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ravensandpages's reviews
568 reviews
The Mossheart's Promise by Rebecca Mix
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, NetGalley and HarperCollins.
It has been a long time since I read a middle grade book, and after finishing The Mossheart's Promise, I can see it's been too long. I was absolutely enchanted from start to finish, and I am going to be on the edge of my seat until I can my hands on the sequel!
The Mossheart's Promise has echoes of my favorite series growing up, City of Ember chief among them, and follows a young fairy living in a rotting terrarium. Canary "Ary" Mossheart is nothing like her grandmother, the chosen hero who went down into the underground decades ago and brought back the cure for the plague terrorizing the fairy village of Terra - but even that had no effect on the mold slowly taking over everything. When the decay reaches her home and starts taking over her mother, Ary decides to descend into the underground herself and find a cure... only to find out her former "hero" grandmother knew the secret about their world and lied about it. Now, Ary only has a week to reach the bottom of the terrarium and set everyone free, or they'll be trapped forever.
This was a bittersweet story, with so many relevant parallels to the world our children have been left with, but it has a core of hope and love that I found quite touching. I especially loved the prevailing thread that Ary is no hero, and never should have been in a position to be a hero, but is brave and true regardless in the name of those she cares for. The Mossheart's Promise is a book of flawed characters, but I loved each and every one of them, especially Sootflank. I found this book charming and clever and tense in equal measure, and as already stated, I am beyond excited to see where the story goes next. I will absolutely be recommending this one far and wide.
It has been a long time since I read a middle grade book, and after finishing The Mossheart's Promise, I can see it's been too long. I was absolutely enchanted from start to finish, and I am going to be on the edge of my seat until I can my hands on the sequel!
The Mossheart's Promise has echoes of my favorite series growing up, City of Ember chief among them, and follows a young fairy living in a rotting terrarium. Canary "Ary" Mossheart is nothing like her grandmother, the chosen hero who went down into the underground decades ago and brought back the cure for the plague terrorizing the fairy village of Terra - but even that had no effect on the mold slowly taking over everything. When the decay reaches her home and starts taking over her mother, Ary decides to descend into the underground herself and find a cure... only to find out her former "hero" grandmother knew the secret about their world and lied about it. Now, Ary only has a week to reach the bottom of the terrarium and set everyone free, or they'll be trapped forever.
This was a bittersweet story, with so many relevant parallels to the world our children have been left with, but it has a core of hope and love that I found quite touching. I especially loved the prevailing thread that Ary is no hero, and never should have been in a position to be a hero, but is brave and true regardless in the name of those she cares for. The Mossheart's Promise is a book of flawed characters, but I loved each and every one of them, especially Sootflank. I found this book charming and clever and tense in equal measure, and as already stated, I am beyond excited to see where the story goes next. I will absolutely be recommending this one far and wide.
House of Light by Mary Oliver
4.5
Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?
Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan
2.0
I was sent an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, NetGalley and Orbit.
LONG LIVE EVIL is built on a fantasy reader's dream: for one more shot at life, Rae must enter the pages of her favorite fantasy series, battle against her fictional crush, and pull off enough schemes to get to the mystical Flower of Life and Death on the one night a year it blooms. The only problem? She's dropped in as Lady Rahela, the heroine's evil stepsister, on the night before her execution and must prolong that fated death by any means necessary despite never having finished the first book. By gathering wicked allies and selling herself as indisposable, Rae intends to pull any wicked trick she has in order to get what she wants and make sure the story goes how she wants it to, including getting her favorite ship together.
I'll start with what I did like about this book, which is that it had a good foundation and I was invested in the cast! Key, Marius, and the Cobra were far and away my favorites, and the relationship between Marius and the Cobra and then Key's devotion to Rae? I was devouring it. I did also love Emer's POV (though I wish her romance with Lia was a bit messier and torrid, it ended up feeling so sticky soft-sweet in comparison to what Marius and the Cobra obviously have and I refuse to believe they don't). Despite what is about to follow, I think the book still has a compulsive readability to it, and if there are any sequels—I believe there are, after that ending??—I will still be in line to pick them up.
That being said. The book was not what I wanted it to be and it wasn't able to convince me that what it was doing was better. LONG LIVE EVIL is more often than not a comedy before a fantasy, and I didn't always find it amusing enough to justify a lack of engaging, sensical worldbuilding in the fantasy story Rae enters. There are a lot of tongue-in-cheek "noun of noun and noun" references, which I did chuckle at the first few times, but it was an energy that was sustained long past the point of making sense. The story really seemed to struggle between trying to be funny or irreverent and trying to be clever and profound, but I think it was slightly too self-aware to strike the correct balance and left me feeling unable to make the final leap of getting properly invested and attached to the series-in-a-series. Furthermore, I really found the cleverness wanting and would have really loved to see the idea of evil and feminine places in stories approached with depth and nuance rather than the beginning of a conversation that feminist spaces & writing have already been having and addressing for years now.
