Imaginative daydreamer Hazel doesn’t really fit in anywhere – except with her next door neighbor Jack, who’s been her best friend since practically forever. That is, until he suddenly stops talking to her. Her mother tries to convince her that this is just something that happens, but then Jack disappears, the prisoner of the Snow Queen. Only Hazel knows enough about fairy tales to follow him into the woods – but even she’s not prepared for everything she finds there.

I’ve always loved Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” but unlike his more famous stories about lovestruck mermaids and misplaced cygnets, I’ve never seen any updates or revisions of it. Since Ursu’s first trilogy was pretty good, I figured I’d give this one a try.

My biggest problem with Ursu’s earlier books was that it often seemed like she was trying too hard to be funny, with variable results. Here, she’s jettisoned that in favor of a more dreamy, story book tone. Again, the results are variable, but overall it’s an improvement – her prose is much stronger. It still gets in the way of itself a bit, though. The entire first half of the book is a slow, thoughtful exploration of Hazel’s various difficulties: her father took off abruptly and is barely in touch, her mother is struggling a bit to keep them afloat financially, she’s by turns bullied and ignored at school, her teacher doesn’t understand her, Jack’s mother is suffering from incapacitating depression, she’s growing up too fast and not fast enough, and then of course Jack’s total abandonment of her before his disappearance. All of these are handled deftly – the way Hazel processes her father’s abandonment through Jack and effect a parent’s severe depression can have on their child are particularly well done – but the overall structure suffers for it. Hazel circles these woes around and around in her head (as Ursu’s characters tend to do) until it becomes tiresome for the reader. Plus, it leaves the book with a giant first act, a medium second, and a rushed and somewhat anticlimactic third.

That said, Hazel was an excellent protagonist, quiet as she was. I liked her relationship with her mother and her mother’s characterization in general – she doesn’t quite understand her daughter, but you can tell she’s trying…and perhaps understands a bit more than Hazel thinks she does. I also liked that Hazel is adopted and the way she negotiates both that and being the only Indian kid in her Minneapolis school – it’s something that I haven’t seen before in kids’ fantasy.

The fairy tale aspect of the story was also very well handled. Shades of Anderson’s other stories run through this one – The Little Match Girl, The Red Shoes – but in unexpected ways. The characters Hazel encounters in the words are terrifying or heartbreaking or both, as all characters in fairy tale woods should be. I especially liked the Snow Queen; she’s not evil, she just is, and her hold over Jack is something that Hazel has to break from Jack’s end of things, not the Snow Queen’s. (Also, when Jack first gets into her sleigh, she offers him Turkish Delight, to his complete bafflement, and I laughed out loud.)

Overall, this book could’ve benefited from some trimming and rebalancing, but that doesn’t take away from its lovely, lyrical nature and strong characters. Four cupcakes.

Scottish Play Doe (please just call him Scott) has always been a little weird, what with his migraines that make him see really strange things, but everything in his life gets a lot weirder when his family moves to Goodborough (home of the GoodCo Cereal Company) and one of his hallucinations steals his backpack. And then it turns out he hasn’t been hallucinating at all: he can see things no one else can, and oh yeah, that includes cereal mascots that might actually be faeries… and they’re all on the run from GoodCo itself.

With the help of his new friends Erno and Emily (who have their own weird connection to GoodCo), plus Mick the leprechaun, Harvey the rabbit man, and a suspiciously hairy housekeeper named Biggs, Scott has to figure out what’s really going on at GoodCo… and how to save the world from one seriously sinister cereal company.

(Mild spoilers within.)
Although I never got around to Rex’s second book, Fat Vampire, Rex was on my list of authors to watch after I finished The True Meaning of Smekday a few years ago. And considering the two books, I feel safe in saying this: Adam Rex is a very entertaining writer and illustrator, but his Achilles heel is definitely pacing.

Something was distinctly off about the way the tension in Cold Cereal built, and I think it comes down to the fact that there were about three different books in this book. Basically, in this one (very long for middle grade) novel, you’ve got way too many elements at play: a creepy cereal company, some Irish/Celtic mythology, time traveling King Arthur, freemasons, and more. And that is just… a lot. Too much. They are all cool ideas, and they tie together eventually, but it also becomes kind of a jumbled, confusing mess. And, because there are just so many elements that need to be pulled together, getting all the pieces in play, moved to where they need to be, and set up for the climax, takes a lonnnnng time, and makes things feel kind of bumpy and uneven.

