Tanya Lisle

Tag: urban fantasy

  • Vicious Review

    Today in working through the TBR pile, some super villain stuff! Because I need to get a bit more up to date on modern super hero books as research for Cloned Evil.

    Vicious follows Victor Vale on his quest for revenge. In college, he and his roommate, Eli Cardale, attempted to give themselves super powers and make themselves ExtraOrdinary, or EOs. They succeeded, but Victor ended up spending the better part of the next decade in jail while Eli went on a quest to murder every EO he could find.

    Neither Eli or Victor come across as good people, and I am a fan of it. Victor is selfish and is ultimately driven by his obsession with Eli. His journey to get powers was largely based around his need to be an equal to Eli, and his subsequent revenge has him pointing all of his attention on him.

    Conversely, Eli’s motivation is one of a twisted self-righteousness. He thinks he’s been given this power by God and he is doing good work, even as he’s going around and murdering people who have not done anything wrong. He doesn’t really seem interested in Victor so much as the idea of what he represents.

    Other characters are more sympathetic. Both of Victor’s companions, the small child and the thug with a heart of gold, are lovely people that help temper his darker impulses and provide a little levity and perspective to the two leads.

    The world building is interesting and there’s a feel to it like this is the start of a larger universe. I don’t know if that’s the intent, but with the way the exposition goes into the theory and detail of how someone becomes an EO and why their powers manifest one way or another, it feels like setup for a much larger series than the one that’s being told right now.

    The narrative is also a little jumpy. It flickers back and forth in time, telling many distinct stories on top of one another to give you a fuller picture of everything that is happening. It makes sense together, though there are moments where a chapter will end and you’ll have to wait a while before the action picks back up again.

    Overall, though, I really liked the story. Definitely worth at least checking out if you like superhero stuff on the darker side.

    Get it on Amazon!

  • Dying for a Living Review

    Today in I have had this on my TBR list forever and I’m finally getting around to reading it, Dying for a Living finally made it! The more I’m going through this list, the more I’m realizing I should have gotten to more of these books sooner.

    The story follows a woman named Jesse, a death replacement agent with a very particular ability. A small percentage of the population has a rare genetic ability to survive death and to stop someone else from dying. Jesse works for the NRD, an organization that arranges this service to the highest paying clients who they have found are going to die soon. Unfortunately, Jesse gets set up to be killed permanently on a job and the story follows her and her friends as they try to figure out why, and who. And, of course, her past comes back to haunt her. 

    Jesse is a total dick and I love it. I have a thing for protagonists who are terrible as people, but who are that way for ultimately understandable reasons. She’s under stress for the entire story, and deals with it by lashing out at the people around her, being sarcastic, and making poor choices. It all feels very realistic, especially as you get into her backstory and how she came to be in this position in the first place. 

    And now I’m going to talk about the bisexual love triangle. I never felt that it intruded on the narrative, but that I have thoughts about it as a whole is a pretty good sign. Namely, Ally deserves someone much better than Jesse, let Jesse just be with the bland but also kind of an asshole Lane. 

    Overall, it was a really fun story, even though the ending felt a little… well, given that this is a series I guess it had to end that way, but I would have liked a little more consequence at the end. I still liked it and the rest of the series looks like it has a lot of great promise to it.

    Get it on Amazon!
  • Which Path You Take is out!

    Which Path You Take is out!

    Which Path You Take, book 7 of The Looking Glass Saga, is out! Digital for now, I’ll let you know as soon as the paperback is ready!

    Alice might have won, but she was far from finished.

    The Bandersnatch is gone and Alice is free of the bet they made. Adrianna is awake. Wonderland may be spiraling further into madness but at least with school back in session Alice can try to get her life back to some semblance of normal. 

    Adrianna, however, is not the same girl she was before. Since she woke up, she is much more aware of the truth behind Alice’s lies and more determined help free Alice of Wonderland’s grasp, whether Alice wants it or not. 

    Get Which Path You Take now!

