When it’s Christmas and the discounts keep coming, I keep buying. This holiday season, I went back home from college for a month and came home to a bunch of Barnes and Noble coupons!
At first, I was excited, but then I started to wonder how many physical coupons and discounts I must have missed while I was in college. *Insert anger* What if stuff is still being sent to my house while I’m back at my college apartment three hours away? Even thinking about it is making my insides cringe with despair at the potential for all those discounts going to waste.
I can well assure you that I definitely did not let these holiday coupons go to waste as I’ve collected three news books over the holidays.
“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man,
and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”
Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life.
Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood.
But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.
This was the first book I ended up purchasing while my semester was wrapping up and the holiday discounts just started to come through. When I picked up this book, I assumed that it is going to be a very deep book but somewhat of a quick read as the book appeared to be quite short. I was also pretty excited that it is a stand alone as I love collecting good stand alone books that I can flip through and reread without a hassle. This book though is definitely not short. It’s quite deceiving in how short it looks but the pages are very thin and the margins are quite small so I’ll probably be reading this book for quite a while so I can properly indulge into the intricate world Novik has drawn up.
Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.
And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him
so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.
Jude was seven when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.
To win a place at the Court, she must defy him–and face the consequences.
As Jude becomes more deeply embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, she discovers her own capacity for trickery and bloodshed. But as betrayal threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.
This book was a little treat for myself from myself for my birthday. I’ve never really read much of the faerie world and I’m thoroughly interested in the political atmosphere that people strongly associate with both these creatures and this story. This book is very much overhyped and after hearing and reading all about the hype for this series, I’m not going to go in with a lot of expectations. From what I’ve gleaned from other reviews, there are some common tropes present in the story and that some of the plot events are somewhat predictable but never having read about fairies before, I don’t think I’ll be bothered too much about the tropes. Whenever I’m going into new genres or themes that I’ve never read about before, my reading experience is usually not that affected by any present tropes. Also, I’ve heard that the main character is pretty unlikeable and I think is meant to be unlikeable so I will definitely be taking this into account when I pick up this book.
Jo Montfort is beautiful and rich, and soon–like all the girls in her class–she’ll graduate from finishing school and be married off to a wealthy bachelor. Which is the last thing she wants. Jo dreams of becoming a writer–a newspaper reporter.
Wild aspirations aside, Jo’s life seems perfect until tragedy strikes: her father is found dead. The story is that Charles Montfort shot himself while cleaning his revolver, but the more Jo hears about her father’s death, the more something feels wrong. And then she meets Eddie–a young, smart, infuriatingly handsome reporter at her father’s newspaper–and it becomes all too clear how much she stands to lose if she keeps searching for the truth. But now it might be too late to stop.
The past never stays buried forever. Life is dirtier than Jo Montfort could ever have imagined, and this time the truth is the dirtiest part of all.
This book is what I’d like to call a steal. I was perusing the sales page on Barnes and Noble and saw this book marked down tremendously on their site and when to grab it with my additional coupons. After having recently read the Stalking Jack the Ripper series and an adult thriller called The Dry, I’ve been really into murder mystery novels. Now this book though, is a perfect mix between two of my favorite genres and I’m sensing a trope that I know I’m going to thoroughly enjoy as well. Anything that has to do with historical fiction and a little bit of romance and a little bit of mystery has me hooked right away. I also love the feel of this book, the cover is so smooth and yet so thick? I love myself a good paperback 😉