Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Dark Artifices- Review of Books 1 and 2

Megan Nicole

Overall: ***

Romance: ***

Reading Rate: ***

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Recommend if you liked: The Mortal Instruments 

Purchase on Amazon here 

I will preface this review by saying that I read both The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices and while I won’t say they were literary wonders I enjoyed both series. They offered great binge worthy heart wrenching paranormal drama (and I am a sucker for it)!

Shadowhunter Books

Knowing how Cassandra Clare loves to tear my heart out I waited until the series was complete with the release of Queen of Air and Darkness to start reading. Like the first series of hers I read I was expecting to be sucked in right away and devour the whole series in a few days… Yes I admit I have a problem….. BUT alas it has taken me WEEKS to get through the first few books and I am not even interested in diving into the third at this point.

Now I have heard a lot people raving about The Dark Artifices and how it is their favorite Shadowhunters novel but I just cannot make it happen for me.

My issues *spoilers*:

  • I think this being the third of her series that I have read I might be a little burnt out on the same concept being repeated – Forbidden love, lack of communication, narrow-minded Shadowhunters. Like that one person we all know that keeps making the same mistakes and wondering why they have so much drama?
  • I personally and not a fan of the Julian being the parent dynamic.
  • 2/3 of the way through the series and I don’t feel like the villain or villians are really built out.
  • I don’t not like the cameos from The Mortal Instruments main crew. I mean if you are going to write a book with Jace in it, I want it to be all him lol. Plus after they hinted about Clary dying I almost didn’t want to keep reading to find out if it really happened.
  • These cameos also ruined Alec and Magnus for me. While I get it was trying to show them in an adult/parent light years down the road I just didn’t care for their new softness.

While curiosity will get the best of me eventually and I will finish Queen of Air and Darkness and hopefully it will be so amazing it changes my mind on the whole series. But as of right now I have no plans to purchase her two new books releasing in 2019 Red Scrolls of Magic or Chain of Gold.

Stay Tuned….

Book Reviews, Products I love!!

Six of Crows Book Review

Megan Nicole

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, Book 1 of the Six of Crows Duology

Overall: ****

Romance: ***

Reading Rate: **

Pages: 465

Recommend if you liked: Shadow & Bone Trilogy, Oceans 11

Release Date: September 29, 2015

Publisher: Henry Holt

Purchase on Amazon here

I recently finished reading Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I know I am super late to the game reading this book but I put it off for so long due to all of the hype. I finally dove into the book and I am glad that I did. Now I do have to preface this with it was not a suck you in fast paced read like the Shadow and Bone trilogy was for me, but overall I felt the story was WAY better.

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Without any spoilers: This book to me was almost an Ocean’s 11 goes back in time with magic. It takes some time to build out the various characters but it was really time well spent.  While you don’t have to read the Shadow and Bone Trilogy to read Six of Crows I would have found parts of the world difficult to understand without all the background laid out in the prior books, and there are also spoilers for Shadow and Bone as all of the events happens shortly after the end of the first trilogy.

What I liked:

  • Complex characters
  • Continuing to build on the world I was introduced to in Shadow & Bone- I also feel the characters and world really grew up from the initial trilogy.

What I struggled with:

  • This is not a fast paced binge read in my opinion. I picked the book up and down over time, and was in no rush to get to the second book in the duology when I was done.

Official Synopsis:

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price–and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone…

A convict with a thirst for revenge.
A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager.
A runaway with a privileged past.
A spy known as the Wraith.
A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums.
A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes.

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.