Hazel in “The Final Rider” is a kind of protagonist I haven’t encountered before, but hope we get to have more of in the future. Forced to leave her little village, Hazel toils away in a mine, not wanting to be noticed by anyone, when she uncovers a dragon egg. When it hatches for her, she becomes the first, and last, dragon rider since dragons and the majority of magic left their world centuries ago. In a land with tense alliances and creepy, mysterious witches, Hazel is thrust out of her simple life into one of violence and adventure—both of which she doesn’t want anything to do with being so introverted, and easily overwhelmed with people and the luxury suddenly a part of her daily life. Hazel is not the confident YA fantasy heroine that has become so common today, which makes her incredibly relatable and likeable, even if at times I wanted to shake her.
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This book fell victim to the hype for me—both positive and negative. I was honestly expecting amazing things from this book because it has, I thought, so many of the things I adore: dragons and riders where the dragons choose who they want based on merit, and a heroine that no one expects to survive. I love everything about that. But the hype train on this sold me on the idea that this was THE book I had been waiting for all year and, while it had a strong start and an exceptionally strong finish, I soon found the middle to be lackluster, to feel like it was slogging through a checklist of tropes that are better suited in YA novels, where this book definitely does NOT belong (not a dig at YA either, just saying). “The Witch Finder” is a dystopian post-apocalyptic story where the America we once knew, and the world as a whole, has been practically destroyed when fragments of the moon crashed to earth, triggering a nuclear war. In the aftermath, the survivors went back to tribe-like societies, forgetting their history in order to survive. By the time the book starts, we are close to a thousand years after the apocalypse and are in the south of America where magic is real, and The Church has become God instead of the other way around. That’s where Malachi and his crew come in. They hunt down not only magic users (witches, that all tend to be women) but also heretics and people who go against The Church in a “free thinker” sort of vein. Malachi is not likeable to start, he’s not meant to be, as the whole story focuses on his transformation from staunch believer in The Church to a free thinker himself. I just don’t think his transformation was as complete as I would have liked. This is my first truly “smut” book. Everything smut and spicy is so BIG on social media that I decided to see what the fuss was about with a book I’ve had for awhile but kept putting off. This is my first Katee Roberts book, too, so I’m sure that people who are familiar with her work are not surprised in the least that this was smut with a “plot” that revolves entirely around said smut. Do with that as you will. Loosely, this book is about vampires, with a half vampire trying to find a way to escape these predators and her abusive father. Along the way she learns there is more to her than meets the eye and apparently sex and orgasms and breeding is the way to unlock her powers and her freedom. I think the only thing I’m really glad about is that I read this version rather than the books individually, otherwise I think I would have been even more disappointed. “Knight in Paper Armor” is a dark dystopian novel set in the near future, where corporate greed and racism have completely taken over and divided up America (and I assume other countries but they’re never really talked about). We follow Billy, a young Jewish boy with incredible physic powers; able to take away the physical and emotional pain of those he touches, as well as mind controlling them if his darker tendencies get pushed too far. When Billy is finally allowed to leave the facility where he’s being tested on to attend school like a “normal” teen, he meets our female main character, Natalia. Natalia is an immigrant from Guatemala, a fact she has to hide, pretending to be from Mexico instead—though she faces a lot of bigotry for that, too. Billy and Natalia deal with extreme racism from practically the start, their world is brutal in every sense of the word, and the author is not shy about sharing their experiences in great detail. The topics covered in this sci-fi fantasy dystopian are important and very much apply to the world we live in today, but I do not think this book is appropriate for the audience it’s intended for…. |
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