Reviews written by Renae M

The combination of historical fiction and paranormal fiction is one of my favorites, and it’s been a successful one, as bestselling author Libba Bray can attest to. In Born of Illusion, Teri Brown deftly handles the task of writing a multi-genre young adult novel, and she does it in a...

After spending several years hearing about the awesome and wonderful author who is Maggie Stiefvater, I figured it was time to accept the inevitable and read something of hers. Everyone insisted that I read The Raven Boys, but The Scorpio Races won out. Why, you ask? Because it doesn’t have...

All good things must come to an end. And, overall, The Crimson Crown was a satisfying conclusion to a wonderful series. Well. The last 300 pages were excellent. I literally had to force myself to read the first 300 (more on that later). Overall, I find that the Seven Realms...

Back before I read either book, I decided that the blurb for The Tragedy Paper was very similar to the concept of Thirteen Reasons Why. Now, after reading both novels, I think the comparison is a good one. Though not entirely identical, the set-up and structure for both novels is...

I think that after the truly exhausting and grueling experience I had with The Ask and the Answer, I needed something different. And I got that, for which I am very grateful. Monsters of Men is just as intense and thrilling as the two books that came before, but it’s...

This is one of the most emotionally draining books I’ve ever read. Patrick Ness went all out; he didn’t sugarcoat things and he didn’t try to spare the reader’s feelings. The end result was 500 of the most exhausting pages I’ve ever read. The final sentence made me want to...

It took me a while to warm up to this book—about 100 pages or so. That’s rather a long time, though since the book itself was nearly 500 pages, it wasn’t too bad. But once things started happening (the first 100 pages cover a 6-hour period or so), then it...

Reading high fantasy is always an investment. You have to invest your time, since fantasy is one of the most long-winded genres there is. You have to invest your patience, because there’s a good chance the author will jerk you around for several hundred pages before s/he makes a plot...

I bought How to Save a Life on impulse, and I immediately regretted it. I hadn’t been a big fan of the other Zarr novel I read, Sweethearts, and I’m not in the habit of buying books from authors I don’t have a good track record with. And after spending...

When you read a book by an author whose writing you’ve already experienced before, you automatically have expectations. As a reader who found Ruta Sepetys’s debut novel to be a mostly mediocre attempt, I think my expectations for Out of the Easy were kept realistically low. I already knew that...

I somehow missed the memo that this book is, you know, horror—and it’s not that I would have refused to read it had I known, but that lack of research on my part made 172 Hours on the Moon a complete surprise for me. And everyone: this book is downright...

Out of the many topics and catchphrases that exist in the world of fiction, I must confess that the word “dragons” does very little to excite me. Actually, I tend to run in the opposite direction. Why do I do this? Absolutely no reason at all. I might blame Christopher...

The hype machine being what it is, and my tendency to reject well-loved books being what it is, I started reading If You Find Me with no little nervousness. I’d read enough reviews to figure out that it had all the buzzwords I tend to look for, and when not...

I really love when a sequel blows its predecessor out of the water. Way, way out—into space. Such was the case here. Overall, I found the first book in the Seven Realms series, The Demon King, to be okay. It was lacking in a lot of areas, and was very...

Kagawa’s The Immortal Rules was probably the first vampire novel I actually enjoyed. I liked it enough to try out her Iron Fey series, which I didn’t like at all. And because of my bad experience with Ash and Puck and Meghan, my enthusiasm for The Eternity Cure waned a...