  • The Black Veins Review

    Okay, so a pitch of a no romance story of any kinds a hook for me. But this now was also an urban fantasy one, a road trip1 and with a title that sounds like we’re getting a little touch of horror elements? I’m checking it out at least.

    The story flows Blythe, a young woman in a magical family with no magic herself. This isn’t a strange thing or treated like it might be an issue, because she knows she is a Guardian, though we don’t know what that means. She is not an outcast in her own family, but she’s moved around so much that she has trouble bonding with people, given that she always has that fear of leaving in the back of her mind. 

    And then it all goes to hell when her parents and little sisters are kidnapped. She’s whisked away as a Guardian to be brought into safe keeping and the adventure starts, with Blythe realizing that the people taking her to safety might not have her best interests at heart and the people who have kidnapped her family are not all they seem. She finds the rest of the Guardians and together they try to rescue her family from the Trident Republic, a rival magical…. Government, I guess. 

    The story is a lot of fun! With a large cast, I wouldn’t have blamed Monet for resorting to more stereotypes, but each of the main kids felt fleshed out and like real people, with their own lives outside of this strange situation they were pulled into and those lives reflected how they dealt with the struggles each of them had. Cords is the only one who I felt had a full character arc happen in the first book, but the rest are well on their way to their own paths of self discovery at the conclusion. 

    I do want to talk a little about how the diversity was handled in the book, because it feels notable. This is a very diverse cast both racially and in terms of queer representation. First off, it didn’t feel like a checklist like some other books I could mention. They all felt natural and like it was part of who they were instead of them being defined by it. 

    As an example, Blythe in particular is a bi black girl, and you never forget either of those. She’s not constantly referencing either thing, but she does state she’s bisexual early on. From that point on, you know every time she’s checking out another character2 you know it’s because she’s interested. And there’s little things that remind you that she’s black, such as her reaction to danger and casual mentions of her hair now and then. 

    This is the trend with everyone else in the cast. There’s the initial mention to make it clear, and then little reminders in the rest of the text so you don’t forget and so that it informs and elaborates on their character rather than being a constant reminder of how diverse the book is. Which, as you’ve probably guessed by now, is what I look for in my representation. 

    I will note that there was one thing that never quite clicked with me, and that was the tense. I do not like present tense. It’s a very small thing, but it was there and it was always a little jarring while reading for me. I know this is an issue for almost no one but me. 

    Anyway, I really liked the book! It was a lot of fun, the characters were interesting and believable, and the story was entertaining. I’m a bit sad the second book isn’t out yet, honestly. 

    Get it on Amazon!

    1. I need to start reading more road trip books for the next series [↩]
    2. Which doesn’t happen too often! It at no point gets distracting or detracts from the rest of the narrative! [↩]

  • Dreadful Company Review

    After how much fun I had with Strange Practice, it seemed only natural that I’d checkout the sequel! Because apparently there’s more than one!

    This book starts with Greta and Ruthvan in France attending a conference about supernatural medical practices.1 In pretty short order things go wrong in that Greta gets kidnapped and it takes a while to notice she’s missing thanks to people being conveniently called away and not thinking much about the woman at a conference not paying attention to her phone for a bit. Gradually, you learn that she’s been taken by a coven of vampires, the head of which has a grudge against Ruthvan, and that this is a pretty terrible coven in most respects. Partially because one is turning people without consent, and partially because another is summoning so many cute things that she’s causing the fabric of reality to grow thin. 

    I mean, worth it though. 

    This book was as much fun as the last one, I’m happy to say. It doesn’t suffer from second book syndrome in that it’s still a contained adventure that references previous events and builds on the characters. There are a few perspectives I didn’t care for initially, but it was good to have them in the narrative to help flesh out the universe and give the last few keys to the puzzle of what was going on. The story has so many disparate parts that you really don’t know until the end how they all fit together, but they do fit together pretty marvelously. 

