Fourteen-year-old Princess Ivy is an intrepid sort, so when an enormous beanstalk erupts out of the castle grounds, she and her dragon buddy Elridge fly to the top to get to the bottom of it. There they discover an enraged – and exhausted – giantess. Ever since a kid named Jack stole her magic harp – and killed her husband – hundreds of years ago, she hasn’t been able to get a wink of sleep. Ivy and Elridge must hurry to the kingdom of Jackopia to retrieve the harp before the giantess wreaks her vengeance – but the king of Jackopia is none too keen to give up his ancestor’s treasures.

Sigh. This book frustrated me, you guys. It had so much potential! But it never quite managed to live up to it.

Essentially, this is a standard fractured fairy tale-style middle grade novel, very much in the spirit of Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons series, or the lovely Goose Chase by Patrice Kindl: a spunky young heroine, assorted bits and pieces of fairy tales and fairy tale tropes, a tongue firmly in cheek. I liked it for that alone; I always approve of making fairy tale-ish heroines more proactive, and plucky young princesses and their dragon friends foiling fairy tale villains are all things that hit particularly close to my heart.

The problem is that Ivy isn’t, actually, all that proactive. She’s spunky, sure, and willing to hurl herself into adventures. But beyond that, she’s pretty blank as a personality, and the further along the book went, the less she actually did. Though Ivy remains the gung-ho central figure, it’s the male characters around her who move the plot forward. Her friend Owen the stable boy comes up with a plan to escape Jackopia, Elridge makes their heroic flight to freedom, and the young prince of Jackopia comes up with the solution that saves the day when they’re caught by his father. In fact, through the second half of the book these three characters are constantly urging Ivy into action. I kept hoping Ivy would do something herself, but she never did – and “spunky” does not suffice as a complete personality if the protagonist doesn’t at least have enough spunk to make decisions.

The other problem is that the book…well, it isn’t funny. There are funny concepts, yes, like a neurotic dragon and a cranky talking goat and an obnoxiously elaborate dress made of flowers. The ludicrous of the capital city of Jackopia, where everything is made of golden eggs laid by descendents of Jack’s famous goose, is ripe for humor. But though those things are all meant to be funny, the prose simply doesn’t sell it. It’s not quite sharp enough, not a distinctive enough voice. It doesn’t sparkle.

Again, I love love love the idea of this book, and I suspect many young readers will enjoy it just fine as it is. But for a funny book about a plucky fairy tale heroine, it was neither funny nor plucky enough for me, and gets only three cupcakes. It is a sequel, and its predecessor, Ivy’s Ever After, may well be better (the Amazon description, admittedly, sounds pretty great), but Ivy and the Meanstalk didn’t charm me enough to find out. If you read the first one, let me know what you think!

When the Green Wind shows up at September’s window and invites her to Fairyland, she sees no reason to say no. And sure enough, Fairyland is thrilling at first, especially once September makes the acquaintance of a Wyvern and a Marid. But all is not right in Fairyland, and to set it right – and rescue her friends – September must find courage she never knew she had – and possibly lose all that she holds dear.

The closer I got to finishing The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, the more anxious I got. Not because the plot was building up to a perfect storm of physical peril, a heroine who’s lost everything, and mysteries on the verge of being revealed – though all of that was true – but because I was realizing that the highest rating I could give this book was five cupcakes, and that was not enough.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is a stupendous book. It reads like a classic of children’s literature – but not like any particular classic, which is its genius. It’s reminiscent of Oz and Neverland and Wonderland and Narnia, but it’s not aping any of them. It pays tongue-in-cheek tributes to those books while still being wildly inventive, creating its own unique world while still feeling like something that would’ve been handed down lovingly from mother to daughter.

