Tanya Lisle

Creative on a health break

Category: Reviews

  • Hot Chocolate Festival Reviews!

    So. There’s a hot chocolate festival happening in Vancouver right now. This would be fine, but I have a bit of a problem and I have been trying to hit as many of the places as I can. Some of them have been fantastic and some have been nearly impossible to get to, so I haven’t tried them yet. And, since no one asked for it, here’s my thoughts of the ones I’ve been to.

    49th Parallel – Dark Chocolate Love

    I do love a dark chocolate, and this one is delightfully dark. 49th Parallel was my favourite of last year’s very few hot chocolate festival drinks I’d tried, so I was looking forward to this years offering. ((It’s also not far from the office, which is helpful)) It is made with cocoa powder, though, so there is a little bit of that grainy-ness to it that comes with not having someone carefully stir it as the milk is being heated up, but it’s not that bad.

    The first time they were out of the doughnut, but it wasn’t that much of a detriment. They have these doughnuts year round, so they aren’t that incredibly special of a treat to go along with it.

    Bel Cafe – Prettier in Pink

    I am a sucker for anything floral, so this one with the rose and fruity tastes was right up my alley. It’s quite sweet, which is a given since it’s white chocolate, but there’s still a good amount of flavour there to latch onto. It isn’t very chocolatey, though, which is unfortunate. It might have been nicer as a milk or dark chocolate instead of the white, but then it wouldn’t have the same aesthetic, so…

    This one came with a macaron that I was not a huge fan of, mostly because I don’t like the non-cream fillings that they chose. The jammy stuff just doesn’t do it for me. Your milage may vary, though.

    Soirette – Mining for Vibranium

    Do you like black things? I am suspicious of any food that is black. ((Activated charcoal, the thing that makes things black, tends to also interact very badly with medications)) Still, I am more suspicious of pea white chocolate, so I went with the black drink and truffle instead.

    The drink is more sweet than anything else. Some of that is likely due to the rim, which is covered in ganache and sprinkles, but also possibly due to the mixing. I found that the drink tasted different the further down I got, with a lot of the sweetness pooling at the bottom and a lot of the chocolate being near the top, which is a strange shift that I wasn’t expecting.

    The truffle was fine. It comes with a chocolate truffle, which isn’t really anything special, although it is pretty. Overall, it’s kind of an average experience.

    East Van Roasters – The Umami Experience

    So first off, don’t go down Hastings to get here. I know better, but my ability to pay attention to where I’m going and not get lost are both awful.

    To start, this is a drinking chocolate as opposed to a hot chocolate. An important distinction to anyone who has had drinking chocolate before. It’s warm, significantly heavier and thicker, and impossible to drink quickly. This one was a little salty and strangely meaty in a way I can’t quite describe, but still really nice. It felt homey eating it, even though it was wrecking my insides the whole time. ((Have I mentioned I’m lactose intolerant?)) It’s one I think I would have enjoyed more with a friend, since it is intended as a much slower experience than the rest of them.

    This is paired with chocolate wasabi almonds, which mercifully aren’t too spicy. There’s a nice flavour to them and they go really well with the drinking chocolate. It even comes with cute chopsticks that you definitely aren’t going to use at all. They are only for the aesthetic. And I’m okay with that.

    Cadeaux Bakery – Cocoanut

    I don’t normally choose the vegan option voluntarily, but at this point I was in pain from the amount of dairy I’d consumed. And this one had a few strikes against it already because I do not like coconut and avoid it normally.

    However. However. It was actually pretty nice. The dark chocolate is a nice counter to how sweet the coconut milk was, and it didn’t have a coconut-y aftertaste until I was a good way through the drink. Of all three drinks Id had that day, this one was my favourite. Possibly because it didn’t hurt me like the others had.

    They also gave me a vegan cookie which was less nice because it was also coconut and this time I could taste it. Also, it was all in togo stuff instead of the cute for here dishes I saw around me.

    Mink – Who you calling a conehead?