    I also really like how the diversity is done in this universe. They exist and that’s it. It feels like the universe is diverse as opposed to a story where they are trying to hit a quota. They are there, you notice them, their actions are informed by their experiences, and then we focus on the vampires destroying reality that we need to call in the forces of hell to deal with. 

    It does, however, still have that other issue where it doesn’t sound like it’s taking place in the modern day. Every reference to cell phones and smartphones feels out of place because they all talk like they are from a very different era. It feels jarring, but I wonder if some of that is because it takes place in Europe. 

    Overall, I really enjoyed it! The series is a lot of fun so far and I’ll probably check out the third when it comes out. 

    Get it on Amazon!

    1. Which is actually a pretty fascinating world detail! [↩]

  • Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks Review

    It’s a strange day when Cole starts teleporting between doors. He could never do it before, and now that he is he doesn’t know how to deal with it. More than that, the cutest boy in school has decided that Cole is the one who he wants to talk to now that he’s questioning his sexuality.

    The second half of that would normally make me put the book down, but there’s ace rep in this book and I wanted to give it a chance, even if it’s only in a side character. And the first half was interesting enough that I wanted to see what was going on and how they dealt with it.

    The story is interesting. It is structured a little like a paranormal romance, with the bulk of the supernatural stuff happening in the last third of the book1 but it is interspersed decently throughout. I thought there were a few times when it could have come back into play a little sooner to make the personal drama and the supernatural stuff work a little more together and it felt less like everything happened all at once at the end. At least, introduce the concept of who the bad guys were a little earlier so they weren’t just looming mystery figures until the end, then reveal the secret society in the last couple chapters.

    With the background of the Rainbow Club, the sheer amount of representation that is in the book feels like it makes sense for the narrative. I really liked how they dealt with the different sexualities, the race stuff, the gender stuff, the disabilities in the book. Namely, they didn’t. The story was not about any of them, so they existed in the book without it stopping everything to explain what asexuality was, or enby or how you should be treating deaf people. They just existed in the story and when it was brought up, it was brought up in a way that makes sense.

    For instance, the love interest, Malik, has the exact same reaction to being ambiguously brown as I did as a kid. And I greatly appreciate it.

    The only time there’s any explaining is done in the context of the narrative. A character thinks they might like boys and girls, but is confused about the distinction about bi and pan. Which Cole doesn’t have an answer to, so he looks it up and asks about it. It makes sense in the context of the story.

    And, because I came here to see the ace character, I liked him a lot. Particularly in how it’s dealt with, namely that someone in the queer community had a problem with it which made him veer away from the community, and the bridges being repaired were done without much fanfare. The situation is more accurate to my experience, and the lack of focus on that resolution works well in the narrative because it isn’t his story. Alec’s story getting more attention than it did would have felt like a distraction to the main plot.

    I really enjoyed this book. The story of the teleporting through doors and how Cole dealt with it was interesting and Cole as a character is different than a lot of other ones I’ve been exposed to in the past. Namely, he’s not spontaneous2 and has multiple hobbies, which makes him feel much more rounded as a character. It’s a bit more romance-y than I typically like, but I didn’t feel like the romance was a distraction from the main plot, and I had fun with it overall.

    Get Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks on Amazon!

    1. No houses eating people or the ocean murdering anyone this time [↩]
    2. He bullet journals, which is another really interesting detail to the narrative [↩]

  • We are the Catalyst Review

    And once again, I pick up the second book in a series without reading the first! I am very good at this. This time, however, Tash McAdams themselves recommended starting here because I am obnoxious and asked for where they wanted me to start. So any problems I might have had was all their fault.

    However, there were no problems! This is the least second book-is of any second book I’ve read. And I meant hat in a good-yet-confused sort of way. There is a lot of rich world building done in this, inclusding a storyline that absolutely feels like it’s a sweeping epic, but the story is framed very much like the first in the series. The alternating perspectives include one character that is new to the world and we see through his eyes how the universe works, which is very much a first book pattern, and a more wizened character who is more familiar with the universe and explains her parts of the universe with familiarity.