On the other hand, there are some very modern aspects of Fairyland that made it additionally delightful. It’s set during World War II – mentioned obliquely, the way a child would understand it – and September’s father is overseas, while her mother works in a munitions factory. September is angry and resentful about this, while still hero-worshipping her mother, a woman with strong arms who knows how to fix things. In fact, September’s bond with her mother and her own ability to fix mechanical things – learned from her mother, of course – winds up being crucial to the plot. It’s such a simple but lovely detail. Mothers are often an inspiration in portal fantasy, but September’s mother, in the 1940s no less, isn’t an inspiring symbol of gentle nurturing, but of physical strength. It’s also implied that they’re not white – at least, both September and her mother are described as having brown skin, as are many of the characters in Fairyland – which is great and refreshing to see. (Although given the whole Rue debacle with The Hunger Games, it would have been nice if September’s race was more explicit.)

September herself is a great character, of course. She’s bold and a bit rude and deeply compassionate and very genre-savvy – although not as genre-savvy as she thinks. She’s also very much a physical hero, wreaking destruction and sustaining somewhat disfiguring injuries along the way, which again, was not something you’d see from Alice Liddell. At one point she rescues Saturday, a Marid (basically a water genie) about her age, by smashing his cage open. He proceeds to be wholeheartedly devoted to her, to the point that when she goes into a dangerous situation, he gives her his token because she’s his knight. I die! Lady knights and the shy boys who love them? So great.

And the worldbuilding! So brilliantly done, full of lots of interesting set pieces, all funny or scary or both, while subtly building up the main conflict of the book. I adored A-Through-L, the wyvern who believes his father was a library (and September’s somewhat skeptical but kind response to that). I loved Valente’s take on witches (always dapper) and wishes (they need to be cleaned every so often to keep them at fighting strength) and alchemists (perpetual grad students! knowing a lot of grad students as I do, this one made me smile extra-hard). Again, without mimicking Oz or Narnia or the rest of them, Valente has done what they have been doing for generations, and created a world that children (and 28-year-old bloggers, ahem) will desperately want to run away to, perils be damned.

Like I said, my one regret about this book is that I can’t give it more than five cupcakes, with sprinkles and cherries and everything good on top. But five cupcakes it most assuredly gets. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to add everything else Valente has ever written to my To Read list.

When Summer and Bird’s parents disappear in the middle of the night, the girls go looking for them, and find themselves in the strange world of Down, trapped in perpetual winter since the queen of the birds disappeared. While Bird finds herself tangled in the lies of the bird-eating, power-grasping Puppeteer, Summer tries to find her lost sister, their mother, and the secret route to the birds’ great migration. But there are secrets hidden in Down and in the sisters’ past that may break the bond between them forever.

Summer and Bird is an exquisite book. It’s not the kind of book I usually like – I’m a plot-driven reader who likes action and humor, and Summer and Bird is meandering, quiet, and sad, the story and even character second to the absolutely lovely prose. So the fact that I couldn’t put it down when it’s so unlike my usual tastes says quite a lot.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how to talk about it, since it’s so not about the story that it’s hard to coherently say “and then this happens and this is how I felt about it.” It’s like reading a poem. The worldbuilding is wonderful, mingling Norse mythology, Western European folklore, and original concepts in a way that feels both timeless and original. The villain is terrifying and loathsome, but still somehow relatable. The main characters will break your heart – I was totally captivated by them, even if I wasn’t quite sure I liked most of them. It made me cry twice on the subway. And hey! All of the main characters are women! That’s pretty cool.

I apologize for not having anything more helpful to say than “Summer and Bird is great, you should read it,” but…Summer and Bird is great. You should read it. Four and a half cupcakes.

It’s turn-of-the-century London, and strange things are afoot: murders, robberies, and a conspiracy involving the Crown Jewels, the floating mineral cavorite, and a mysterious weapon. Luckily, three teenage girls are on the case: tech-savvy Cora, who works for a steampunk inventor; beautiful Nellie, a flamboyant Magician’s assistant; and serious Michiko, fight assistant and samurai in training. With the three of them working together, no villain stands a chance.

Way back in the dark ages of this blog (jeez, have we really been doing this for six years?) I read Kress’s first book, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, and absolutely loved it, so a Kress book about girls teaming up and becoming friends in steampunk Victorian England seemed like a sure thing for me. But, well…maybe I’ve become more discerning (or more jaded) in the intervening years (six of them! good god); maybe I unthinkingly give more of a pass to first-time authors and expect more after a few (six) years have gone by; maybe Alex was just way better. Because I’m sorry to say, I really didn’t enjoy The Friday Society very much at all.