    Aside from the presentation, it’s honestly nothing special. It’s a standard hot chocolate served in an ice cream cone that has a very thick layer of chocolate inside of it so that it doesn’t melt through it to the wafer. It was nice, but it’s less than a full cup of hot chocolate and not really worth the price.

    Dishonorable Mention: Perverted – Young, Dumb, and full of Kumquat

    I have had so much trouble with Perverted to the point where it wasn’t open when we went to get it. A coworker ended up getting one of these and, well, she wasn’t impressed. I’ll skip the tale of their service, which is always a bit of a crapshoot, and right to the drink. It was white, weirdly thick and lumpy in appearance, and apparently tasted of steamed milk that had read about white chocolate on Wikipedia once. The merge that came with it tasted like sugar and nothing more. So… skip.

    Anyone try  the other ones? How is it?

  • School of Sight Review

    I picked up School of Sight back when I was at VCon directly from the author! Always exciting, and it was a reward for me once NaNoWriMo was over to finally dig into it. And it was definitely worth the wait!

    The book is about someone who has discovered that they have the sight and is being brought into the world of vampires, fairies, and werewolves just as a strange new force has entered the fray and is picking off the supernatural community one by one. The way the world is revealed is really well done, with a lot of things being presented as matter of fact and the perspective character just trying to keep on top of it while being fully aware of how lost they are. And they aren’t the only one, given that they live with two roommates who, honestly, take the news that the world is magic a lot better than they do. 

    Also, for folks like me, there’s a romance in it but it’s incidental to the narrative. The story is not and never becomes about the romance, which makes me so very happy. 

    You may have noticed I’m using they pronouns. There’s a reason for this. I never noticed it while I was reading it, but the main character’s name and gender is never actually mentioned. From other cues in the text, I think they are a male named Jose, but that’s largely based on very small hints and I can’t be sure. ((I may have to ask the author if this was an intentional choice or if I just wasn’t paying enough attention.)) The book does generally have a good dose of queer content, which I like. 

    On the negative end, I did find that the pacing was great until the end when all of the things happened and there were some conveniences that could have been brought up earlier. ((Like everyone’s birthdays? You could have mentioned that earlier so it didn’t seem so out of left field. On the other hand, it was mostly used for raising stakes that were never going to happen, so…)) There were a few concepts that I feel could have been brought up earlier so that it wasn’t all piled in at the very end to help smooth out that transition a little. 

    Overall, though, the ending wasn’t enough to deter me. It was more that it could have been done better than it was a detriment to the story as a whole. And the rest of the story made up for it, along with the world building. It was a lot of fun and I’d suggest reading it, though be aware that you might run into some issues talking about it. 

    Get School of Sight now!

  • Blue Lily, Lily Blue Review

    Oh hey, the plot kicked back in! They’re actively doing things to find Glendower again, which is the main thrust of the series! Find the old dead Welsh king and then… something. Have a wish granted, gain is favour, I’m still not actually sure what they think is going to happen or why it will happen when they find the tomb.

    This book tries very hard to give Blue an arc outside of being in love with Gansey and it doesn’t quite land for me. It’s a lot of things happening to her to try and give her other things to do. Her mother is missing and it is something that she has to deal with. It could have been an arc but it kept feeling more like something she was reacting to than something she was part of. 

    And they gave Gansey a magic which no. He was going to be the one non-powered character bringing them together in the quest by his personality and his drive to do all this, but giving him the power to command things as an actual power tosses that out. 

    Adam and Ronan are fine. Adam is still a dick and being portrayed as not a dick. Ronan realizes he likes Adam in this book but, as he’s a male character, he had his character arc established outside of this relationship and he gets to have his own story that isn’t dependent on the love story and guys I do not care about Blue anymore and it makes me sad. 

    So let’s talk a little about the plot and structure of the series as a whole. Each of these books could conceivably be about a single character’s arc and how other people interact with that arc to further their own larger narrative. The first being Adam, second Ronan, this one Blue, and fourth will be about Gansey. Of those four book, only one has not been about the hunt for Glendower, which makes the beats of the series a little weird. 

