is a stubborn and capable single mother and career woman, but who is completely unable to cope with the idea of magic, to the point of it affecting her mental health, while her love interest takes it all in stride. And while the children think she really wants to be editor-in-chief of the paper where she works, what she really wants, it turns out, is to get married and stay home with the kids. The example with Achmed is certainly more potentially damaging today, but both aspects of the book rubbed me the wrong way. But again, their products of the time, and there’s not much to be done about them besides pointing out that they exist and avoiding them in modern books.

My major quibble with the book that was not an element of the 1950s was the resolution. The kids’ mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Smith, who knows all about the magic, proposes, but she turns him down because, having seen glimpses of the various wishes, she thinks she’s going crazy. Since the children want them to get married, they make a series of increasingly dumber wishes to make their mother believe in the magic, but it’s Mr. Smith who finally makes the wish that works and leads to their happy ending. Which annoys me because it’s the grown man in a book about three little girls and a boy saving the day, but also because he’s not the protagonist. The kids are the protagonists, and I wanted them to figure it out, not some random dude!

Aside from this rather annoying conclusion, though, Half Magic is, as I’ve said, an extremely charming book, and makes me want to read the rest of Eager’s work (aside from The Well-Wishers, which I’ve read many times). Four cupcakes.

These two books don’t actually have much in common, but I’m killing two birds with one stone here because they’re both sequels to books I really enjoyed, and while I liked both books, I don’t have a heck of a lot to say about either one.

Behemoth is the sequel to the awesome steampunk Leviathan. In this installment, Deryn and Alek go their separate ways in Istanbul: Deryn’s got a secret mission to help the Darwinist powers hold the Dardanelles out of Clanker hands, while Alek’s looking for allies to help him end the war.

One thing I really like about this is that, despite being a middle book, it doesn’t read as just a way to move the characters from Point A in the first book to Point B for the conclusion in the third. I think Deryn’s story is stronger in this regard — she’s actually got a mission she’s attempting to carry out, where Alek stumbles into a rebellion and makes the best of it — but their two stories came together perfectly and the climax was pulled off really well. And we got another couple new female characters into the mix, which is great for a book that takes place in the midst of military actions, which tend to skew male.

One thing Jess and I discuss when we talk books is that she’s a much shippier reader than I am. She actually liked Leviathan more than I did, because I was pretty much indifferent to the budding romance between Alek and Deryn, and she loved it. This book works the romance in a lot more heavily… and this time, I really enjoyed it. I came out of it much more invested in their relationship than after the first. The book is a solid four and a half cupcpakes, only missing five because the background politicking remains somewhat confusing.

Blue Fire is the sequel to The Shifter. In it, Nya and her friends are still wanted by the Duke for some nefarious purpose — and when her friends are arrested, Nya has to sneak into enemy territory to try to get them back.

This book had essentially all of the same strengths as the first did: Nya’s voice is strong and fun, high stakes, and great worldbulding. Seriously — worldbuilding is a huge part of my love of sci fi and fantasy, and Hardy does a great job in Blue Fire of creating a whole new city with its own personality, distinct from that in the first book, while making them feel like part of the same world overall. She also really gets into exploring Nya’s healing powers. She lets healing be a power that’s as morally dubious as the person who uses it, and goes further into its uses than most authors (for example, creepy soldiers who can heal themselves in the midst of battle by shifting their pain into their armor).

That said, I found it hard to keep track of what Nya’s skills actually do. She’s not a “normal” healer, so her abilities are different and harder to pin down, and she discovers new facets on occasion. I was also pretty lost by the climax. Now, I admit I do tend to skim looking for dialogue and action (terrible habit, I know, but breaking it after so long is not easy!) but I went back and reread when I realized I was lost… and still couldn’t quite work it out. I was a little confused by the first book’s climax, too, but afterwards it had a handy, “This is what that means,” paragraph so I got it. In Blue Fire, I was left going, “…huh?” (That said, I appreciate that at least Hardy doesn’t talk down to her readers.)