The first issue I noticed was the Victorian setting. By which I mean: it was nonexistent. Yes, technically it took place in turn-of-the-century London, but the prose was completely modern, and the heroines speak with current colloquialisms (“I look hot,” “This is totally uncool,” etc.). Though there are some 11th-hour throwaway remarks about feminism and the restrictiveness of Victorian society, the girls are fairly unrestrained by their time period; they go where they want when they want, they talk back to and hit on men, they have a slumber party. (This book contains both a typical modern dinner date and the words “make out session.” Nope nope nope.) The steampunk is barely a factor until the very end, when they bust out a couple of cool weapons. There was no sense of mood, of place, of worldbuilding. A huge part of the enjoyment of steampunk comes from reveling in the 19th century setting and clockwork inventions, so when a book doesn’t bother, it smacks of bandwagon-jumping. Certainly it begs the question: If you’re not going to use your historical setting, what’s the point of having it?

It was also super problematic in terms of race. First, there’s Michiko, who is serious and silent and wise and focused on honor. She’s a samurai in training, or was when she left Japan, but she also worked for an aging geisha at one point. She speaks very little English, so during sections that aren’t from her point of view, she’s forced to speak very little, and in stilted English when she does talk. She’s the only one of the three protagonists who is abused by her current employer; she’s also the only one who doesn’t get a love interest. There are two other Japanese characters in the book: an old, retired samurai who gives Michiko her sword, and a young boy who she trains, who she calls “Little Monkey,” and who show

The other major character of color is Raheem, Nellie’s boss, a mysterious and wise magician whose face and bare body are described with more sensual detail than any other character in the book, who gets mysterious shipments from Africa, and who is a font of tea, yoga, and Eastern mysticism-tinged wisdom. Oh, and there’s a Chinese man who works in an opium den and seems to be part of the conspiracy in a way that never actually pans out.

I will give Kress this credit: she attempts to problematize the racism and Orientalizing of Victorian culture. Michiko’s employer treats her like a thing to put on display and is deeply ignorant of Japanese culture, and the book heaps scorn on him for it. Nellie is dismissive of people who exoticize or fear Raheem.

But Kress’s noble efforts to problematize this exotic othering fall flat in the face of her silent, sexless samurai heroine, victimized by white men and uttering only a few halting English sentences; or her sexually objectified, mysteriously wise, magic-wielding brown man. Especially when the bit characters of color consist of a wise samurai and an opium den owner. I mean, come on. You can’t combat racism by deploying a dozen unconfronted stereotypes!

I liked the concept of the book a lot, and the efforts to build a friendship between girls and confront ideas of sexism, classism, racism, and sexual violence. Those are all good things! But ultimately the lack of Victoriana research or worldbuilding, problematic handling of race, and thin characters and prose left The Friday Society very lacking. Two and a half cupcakes.

With Lily spending so much time starring in books, her mother is starting to get worried about her own fate, since moms in books often don’t fare so well. However, her health-and-sanity-restoring vacation takes her to Todburg, the most haunted town in America. And the thing that returns may look like Lily’s mother…but it very definitely is not.

I’ve talked about Anderson’s Pals in Peril series a couple of times on this blog, so I won’t go into the underlying conceit of the books (which is very clever) or waste time convincing you, once again, that Anderson’s prose is very funny. Once again, Anderson delivers a quick, funny read, although in this case he’s replaced his high-flying spy-tastic adventures with an affectionate send-up of classic horror. As usual, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Still, I had a couple of small disappointments. For starters, the love triangle that put me off in the last book gets more pronounced in this one, and I pretty much can’t stand love triangles. That’s obviously a personal preference – your mileage, obviously, may vary.