    If there had been one more book in the series, I think the pacing might have been better. As it is, Blue Lily, Lily Blue feels like it was trying to cram in a lot of setup for the climax. ((And I remember the climax feeling very cluttered, so that doesn’t help)) There were new things introduced, including characters, that don’t really get much time to land properly. Like Henry Cheng and the “Vancouver crowd” which I will go on about in the next book. ((I am Asian. I am from Vancouver. I have thoughts.))

    Unfortunately, the pattern of Glendower, something else, Glendower, something else, Glendower couldn’t be maintained because it is only four books. If Noah were a more prominent character instead of being relegated to having as much screentime as an animal sidekick, it could have been a bit better paced as a series, but ultimately this is what we get. Which is fine. I liked it a lot more the first time around, though. 

    Get Blue Lily, Lily Blue on Amazon

  • Raven Boys Review

    I read this series before and I’m revisiting it now. I’m realizing that I’ve got different feelings about it this time than I did the first time, which happens. I’m looking at the formatting of the book for one ((And I don’t like it. For the record.)) and paying more attention to the structure and how the series itself is constructed. Which is interesting, loose, and a little on the hybrid pantser/plot side of things.

    So the book itself is about Gansey. The back of it claims it’s about Blue, but she is honestly treated as an observer to the series, watching as three out of the four boys go about their lives with an easy out if she ever doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. She has the most interesting setting around her, with her psychic mother and her being a battery for the supernatural rather than having any psychic abilities herself, and she wants to have an experience that will make her feel more like the rest of her family.

    Gansey is the centre of it all, but also the least interesting part in the cast of everyone else. He is a rich kid looking for Glendower, an long dead Welsh king that has for some reason been buried somewhere near Henrietta, the town this all takes place in. He and his friends go to Algionby Academy, and the book is less about this story than it is about the individual characters.

    Which works well for me, because some of the individual characters are far more interesting than this idea of wake up dead king and he’ll grant you a wish. Ronan is a main focus, though he is never a perspective character, for instance. Whether this is to shroud him in mystery or because he just doesn’t have much to do besides set up how others see him in this book, I’m not sure, but just using this book to establish the resident badass with a cute pet raven and tragic backstory is fine by me.

    And then there’s Adam, who really needs a bit of a trigger warning on him. He’s also got a tragic backstory, but you actually get to see it unfold in this book. He’s a poor kid on a scholarship and working many jobs to cover the rest of the cost and comes from an abusive household. You get to see how that unfolds over the course of the book and probably should come with a trigger warning for anyone who may find the scenario familiar.

    The main plot running through it turns out to be about the sidekick character, Noah, who is just… there. I love him, but narratively he’s serving as motivation to move the plot forward, and structurally the plot only serves to make the characters interact with one another. It’s not ultimately treated with as much importance as the individual characters and what they are doing.

    Which is to say, I still really like the book, but I’m having a lot more fun this time around taking apart the story on a structural level and examining the pieces of it. Bring to decide if it was really meant to be four books for the series, or if it was made that way because of editorial demand. This book is, in large part, just set up for the rest of the series, with more time spent establishing where the characters came from and where they stand as opposed to telling the core story about the kids trying to find the old king. And I’m wondering if that’s because she wanted to make the series as long as she could manage, or if it was actually because that’s how long the story she wanted to tell was.

    Check it out on Amazon

  • Blue Magic Review

    I don’t think I really liked Blue Magic. It’s not that it was a bad book, but there were just a lot of little things that rubbed me wrong until eventually t all came together into this box. The elements I liked from the first book were less prominent and the ideas I didn’t much care for were expanded upon which is unfortunate.

    For instance, there’s the whole thing about fairyland where the vita has frozen everything? That bit I didn’t care about? That is half of the book, or so it seems. Maybe only a third. And there’s characters in it that I just do not care if anything happens to them, good or bad. There’s a man meant to be a romantic rival and I just don’t care at all.

