wanderlustlover's reviews
3763 reviews

Spring 2020 (Book Club: January);

Full rating: 4.5

I have to admit I definitely fell in love with this series. I have so many thoughts about everything happening in this world. I have so many respects for the subtle way you can tell this whole first 1200 page novel is still an introduction into this 10 Book Series. Yet, you fall in love with everyone. You get involved in their failures and their successes.

As with many books, I predicted most of what happened in this book, except for two large things. One, I assumed Jasnah already knew everything Shallan was doing, and was waiting her out to call her on it (especially once it had happened and she was still there). Two, I was absolutely shocked at the big move Sadeas made in the biggest fight of the book. My heart it bleeds for this fallout.

I love that there is not a lot of explanation of anything in this book that isn't part of characters talking or the world being describing. The writing congratulates on being smart and expects you to put it together as it is all going on, and it's such a gorgeous breath of fresh air in that.

Highlights - The found family of the Bridge Crew. Team Girl Researchers. Friendships striding strong, and friendships betrayed out of nowhere. Having my two noblest men meet before the end of the book. Feeling heartbroken for an assassin. The pricelessness of a life conversation.

This book quickly bounced up into favorite, long for YA and incredibly devourable, and it's only the beginning. I was warned of this before I started it. It's the beginning of the story only, they said, and I waved my hands and only half listened, until I was fifteen percent from the end of the book (devouring it hours a day), screaming at my Twitter "How can I almost be done, we're only beginning????"

I love the time period. I love the language. I love the very different characters and the incredibly multifaceted points of view you end up in, all over the place in all of the chapters. I love how much and little we know when we start this book and when we end it. How human everyone is, and fluid everything is.

This is up in my top ten for the year, and I advise everyone to read it.

Spring 2020 (April);
~ My Sisyphean Sanderson Challenge

One of those Sanderson books I've heard about in low whispers for two years since I started my challenge, across reading two of the Big Sanderson End-of-Year Letters, and now I finally understand. There's a lot to love about this book.

The magic system is wholly different and interesting. The mystery of the why-or-why-not picked demands to be known more. The growth of the friendships and mentorships. The obvious red herring that blossomed into something even bigger, and less expected (which is 100% why I love Sanderson, because I truly can't predict what he's doing with something).

I, too, am now in the group of people who will be hoping tenuously into forever for another in this series.

I'm moving this one to presently reading as a sneak peak of the Prologue and the First Chapter came out earlier this week as a wonderful, amazing gift from herself. I'm so intrigued and curious to see where this goes. All the girls, and different characters, how people interact, and the gorgeous, silky flow of the words.

And how soon it will be when I will have the whole of it in my hands to devour whole!


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Finished it and I love it so, so, so, much. My favorite quote is "I'm not afraid of being afraid" between Persephone and Hermes, which remind me so much of September and Ly's conversation in The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making ("Be careful with me, I'm fragile," Ly Said, and September, Replied, "It's alrught. I'm not.")

I devoured this book so quickly once it was finally in my hands. I smiled at how simple and right it felt all the choice Persephone made that changed everything, and cried at her scene/choice in the Elysian Fields. I can't wait to see everything else Sarah writes.

This book is so very well done. It's my first favorite book of 2012. It chronicles one beautiful relationship, one struggling author, two very flawed people, and four amazing parents. But to say that was all that I found in the covers would be like saying was that all there was ended at print being pressed on a page, too.

This book is stunningly well documented, both narration and situationally, about what it is like to live with cancer, and live with loving someone who is living with-or-dying of cancer. And as someone who's been through that, several times I wanted to put the book down and just take a breather, to write this man thank you cards.

Because he got it right. He got all of it right. All of the grace and the gracelessness. All of the different ways everything in daily interactions and names and love and survival. Everything. Buy this book. Buy a box of tissues to sit next to you with it. But go acquire it soon, or now.

Spring 2020 (March);
~ My Sisyphean Sanderson Challenge

I funny thing about reading these two books is that I did not know that they took place in the spaces between three concurrent games. The first one is a perfect standalone, without having looked at or played the games, and the second took a tiny scooch of research to understand. Both of them were intricately and exquisitely well written.

I have a lot of feelings about the Gods in question, and the constant rebirth cycle, but mostly I remain in utter awe of the fact every single one of Sanderson's books has a completely different, and fully worked out, magical system of its own.

A harrowing tale, recommended by my school librarian, that is deeply compelling from the second page, just like it's reviewers have said. You will be so quickly drawn into Carrie's world, both the past and the present, so realistically scoped. The compartmentalization is a master craftsmanship, as are all the slow reveals that you figure out in the last half of the book about everyone. I definitely recommend it to others.

This was another Audible.com sale purchase, and it was a lot of fun. I love learning about the universe, and especially about things we still don't know. Three awesome things I learned this time around -- Quarks were named about James Joyce; no one has ever actually seen an Elctron, and Indigo actually does not actually exist as a color spectrum color.

Summer 2021 (May);

I had to read 4 book club books & several of my 36 Fiction/Non-Fiction Bingo Board Challenges ahead of schedule to be able to set aside most of May to devour (and be devoured) by this book. I loved everything about and I remain steadfastly agog that every one of the books in this series has ranked at five stars, while being over 1,000 pages. This series is better than anything in such a long, long time.

What do I even put here without throwing a billion spoilers into this place.

I love madly what was done with Shallan and the three-in-one situations, and even more my heart only grows even bigger for Adolin's acceptance of her wife no matter what shape, face, and place she happens to be in, only wanting to be her stalwart supporter. Kaladin remains a forever favorite and I absolutely trusted Sanderson with the arc he wrote through this book for him, the unexpected place he found himself in, found new people to protect, serve, and defend, as he began to focus on his own healing finally, too.

Also, Maya. I knew it was coming and predicted it from the beginning of the book. The one thing to turn the Honor Spren around as the greatest example of his greatest good & what that could mean for every bearer of a blade from the earlier wars. But. Oh god. It was so well done. And I didn't predict at all the scene in how it happened or what would happen, only the big picture, point person. It was so, so, so good.

Dalinar remains a force to be forever reckoned with, and I love these parallel's and striving that are all of everything between him and The Storm Father. Also, it can't go without saying, it was AMAZING to see Navini get to come into her own during this book in every way possible: learning of her ills, constant striving in the worst of situations, slowly growing the oddest of connections.

Everyone and Jasnah, everything Jasnah, including my flailing about the biggest new thing with Wit. Plus, gosh lets talk about how massively awesome it was to have so much more Wit in the book in one of our locations. I loved it so, so, so much. I, also, loved Jasnah's many ways of making it known she could be just as formidable as a queen as any man who was a king before her. How that both did her good and gave her experience that wounded a part of her (in the right way).

I just. Everything is amazing. Everything.

Everyone needs to be reading this series. Drop everything and do that.

I have let so many reviews slide past me while settling into my new job, so here we have many coming, starting with this one. A tiny sliver of a novella drawing together the main boy characters of Riordan's Egyptian series and his Greek/Roman series, in a way that is wonderfully well done. I loved seeing these two smash into each other with their vastly different ideologies about how the world works and what all they've learned about it.

And I love best that it leaves you wondering if this is only the beginning of what is yet to come.