But on the plus side, a lot of the ideas are really enjoyable and entertaining. Sinister cereal company that uses faerie creatures as mascots? HECK YES. And the time traveling King Arthur idea was really cool. Also, while Scott and Ernesto were both basically everykids, Emily was wonderful — she’s a supergenius, smart enough that she’s figured out a lot of what’s going on before everyone else, but no one believes her, but also smart enough to understand that and deal with it. And smart enough that when her brother tries to make her feel better for being a social outcast, she doesn’t really want to hear about it. She knows people don’t like her and she doesn’t want to be condescended to about it, frankly. That was a small piece of the story, but a great touch.

Overall, the book was enjoyable. There are a lot of good gags and Rex’s tone is funny and entertaining. But when I got to the end and realized that it’s the first of a trilogy, instead of jazzed for more, my reaction was, “How is it POSSIBLE that there’s more???” So, while it has the same pacing issues as Smekday, it doesn’t deal with anything deeper than the surface story the way Smekday did. thus Cold Cereal gets three cupcakes.

(Note: I was given an advance copy of this book by my personal ARC fairy. It actually goes on sale next week, 2/7/12.)

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.

Summerton is the most beautiful resort town in New Zealand, but since Keri’s older brother killed himself unexpectedly, she’s been even less enchanted with the town than usual. Then she talks to Janna and Sione, whose older brothers also killed themselves – without warning and without leaving a note. Sensing a pattern, the three of them start looking for a serial killer, but Summerton’s secrets may just be darker – and more supernatural – than they think.

The Shattering is not a book about magic. Oh sure, there’s magic in it, and that’s what sets the plot in motion. But at its heart, The Shattering is about things that are much more raw and real: the grieving process. Secrets. Bullying. The complicated ways we relate to the places we’re from. Summer flings. Friendship. In fact, for a significant chunk of the book I wasn’t 100% sure there was going to be any magic, and I wouldn’t have minded in the least if there hadn’t been, since everything else was handled so deftly – except that I wouldn’t have been able to tell you guys about it here.

I honestly don’t have a lot of deep thoughts to share about this book, but here’s a few salient points:

• It’s incredibly gripping – I picked it up while sitting by the pool on vacation in Florida, and the next time I looked up the sun was setting and it was time to get ready for dinner. It’s also a little creepifying – don’t read it right before bed, maybe.
  
• The characters are wonderfully complex and feel like real teenagers; even when they’re saying horrible things or being petty or cruel, they still read as decent, complicated people.
  
• As with Karen’s previous book, Guardian of the Dead, The Shattering is consciously diverse and explicitly addresses issues of race, gender, and sexuality throughout. It also draws strongly on its New Zealand setting and references Samoan and Maori traditions and culture. All of that is basically super great.
  
• It is, unsurprisingly, pretty sad – after all, it’s about three teenagers whose brothers have just died. I was in tears by the end, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
  
• Did I mention? It’s really freaking good.

While Guardian of the Dead was excellent, The Shattering is nearly flawless. My one teeny tiny quibble is that while the book spends a lot of time on its heterosexual love triangle, I would have liked to see Keri, who is gay, have at least a hint of a love life, even a one-sided one. Still, as she’s the primary narrator, she doesn’t exactly get short shrift, story-wise (and there is a mention of her dating at the very end).

All in all, The Shattering gets the full five cupcakes. Bring on the next book!

(Requisite disclaimer: Karen is a pal of mine. But honestly, I think I would have loved this book just as much if she were my mortal enemy. Well, maybe not just as much. But close to it!)

Beka Cooper has just buried her fiancé when she’s called in on a Hunt that threatens the royal family – and the safety of Tortall itself. Along with her partner Tunstall and her loyal scent hound Achoo, Beka must travel far outside of her comfort zone and untangle a conspiracy involving some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the kingdom – while she’s forced to question exactly who she can trust.

