Book #148 of 2025: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab This 2025 horror title is going to be one of those books that some readers absolutely devour, but I couldn’t shake the impression throughout that it was just warmed-over Anne Rice rewritten to include toxic sapphic relationships — The Vampire …
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Book #105 of 2021: A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology edited by Dhonielle Clayton I love how works like this aim to spotlight authors and characters of under-represented backgrounds in literature, but for me as a reader, the YA sci-fi and fantasy stories in this collection are generally more good than …
Book #258 of 2020: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab I was a little hesitant to pick up this book, both because I’ve had mixed feelings about the previous titles I’ve read from author V. E. Schwab and because the general concept of a heroine who can’t be remembered once she’s …
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Book #146 of 2020: A Conjuring of Light by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #3) This last volume has the most coherent plot stakes of the Shades of Magic trilogy, but it’s still a pretty rambling adventure that never seems to take full advantage of the cool multiverse setting. There’s also a lot of …
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Book #100 of 2020: A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #2) An unfortunate continuation of the thin plot and character motivation issues that are keeping me at a distance from this fantasy series. The biggest event in this second volume is a magical tournament that isn’t even mentioned until a …
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Book #62 of 2020: A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #1) This fantasy novel improves as it goes along, but it’s literally over a quarter of the way through before there’s anything that could remotely be called a plot. I’m also not happy that the only significant female character …
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