Second, Zombie Mommy introduces a new character, presumably a one-off: Katie’s cousin Madigan. Like Katie and Jasper (and a slew of characters from way back in Book 2, The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen), Madigan is the star of a series of books – in her case, the Snott Academy series, a clear parody of Gossip Girl and its ilk. Accordingly, Madigan is pretty, stylish, and a spoiled brat who spends the bulk of the book complaining, texting, and throwing herself at Drgnan, Jasper’s monk friend and the object of both Katie and Lily’s affections.

Now, I’m not a fan of Gossip Girl-style series, and for the most part Anderson’s fairly scathing parody is funny. But there’s a very thin line between “making fun of books teenage girls like” and “making fun of teenage girls,” and Anderson skirts uncomfortably close to it in this one. Madigan does get a lot of funny lines and one or two moments of raw courage, but in the end she’s pretty much dismissed as useless and shallow and shipped back off to the Upper East Side (with [SPOILER REDACTED] in tow, but that’s beside the point). She’s certainly not the first character in this series to be portrayed as a one-note annoyance, but since she falls into a category that’s so often villified by kids’ books – the dreaded teenage girl who actually kind of enjoys being a teenage girl – it got my hackles up a bit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was offended by her portrayal; it was more that I wanted more from her.

(I’m also starting to want a bit more from Katie, who is clearly less interesting to Anderson than either Jasper, who is hilarious, or Lily, who has oh so many feelings. I’m not sure why Jasper and Lily are the ones to come up with ways to deal with the undead, for example, when the supernatural is explicitly Katie’s area of expertise. Katie is left to do nothing in the book but sulk over Drgnan, which is…not what I want for a character who’s basically Buffy Lite, let’s say.)

I did still enjoy Zombie Mommy quite a lot, of course, and I plan to keep reading this series. But this one didn’t quite hit the balance that previous ones have, and so it earns only four cupcakes.

When Evie’s parents ship her off to New York City to live with her Uncle Will, she’s expecting a positutely wonderful new life in the city that never sleeps, Prohibition be damned. Maybe the glitz and glamour can help her forget about her brother, killed in World War I, or the weird power she has that keeps getting her in trouble. But that’s before a serial killer starts cutting a swathe of ritualistic murders through New York – murders that Uncle Will thinks might be calculated to bring about the apocalypse. Throw in a Harlem poet with healing hands, a charismatic pickpocket digging up government conspiracies, a Ziegfield Girl with a troubled past, plenty of hooch, and a whole lot of secrets, and New York may just be more than Evie bargained for.

When I reviewed Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy, I noted that I love Victoriana and boarding school stories. Well, I love the Roaring 20s and plucky girl detectives even more, so when I found out this book was coming out it was pretty much like Christmas and my birthday all at once.

So let’s start by talking about the setting. Like the Gemma books, it’s incredibly well-realized. There are times when the slang gets a little heavy, I’ll admit, but for the most part Libba* constructs a rich, rowdy world of Gatsby-esque decadence for the reader to get lost in. Evie’s struggles for independence and the theme of post-WWI alienation running through the book help to bolster the feeling of Jazz Age authenticity. Speaking as a New Yorker, Libba also mixes spot-on descriptions of real-life the city with landmarks that are no longer there or never existed at all in order to immerse you in a fictionalized, magical Manhattan that feels very real.

Now for the other half of my favorite things: the plucky girl detective. You guys, I loved Evie. Loved, loved, loved her. It feels a little weird to say that a character is charismatic, particularly the main character of a book (as opposed to, say, her charming love interest), but Evie bubbles over with life and verve. She’s funny, she’s bright, she’s energetic, she’s full of beans. She’s flawed – impulsive, careless, and often selfish – but like so many people in real life, she’s so radiant you can’t help forgiving her for being a bit of a bull in an emotional china shop. And she does possess deeper feeling; a vast gulf of grief over her brother, genuine love and loyalty towards her friends, and a powerful need to do the right thing and use her power to catch the serial killer “Naughty John,” even when it’s painful and scary. I also have a bit of a weakness for bubbly young people living with emotionally closed-off uncles – blame a childhood of DuckTales for that one. I would’ve liked more of Evie and Will’s relationship, but what we got was still pretty great.

