This genre includes fairy-tale retellings.
I finally read The Wicked King, by Holly Black, and it was an amazing political story. The second book of The Folk of the Air series starts months into Jude’s bargain with Cardan. She’s running the kingdom and trying to keep the new king in check with his vow of obedience.
I have mixed feelings about how to rate Jon Skovron’s Misfit. On the one hand, the writing isn’t good and the plot is predictable and not satisfying. On the other hand, I know a younger version of myself and at least one of her friends might have enjoyed it.
It’s been a long time since I read a fantasy book that included war and flight and that focused on women. I was more enticed to read Claire Eliza Bartlett’s We Rule the Night when it said one of the girls had been caught disguising herself as a man to join the military.
I had heard about Siren’s Lament from another blog because I was looking for webtoons to read, and it’s good. Lyra is a wallflower in love with her best friend, but he is dating someone else and might not like her that way. One night in a moment of pity, Lyra crosses the path of a siren and finds herself entangled in a curse. Siren’s Lament, Season 1, by instantmiso is a romcom that focuses on a love triangle and tries to draw Lyra out of her shell.
The cover of The Girl From the Other Side, Vol. 1 by Nagabe struck me as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and the two characters on the cover looked sweet. It’s actually a sweet story about a monster who is raising a little girl who was abandoned for fear of her spreading the monstrous curse. This manga is well worth the read.
I’ve tried time and time again to get into The Infernal Devices, the prequel trilogy to The Mortal Instruments series, but I haven’t been able to. So, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get into Lady Midnight, the first in a different spin-off. I was pleasantly entranced by the setting and the characters of the novel.
Blanca & Roja, by Anna-Marie McLemore, retells two of my favorite fairy tales, Snow-White and Rose-Red and The Wild Swans, with two Latina girls and a non-binary prince. Blanca and Roja del Cisne are the next two girls in a long line of women who were born in their exact pair because of a blessing and curse from the swans who raised their great-great-great-grandmother. This was a blessing to the original bisabuela, but it has been a curse for every pair because….
Twelve-year-old Conor O’Malley must come to terms with his mother having terminal cancer and what that means for him. He’s an independent boy who has had to take a lot responsibility during his mother’s illness and after his father left them. He also has to deal with a strict grandmother and bullies at school. What sets all of this in motion is an old tree that hunts him down and forces him to face the truth through storytelling. The movie adaptation of A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness, convinced me to read the novel, and both are beautiful.
I was interested in the concept of a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, and I hoped it would be good if Gregory Maguire wrote it. The result, Matchless, is not good. It’s barely okay.
The title, The Good Demon, is enticing enough on its own, which is why I stopped to look at it at the library. Then you find out that the protagonist, Clare, has been exorcised of her demon, the one known only as Her, her best friend. She’s devastated, angry and depressed. Then she finds a few clues left by her Only so that they can be together again, and it involves the reverend’s son. As she struggles with the boy being present as his father exorcised her of her demon and with finding her demon, she gets to know the boy and discovers the dark history….
Cat on the Bookshelf 