Scookie Reviews

FLY ON THE WALL by E. Lockhart 4 Stars Verdict: A short tale of naked truths. Contemporary usually isn’t my thing. I need life threatening stakes, magic, and twisted, villainous plans – but E. Lockhart’s books are a welcomed break from what I call ‘the norm’. They’re short, and packed full of emotion and meaning. FLY ON THE WALL in particular felt relatable, full of diversity, and got me thinking about life in the way a demon fight never could. Gretchen sees herself as ordinary, which is why she loves drawing her larger-than-life comic book muses. Her drawing style isn’t appreciated by her art teacher, and she doesn’t really like the other students. In fact, she’s a bit judgemental – until she becomes a 'fly on the wall', and learns the naked truth about the people she had previously dismissed. Just like Gretchen, the plot starts off a little ordinary, and the overall pace of the book is helped by the fact its so short. It sets the scene, twists, makes a point, and ...

SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT by Derek Landy 5 Stars Verdict : Fun, weird, and magical - what's not to like? In short, it’s a fun MG book. It has humour and a jovial spirit running through its pages, getting serious at times when it needs to, but never feeling like a heavy weight of despair and angst that comes with YA. A welcome change from my normal genre! I love how there's a quirky spin on the story. A thirteen year old girl inherits her strange uncle's house, bumps into a walking talking skeleton with magical powers, and the two team up to beat the bad guys from acquiring ultimate power. They both have a good sense of humour, which made it a fantastic read. Fun, weird, and magical sums it up the best. At times I felt the high amounts of action would be better placed in a film than a book, and the description tended to be at a minimal, but I liked this book a lot. I like how it’s different, standing out from the large heap of books I’ve swept my eyes through lately....

GATES OF THREAD AND STONE by Lori M Lee 2 stars Verdict: Not good. I always feel bad for writing two star reviews. Most of the time it's just a book that could do with more work, not a bad author. But I'm going to be bluntly honest.  I felt the writing was dull, the world building was flat, and the pace was slow. I’ve read worse, but that doesn’t make this story better. After Kia eats a sandwich, wanders around, eats another sandwich, visits the shops… eventually, her brother goes missing. He childhood crush insists on helping her, and together they leave everything behind to find him. Kia is also able to control the threads of time, a gift she must keep hidden. I think Kia stuck to this a little too tightly though, because I completely forgot she had magic for most of the book. The concepts puzzled me. There were too many ideas, but none of them were used to their best capacity. Is a sentinel the same as a hollow? What is a mahjo? How is that different from ...

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER by Stephen Chbosky 4 stars Verdict: Very 'readable'. It's my favourite type of narrator, the naive in a broken world. Charlie (if that is in fact his real name) watches, listens, and both understands more than others as well as fails to comprehend what is obvious to the reader. He's very different from others his age, more honest, possibly slightly autistic, and broken. Definitely broken. The book is written as a series of letters from our narrator Charlie to an unknown receiver, and trying to work out whom could drive you insane. It's a character we don't know, a character who could be us, unless of course you did sleep with that girl just because you could. That aside, it's left purposefully vague. There's not too much plot, just things that happen, the story bumbling along, and then a moment at the end that reveals a little more about Charlie, and then that's it. A lot of the characters were pretty nice...

RUIN AND RISING by Leigh Bardugo 2 stars Verdict: Didn't really enjoy it. #1 Shadow and Bone #3 Siege and Storm The author has all the signs of an awesome writer, but I just didn't think it was an awesome book. There’s a fantastic twist which links all three books together, and while it was amazing it doesn’t change the fact that I only enjoyed reading bits of this series. It didn’t seem so bad at the time, but I couldn’t read more than a couple of pages before deciding I needed yet another a break. There wasn't enough to get excited about, and even though there are some great sequences, they were too short and far between. A good book makes those mundane linking scene, like travelling, seem interesting, but the amount of travelling in this book was a tall order, and it ended up feeling as if a lot of irrelevant buffer material was plumped into the book’s sparse feathers. I realised at some point that I didn't really like or connect with any of the charac...

KING'S CAGE by Victoria Aveyard (Red Queen #3) 4 Stars Verdict : Good but long. #1 - Red Queen #2 - Glass Sword Or at least it felt very long to me. I almost tapped out at book two. If I'm honest, my main complaint of book 2 – that it’s overwritten – still holds true for this book, except for everything else works so much better this time around. The plot could have turned any which direction, and that made me read on eagerly. Mare has handed herself over to the king in order to spare her friends, giving Maven a powerful tool to twist against the Scarlet Guard. She isn’t whiny this time – she's utterly trapped, and does what little she can to help her cause. She stays strong in a way that shows how far she’s come, and I found myself liking her again. The writing is what made it feel long to me, yet at times it's worth it. It might be superfluous, but it’s still beautiful and vivid, full of emotion. Every word evoked a new emotion in me, although it did...

SIEGE AND STORM by Leigh Bardugo 3 Stars Verdict: Starting to lose interest. #1 Shadow and Bone #2 Rise and Rising As much as I wanted to love this series, this felt like a second book to me in every way. Battles are lost, relationships are sunk and mended, but none of the events were particularly surprising. I've read other reviews and I'm just not on the same page. I'm at a slight loss already as I hear the main appeal of this book is the Darkling, and to me he's too vague and absent to grab my attention. Learning more about his past would have been intriguing, but in this book we mainly see how power affects Alina and Mal's relationship. It opens fast as Alina and Mal face the Darkling once more, but after that the pace dwindles. The author has a beautiful way with words, but spends them on the wrong things. There's so much time inside Alina's head and teaching us about the world, and not enough actually happening in the now. As the book g...