    Speaking of, there’s a lot of romance in this book. Astrid is meant to be with a guy and because it’s predestined, there’s a lot of mentions that they will end up together with no actual developing of that relationship. Which I’ve learned tired me even more than romance, and I have talked about how I feel about romance in books.

    The story is also very different from what the first book was. Where the first was framed as how the world came to be ruined, this one is meant to be much grander, but there’s more about what’s happening than the actual character motivations and actions that I’m much more interested in. Instead of being in the story, I feel like I’m watching it from a distance and I can’t really make a connection with any of the characters.

    Speaking of the characters, there’s a whole bunch of new ones. I hope you like characters that have names and single personality traits because there’s too many of them in one book to let them have full personalities. Someone died and I have no idea which one it wasI. Apparently it was sad, but I only know that there was a camel and he was important, but I don’t know who he was. What he did. Why I should care as a reader. I don’t even know his name.

    Everything seems to be done as a means to an end. Astrid is a chess master and socially inept and incapable of really helping herself in a lot of scenarios. It’s an idealized version of what might actually happen, where everyone’s just okay with the powerful woman being in charge with the most minimal argument. And, as contrast, a competent woman being in charge in fairyland, but having an uprising that kills her.

    While I do like a lot of the ideas here, I wasn’t really a fan of the execution and it didn’t feel like a sequel to the same book Maybe taken separately this would be fine, but it’s not what I liked about the first. If you want to find out what happens, maybe pick it up from the library.

  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Review

    I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is bad. Like, really bad. And yet, I still flew to New York and saw it on Broadway.

    You guys. The show is so good.

    The acting really does make the whole thing so much better. A lot of lines that seemed flat or off in the script were delivered so well and made it work so much better than it ever did on paper. The characters come to life and become far less flat, and Scorpius in particular ((was my favourite!)) was so well acted and portrayed. The screaming was a choice that I am totally behind, and his interactions with Albus and the other characters was fantastic.

    Even the adults, while I don’t agree with a lot of the script decisions, were well done and I loved the way they were portrayed. They managed to retain enough of their book-selves in the portrayal that it didn’t feel too strange while I was watching.

    And the special effects! There were some great magic sections in this show. It wasn’t just the wands lighting up, but the transformations of characters from one to another, to quick changes, to characters appearing from nothing, to that absolutely fantastic time travel effect. The sound and lighting are things I don’t normally think of when I’m watching a performance, but they did such a good job with the whole production.

    The thing I expected the least were the dance numbers. No singing, but there was a bit of interesting choreography, and the fact that almost every robe swish was punctuated by this sound effect and, well, I really loved it.

    It is a very long show, though. We were up in the nosebleeds, but for about 5 hours of show, $100 is not bad at all. We could see everything, even the pool that appeared on stage for part of the show. Honestly, it was such a good show. If you’re anywhere near Broadway, even if you didn’t much care for the script, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still a show worth checking out!

  • Shadow and Bone Review

    I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for ages. I got it entirely because I liked the cover, namely because it doesn’t have any of the things that I dislike about YA covers. ((I will rant at length about the female without a face standing there while vaguely interesting things happen around her covers at length if you give me a chance)) I was a little iffy on it because it is a first person narrative, which I have been hesitant about, and I’ll get into that in a bit, but first, thoughts on the book!

    Shadow and Bone follows Alina in what feels like a fantasy version of Russia ((Apparently this is intentional)) as she discovers that she’s not just an orphan in the army, but one of the most unique Grisha ((Wizards, essentially)) alive. She gets whisked away to a place where she can train her magic while falling into the intrigue of the court and trying to learn as much as she can to help The Darkling, the most powerful of them all. The more she learns about the Darkling, however, the more she realizes that she’s in over her head.

    There’s a lot of really interesting world building. A lot of it is done in the language, which just feels Russian somehow. The setting feels like a fantasy universe that’s not too far off from our own, more like what might happen if there was magic out there and it were a couple centuries ago. I’m not entirely sure what the Grisha are since it doesn’t really go into whether they get to choose their specialties or if they are born with them, but I did like how they structured a lot of the universe.

