Thought Train to Pusan

I’ve read a few of Holly Black’s other novels dealing with faeries which were alright but not bad, and hearing good things about The Cruel Prince , I figured it was worth a read! And it was quite an entertaining YA novel, though I can’t say that I loved it. The Cruel Prince begins with three young sisters living in the human world: two twins named Taryn and Jude, and an older sister who is actually half-human-half-fae named Vivienne (or Vivi). The three live with their mother and father, until the father of Vivi returns to bring his daughter back to the faerie world, and also takes the other two siblings with him. From there, we follow Jude at the age of 17, years after coming to the faerie world, and trying to find her place. It is a time of some unrest as a new King is rumored to soon be crowned, and while Jude wants nothing more than to be a knight, she soon finds herself embroiled in a world of intrigue and underground conspiracy. This story involves so...

I’m not sure if this is just going to be a trilogy or intended to be a longer series? In any case, I just finished reading the three books (so far!) in Holly Black’s Curse Workers young adult series (titled White Cat , Red Glove , and Black Heart ). The premise is interesting, and draws the characters into a world of crime and corruption that I haven’t seen in exactly the same way in other YA books, though some of the typical tropes and characters definitely come out to play. In particular, there is some good commentary that could be related to “outing” people and the persecution of particular groups within society today, in the form of wanting to test everyone so that they can be clearly identified as “curse workers” within this world. I shall explain what this means henceforth: Set in what is the current present day, White Cat begins with us coming to know a teenager named Cassel, who is the youngest in a family of curse workers: curse workers are a small subset of the populat...

I asked my friend for some recommendations of books, and found these two thrust into my hands. Apparently there is actually another book that comes in between them in the series ( Valiant ), but that it is about other characters whereas Ironside is more like a direct sequel to Tithe . But anyways, that’s a bit of a side note. I will start this off by saying that as a kid growing up, I love love LOVED anything to do with Faeries and other little magical creatures like that. So I was intrigued, seeing as how I haven’t actually read any young adult novels based around those types of creatures (which is kind of surprising to me). And these two books were pretty interesting to hear all about these faery worlds and creatures and customs, despite the fact that the plot followed that sort of typical YA, “you’re different from everyone else” pattern. What do we call it? The special snowflake thing? Anyways. The only problem was with the main character, Kaye… There was something about her....