'Exodus in Confluence' by Bryant A. Loney

Book details

Genre: YA

Publisher: Verona Booksellers

ISBN: 978-0-692-24564-4

Synopsis

"NO PLACE IS EVER GOING TO BE SAFE."

Exodus in Confluence is a glimpse at what can happen to people when they are put under truly adverse circumstances -- struggling to hold onto their moral values in the face of almost certain death. It's a blend of narrative and commentary on the human condition. It's about people struggling to be human beings.

Five months into the zombie apocalypse, seventeen-year-old Stephen Hart lived in a society where rules and humanity had left him for dead. The remaining survivors clung feverishly to whatever hope remained -- maybe it was a family member, or a religion, or a destination. But in less than one week, everything changed. (And so the cycle repeats.)

A year later, his ramshackle settlement has been compromised, as evidenced by the hordes of the undead swarming inside the gates... and Stephen is to blame. Instead of running, he takes to the airwaves, using the transmission in the now-abandoned radio station to broadcast his story via speakers to his fleeing citizens. This way, maybe he won't look like such a total monster.

With the clock running out, venture into Stephen's post-apocalyptic world, where circumstances can make us become something other than ourselves.

[From Goodreads.]

Review

When I initially sat down to read Bryant A. Loney’s novella, I have to admit that I was a little hesitant.  Generally, novellas aren’t really my thing (I like my books big and complex – anything under two hundred pages leaves me feeling unfulfilled and grumpy), but I was also concerned that my expectations of the author had skyrocketed after I read his novel To Hear The Ocean Sigh. Long story short, I didn’t want to be disappointed.

I needn’t have worried.

Loney’s novella is dark, haunting, and thought provoking. As in To Hear The Ocean Sigh, I was in awe of the author’s incredible writing style – his ability to weave such wonderfully gripping stories without sacrificing eloquence and elegance is quite frankly astounding, especially considering that he only wrote Exodus in Confluence at sixteen. Plot-wise, Loney is a genius, but that’s all I’ll say for fear of ruining the adrenaline rush that will leave readers reeling.

But these elements were not even the best part about Loney’s novella. Lurking beneath his story is a highly insightful commentary on modern society’s departure from its own humanity, and it’s enough to send shockwaves through any reader’s system. I loved it, especially because it serves both as an observation of the futile violence that is obliterating our world, and as a warning of what is to come if we don’t prevent it.

This is a phenomenal story that everybody needs to read.

~Thank you to Wes Florentine from Verona Booksellers for providing me with the opportunity to review this novella.~

(Not really, but you get the idea.)

Rating: 5/5

Recommended to: Anybody and everybody.

The Last Word

If all that wasn’t enough to convince you that you should read this novella, I have three more reasons:

1.   It’s amazing.

2.   It will only take you 90 minutes to read.

3.  Zombies.

‘The Accident Season’ by Moira Fowley-Doyle

Book details

Genre: YA, Magical Realism

Publisher: Corgi Childrens

ISBN: 9780552571302

Synopsis

It's the accident season, the same time every year. Bones break, skin tears, bruises bloom.

The accident season has been part of seventeen-year-old Cara's life for as long as she can remember. Towards the end of October, foreshadowed by the deaths of many relatives before them, Cara's family becomes inexplicably accident-prone. They banish knives to locked drawers, cover sharp table edges with padding, switch off electrical items - but injuries follow wherever they go, and the accident season becomes an ever-growing obsession and fear.

But why are they so cursed? And how can they break free?

[From Goodreads]

Review

This novel is flawless.

I feel like Moira Fowley-Doyle grabbed my hand tight and led me through the darkest shadows of myself to rediscover the wild part of my soul. Reading The Accident Season made me feel alive – it was like she wove a spell through her words that made me want to read and live recklessly. All at once, I wanted to run outside and look for the magic in the world, because finishing her novel helped me to believe it was out there somewhere.

No other book has made me feel that way in a very long time.

Darkness seems to pulse through Fowley-Doyle’s characters. They are dangerous, they are broken, but they’re also so real. They are lost, tearing up their own lives in a misguided attempt to find their place in the world. Although Cara narrates the entire novel, I felt as though I knew each and every character personally, and in part that’s what made this novel so utterly haunting. Charming, wild Bea who radiates energy and fire; calculating Alice whose past clutches onto her present; quiet Sam, afraid of himself and hiding in the shadows; and Cara, who chases after nightmares. And their relationship is also just brilliant. Despite their striking differences and individual problems, they never fail to link arms and march on through their pain.