    And I do find myself liking Alina, even if I wish she were less… well, less of a YA heroine. Unlike the rest of the court, she doesn’t care about how pretty she is and there’s a weird focus on how pretty other characters are in comparison to her. There was a nice break where she allowed herself to enjoy being pretty and dress up in clothes for fun, but there’s a strange focus she has on the appearance of other people that just rubbed me the wrong way. Other than that she was proactive and had a strong voice in the narrative that I liked, but there’s just a few things about her that bothered me a bit.

    I also had trouble taking a few things seriously. The Darkling never gets an actual name, and it’s strange that I’m supposed to feel like this guy is anything but a kid who picked a title for himself. I found myself waiting for someone to try taking him down a peg by using his real name, but it never happened. I’m also about 70% sure the twist with Baghra didn’t actually make sense. Like, why keep her there? Why doesn’t she take a more proactive role given what she knows? Just… why?

    But this book helped me figure out what it was about the first person narrative that bothered me so much as a kid. See, in the past I always felt that I was supposed to be that main character. Given that the stories I was reading at the time with a first person narrator were largely bland women that made it easy for the audience to slide into, and that these female heroines had mostly romance arcs, I hated the experience. In this book ((And Percy Jackson, actually)) Alina has a personality of her own and it felt like I was being told the story instead of along for the ride and supposed to be part of it.

    At some point, I think I will check out the rest of the series. Despite the issues I had, I still want to know what happens next.

     

    Check out Shadow and Bone

  • The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray Review

    I’ve mentioned this book to some people, but let me talk about how much I enjoyed it. I’m not just saying that because I happen to know Latimer and I’m very happy to have her book finally in my hands.

    The story follows Bryony Gray, a young girl taken in by a family that doesn’t much like her but does appreciate what she can do for them. She’s been made to paint portraits by an abusive aunt and uncle who have taken her in and secluded in the attic where she can only look out at the next house and imagine she could be friends with the children who live there.

    Well, until the portraits she has been painting are linked to a series of disappearances. Then she finds that not only have some of the things she’s been seeing are a real danger, but she gets to break out and actually meet the neighbours who help her deal with her paintings and find out more about who her parents really were.

    Middle grade horror does not get enough love as a genre and Latimer does it wonderfully. There’s a good focus on the adventure with the horror elements being more of an addition. It’s also not that sort of horror that you find in the books for older folks. Not descriptions of blood splatter or gruesome murders but the more unsettling things that are different from the way they should be told through the lens of a character where these things are not entirely unusual.

    Plus it’s got some nice queer representation! There’s nothing official, mind you. It’s middle grade, after all. And traditionally published. A fully realized couple was not going to happen, but there’s enough in there that I read it as very obvious, even if others are reading it as subtle.

    I’d very much recommend it. It’s a lot of fun and, as middle grade, a pretty easy read. There’s a lot of interesting ideas in it, and it’s told fantastically.

    Also I want a sequel. ((It doesn’t need a sequel, but I want one anyway))

    Get The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray here!

  • Rise and Run Review

    This is not something I would have normally picked up now that I’ve read it, but I think I’m going to give more books like this a chance. RJ Plant paints a really interesting future, one controlled by organizations looking for a quiet domination of a populace via espionage and biological warfare in the most unpredictable ways.

    It honestly took me a little to get into it. There is a whole universe that needs to be set up, from a world that has been changed by the war to the differences between what’s happened in Ireland and the US, and it’s done very well. ((And there’s an organization called GDI, which took me ages to take seriously…)) But I knew the mind switching was coming up and I really love a two minds fighting for dominance over one body story.

    Felix is a hard character to get behind once you meet Conor, the brother who’s been trapped inside Felix’s body. I will profess a preference to Conor, given that he’s spent his life watching everything his brother’s done and never been allowed to come out. When he does come out and we start getting answers that bring about more questions, particularly about just who is behind everything and what the purpose of his chimerism is. The execution of the chimerism and the reasoning behind it is fascinating and a spoiler, so I will refrain from talking in too much detail about it here.