The rest of the cast was pretty great, too: Evie’s best friend, the sensible, somewhat dowdy Mabel. Their glamorous friend Theta, the hardboiled Ziegfeld Girl, and her sardonic but incredibly kind roommate Henry, the wannabe Tin Pan Alley composer (though I would have liked for the series’ one gay character (so far…?) to have had a slightly larger role). Memphis, the dreamy-eyed loner who runs numbers up in Harlem by night and writes poetry in a graveyard by day and loves his bratty, prophetic little brother Isaiah to pieces. (P.S. How much do I love that the “prophetic little brother” is not another precious Charles Wallace Murray-ripoff, but an energetic, bratty, otherwise completely normal kid? Revolutionary!) Fast-talking, light-fingered Sam, who steals both a kiss and a twenty from Evie the day she arrives in New York, and finds himself caught up in the mystery – and a love rectangle – kind of by accident. Bratty socialites, bloodthirsty reporters, no-nonsense cops, and the Great Ziegfeld himself.

And of course, the killer. The Diviners is a thriller first and foremost, and it certainly thrills. It’s the kind of scary that I avoid reading right before bed, with some rather gruesome (but not age-inappropriate – remember, this is the upper end of Young Adult, not middle grade!) murders, a haunted house that is just as scary as the Cavendish Home, and a growing sense of doom, masterfully built up as the book goes on. Naughty John’s creepy whistling manages to be chillingly Hitchcockian even though you can’t hear it. That’s some good suspense. And there’s the promise of worse to come with the many unresolved plot strands at the end.

…And that’s actually where my only criticism of the book comes into play: the plot. Don’t get me wrong – it’s very good. But there are kind of two plots going on here. One is the one where Evie comes to New York and helps her uncle solve a mystery, and it’s excellent. The other involves Memphis and Theta and a slew of characters from Harlem; Sam’s mother and Will’s assistant Jericho and secret government conspiracies; Evie’s dead brother, Will’s secret past, and a seemingly-friendly guy who keeps chatting up Mabel; the weird, ominous dreams shared by just about every member of the cast and dozens of cryptic “it’s coming”-style warnings from mysterious old ladies. Which is also fine; it’s just that you don’t realize that absolutely none of that has anything to do with Naughty John until, like, the second-to-last chapter of the book. What seemed to be a carefully-woven tapestry is, in fact, a lovely throw pillow and many, many spools of beautiful thread that may or may not be woven into a new tapestry, of which we currently have only a sketch.

I mean, I’m hooked, regardless. Everything in the book was great, and I am chomping at the bit for The Diviners 2: Divine Harder. But Libba is clearly more interested in painting portraits of her various characters and mysteries than in telling one single story, and as a reader who loves a really tight plot, I wish the series was a bit more cohesive.

Oh, and I guess I have one other quick quibble: the romance at the end seemed super rushed. I won’t spoil it, but Evie develops feelings for a character she barely gave the time of day to basically overnight. I’m not opposed to the couple, per se – I just would’ve liked to have seen more build up.

Despite these issues, I obviously loved the book. I tore through it in a day (thank you, long train ride to Boston!) and am eagerly anticipating the next one. Four and a half cupcakes, and a cherry on top.

*Becky and I call Libba by her first name because, like Justine Larbalestier and Tamora Pierce, we want desperately to be friends with her. This is the second-highest honor we can bestow upon a writer, second only to referring to a writer as Mr. Coville.

Belleville is the perfect town, neat and clean and organized, which is just the way 12-year-old Victoria likes it. But then rumpled, unconventional Lawrence, her best – and only – friend, disappears. Naturally, it’s Victoria’s job to look for him. But when she does, she uncovers a terrifying conspiracy, a world of nightmares that all revolve around the spooky Cavendish Home, where “odd” kids either come out different – or not at all.

I picked this up at a Halloween/spooky middle grade books-themed event at Books of Wonder, and boy, was it appropriate for the event. The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls is one of the scariest, most twisted children’s books I’ve ever read. The super ominous first half is bad enough, but the horror really gets going in the second half, after Victoria is committed to the Home. LeGrand hurls pretty much every phobia you can name at the reader, and makes up a few for good measure. (Word of warning: if you have a big problem with bugs, do not read this book.) The children in the Home are subjected to both physical and psychological torture, and the outlandishness of the villains and the shifting, supernatural Home can’t disguise the gruesomeness of some of that torture.