However, the denouncement and the cliffhanger at the end were great. I think the very last section adds a lot of depth to the supporting cast, and I can’t wait to see the how everything plays out when the series ends. Four cupcakes.

In the hugely anticipated final book in the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss finds herself at the center of the growing rebellion. But even in isolated District 13 there are politics she must navigate and dangers she must guard against – not to mention Peeta is still a prisoner of the Capitol. Can Katniss be the rebels’ Mockingjay without becoming a pawn in someone else’s game? And what will the cost of independence be?

Warning: there will be CRAZY spoilers after the cut.

Jess: Well, I’ll say this right off the bat: it’s a brilliantly written book. I got it at a midnight event, went home to sleep, then woke up and didn’t move from my bed until I had finished it. I don’t think I even took a bathroom break. It’s incredibly gripping and exciting; even when you’re devastated by what’s happening on the page, you can’t put it down.

Becky: Ditto. I made the mistake of reading the first few chapters before sleeping, and tossed and turned all night because my brain wouldn’t turn off. Taken as a whole, I love this trilogy. And that’s why it pains me to say that when push comes to shove, I didn’t like the ending. The book had me for at least 3/4 of the way through, even up through the climax — in fact, the climax of the team making its way through the Capitol was one of my favorite sections of the book. But then you hit Prim’s death, and bam. I’m done.

Jess: Agreed. In part that’s because I kept waiting for Katniss to do something, to have any idea of the bigger picture, to make choices about the future of her world. But she never really does. It was a problem in the second book, too, but I thought at least it might be remedied by the end of the third…but no. Katniss is played all the way through, and all she gets to do in both Catching Fire and Mockingjay is fire an Arrow of Significance without really understanding the consequences or dealing with the fallout.

Becky: There are actually a bunch of facets there that didn’t work for me. Like the fact that as soon as Katniss sees Prim die, she goes comatose… actually, she spends a lot of the book that way. I absolutely understand why; the story is about war and Katniss is a victim of war. It would’ve been extremely cheap for Collins not to show the consequences. But in a first person narrative, if your narrator is unconscious or otherwise taken out of the picture, so is your reader. I had been less than thrilled when Katniss broke down over Peeta earlier in the book and so he was rescued by other people, entirely off-page, but moved past it because the story is so compelling. But having Katniss go completely comatose at the book’s climax? I couldn’t pass that one over. She didn’t do anything at that point, except eventually get the Arrow of Significance, and after that she didn’t even know she was on trial, let alone participate or do anything to deal with rebuilding Panem. So a) that’s disappointing when you have a character who has (in most ways) been so active for two-and-a-half-ish books; and b) that’s not great storytelling, which is disappointing from Collins, who is usually an amazing storyteller.

Jess: Though I’m loath to ascribe motives to writers – how the hell do I know what they’re thinking, right? – I can’t help feeling like Collins was so intent on showing us the horrors of war that her storytelling suffered for it. Your mileage may vary, of course, but Becky and I are both structure nuts, and I think the structure of the book fell apart with Prim’s death. From a storytelling perspective, Prim’s death was completely redundant – we already saw Prim die when Rue died, since Rue was always essentially a Prim stand-in.

Furthermore, Katniss’s primary motivation from the very beginning of the first book was to save Prim. She ultimately failed to do this, obviously, since Prim died – but by voting in favor of having a Hunger Games with Capitol children, she’s failed all Prims everywhere. And yes, in war, children and loved ones die, and there’s nothing you can do, and it’s senseless and horrible and there’s no narrative cohesion. But in terms of a story…the protagonist failed at her primary goal in every sense, hooray?

Becky: I also feel like the book couldn’t quite pick a moral and that was part of the problem. You have a great scene of Katniss talking an enemy soldier out of being an enemy, and talk about forgiveness and rebuilding as the way forward and the way to prevent future tragedies. But you also have the moral of “war is hell, and destroys everything and everyone.” Which is a fine message, if depressing, but the two are pretty direct opposites. And because Katniss herself is too traumatized to be part of the rebuilding at the end, all you end up with is the idea that everything is hell, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it, because there’s nothing Katniss can do. I don’t know if that’s what Collins intended (though I hope not), and again, it certainly isn’t wrong to write a moral I happen to disagree with… but as a reader, I just found it too upsettingly horrible.

