Thought Train to Pusan

--> I first read Sally Green’s Half Bad Trilogy of YA novels (including Half Bad , Half Wild , and Half Lost ) two years ago, and at the time I really enjoyed it. But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about these YA novels that involve young people standing up to injustices or find themselves fighting for something greater than themselves, what with everything going on in our world today: in this case it’s not per say exclusively the young people who are fighting, but they are the majority, as it is they who are facing a whole life of nothing but more and more injustice to come, and those who are able to bring in a new generation with new ideas. The Half Bad Trilogy focuses on a society of witches that blends in with the regular world (“fains” as humans are called), but there is a council of “White Witches” that govern activity and search to hunt and kill all the “Black Witches” within the UK. In other regions of Europe, the White and Black witches basically just l...

Including: Mistborn , The Well of Ascension , and The Hero of Ages A back-to-back read through of the three novels in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy (as a part of a bigger series and world created by the author). This trilogy presents a world with many of the seeming aspects of what would be considered “high fantasy”, but without as much of the convolution and excessiveness what sometimes comes with those types of epics. That is not to say that there aren’t many characters (there are, but it’s a good amount), or that the world itself that is created feels too small or not real enough, but everything seems to fall into place very nicely and is followed without much difficulty or needing to go back and re-study any events, locations, or characters. It may have also helped that I pounded through these three novels back to back, but still! There is enough mysticism and magic to make it interesting, but also a set of logic and rules to the magic which makes things not feel too ...

Half Bad. Half Wild. Half Lost. It sets itself up to follow the usual young adult series storyline, yet there was something really intriguing about this series to me, and I absolutely devoured all three of the books as fast as possible. It might be that I’ve never really experienced the mythology of witches presented quite in the way this book does, which made it interesting to me. There is also such a survival instinct present in these books, and a connection to nature that is really beautiful, particularly in relation to the protagonist and his father. I also appreciate how a lot of young adult books nowadays don't feel the need to shy away from serious topics or from things that are a little grim. Of course, that's not for everyone, and despite there being quite a bit of violence in these novels, I found that it worked well with the tone of the story and the themes present. Also, I think it was very much a stylistic choice of Sally Green to describe things in enough...

After reading the first book of the Captive Prince series, I was not exactly sold on it, and considered just stopping there. But after a little commenting back and forth with Narfna (aaayooo!) who had indeed read the rest of the series, I was convinced to keep going. And you know what, it has definitely improved and peaked more of my interest. There are still some things that I’m a little unsure of or uneasy about, but I am beginning to see a bigger picture that makes me want to know how everything is going to wrap up in the final book. Some of the “inevitabilities” and other things that I predicted in the first novel have indeed come to be, but there is still a lot that leaves me wondering, as this second book in the series was a lot more plot-driven and filled with so much political intrigue and interplay that I would never have anticipated (much like our protagonist Damen did not anticipate himself either?) The previous novel in the series focused on Prince Damen of Akielos,...