    What I’m saying is that it’s written in such a way that I have no idea what came before it. And I’m intrigued.

    As for the book itself, it was a lot of fun! In that way I describe fun. On the one side, we follow Toby, who leaves his comfy life as a rich kid in the city only to be immediately mugged as soon as he leaves, have his finger cut off, and develop incredible super powers. On the other we follow Epsilon 17, who is a child soldier with incredible powers that has to track him down while at the same time really not wanting to find him at all.

    The story follows the two of them as they both struggle with the Institute, who want to catch Toby and do… something with him. The question mark is less interesting than the chase and how the story comes together. It’s well paced, not forgetting about the human element of the post-apocalyptic world, and it ends in a wonderful showdown between just who it should be between. In my opinion, anyway.

    I have a couple small issues with the book, but nothing that detracts from the experience of reading it. The prose is very dense, and there were a couple reveals at the end that felt like they wasn’t led up to enough, but overall it was a lot of fun and I would highly recommend checking it out.

  • 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.1 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.2

    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

    1. And I remember the climax feeling very cluttered, so that doesn’t help [↩]
    2. I am Asian. I am from Vancouver. I have thoughts. [↩]

  • Dream Thieves Review

    Dream Thieves is the second book in the Raven Cycle and I can see why Aiden1 likes it so much. It’s all about Ronan, and it’s also a book where the plot and the characters feel like they are actually connected to one another in a substantial way. Mostly because this is a book where Ronan is the plot.

    Which means I actually have something to talk about other than structure.

    Ronan develops into an interesting character in this one, not only because he has developed magic powers. He gains some depth in the form of his backstory, in the form of how he deals with stress, in the form of how he deals with success. We see what he cares about and what he doesn’t care about. And all of that builds him into a wonderful character that I was happy to follow through the majority of the book, even if he has a questionable choice in crushes.

    Weird thing is that I liked Adam a lot more the first time I read this series. Adam played a much larger role in the first book, with his quest out of his abusive home life, but this book left me realizing that he’s a dick. Yes, growing up around abuse makes people process the world differently and he may not be able to relate to people in typical ways, I know. But there’s a constant sense that he sees himself as lesser than the people around him and that makes him better than them that permeates through his perspective. Not to mention that scene between him and Blue, which plays out all too familiarly to any female who had male friends who expected that their friendships meant more than they did.

    This is also where I really notice that Blue is the only female voice in the story, really. There’s mention of her being a raging feminist that is only forgivable because they are teenagers and eye rolling in pretty much any other context. There are things that happen to her where I really feel that lack of female peers around her because there were conversations that really should have happened that never happen. Does she really have no one to talk to about boys? Not one? Hell, not even her mother or cousin or one of the other women in the house who could have pointed out any of these things to? At the very least to talk to about what happened with Adam? Or anything else?

    The love story kicks in and I do not care you guys. Romance is not my thing. I always feel bad when I stop caring about female characters, but their plots always seem to devolve into something related to romance and Blue is no different. In the first book, she was sort of seeing Adam, but in this book she falls in love and the prophecy that she’ll kiss her true love and he’ll die develops a firm target. Gansey, who we knew would be her true love in the first book, is now someone she has fallen for. And just… I stopped caring about both of them in an instant.

    Gansey, though. Let’s have a moment to talk about why he’s so hard for me to sink into despite him still having another plot around him. I don’t know why he wants to find Glendower. He has a lot of reasons. He thinks he’s not dead because of the grace of Glendower. He has an intellectual curiosity about him. He’s got a weird obsession. It’s about the pursuit of him more than what the end goal is, and when there’s no real end goal, I have a lot of trouble hooking into the character’s motivations.

    However, this book is in large part about Ronan. And Ronan is fantastic. I know I’m being a little harsh about the rest of the characters, but it overall is a pretty entertaining read.

    Check it out on Amazon

    1. The person who originally got me to read the series [↩]

  • 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 one1 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

    1. And I don’t like it. For the record. [↩]