I can, at the very least, assign some of my disappointment to a strong caveat, being that I have been a lover of portal fantasies, isekai, and female-led isekai basically my entire life. I have seen some of the best and a lot of the mediocre, and on the other hand, I've also seen some of the best and a lot of the mediocre when it comes to addressing genre issues and putting spins on genre-specific tropes. So now a lot of my desire when it comes to new entries is that I need something truly clever and different, and if the title of your book is LONG LIVE EVIL, I'm at least hoping for an actually evil main character (I support women's wrongs!) who supports the evil hero (which I have Things To Say About but I'll save it for now) or a far deeper dive into the roles characters are assigned which then reflect the roles we as people are assigned in our society. Stepping back, I think I wanted something far more serious and intentional, like feeling like Rae was stepping into a more understandably world-famous series akin to GOT or Wheel of Time. Though it certainly would have been more work, I feel the discussions being had in the book would have been far stronger with a more purposefully designed in-book world instead of a world that amounted to a few jokes and Tumblr posts in a high fantasy trenchcoat.
My final note is that the writing felt strangely unpolished compared to other ARCs I've received, but I do think this is something that can be cleared up with a few rounds of edits. There was a lot of repetition and clumsily crafted metaphors, and Rae's ignorance of the books could have been tweaked just a bit to lend the plot twist way more punch. I also felt that the "excerpts" in the beginning of the chapters could have done far more to worldbuild and reveal info about characters to avoid the infodumping & monologues that set the pacing back more than once. There are aspects of LONG LIVE EVIL that could be something, but I think it kept drawing back into something shallow and palatable rather than taking the leap to be something unique. I am looking forward to see if the sequels will lean into that (again! especially with that ending!!) or be more of the same.
LONG LIVE EVIL is built on a fantasy reader's dream: for one more shot at life, Rae must enter the pages of her favorite fantasy series, battle against her fictional crush, and pull off enough schemes to get to the mystical Flower of Life and Death on the one night a year it blooms. The only problem? She's dropped in as Lady Rahela, the heroine's evil stepsister, on the night before her execution and must prolong that fated death by any means necessary despite never having finished the first book. By gathering wicked allies and selling herself as indisposable, Rae intends to pull any wicked trick she has in order to get what she wants and make sure the story goes how she wants it to, including getting her favorite ship together.
I'll start with what I did like about this book, which is that it had a good foundation and I was invested in the cast! Key, Marius, and the Cobra were far and away my favorites, and the relationship between Marius and the Cobra and then Key's devotion to Rae? I was devouring it. I did also love Emer's POV (though I wish her romance with Lia was a bit messier and torrid, it ended up feeling so sticky soft-sweet in comparison to what Marius and the Cobra obviously have and I refuse to believe they don't). Despite what is about to follow, I think the book still has a compulsive readability to it, and if there are any sequels—I believe there are, after that ending??—I will still be in line to pick them up.
That being said. The book was not what I wanted it to be and it wasn't able to convince me that what it was doing was better. LONG LIVE EVIL is more often than not a comedy before a fantasy, and I didn't always find it amusing enough to justify a lack of engaging, sensical worldbuilding in the fantasy story Rae enters. There are a lot of tongue-in-cheek "noun of noun and noun" references, which I did chuckle at the first few times, but it was an energy that was sustained long past the point of making sense. The story really seemed to struggle between trying to be funny or irreverent and trying to be clever and profound, but I think it was slightly too self-aware to strike the correct balance and left me feeling unable to make the final leap of getting properly invested and attached to the series-in-a-series. Furthermore, I really found the cleverness wanting and would have really loved to see the idea of evil and feminine places in stories approached with depth and nuance rather than the beginning of a conversation that feminist spaces & writing have already been having and addressing for years now.
I can, at the very least, assign some of my disappointment to a strong caveat, being that I have been a lover of portal fantasies, isekai, and female-led isekai basically my entire life. I have seen some of the best and a lot of the mediocre, and on the other hand, I've also seen some of the best and a lot of the mediocre when it comes to addressing genre issues and putting spins on genre-specific tropes. So now a lot of my desire when it comes to new entries is that I need something truly clever and different, and if the title of your book is LONG LIVE EVIL, I'm at least hoping for an actually evil main character (I support women's wrongs!) who supports the evil hero (which I have Things To Say About but I'll save it for now) or a far deeper dive into the roles characters are assigned which then reflect the roles we as people are assigned in our society. Stepping back, I think I wanted something far more serious and intentional, like feeling like Rae was stepping into a more understandably world-famous series akin to GOT or Wheel of Time. Though it certainly would have been more work, I feel the discussions being had in the book would have been far stronger with a more purposefully designed in-book world instead of a world that amounted to a few jokes and Tumblr posts in a high fantasy trenchcoat.
My final note is that the writing felt strangely unpolished compared to other ARCs I've received, but I do think this is something that can be cleared up with a few rounds of edits. There was a lot of repetition and clumsily crafted metaphors, and Rae's ignorance of the books could have been tweaked just a bit to lend the plot twist way more punch. I also felt that the "excerpts" in the beginning of the chapters could have done far more to worldbuild and reveal info about characters to avoid the infodumping & monologues that set the pacing back more than once. There are aspects of LONG LIVE EVIL that could be something, but I think it kept drawing back into something shallow and palatable rather than taking the leap to be something unique. I am looking forward to see if the sequels will lean into that (again! especially with that ending!!) or be more of the same.