I really enjoyed the first two Beka Cooper books, and would have reread them before I read this one, but since all of my books are currently sitting in a storage unit in Red Hook, that was not an option, so I’m working from memory here. My thoughts on the series as a whole haven’t changed: I enjoy the procedural structure of the books and Beka herself, and I’ve always loved the worldbuilding of Tortall.

But I have to say this book disappointed me. For starters, there were a few places where it was hard to follow. Despite having read 17 books set there, I don’t have a detailed working map of Tortall in my head, so whenever our heroes went in depth about which path to take I got pretty lost, and the maps in the front weren’t much help. This may be reading comprehension fail on my part, but I’ve never had this problem with Pierce before, so I’m thinking not.

I also found Beka’s relationship with Farmer, the mage on their Hunt, to be fairly rushed. She doesn’t seem to like him at all for much of the book, and not in the kiss-kiss-slap-slap way – she just seems annoyed and uninterested. Don’t get me wrong – I found them super cute when the romantic aspect of their relationship started to develop. But it seemed to go from interest to engagement extremely abruptly.

Finally, a major spoiler: show

Mastiff was certainly compelling – I couldn’t put it down – and I liked a lot of it, but I found the above issues to be sticking points with me, particularly the last one. That’s why Mastiff only gets three and a half cupcakes. Sorry, Tammy! I still love you!

Nicholas Flamel and his wife Perenelle have lived nearly seven hundred years, thanks to Nicholas’s possession of the Codex, a book full of magical secrets like the elixir of life, the spell to turn base metals to gold…and the key to bringing back the old gods and destroying the human race. When Nicholas is attacked by his almost-as-ancient enemy, Dr. John Dee, and the book and Perenelle are both taken, Nicholas knows he doesn’t have long before the human race is wiped out by Dee’s masters, the Dark Elders. All Nicholas has on his side are Josh and Sophie, ordinary 15-year-old twins who didn’t mean to get mixed up in all this. But Nicholas suspects they may be the twins prophesied in the Codex, who may save the world…or destroy it.

In the past decade, there has been a slew of kids’ and YA fantasy series that became phenomena: Harry Potter. Twilight. A Series of Unfortunate Events. Percy Jackson. The Hunger Games. And, naturally, such success brings more aspiring authors to the 18-and-under market. While the majority of the successful ones do genuinely seem interested in writing stories for and about young people, every so often I find myself getting the sense that a certain author is merely jumping on the kids’/YA bandwagon. There’s the sneaking suspicion that the author isn’t the least bit interested in kids, but decided to write for that market because it’s lucrative – and after all, how hard can it be? They’re just kids.

I don’t know Michael Scott’s life. He may have always dreamed of being a YA author, in which case, congratulations! But The Alchemyst really felt like a bandwagon book.

That’s not to say there aren’t strengths to the book. Scott does some really interesting worldbuilding, populating his pages with basically every ancient pantheon in history. I found his interpretations of Hecate, Bastet, and the Morrigan to be fascinating, especially in the ways they negotiated the modern world, and I loved the throwaway mentions of figures like Odin and Persephone and the passing references to Arthurian legend and American folklore. The gods were all nicely scary, even the “good” ones, and Dee (based, like the Flamels, on a real historical figure-cum-legend) was a solid antagonist.

Perenelle, Flamel’s wife, was quite frankly great – smarter, more resourceful, and more engaging than her husband. I loved that even though she spent most of the book in Dee’s clutches, she never became a damsel in distress, but instead used her magic and cunning to send messages to Nicholas and try to escape. For that matter, I loved that there were nearly twice as many major female characters as male ones in The Alchemyst, and that they were all more powerful than the dudes.

Even Flamel was fine, if a bit of an enigma (in that annoying “I won’t answer your questions, not for any real reason, just to drag out the plot” way, to boot). If Scott had jumped on that other literary bandwagon of the Oughties and written a magical Da Vinci Code, letting his clear fascination with Dee and history and mythology take center stage, he probably would have had a stronger book, or at least one that feels less like an imposter.

But he didn’t, and we’re left not with Flamel or Dee as the protagonist, as Scott admits in the Afterword he originally intended, but Josh and Sophie. And Josh and Sophie do not resemble teenagers in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it took me several pages to realize they were supposed to be teenagers at all (like, I didn’t pick up on it until the narration said “Josh and Sophie were fifteen”). Before that, I was genuinely perplexed as to why this YA book starred a couple of 30-year-olds.