Jess: Exactly. If the books are supposed to be about breaking the cycle of violence and hatred, they need to show the cycle broken, and we have no faith that it will be. The only major character who seems to be in favor of that is Peeta, and he was never part of that cycle to begin with. Instead we’re left with broken Katniss, broken Haymitch, and some incredibly minor character we have a vaguely positive feeling about left in charge of the government.

Becky: So yes: the ending had its issues. But it also had bright spots. Like Peeta! As I’ve said about a billion times on this site, I’m not a particularly shippy reader, and I was never even remotely interested in the romance — it seemed very much Not The Point. But as a character, in and of himself, Peeta was wonderful through the whole series, and shone in the third book. His arc was wonderful and sad. When he was rescued and everything went all to hell, I was genuinely upset. I was worried about him! Like he was a real person I could somehow rescue and cuddle! Because he needs all the cuddles. Except for those reserved for Finnick, of course.

Jess: Oh, absolutely. In general, the characters were brilliantly drawn. Peeta and Finnick broke my heart, Haymitch was wonderful, and though I didn’t like the fact that Prim died, I liked that she was allowed to become more of a person in this book instead of a delicate flower Katniss had to protect. I also thought Gale was very well done. I pretty much can’t stand Gale (and I hated the love triangle), but his character arc works so well.

Becky: And newcomer Boggs was great, too. There were so few genuinely good people in the series that it was nice to see someone new who just wanted to do the right thing. And Cinna, while he obviously never appeared, was still a great (and very felt) presence. I actually missed him terribly as a person, if only because, looking back, he was one of the only characters who didn’t manipulate Katniss — he went out of his way to make sure she’d be the one who made the choice to be the Mockingjay, even though that was what he wanted for her. What a classy guy. Um, character.

Jess: There was so much about this book that was so great, and yet there were some really disappointing aspects to it as well. As much as it pains us, Mockingjay only gets four cupcakes (the only non-perfect score Suzanne Collins has ever gotten on this site!), bringing the series down to four and a half cupcakes overall. Still a respectable showing, though, and if these books don’t go down in history as classics of the genre, well, we’re sad.

Underlying the world we know is a world of magic users – a handful of lesser guilds, ruled over by the powerful and ruthless wizards. For centuries, the wizards have been forcing magical warriors into deadly tournaments to avoid confronting each other directly and starting an all-out wizard war. That all changes in The Warrior Heir, when Jack Swift, an ordinary high school student, discovers that he may be the last warrior alive – and every wizard in the world wants to use him or kill him. Jack is thrust into the wizard tournament, and wizard society is subsequently turned in its head. In The Wizard Heir, the immensely powerful young wizard Seph McCauley finds himself a pawn in the growing wizard war, thanks to a magical lineage he doesn’t even know about. And in The Dragon Heir, the fate of everything may just rest in the hands of the seemingly-unmagical Madison Moss, who is trying to fight both her growing attraction to Seph and the destructive power she holds over him. If the magical world is to be saved, Madison must figure out her place in the ancient legends before the other side gets their hands on her.

There’s something odd about these books. All three are very, very long, and very, very dense. Whenever I was actively reading them, I was totally engrossed and completely enjoying the story. I didn’t want to put them down. However, when I did put them down, I always had to force myself to pick them back up again. They were so long and so dense (and contained a far higher ratio of soul searching and angst to action than I prefer) that it was a struggle to get through them, even though I enjoyed the experience of actually reading them. It was sort of like exercising is for me: I like it when I’m doing it, and I’m always glad afterwards, but it’s like pulling teeth to get me there.