I’ve taken books to task before for going too far – for attempting to push the envelope into “scary” and ending in “gross and inappropriate.” And make no mistake: The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls contains actual torture of children. Yet for the most part, I think it treads on the appropriate side of the line for its age group. Why? Well, for starters, it’s extremely well-written, and what comes off as tacky and gross in a poorly-written book is a chillingly effective scene in a well-written one. But more importantly, it’s a horror book through and through, while most of the books that I think go too far are horror-comedy, and ask you to laugh at violent and the macabre. It’s precisely LeGrand’s commitment to pure, stomach-turning horror that makes The Cavendish Home work; the book never asks you to be anything but upset by all its upsetting scenes.

I say all of this to praise the book, but also as a warning for the squeamish. I’m glad I read it, because it was excellent, but had I known how intense it was I might have passed it over. If you’re on the fence, behind the cut is the worst thing that happens in the book; if you can handle that, you can handle the rest of it: show

So why did I pick it up, if I’m so skittish about horror? (You’ll notice the “Horror” tag on this blog is not super-well populated.) It was the description of Victoria herself that drew me in. She’s the kind of character who would be a minor antagonist in any other children’s book: prim, uptight, competitive, organized to an almost pathological degree. She’s viciously determined to be the head of the class no matter what, and is, it must be admitted, controlling, smug, and judgmental.

I loved her to pieces. First of all, she’s a very different protagonist than your usual free-spirited oddballs, and just that change was nice. Second, I must admit I see more than a little of myself in her. I’m more like her now than I was as a scuffy-looking kid who never brushed her hair, but it was still a comfort to read about a protagonist whose uptight Type-A-ness borders on the pathological, and I think Victoria could end up meaning a lot to the kids out there whose issues mirror hers and who don’t often find themselves as the subjects of books. Third, I loved that though Victoria certainly learns to cool it on the judgmental, controlling aspects of her personality, it’s still that very personality – her stubbornness, her bossiness, her unerring conviction in her own rightness – that enables her to save the day.

Again, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls is not for the faint of heart, but it’s an excellent read if you like your plot twists dark and your heroines atypical and prickly. Four and a half cupcakes.

So without further ado, here is our first question: Which tropes do you hate the most when you run across them as you’re reading?

Jess: Well, as I’ve noted before, I will immediately close any book that has no significant female characters. I think we’re all also aware that I’m not a fan of supernatural romance, though that’s more of a genre than a trope. Anything that villifies teenage girls (most common in books aimed at little boys – think Phineas and Ferb-style humor) makes me see red. I don’t like unearned power-ups (“Lo! By touching the Orb of Odin you have gained the knowledge you need to defeat the dragon!”) or unnecessarily cryptic mentors (“I could tell you you’re the Chosen One, but I won’t, because then the book would be over too soon”).

But one of my biggest pet peeves is something I’ve seen with increasing frequency since the successes of Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket: “wacky” child abuse. Look, let’s call a spade a spade. Harry is abused by the Dursleys. The Baudelaires are abused by…everyone. But Rowling and Snicket are able to hit a really delicate balance of making you feel bad for the protagonist(s) while keeping their suffering kind of unreal and funny, especially in the lighter early books of both series. The Dursleys are funny, so their emotional neglect of Harry doesn’t initially come off as horrifying. The Baudelaires are asked to do things so ludicrous it doesn’t read as upsetting (i.e. a pre-verbal infant working in a lumber mill).

Too many books have attempted to copy that and instead landed on “…That’s not okay.” (The Sisters Grimm, chained to a radiator by a foster parent, spring to mind.) To pull this sort of thing off, you need to have a) really funny prose, b) a slightly unreal “real” world, and c) a sensitivity to what reads as believable child abuse, so that you can avoid it. Not nearly enough books have all three, and feeling like you need to call Child Protective Services is not a good way to start a fun adventure novel.