Oh, and the pain they suffer through… Cara, Sam, Alice and their mother Melanie become accident-prone every October. Nobody understands why, but the accident season can be deadly, and this time Bea’s tarot cards have predicted an outcome even worse than the usual cuts, bruises and broken bones. Initially, I found this premise enthralling, but the author weaves in contemporary, mysterious and paranormal features that made my head spin in the best way possible. I’d never delved into Magical Realism as a genre before, but it’s delightfully bizarre – a dark and twisted reality is created by treating magical occurrences as the norm. Cara catches glimpses of her own imaginings in the real world, but the author writes as though they are actually there. Paranormal creatures come out to play in the dark of the night, but while they could simply be metaphors there’s a suggestion they’re real. The effect is exhilarating.

But The Accident Season becomes a masterpiece because of its author’s writing style. The experience of reading it was simply intoxicating – I felt like I was drunk on a magical concoction of sadness and ethereal beauty. The story flowed as smoothly yet wildly as dancers in a trance. There’s really no other way to describe it. Fowley-Doyle’s words are raw with emotion, tumbling across the page recklessly and effortlessly, but simultaneously stunning in its poetic imagery. “Singed, singe, sing, sang, song. Our pain is a song. It opens us out and drops pebbles of truth inside us and then it sews us back up again.”

The Accident Season is wonderfully weird, with equal parts creepiness and beauty woven into its storyline.  Moira Fowley-Doyle’s writing is wildly addictive, and I can’t wait to read her next novel.

Rating: 5/5

Recommended to: Readers with a forgotten dark side.

The Last Word

I don’t know how this book doesn’t have a five-star average rating on Goodreads. It’s one of those novels I’m going to force all my friends to read. I’ll probably reread a billion times. It’s absolutely incredible.

I mean, look at this:

“Rain falls on the keys like it’s going to type out its own secrets. I would read them aloud but I don’t speak the language of the rain. I’m not even sure I can understand the river any more. It roars on beside me but it doesn’t whisper my secrets back at me, and it doesn’t call my name. Maybe it never really did.”

Just beautiful.

'A Court of Thorns and Roses' by Sarah J. Maas

Book details

Genre: YA Fantasy (with a few New Adult elements)

Publisher: Bloomsbury

ISBN: 9781408857861

Synopsis

A thrilling, seductive new series from New York Times bestselling author Sarah J. Maas, blending Beauty and the Beast with faerie lore.

When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast-like creature arrives to demand retribution for it. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she only knows about from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not an animal, but Tamlin—one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled their world.

As she dwells on his estate, her feelings for Tamlin transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie and warning she's been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But an ancient, wicked shadow grows over the faerie lands, and Feyre must find a way to stop it... or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.

Perfect for fans of Kristin Cashore and George R. R. Martin, this first book in a sexy and action-packed new series is impossible to put down!

[From Goodreads]

Review

I’m struggling to find words that will accurately describe the sheer extent to which this novel destroyed me. I'm broken inside. But I loved it. I love Sarah J. Maas, and I love everything about her writing – her characters, her fantasy worlds, her enthralling stories. Honestly, although I’ve read a few negative reviews, I cannot find a single fault with A Court of Thorns and Roses.

Perhaps this is because I didn’t enter Maas’s world expecting to read the perfect retelling of Beauty and the Beast – in fact, I almost forgot that it was supposed to be a retelling until I was about a third of the way through. Maas loosely winds some elements of the classic tale into her own storyline, but she’s warped and altered it so much that it is now entirely her own. Strangely enough, that makes her novel even more appealing to me – I have more interest in reading a unique tale with subtle recognizable elements than a book relying on the exact framework of the classic story.

One thing I do have to shine the spotlight on is Maas’s characterization. Sometimes I wonder if the reason that her novels seem to surpass all other fantasy works is because her heroines are not only kickass, but entirely human in their flaws and emotions. It’s magical how characters like Celaena and Fayre will stay in my mind for ages after I’ve finished reading their stories. I want these women in real life, and I kinda want to be them, too. (Also, hello Tamlin. Please magically materialise into my life right now.)

A Court of Thorns and Roses is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read. It ruined me. I fell in love with its smooth, lyrical words and the way it moved. Then it ripped a hole in my chest and tore out my heart, lighting it on fire and grinding it to dust before grinning sheepishly and running away. 

Rating: 5/5

Recommended to: Fans of Throne of Glass and George R. R. Martin.

The Last Word

These are my reactions throughout the novel, expressed in gifs, because nothing else will accurately portray my emotions.

