Nov, 22 - Managing Expectations
It's amazing to me how much my expectations can color what I'm reading or what books I choose to prioritize. This week was a stark reminder of that for me. I finished three main books this week (again, not including the How to Train Your Dragon books that I finished because I still haven't figured out how to review those properly). One was a book I was looking forward to and was disappointed by, one was a book I'd avoided for actual years because I expected to hate it and then didn't, and one was one that I picked up randomly from the library and then read in a day because it was overdue. Oops. Lesson learned. You can't always judge a book by its cover... or even by what other reviewers say about it on GoodReads.
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Author: Johnny Payne
Genres: Magical Realism, Adult, Literary Fiction
Review Type: BookSirens ARC
Star Rating: 3 stars, although I'm still considering lowering it to 2.75
My Tags: booksirens-arc, modern-fiction, standalone-fantasy, region-south-america, region-north-america
Synopsis
What if your abandoned stories came to life?
Jasper Delgado, a once-successful novelist, has hit rock bottom. He’s lost his girlfriend, his house, and every dollar he earned day trading the stock market. All he has left is a beat-up laptop filled with a “graveyard of first chapters”—unfinished novels he could never bring himself to complete.
A mysterious inheritance. A vanished father. A journey into the unknown.
When a strange letter arrives from Peru—typed by an eccentric notary on a sticky-keyed Corona—Jasper learns he may have a half-sister and a claim to a crumbling hacienda near Cusco. With nothing to lose, he sets off in search of answers about his past...and a future that might still exist.
When fiction bleeds into life…
As Jasper’s life unravels, the surreal fragments of his abandoned stories begin to surface—blurring the line between memory, fiction, and reality. Zombies in junkyards. Antarctic explorers. Childhood memories and Inca warriors. Is he finally losing his grip—or rewriting his own story from the inside out?
My Review
This wasn’t the book for me unfortunately. I knew I was maybe picking something a bit outside my comfort zone when I committed to read this ARC, but the cover had kept popping up on my feed and the blurb had caught my curiosity. Plus, I love a good work of magical realism.
This book reads like literary fiction. The prose was well-written with vivid descriptions and an elegance to it that carried me smoothly from one page to the next, and I enjoyed exploring a part of the world that I haven’t explored much—in literature or otherwise. This isn’t a plot-driven story. It’s a story that focuses on themes and characters and relies on them to tell the story.
Unfortunately, I think that’s where it lost me. I enjoy character-driven stories (in fact, I normally prefer them), but I need the characters to be compelling and feel real, and I just never got there with the characters in this book. Their dialogue often felt stilted and unnatural, and there was always a distance between them and me that meant I couldn’t really walk in their shoes and understand their feelings. I was told things about who they were, but I wasn’t always shown it, and the author maintained a running commentary on who the characters were and how they felt that meant I felt like I was listening to someone tell a story about the characters rather than experiencing life through the characters’ stories. It probably didn’t help that the characters were all significantly hornier than I am and all seemed to default to sexually objectifying the opposite gender, and I got tired of reading about that pretty quickly. Fortunately, there was only one actual open door sex scene that was very skippable.
On the whole, I wish I had enjoyed this book more. The prose is good, and the premise was intriguing. It just wasn’t the book for me.
I received an ARC from BookSirens for free and am leaving a review voluntarily.
I'd recommend this book for: I'll be honest, I'm having a hard time recommending this book. I guess if you like compelling prose and literary fiction this might be worth giving a try?
Find this book on GoodReads or StoryGraph!
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Author: Liz Braswell
Genres: Fairy Tale Retelling, YA
Review Type: I was curious
Star Rating: 4 Stars!
My Tags: faerie-tale
Synopsis
It should be simple—a dragon defeated, a slumbering maiden, a prince poised to wake her. But when said prince falls asleep as soon as his lips meet the princess', it is clear that this fairy tale is far from over.
With a desperate fairy's last curse infiltrating her mind, Princess Aurora will have to navigate a dangerous and magical landscape deep in the depths of her dreams. Soon she stumbles upon Phillip, a charming prince eager to join her quest. But with Maleficent's agents following her every move, Aurora struggles to discover who her true allies are, and moreover, who she truly is. Time is running out. Will the sleeping beauty be able to wake herself up?
Review
I did not expect to enjoy this one as much as I did given that it has really low Goodreads ratings and I was unconvinced that it’d tell a creative and new story based off the Disney roots. It ended up proving me wrong. This was a very creative retelling of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty that added depth to the characters and grounded the world in reality. It’s a very character-driven story, and I loved watching Aurora grow as the story progressed. Her character development made so much sense to me given what she’d experienced, and it made everything feel so real and tangible. I also appreciated the ways the author raised the stakes in the story. There were actual, real consequences for people’s actions, and that further fleshed out the world and made the fantastical feel plausible.
I might need to go read the other Twisted Tales after all. I obviously misjudged this one.
I'd recommend this book for: people who enjoy fairy tale retellings with realistic character development.
Find this book on GoodReads and StoryGraph!
Author: Nadine Brandes
Genres: Standalone Fantasy, Christian, YA
Review Type: I was curious
Star Rating: 4 Stars!
My Tags: standalone-fantasy
Synopsis
She didn't ask to be the Wishtress.
Myrthe was born with the ability to turn her tears into wishes. But when a granted wish goes wrong, she is cursed: the next tear she sheds will kill her. She must travel to the Well to break the curse before it claims her life—and before the king's militairen find her. To survive the journey, Myrthe must harden her heart to keep herself from crying even a single tear.
He can stop time with a snap of his fingers.
Bastiaan's powerful—and rare—Talent came in handy when he kidnapped the old king. Now the new king has a job for him: find the Wishtress and deliver her to the schloss. But Bastiaan needs a wish of his own. He gains Myrthe's trust by promising to take her to the Well, but once he gets what he needs, he'll turn her in. As long as his growing feelings for the girl with a stone heart don't compromise him.
Their quest can end only one way: with her death.
Everyone seems to need a wish—the king, Myrthe's cousin, the boy she thinks she loves. And they're ready to bully, beg, and betray her for it. No one knows that to grant even one wish, Myrthe would pay with her life. And if she tells them about the curse . . . they'll just kill her anyway.
My Review
One of the things that's refreshing to me about Nadine Brades' writing is that she does Christian fantasy differently. I've gotten so tired of allegory-based stories that read like the fantasy equivalent to Pilgrim's Progress. I'm over it. Nadine's books never make me feel like that. Sure, it's YA fantasy with all the YA fantasy tropes, but there's nothing wrong with that genre--especially if you expect it going in to the story. And, sure, spot the symbolism pretty quickly, but hey, I can do that in the Narnia books too. Nadine's worlds are creative, her characters are realistic, and she grapples with the actual realities of people's pain and doesn't gloss everything over with the picture perfect ending. I think Fawkes is still my favorite book that she's written, but I'm also so glad I read this book today. It hit me right where I needed it, and I look forward to reading whatever she writes next.
In addition to my problems with the characters, the narrative device of including all the unused first chapters just didn’t work for me. I never personally found the through-line that tied them all together and wove the cohesive story and again had to rely on the characters telling me why it mattered that those chapters were included.
I'd recommend this book for: People who want a YA fantasy with Christian roots and strong characters.
Find this book on GoodReads and StoryGraph!
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