On top of that, these books completely slipped my mind when considering my backlog of Books to Be Reviewed. Seriously, I read them months ago and completely forgot about them immediately afterwards, even though I have another book of Chima’s sitting in my TBR pile. So I clearly have some sort of inexplicable mental block about these books, but I’ll try to do my best to review them anyway.

First off, the worldbuilding is great. I love the guild system, with its different types of “Weir,” or magic-users: emotion-manipulating enchanters, amulet-crafting sorcerers, precognitive seers, magically strong and durable warriors, and spell-speaking wizards. I love the allegorical legend explaining the origin of the guilds, and the way it turns out to be not so allegorical after all. I love the complicated history of the wizards, interwoven with real history. Good times, all of it.

Now for the characters. Jack is a perfectly decent if somewhat boring Everyboy of a protagonist. I was a little annoyed when he was thrust out of the spotlight in favor of a completely different protagonist for the second book, but Seph is also a perfectly decent protagonist, angstier and more arrogant, which makes him both more interesting and less likeable than Jack. The third book is divided between several protagonists, but mostly Madison and clever but low-power wizard Jason Haley. I found them to be my favorite protagonists – more interesting than Jack, more likeable than Seph – but hoo boy, they both spend a lot of time angsting and completely failing to communicate with the other characters in order to forward the plot. This is wildly frustrating, since it means they do a lot of idiotic things they would have avoided if they’d just talked to other people. I hate that. In general, the angsting is my biggest problem with the book, because all the characters spend a lot of time worrying the same issues like a dog with a bone. I feel like a hundred pages of very repetitive “who can I trust” or “oh no I am a monster” agony could have been easily cut from each book. Maybe it would have made them easier for me to get through.

There’s also a somewhat weird pattern of women being used or traded or otherwise treated as valuable possessions and/or weapons, at least as far as important, magical women go. Jack’s Aunt Linda is an enchanter and as such, though she is one of the major movers and shakers of the series and in fact can be credited with setting the whole thing into motion, is also very much something the wizards want to possess as a fun sex toy, since that’s how they view enchanters. Madison is sought by both sides in the final war because they know how powerful she is, although not why. Alicia Middleton, a teenage wizard, is introduced as a spy who dates Jack in order to keep an eye on him for the powerful wizards who want to use him in the tournament; she is redeemed in the third book, but the redemption involves her being pulled back and forth between the interests of powerful male wizards, working both sides while wearing, essentially, a slave collar. And show

Anyway. Despite my difficulties getting through the books (and remembering that I had done so), I did, you know, actually really like them, and I’m glad I forced myself to finish. Four cupcakes.

The ancient and evil woman called Beloved has finally broken through into Luster, the land of the Unicorns, and brought the Hunt with her. As the Hunters start their genocide, the unicorns gather together and find allies of their own — but if they can’t find a way to get back their fighting fire, it could be the end of the unicorns forever. But Beloved’s mad Hunt has an unintended consequence: the gate she opened is right in the heart of Luster, destroying the great tree that holds the world together, and now not just the unicorns, but all of Luster, may be doomed…

General spoilers are unhidden after the cut.

Not gonna lie: I devoured this book. I did a doubletake when I realized I’d missed its release, bought it the next day, and had it finished in under 24 hours. I had originally planned to reread the whole series first, but it was so new and tempting and right there in my bag, and look, I’m only human and I’ve been waiting for the series conclusion for, like, 16 years now.

It’s hard for me to figure out what to say here, so I’ll start with this: it feels like the legend and worldbuilding behind Luster ran away with the story at some point. I remember reading the second book, and I was utterly blown away by the twist at the end, when you find out the truth about the Wanderer. But I didn’t feel similarly about the reveal of the Whisperer in the third book, because the first two set it up clearly that Beloved is the series’ Big Bad. Adding in the Whisperer, while intriguing (and it says a lot of interesting things about the unicorns) meant that the story was no longer about Cara and the unicorns fighting with Beloved; it was about defeating a much more nebulous villain, and Cara was no longer at the heart of that conflict.