The real problem, though, is not that Josh and Sophie don’t feel authentically youthful, but that they don’t feel authentically anything. They’re total ciphers, given character traits and knowledge at random to drive the plot forward. The trivia they spout off is ludicrously specific: their expertise in archaeology is hand-waveable thanks to their absentee archaeologist parents, but archaeology is not the same thing as paleontology, so I’m not sure why Sophie knows that pteranodons are older than pterosaurs, and it certainly doesn’t explain why Josh knows how old Joan of Arc and King Tut were when they died and why he can name the craters of the moon. Conversely, they know almost nothing about mythology, mostly so Flamel can explain it to them and the reader, but you’d think they’d have picked some of it up from their parents.

Aside from their extremely specific and esoteric knowledge and Josh’s tendency to run off at the mouth, they don’t really have personalities to speak of. Every so often Scott stops the narration to inform us that, say, Sophie likes tea or Josh is afraid of snakes, and he repeatedly tells us (but never shows us) that the twins love and rely on each other, but there are no consistent patterns of behavior to shape their characters. At one point, the twins are watching Flamel and another ally fight off the bad guys.

“We should help,” Josh said.

“And do what?” Sophie asked, without a trace of sarcasm.

[Two paragraphs later.]

“We’ve got to help!” Sophie said.

“How?” Josh shouted, but his twin had run into the kitchen, desperately looking for a weapon…

There’s never any acknowledgment that the twins have switched sides of the argument. It’s shoddy editing, but it’s also symptomatic of the twins being such blank slates that either one of them could easily take one side of the argument or the other. It’s not that Sophie is helpful and Josh is reluctant, or vice versa. They’re both just empty.

Finally, Scott uses my least favorite narrative trick in order to give Sophie magical abilities: one god touches her, and she gets them. Another god touches her and she understands them. There’s no earning of her skills and no effort to bring them under control; she just meets two gods and suddenly she’s a powerful magician. (It also enhances her senses, but because she already had a preternaturally good sense of smell when it was convenient for the plot, it lacks impact.) By watching Sophie learn how to use her powers, we could have gotten into her headspace a bit, but Scott doesn’t bother, thus exacerbating the feeling that Sophie is a plot device and not a character.

There are some great concepts underpinning The Alchemyst, but they’re undermined by lazy writing and nonexistent characterization. To make a book for young people work, you need to put engaging young people in it. As I said above, I don’t know Scott’s life; he could very well have spent ages crafting Josh and Sophie’s personalities. But unlike the clearly lovingly-researched rest of the book, they read as if he doesn’t care about them. And if he doesn’t care, why should I? The Alchemyst gets one cupcake, and I won’t be picking up the rest of the series.

I took as thorough a set of notes as I was able, given the mediocre quality of my pen and the fast pace of the conversation. So alas, a few names on lists of favorites and recommendations and whatnot may have been lost.

Question: What were your favorite/most influential novels/writers growing up?

JL: The incredibly prolific Tanith Lee.

CC: E. Nesbit, Enid Blyton, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper.

JL: Explains the context of Blyton (widely read, but “horrible, racist” content) for those of us in the audience who aren’t familiar.
(Huge note from Becky — I originally misread my notes and applied this to the wrong writer. Enormous apologies for misquoting JL on something so important.)

HB: Madeleine L’Engle, Susan Cooper again, D’Aulaires Greek mythology.

CM: Tolkein, Lloyd Alexander again, Ursula K. LeGuin, Diana Wynn Jones.

Question: These formative books don’t seem similar to what the panelists actually write — why is their own writing so much more urban?

CC: The previous list was more things they read when they were younger than the YA crowd. Also read a lot of Anne Rice and BorderTown novels, which were eye opening.

HB: Harry Potter is an odd series because it starts off with an 11 year old and ends up with a 17 year old, so it winds from middle grade into YA. So what they really end up talking about is MG.

CM: Agreed, but even so HP really spurred the growth of YA.

JL: Also read a lot of retold fairy tales, particularly loved Jane Yolen‘s (who was in the audience).

(Everyone agrees that 1) retold fairy tales are great, and 2) Jane Yolen is also great.)

