Book Review: Entwined (Heather Dixon)

“It’s only madness if you actually do it. If you want to break all the windows in the house and drown yourself in a bucket but don’t actually do it, well, that’s love.” ~ The King (Entwined)

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Genre: YA Fantasy (Family centric w/ light romance)

Summary: Come and mend your broken hearts here.
Just when Azalea should feel that everything is before her–beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing–it’s taken away. All of it. And Azalea is trapped. The Keeper understands. He’s tapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. So he extends an invitation.
Every night, Azalea and her eleven sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest, but there is a cost. The Keeper likes to keep things. Azalea may not realize how tangled she is in his web until it is too late.

My Humble Opinion: See I don’t always read horror!

You could say that this is a quiet book, a beautiful re-imagining of the Grimm’s faerie tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”.  And you’d be right to a point. The world the story takes place in is like our own, but tinged with magic. It has recognizable elements, but it’s a unique world of its own. True, Entwined doesn’t start off with a bang, and the suspense is much more emotional and psychological. There is plenty of action throughout, but it takes form in the rising stakes of emotional, mental and physical well being rather than sword fights (although there is that too).

This is one of the most powerful and empowering books I have ever read. The romance is slow and builds realistically, and falls to the way side for something more important-the love and ties that one has with their family. With twelve sisters in the book, the Keeper, the King, and the small handful of love interests, this book has quite a large cast. But every single character is vital and important. Every character is fleshed out beautifully, which leads to wonderful humor and heart breaking arguments (some of the arguments between the sisters as well as their arguments with the King were incredibly hard to read).

Unlike in the Grimm faerie tale, the main characters are girls and their weapon is dancing. They learn about themselves, each other, and their father through dancing. Each dance is described wonderfully, and in such a way that the reader really does realize that dancing is not only an art but a demanding, challenging one at that. That was probably my favorite aspect about Entwined. Dancing, and all things associated with it are all valuable and highly praised things. The girls have power, and when it is taken away they yank it back through dancing. Azalea as the oldest empowers the others, but the others empower her too.

TL;DR: Frankly, I don’t know what’s not to like about this book. The writing is melodic, the characters are fantastic and there are some lovely twists. There’s even a good bit of creepiness and mystery in this as well, and everything is pulled together seamlessly. It’s a book I would recommend to anyone, and one I completely adore. It’s books like this that make reading worthwhile.

Book Review: Anna Dressed in Blood (Kendare Blake)

|+|This book has graphic gore in it, if this bothers you on any level or could possibly trigger/upset you pass on this book|+|

“But I get the feeling you’re always thinking really hard.” ~Thomas (Anna Dressed in Blood)  

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Genre: YA Horror/Romance

Summary: Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.

Yet she spares Cas’s life.

My Humble Opinion: Not gonna lie the reason I got this book is because one of the key characters has my name. Also it’s about ghosts. And it’s considered a pretty scary book. Dibs. My expectations were high for this book and unfortunately the book fell short of them in a number of areas. But I’m so glad I kept reading until the end. The ending made the rest of the book worth it and gave me enough confidence in the author to want to read the sequel.

Anna Dressed in Blood is interesting for a number of reasons, I think the biggest one being the way the author played with tropes. You have the cooler than ice popular girl, the total geek who only is noticed when he’s being too weird, and then you have Cas, our hero, a lone wolf who’s trying his best not to make any friends or draw any attention to himself, and honestly, who needs ‘em? He does very much so once he meets the violent ghost Anna.

Cas’ character development was painfully slow. Frankly I felt much more of a connection to Caramel (the cool girl) and Thomas (the geek) than I did to Cas. Cas really didn’t grow on me until the very end. And I mean the last four chapters very end. This was a major issue for me because Cas is not only the star of the show, he’s also our narrator.

I felt that at times the author used this as an excuse for jumpy transitions. Things would happen quickly for Cas and so he would just skip things and it caused me major confusion. Towards the start of the book I found myself having to re-read a lot, only to find that I didn’t miss anything, the transition scene was completely missing. Interestingly enough although the pace of the story quickens towards the end, the transitions get much better. It’s almost as if the writing improved as the book went on.

The reason Caramel was such a cool girl to the rest of the school is because she didn’t let her status define her. She actually cared about people and that coupled with her natural charisma made her really awesome. I lit up every time she surprised Cas which was often. Thomas was so relatable was because he was so far from normal, but he still was a good friend. He never let society’s views of him stop him from being a kind person and often a voice of reason. He really comes into his own towards the end.

Anna was a really unique take on violent ghosts and sadly I can’t say much about why she’s one of my favorites and why she helped carry the book for me without getting into spoilers. Just trust me when I say that she’s awesome. Although most scenes with Anna involved gore. None of this gore stuck with me (just like the romance felt really left field to me until the very end). I felt like it was gore to try to scare the reader, but instead it just grossed me out and made me go “meh, ok, whatever.” Frankly the horror element of the story was a huge letdown. It just wasn’t there for me. Gore =/= horror.

TL;DR: If you don’t mind a good amount of gore and enjoy character driven books then you might want to give this book a go. It’s a fun read and despite the faulty transitions, the hard to love/get behind Cas, and the gore for horror, this is a really character driven book and I enjoyed that. Each character does come into their own. And nearly everyone gets a turn saving someone in a way that was completely true to them. That was really neat because it meant that no character was stuck in a stereotype or trope, they expanded beyond that, beyond the first judgements of Cas and the reader. Although this book by no means blew me away, it was enjoyable enough for me to want to pick up the sequel. I trust the author to do some really awesome stuff with these characters in the future, seeing as this book got better as it progressed.

Welcome!

Welcome to the all new blog! I wanted to do a blog here as well as keep my personal/book one on tumblr. Some people are more comfortable on tumblr than they are on Blogger and vise versa. I was on Blogger a while back then left for tumblr. I know that some people have mentioned that they enjoyed my reviews and writing shenanigans on here and also it's a grand deal easier for me to participate in blog tours on here vs tumblr.

So, two birds with one stone! This won't be as personal as my tumblr, but if I post any writing to tumblr, I'll post it here as well. Same with the book reviews, and maybe (if we're all lucky), I'll also post my book photography. I also am doing a series of posts to help self-published authors (I'm one myself), so I'll be posting those as well. I firmly feel that we authors should help each other as much as possible. To top it all off you guys get the perks of seeing blog tours too and those are always fun!

At any rate, I'm looking forward to it! Over the next couple of days I'll be uploading my most recent book reviews.

For those of y'all not familiar with what I read I'm very much into fantasy, horror (psychological please), murder mysteries/mysteries, true crime, paranormal, and historical fiction. Give me darkness for I thrive off of it. I'm a morbid little soul, so what I read tends to be on the darker side. If this sounds like your cup of tea (or coffee) then welcome! Hope you enjoy yourself and find some lovely books along the way. If you're not into all of that but are feeling daring, welcome anyway, happy to have you! Hopefully you'll find some books to fall in love with as well.

As for my writing....I write dark speculative fiction, and while dark, it doesn't quite fall into the horror genre. I also have a WiP that's a dark realistic fiction. Expect to see some sneak peeks of those as well!

If you're coming back or if you randomly stumbled upon me, thanks for being here and I hope you enjoy the blog!