Becky: Oh man, Jess totally hit on one of mine, which was the wizened mentor thing. “Yes, young protagonist, I know you have a lot of questions, and I will answer them all…when the time is right.” Yet the right time is never before the protagonist almost gets killed because s/he doesn’t know what’s going on. It irks me because it’s just so sloppy. If your story would fall apart if someone gave the protagonist a primer on who’s trying to kill them and why, then you need more there there. Withholding exposition for no reason is a totally false way of creating suspense.

Here’s another trope I’ve come to hate, thanks to some prominent cases in the last couple of years: big final battles where a whole lot of people die to up the drama and angst. During HP7: The Campenating, a handful of characters died in the background – but it was so background that I actually didn’t realize Lupin was dead until his ghost showed up. Mockingjay was an offender, too. Come on, after building up Finnick so much, you’re going to kill him offscreen as Katniss scrambles away? Bah. Humbug. There are plenty of ways to create drama and angst; wholesale slaughter can be one of them, but it can also make things lose emotional impact instead of giving them that emotional gutpunch you’re going for.

So those are our worst offenders. What tropes do you hate?

In the final book in the Seven Realms series, Raisa has finally been placed on the throne as Queen of the Fells – but that doesn’t mean she’s safe. The wizards still hope to replace her; the clans are willing to go to war to get her to marry one of their own; neighboring kingdoms threaten their borders. And her bodyguard, street lord-turned-wizard Han Allister, is determined to marry Raisa himself. Though Raisa returns Han’s love, she knows she has to make a political alliance for the good of the kingdom. But a thousand-year-old secret just might make Han the most powerful match of all.

In the past few years, I’ve been let down a lot by the ends of series. So many authors seem able to set up a great story, but not to end it in a way that doesn’t basically make you want to throw yourself off a cliff in despair. And since I’ve been waiting a year and a half for The Crimson Crown, I was super duper worried about how it would all pan out.

Luckily, I didn’t have to be. The Crimson Crown is great. Like The Gray Wolf Throne, it zips along at a whipcracking pace, crammed to the gills with action, sexual tension, political intrigue, betrayals, surprising alliances, and Han being a hilarious troll towards the other wizards, which: YES. I don’t want to go too much into plot details, but suffice to say that the dangling plot threads are wrapped up nicely but not tritely, and the relationships between the characters – not just Han and Raisa – grow and resolve in satisfying, believable ways. And Raisa, especially, continues to be a wonderful character: utterly devoted to her queendom, selfless when it comes to her own fate but unwilling to compromise when it would hurt her people, a brilliant strategist, and – thanks to her time in military school – totally badass in a fight. She’s a fantastic heroine and I’m thrilled that she was allowed to shine all the way through the series.

My one caveat is…well. The clans are inspired by Native American culture, and for the most part the series treats them well, as fully-realized, complex characters and not stereotypes spouting off stilted eco-wisdom. Raisa herself is of mixed race, as are several other characters, all of whom are good guys. However, show

Overall, though, Chima’s characters are, whatever their race, three-dimensional and compelling, and The Crimson Crown is an incredibly gripping read and a fantastic conclusion to a wonderful series. Four and a half cupcakes, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Bitterblue
By Kristin Cashore [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

I think this was my favorite of Cashore’s trilogy (though I probably ought to reread Graceling under less frantic circumstances), though it still had its ups and downs for me. While I felt like Bitterblue was better in terms of plot than Fire, it still felt a little slow. It was, essentially, a mystery rather than action-adventure, but I didn’t feel like there was really enough to the mystery to justify how long it took to get things figured out. On the other hand, I was fascinated by all of the cyphers and puzzles there were to ponder, even as things moved slowly.