    Overall, it’s a really entertaining read with some good twists and turns. The world is uniquely set up to make Conor and Felix’s struggles that much more interesting and keep the stakes in the narrative high. I’d definitely suggest giving it a shot!

    Check it out on Amazon!

  • Revenant by Kat Richardson

    First and foremost, I refuse to accept that this is the end of the series. As an end to the arc, it’s perfectly servicable and plenty interesting. As the end of the books all together, no.

    This time, Harper ends up going to Portugal to deal with Purlis and one of Carlos’ old enemies. The whole story revolved largely around Carlos instead of either Harper or Quinton, getting into how he became a vampire in the first place and taking a look at his sordid past while trying to stop the bone mages from bringing forth a dragon that would destabalize Europe.

    I’m against it as an end to the series mostly because it revolves around a secondary character rather than our lead. I still have plenty of questions about Quinton and Harper to be answered, ((And a desire to have Harper dance as a plot point because for how often I’m told about it, I’m almost never shown)) and instead the book goes off about the vampire who was the crutch for the first bit of the series. While it was nice to have some more Carlos and get a bit more information on him, as the final book in a series is not where I’d want it.

    I could probably also do without any more Carlos/Harper moments ever. The dialogue between the two felt very off somehow and this whole Carlos thinking Harper is the best thing ever that he would also like to have sex with turned out to be really awkward more than anything else. I don’t know what to make of it, but I felt like it probably could have been cut.

    Quinton, on the other hand, only brought up friendship once! It was awful and then the issue finally dropped. At last. I hope that when the series continues, ((And for all my complaining, I do hope it does)) that never comes up again. Ever. It’s my least liked subplot in anything I’ve read recently and I really didn’t want it handled so directly in a book about adults. None of these sounded like conversations I’ve had with other people. No more of them.

    I was actually really surprised that so little of the book ended up being about Quinton or Purlis. It might have been his organization, but for all he was built up, Purlis didn’t actually do much in the book. He delegated the torture to someone else. He might have caught Harper initially, but she kept getting passed off to the bone mages. He kind of reacted to the soul link in that he felt it now and then when Harper got injured, but so little was about Quinton and Purlis that I was kind of disappointed when he was taken care of at the end.

    Speaking of, I can’t wait for Quinton and Harper to finally be married because it means that everyone stops saying spouse-in-soul or coming up with other married-not-married terms for them. When they elope ((You know that’s how it will go down)) then we can get back to everything back to being about Harper nearly getting killed and saving her damsel of a husband. ((Who still needs to get beat up so bad that Harper comes to his rescue. Why has this not happened yet?))

    I think that’s most of why I’m a bit unsatisfied at this point. I thought that this was the end of the series, but there’s so much left unresolved. The epilogue consisted of a lot of telling about what happened to the smattering of characters, left out a bunch of other characters, and we get the answer to a marriage proposal. I don’t even get a dose of ferret in the book when Chaos ((The ferret)) has appeared in literally every other one. I don’t know what happens to her.

    Still, there were good parts too. I did like meeting Quinton’s sister and her kids. And it was nice to see the Danzingers again one last time, even if we only get to see them the once. Mara even got to do something and give us a nice reminder of how far Harper has come. The magic, again, was nicely done ((Even if that bone swapping was very convenient)) and it didn’t wait until the half way point to pick up the pace. When things were moving, they were fantastic and there were a lot of little subplots and research that were interesting.

    It’s just not a final book. Labyrinth was a final book. It was about Harper, about being a Greywalker and about what her role was in the story. This was the end of a story arc where Carlos stepped in and helped save the day again with a “Stay Tuned for More Adventures!” at the end.

    I’m going to hold out hope for a new book and a new arc one of these days. I liked the series and I want a proper conclusion to it eventually. I’m just going to have to think of Revenant as a book that ended on a “To be continued…” for now and hope that eventually there is more.

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