Buying the book:

Reading the first page:

Feyre:

Tamlin:

Amarantha:

Rhysand:

Towards the end:

The actual end:

Realising the sequel comes out in MAY:

‘Church of Marvels’ by Leslie Parry

Book details

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: HarperAvenue

ISBN: 0062367552

View on Goodreads.

Synopsis

New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.

Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her.

A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both.

As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments-a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.

Review

Part of me wants to ramble on and on about what a wonderful piece of literature this is. Every miniature aspect of the novel is crafted with the detail and care of a genius creating her most phenomenal masterpiece, and the end result is extraordinary. I was constantly caught between an urgent need to devour every morsel of the story, and an overwhelming desire to savor every twist and turn of the plot, committing to memory each character so that I could revisit their stories in my mind over and over again.

The other part of me wants to throw myself off a building, because Parry’s plot twists are toxic. My nerves are fried, and I have exhausted my body’s capacity for emotional attachment to anything. I cannot count the number of times I had to close the book, put it aside (very carefully) and take a long, long walk just to catch my breath and calm down. My heart was racing that fast.

I can’t bring myself to say anything more, because I might collapse into a puddle of tears about the sheer depth of my love and hatred for this novel. Love because it changed my life, and hatred because it destroyed it, too.

Rating: 5/5

Recommended to: fans of The Night Circus, The Palace of Curiosities, Frog Music.

The Last Word

Just to put it all in perspective, Church of Marvels makes me want to change all my other five-star ratings four stars.

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‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’ by E. Lockhart

Book details

Genre: YA Fiction

Publisher: Hot Key Books

ISBN: 9781471404405

View on Goodreads.

Synopsis

Frankie Landau-Banks attends one of the most privileged schools in the country.

She is popular, cute and funny.

Her main preoccupation is the gorgeous Matthew Livingston.

But that’s not all there is to Frankie.

She’s also smart.

Then Frankie discovers Matthew has been keeping secrets from her.

What will she do to get even? How far will she go?

It’s up to Frankie…

Review

I started reading The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks with relatively low expectations. I’d been looking for a lighthearted, mildly entertaining novel to help my brain recover from PESD (Post Exam Stress Disorder) and stumbled across the paperback on my sister’s bookshelf. Funnily enough, I didn’t even register that it was by E. Lockhart until I was about ten pages in, and by then I’d already kissed the rest of my plans for the day goodbye.

I should’ve learned from We Were Liars that one should never underestimate E. Lockhart’s ability to turn a seemingly ordinary teen love story into a novel that can practically rip the entire world to shreds.

There’s so much I want to say, but I’ll try and limit it to two main points:

1. The story, in isolation, is brilliant.

At first glance, Lockhart’s novel seems like yet another story about a teenage girl’s jealousy-driven revenge rampage on her lying boyfriend, in which she cuts holes in his favourite T-shirts and basically acts like Taylor Swift in her Blank Space music video.

Yeah, it has absolutely nothing to do with that. Replace the emotional wreck of a teenage drama queen with an ambitious mastermind, and then throw in some genius pranks, infiltration and a secret society of pompous teenage boys. Then wrap it all up in a beautiful little package of expert plotting and an inimitable narrative style, and you get a breathtaking novel that deserves every award it’s won.

2. Lockhart’s subtle social commentaries made my life.

The dark little commentaries in this novel are pure perfection. And if there’s one thing I absolutely love in a YA novel directed at middle to upper class teenage girls, it’s a social commentary that will make them think.

In this case, Lockhart deals with feminism and patriarchy in a predominantly white upper-class setting, but she writes about it in such a way that younger girls might finally be able to understand the reasoning behind feminist attitudes. Frankie, at fifteen, questions the sexist attitudes and double standards at her school. For her, it’s not enough to combat male power (like the all-boys secret society) with attempts to establish all-female power – she wants to infiltrate sexist institutions and demolish them from within. She questions and challenges the way in which boys see her, because she doesn’t want to have to pretend to be an air-headed piece of arm-candy just because she’s a woman. But then Frankie begins to act, and the results are as inspiring as they are destructive.

E. Lockhart is steadily emerging as a prominent YA author, and rightfully so. Evidently, she has something to say through her novels (which are essentially some of the most well-written YA books on the shelves right now) and I, for one, am beyond prepared to listen.

Rating: 5/5

Recommended to: All teenage girls and boys everywhere.

The Last Word

This quote is probably going to become my new mantra:

“It is better to be alone, she figures, than to be with someone who can’t see who you are. It is better to lead than to follow. It is better to speak up than stay silent. It is better to open doors than to shut them on people. She will not be simple and sweet. She will not be who people tell her she should be. That Bunny Rabbit is dead.”