This was also the only book in the series where I was at all invested in the romance. A smart princess who disguises herself to go into the city meets a charming rogue? Yes, please, I’ll take twelve. (Why yes, my favorite Disney movie is Aladdin…)

One other random note that had me bemused throughout the whole series: Katsa and her merry men gang of friends have this Council going that subverts bad monarchs and helps free people. But it’s already in progress when we meet her in Graceling, and it continues its work throughout Bitterblue — but we never actually see much of it. Especially not in Bitterblue. It feels like the Council could be a series of novels in and of itself, and having it occasionally mentioned in the background is a lot like having a series about the adventures of some lady who lives a couple of townships over from Sherwood, whose buddies occasionally let her know what Robin Hood is up to.

Four cupcakes.

Cinder
By Marissa Meyer [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

This book is a sci-fi take on Cinderella, and I think it did itself a huge favor by using Cinderella as a basis and inspiration, but not forcing itself fully into the same plot and structure as the original fairy tale. That gave the narrative a lot of freedom to do more and build around the fairytale than I was expecting. As for the sci-fi aspect, weirdly, I am totally able to suspend my disbelief for the idea of cyborgs, but still never quite bought into the “humans moved to the moon and developed creepy superpowers” aspect of it. The two pieces didn’t feel like they ever quite meshed.

I liked Cinder as a character, and I thought the prince was pretty dreamy, but as someone who isn’t a shippy reader in the first place, their romance seemed to come out of nowhere pretty quickly (they only met a few times before he had feelings for her, and I wasn’t sure where they’d come from). I also called the big twist ending and a few of the other plot points early on — which isn’t really a problem, since it was still a really enjoyable read, but it dulled the shine on the big reveal. One thing I will say, though, is I’m intrigued by how much the use of mirrors cropped up in this. Mirrors aren’t usually Cinderella’s thing, and it makes me wonder if future books might explore other fairy tales a bit.

Overall, this book was solid. It definitely read like a debut, a little bit rough in some ways, but I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of the series. Three and a half cupcakes.

The Demon’s Surrender
By Sarah Rees Brennan [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

In the last year or so, Sarah Rees Brennan has snatched up the title of my favorite YA writer, and I think The Demon’s Surrender is my favorite book of this trilogy. That’s probably because the narrator, Sin, is my favorite of the three narrators, and also because I am way more shippy about Sin and Alan than I ever was about Mae and Nick.

I can’t say I loved every aspect of the book, but overall I liked this series much more than I expected to (urban fantasy is not my favorite) — it was incredibly compelling. And it makes me wonder if maybe Ms. Brennan reads this blog, because in my review of the first book I said the narrator didn’t work for me and I wished someone else would get the POV in book two — and it happened; and in my review of the second book I asked why Mae and Sin had to be set up as rivals — and this book was actually explicitly about the expectation that women will be rivals instead of friends, and how the two of them navigate that to work together despite it all. So definite kudos on that front, too.

There’s a lot to enjoy about the series: awesome ladies, queer characters, the dark and broody boy (if that’s your thing) and the charming liar boy (which is definitely my thing) and the relationships between all of them. The characters stood out to me much more than the plot, and I wasn’t totally satisfied with the “who will run the Market?” storyline’s resolution, but the characters and the very compelling prose are definitely enough to give this a solid four cupcakes.

Team Human
By Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

I really enjoyed this book, which should come as no shock, since long-time readers may remember that Justine Larbalestier has long been of my favorite YA writers and, like I said above, Sarah Rees Brennan is a new favorite. So the two of them teaming up to write a vampire parody novel? Yes, please.

The book takes on a lot of vampire novel tropes — it features a brooding (though not sparkling) vampire who’s in love with a much younger mortal; said mortal is Cathy, a teenage girl who finds the whole concept of vampirism romantic and beautiful. But the protagonist is her best friend Mel, who finds the undead thing pretty ridiculous and has no patience for Cathy’s infatuation, and is determined to save her friend from herself before she can make the terrible choice to become a vampire.

So, in other words, a protagonist who responds to the vampire thing like a lot of readers with Twilight fatigue do. The book is entertaining above all else — there’s not much to it, plot-wise, but it was a really fun read that managed to poke fun at the vampire craze (particularly Twilight) without being nasty or dismissive of the young women who love it. That’s a hard balance to hit, but I will always like fond parody so much more than nasty parody, and that’s why this book worked. Three cupcakes.