CM: Feels her writing is more “in conversation” with what she read as a kid. She loved classic fantasy, but realized that she was very much the Other when reading it, not the hero (due to her complicated ethnic/religious background), and wanted to write to put her own kids in the middle of the books instead of on the sidelines.

Question: HP hit near the beginning of the panelists’ careers — did it change the game for them?

CC: First book published was right before HP7 came out.

JL: Wasn’t published until 2005, but she beat Twilight!

HB: Read the first four HP books and felt they “pulled publishing towards a different age.” Pre-HP, the industry was more interested in picture books, but HP’s “gravitational pull” opened the door for more MG and YA.

CC: HP is the closest thing to a book everyone has read. It introduces a lot of people to fantasy and is where they learn what fantasy is and what the tropes are, the way Tolkien was for previous generations.

JL: Wrote YA before she knew that was really a thing, so it worked out well for her. Also, YA is a category and not a genre, because it contains all genres. “It’s a comfortable place if you love every genre and want to write all of them.”

CM: HP makes her up her game as a writer, and the financial success of the series lets publishers take risks on other books that probably wouldn’t get published otherwise.

CC: Its success also brought other classic YA books back into print.

JL: A lot of people who had negative reactions to HP originally felt that way because they already loved fantasy and were annoyed at being told it was the greatest, most original, etc. It isn’t the most original! That isn’t a flaw, though.

CM: Agreed. And people often get told their works resemble HP even if the came out first, like Garth Nix.

JL: “So about Garth… Well, all Australian writers know each other. (laugh)” Nix was already writing, like he was on a boat in the ocean of YA, and HP came along as a tidal wave that pulled him along with it and he found much wider success because of it.

CM: Also, kids go from reading HP to reading other fantasy if they like it.

(A pause to discuss the importance of LeGuin’s writing on her and in general.)

Question: So what books are you loving in YA now?

To save my aching wrists, instead of typing this up I will point you towards the response list already posted at Getting Past the Gatekeeper.

Audience Question: What makes a book YA?

HB: Publishers have different divisions for kids, so it depends on where you sell your book. Also, YA is most for teens and about teens, but not written from a place of nostalgia.

JL: It’s not YA if your narrator is looking back from adulthood (but like all rules, that one can be broken).

CM: It’s how you speak to people — she writes YA because she wants to reach people who are still trying to save the world.

Audience Question: Any good adult urban fantasy recs?
General answers: Charles DeLint, Emma Bull, Kushner, Gaiman, Scott Lynch.

(General discussion of Philip Pullman and people’s split opinions on him — CC loves his stuff, JL not so much. “Wheel people?!!”)

Audience Question: How have publisher and author expectations changed because of HP?

HB: Kids are big business now. Adult books have very different (smaller) sales expectations.

CM: Agree — there’s also more oversight and involvement from the publishing house.

Audience Question: How has Rowling affected the splintering of genres within YA?

HB: All of the genres had already existed, and YA actually just reinvented the wheel.

JL: Twilight had a bigger impact in creating paranormal romance, which has emerged as a huge splinter genre.

CC: Also, because of genre splintering, you can’t always count on your books being shelved together in YA if you write different genres.

That was all there was time for. All in all, a really interesting, really fun discussion.

Josephine is sure she’ll be bored when her parents move her to the tiny town of Awkward Falls, Manitoba, but that’s before she discovers her next-door neighbors: kid genius Thaddeus Hibble, his robot butler, and a zombie cat. But the deranged killer Fetid Stenchley, who killed Thaddeus’s grandfather, has escaped the insane asylum and is on his way to take out Thaddeus as well. Throw in an aging movie star, half a dozen enormous genetic monsters, and some dark secrets about the past, and Awkward Falls is turning out to be not so boring after all.

This is a first novel (though Graves has written “many picture books,” according to the author bio), and it shows. The prose is mediocre; it’s not really bad, but it’s not terribly engaging, either. It’s just…there. The plot structure is kind of a mess – there’s almost no rising action, just chapters and chapters of climax, an awkwardly-placed moment of downtime, and then brief excitement that ends abruptly without actually resolving anything.

