Genre: Adventure

This might be the earliest I’ve ever read a newly published book as I ninja-ed it the day my library got a digital copy and I was very excited based on the synopsis and listed genres. For me, the Book of Doors was a solid comfort read (note, NOT the actual Comfy read genre) that felt nostalgic in the first half, invoking the wide-eyed magical feel of many YA fantasy books I read growing up yet clearly intended for adult readers. This book is also fully targeted towards book lovers with countless descriptions and settings based on book collections, stores, or libraries (to be expected for a story involving magical books). What I did not expect was the surprisingly ambitious and well-executed time-traveling/manipulating second half that manages to recover and tie-up the narrative successfully after a disjointed mid-section. Despite the obviously heavy fantasy elements provided by the magical books (I assume it’s not mentioned in the synopsis as not to show it’s trump card early), the Book of Doors should first and foremost be considered a soft time-travel drama. A young women in her 20’s living day to day in New York, Cassie is at the pivotal stage in her…

I was very close to dropping this in the first part but stuck with it as I heard the story picks up quickly. Furthermore many fans often consider Red Rising to be one of the weaker books in the series and thematically different due to its culling game-focus. I’m glad I stuck with it though as I thought Red Rising was ultimately great (with a few reservations), a 3 that progressed to a 4.5 rounded up. A mesh of different genres and styles, Pierce Brown is a certified fantasy sci-fi action nerd irl and it shows in his work. The writing style is no-nonsense laced with some advance vocabulary while the plot is fast-paced and furious. The book often takes pleasure in going where the reader wants/or doesn’t want it to go. Case and point if someone commits a terrible act, the book will gleefully and gruesomely execute some sort of twisted judgement on them. But if there’s a character who you are getting attached to and seems to be thriving, you know they’re going to meet an unfortunate end. There are elements in the narrative that are familiar and comfortable to fans of the genre such as the focal…

My novella of choice for the obligatory spooky horror read for Halloween, this was an odd read that I have mixed feelings about. It really captures the gothic horror fairytale genre well and feels like a modern reimagining of Edgar Allen Poe’s literary style (in concept only unfortunately). The narrative themes of humanity and what constitutes being alive is interesting, if only the writing quality matched it. The writing is typically quite readable with great visuals but then Khaw forces complex and obscure vocabulary in randomly that derails the literary flow. It’s as if Khaw flipped open a thesaurus and actively tried to find the most obtuse and unheard of word to give the writing a more classical or educated flair (it doesn’t). You can deduce what the random words mean by using context clues and analyzing the sentence structure of the passage, but the fact that you’re able to do that just shows how out of the place the vocabulary is when the rest of the writing is straightforward and simplistic. Not only that, the writing itself suddenly drops the vague attempt at old English about 30-40 pages in which is also a welcome relief since it wasn’t ever…