The fourth book takes it further. It turns out that the Whisperer isn’t something that can be defeated by Cara or the unicorns at all, which surprised me: with the repeated talk about the unicorns needing to find a way to “regain their fire” after having tried for so long to be pure, I genuinely thought that they would have to reclaim their darker impulses, and in so-doing, defeat the Whisperer that was created by those impulses. Instead, there was a whole additional layer of conflict added. To defeat the Whisperer, the book had to bring in Elihu, Fallon, and Allura, and even though we barely got to know Elihu as a character, the whole conflict hinged on him. There were pieces of it I loved — I think the Dimblethum’s backstory was awesome — but that meant that the series was really no longer about Cara and Lightfoot and their friends. Instead, it was about some godlike creatures and ultimately out of everyone else’s hands, and that frustrated me a little.

Actually, now that I think about it, very little of The Last Hunt was about Cara (and Lightfoot was barely in it at all). Between her parents, the dragons, the centaurs, the delvers, M’Gama, and other unicorns, her story was only one of many, many plot threads. They were all woven together very well. The book never sagged, I was never bored, and once I remembered what had happened in the previous book I was never lost or confused by having such an array of subplots. And the fact that they came together in the massive final climax was nothing short of amazing — just getting all of those characters together at one place and time couldn’t have been an easy narrative feat, and the dual-climax of the Hunt and Luster shaking apart worked really well. But, as I said in my mini-review of Dark Whispers, having so many POVs and so much going on means there isn’t time for a lot of development for any of the characters. I think the character who stuck out to me the most in this book was Rocky, because (between this and the previous book) he really did have the strongest character arch.

As a reader, I’m really into story structure. I love worldbuilding. On a technical level, I think those aspects of The Last Hunt are brilliant. But as good as they are, I don’t think those things are really Coville’s strength as a writer. I’ve always loved his characters most of all. He has a rare talent of making characters feel very, very real — especially tween and teen girl characters, which seems to be pretty rare from male writers (and oh man, I can’t tell you how strongly I identified with Wendy from the AI Gang as a kid, for example). So as much as I flew through this book, and really loved the glimpse into Luster’s history and aura of hope for its future, I also wish there had been more of that character in it. Still, I enjoyed it mightily — more than Dark Whispers, definitely — and give it a solid four cupcakes.

On his 11th birthday, Will Stanton learns that he not merely human; he is the last of the immortal Old Ones, destined to protect the world from those that would destroy it. Since time immemorial there has been a constant struggle between the forces of the Light and those of the Dark. Now the Dark is rising, gathering for a final push, and the chances of stopping it for once and for all rest with a small group of children: Will, youngest of the Old Ones; Simon, Jane, and Barney Drew, powerless but clever and resourceful; and Bran Davies the Raven Boy, with a secret magical heritage of his own.

I originally meant to read this entire series before the movie came out, then do a sort of comparative review of the two. In 2007. Oh well, the best laid plans, right?

I really liked Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book in the sequence, which was about the three Drew siblings searching a tiny island in Cornwall for the Holy Grail, with some guidance from their Great-Uncle Merriman. I love books about plucky British children on holiday, and books about working out magical puzzles by following clues, and books about Arthurian legend, and this had all of that in spades.

The problems arose in the second book, when Will, the protagonist for the rest of the series (well, he splits point-of-view chapters with the Drews in the third and fifth books, but he’s really the main character of the whole sequence), took over. Now, I like Will just fine, as an 11-year-old boy. Unfortunately, glimpses of Will-the-11-year-old-boy are few and far between in the series. We see far more of Will the Old One, who is just kind of boring and pompous and unrelatable. He views humankind with a sort of distant, patronizing fondness; there’s no immediacy between Will and the reader or Will and his friends and family. One book features a mortal whose life is put at stake by Merriman, another Old One, as a sort of failsafe magical device, and when the mortal realizes how willing Merriman was to sacrifice him, he is deeply hurt and winds up betraying Merriman. Will and Merriman show very little understanding or sympathy towards the mortal, or anger or hurt at his betrayal, just vague but tolerant annoyance at the inconvenience of the whole situation. It’s this sort of reaction that makes Will, except for those rare moments when his normal boyish self shines through, a cold and somewhat unlikable narrator.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the series suffers greatly from…it’s not even a case of telling, not showing. Things just are, with no proper transitions or growth on the part of any of the characters. Will is given a book to read early on; the reader doesn’t get to see any of the content, but it instantly teaches Will how to be an Old One and use his powers and basically helps him change instantly from a confused little boy to an untouchable god. It’s incredibly unsatisfying; we never get to see Will learn or grow. To a lesser extent this happens throughout the series: characters suddenly know things for no reason, or instinctively trust or distrust people because they just do. The whole thing reeks of deus ex machina.