Most egregiously, though, Josephine, the ostensible heroine, is a complete cipher of a character. The bland Everykid protagonist can be a problem in kids’ lit, but I usually see it with boys. Josephine’s a shining example of it. We’re told in quick succession that she’s quirky, but also wants to be normal, but also doesn’t want to be normal. She doesn’t appear to have any interests or hobbies, and before she makes her only significant action of the book – going over to the Hibble house and meeting Thaddeus – we’re given a long explanation of how impulsive she is, instead of, you know, being shown her doing impulsive things. Eventually she disappears into the background of the narrative in favor of the more colorful Thaddeus and Stenchley and Felix, the zombie cat. (Really, Felix is the closest thing this book has to a hero.)

But my major problem with the book was that it was…well, gruesome. Aggressively and unrelentingly so. Stenchley is a cannibal, so he spends the book doing his best to literally eat people alive – he bites Josephine so hard he draws blood. His past crimes – including strangling Thaddeus’s grandfather – are described in loving detail. So is the absolutely horrendous “treatment” he receives in the insane asylum, which involves opening up his skull (it’s kept shut with Velcro) and applying extreme heat to his brain. Thaddeus, meanwhile, has a genius for reanimating dead animals, and his work is also described in elaborate, squishy detail. His grandfather, who has been dead ten years, is reanimated halfway through the book, and the rotting zombie stumbles around, decaying in, I probably don’t have to say, extremely gory detail until he is devoured by the mutated monsters he invented.

Look, I’m not clutching my pearls and crying “Think of the children!” This book is intended for sixth graders, who can probably handle it. I just think it’s gross. Gratuitously, excessively gross, with no strength of plot or characterization to balance it out.

Overall, The Orphan of Awkward Falls is simultaneously kind of bland and extraordinarily icky, and so it gets one and a half cupcakes.

In the final book in the Healing Wars trilogy, all Nya wants is to search for her missing sister — until she learns that her home city of Geveg has rebelled against the Duke. Now the Duke is bringing his whole army to Geveg to retake control, or destroy it entirely. Seeing no other choice, Nya takes off to warn her people, only to quickly become embroiled in the rebellion itself. But is she really a symbol of hope, or is she only a pawn? And can she manage to be a hero?

General spoilers for the series after the cut:

Hey, look at me, actually reviewing a book for the first time in over six months! Disclaimer, I read this one in ARC form, and it was very kindly provided by the author. But I promise I’m not biased when I say that this book was awesome.

I won’t lie: I was a little bit wary going into it. I don’t know if it’s just my bad luck as a reader, or if there’s a problem endemic to YA, but at least four trilogies I’ve read in recent years have ended with fizzles rather than bangs, even when the first two and a half books have been great. So I am pleased to report: it does not fizzle! After spending two and a half books building up how evil the Duke is, building to a war, and building up Nya’s character, the conclusion shines where other books… uh, didn’t so much.

It probably isn’t fair to do a one-to-one comparison, but without naming any names (ahem) there was a trilogy that concluded last year where an impoverished teenage girl’s main goal was to save her little sister, and as she tried to accomplish that she became the symbol of a rebellion against an oppressive government. I bring this up because some of the pitfalls of that particular book are also elements in play in Darkfall, but here they turn out solidly. The stakes of the war are equally deadly here — terrible things happen, battles are lost, and people die. Some of it is even Nya’s fault. But even when bad things are happening, Nya never checks out; and even when she’s being used as a figurehead, she never loses her agency. She’s the one who decides to play along with questionable leaders, even when things don’t feel right, and then she has to deal with the consequences.

In my review of Blue Fire (the middle book in the series), I mentioned that I had a hard time tracking what happened at the climaxes in the first two books. That was actually not the case in this one — there was a heck of a lot of action happening near the end, but I never lost track of what was going on with Nya’s powers and the Duke’s weapons.

Aside from improving on what I found to be the previous book’s main weakness, the conclusion maintained all of its strengths: the worldbuilding is great, Nya’s voice is strong and she’s fun to read about, and the story is compelling. The only tiny quibble I had was that I don’t think we got to know one of the characters who died very well beforehand, so it didn’t have quite the impact it should have. That’s an extremely minor complaint, though. The book is a solid five cupcakes, leaving the series as a whole at four and a half.