In general, the more vague and mystical and grandiose the books got, the harder it was to follow them or relate to them. When Cooper kept the books on a more human level, they were far more compelling. This is why the Drews are more successful characters than Will; it also applies to Bran, the troubled Welsh boy of mysterious parentage who is introduced in the fourth book. The Drews and Bran can be confused, or scared, or petty, and it’s their moments of all-too-human peevishness that make them interesting and likable.

All that said, the books are enjoyable. The prose is absolutely lovely, some of the best I’ve read since we started this blog. The passages describing Cornwall and Wales in particular are like poetry. The mythology is really well-done, although only Arthurian in the broadest sense. And the climaxes are all exciting and high-stakes. So it wasn’t like I didn’t like the books. Just, you know. Will. (Sometimes.)

In light of that, and in light of the fact that these are classics, and a lot of the problems with the books have only become annoying tropes years after The Dark Is Rising helped blaze the trail for modern kids’ epic fantasy, the sequence gets four cupcakes. Not bad!

Nya is a hungry orphan who looks after her little sister, an apprentice Healer — and Nya is also a Taker, someone who can heal other people and take their pain. But unlike proper Healers, she can’t dump that pain into pynvium, only into other people, so she’s always thought her power was usesless (and something to hide, since the Duke whose forces are occupying her homeland has a dark interest in unusual abilities). But when a pynvium shortage hits her city and apprentice Healers start disappearing, suddenly everyone wants to use Nya’s abilities. But all Nya cares about is finding her sister before it’s too late…

I really liked this book! It reminded me a bit of Active Voice favorite Fly By Night, actually (in a good way, that is). The plot is similarly caught up in intrigue and the politics of Nya’s world: someone is hiding the pynvium shortage, but why? Who is starting riots and why? Why are people interested in Nya’s talent, and what’s happening to the missing apprentices? As it happens, though, I’d also say the book’s biggest weakness is that some of the intrigue gets confusing. There are three separate antagonistic forces, sometimes working together and sometimes not (and Nya doesn’t always know if they are or not), some of them working for the Duke and some against him, so it was mildly difficult to keep straight who was after what and why.

All this intrigue is set against some very strong worldbuilding. The magic of healing is interesting (and gets more so as the book goes on and Nya discovers other facets of her abilities), and the culture of her world is really fascinating. Nya’s country is occupied by a foreign military, and has been for long enough that outsiders have moved in and made it theirs (kicking the native-born citizens out of the best houses, taking the best jobs, etc). All the main characters still remember the invasion (and most lost loved ones during it); through the whole book there are simmering undercurrents of both anger and fear. The characters want the outsiders gone, but also know they were crushed when they fought before. The dynamics are really well presented.

Just a few other thoughts on this one. The book was listed as teen, but read more as middle grade to me, in terms of tone (aside from a few gruesome moments) — the writing is rich but Nya came across as pretty young. Her character development is great, though. She’s not naïve at the outset, but she faces increasingly morally grey questions and is forced to find answers, and sometimes she makes choices I didn’t expect as she learns how to weigh consequences.

Conclusion: like I said, I very much enjoyed this. I don’t have a heck of a lot to say, but definitely recommend it to people who like fantasy, and I’ll pick up the next book for sure. It earns a very solid four cupcakes.