Frost by M. P. Kozlowsky

November 9, 2017 by Leelynn @ Sometimes Leelynn Reads ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Being human is her greatest strength.

Sixteen-year-old Frost understands why she’s spent her entire life in an abandoned apartment building. The ruined streets below are hunting grounds for rogue robots and Eaters.

She understands why she’s never met a human besides her father. She even understands why he forbids her to look for medicine for her dying pet. But the thing is, it’s not her real father giving the orders…

It’s his memories.

Before he died, Frost’s father uploaded his consciousness into their robot servant. But the technology malfunctioned, and now her father fades in and out. So when Frost learns that there might be medicine on the other side of the ravaged city, she embarks on a dangerous journey to save the one living creature she loves.

With only a robot as a companion, Frost must face terrors of all sorts, from outrunning the vicious Eaters…to talking to the first boy she’s ever set eyes on. But can a girl who’s only seen the world through books and dusty windows survive on her own? Or will her first journey from home be her last?

“I want to see things the way you do.”

The big reveal towards the end of the book blew my mind. Honestly, I should have seen it coming with the way that things were going, and yet it still came as a shock to me. Let me just put that out there since it’s the biggest thought in my mind right now.

Okay, back to the review.

So this is a story about a girl named Frost (yes, another book named after the main protagonist) who lives in a world that is pretty much destroyed. We first meet her in a pretty much empty apartment with her dying pet brute. A brute is almost like a vicious pink dog, only not a dog but something worse. The fact that she was able to even have one of these creatures as a pet was astonishing to even her robot companion and anyone else she met. Everything was pretty much status quo for her until her robot Bunt told her that her beloved pet Romes was dying. It was that knowledge that made her want to leave the apartment for good and make to the promised land of The Battery, where the destruction of the world would be left behind and the healing could begin.

So they left the apartment, and that’s when everything changed.

Frost is a sixteen-year-old girl, and yet I felt like she had the hope of a child, one that despite all of the death and destruction around her still believed that there was something better out there. That hope was what made her leave her life of solitude behind in that dreary apartment, one that made her risk everything in order to save Romes. It was that hope that ended up touching the humans she ended up meeting, Barrow and his son Flynn, even though there didn’t seem to be anything left to hope for. She almost felt weak in my eyes, needing everyone else to save her in moments that were life or death. What good was this main character for, and what was it that made the author want to tell her story?

This combination of robots and zombie-like creatures was an interesting take that I hadn’t come across before. Then again, I haven’t read as many books as I would like, and this is one of the first zombie type books that I have decided to read. It was interesting though, to see that the people still left in this world were either enslaved by a vicious dictator, “Eaters” that couldn’t help but feast on flesh, or other. The “other” group, which I would include Frost, Barrow, and Flynn in, were those that weren’t yet enslaved, but not free either. They were just surviving from what was out there, trying to make sure that they weren’t either killed or tortured by the ones that served the “Good John Lord”. What happened to the world that it was so utterly destroyed?

There are rarely any good things that happened to Frost in this book. Not everyone we meet in this book makes it to the ending, both good guys and bad. The ending is almost a cliffhanger, and the revelation that both Frost and the reader finds out is one that completely changes the game. Did it make the hours spent on this book worth it? I would say so. Were there parts of the book that made it difficult to get through? Unfortunately, yes. There is supposed to be a sequel coming out in the near future, and I’m curious to know what Frost is going to do since she is pretty much on her own now. Were her efforts to save Romes really worth it? Is he going to die anyway? I’m still waiting to find out.

I don’t regret reading this book, but I do regret reading it before the sequel came out. It was almost nice to see someone that didn’t give up hope, even though I don’t know how I would have reacted in her shoes. There were times when it seemed like everything was about to end, but then I saw I still had more of the book read and figured that something good had to happen eventually. All in all, it was an interesting read and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to see what happens when robots and zombies decide to take over the world.

Rated: 4/5 ★

The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel – Book Review

October 12, 2017 by Leelynn @ Sometimes Leelynn Reads ♥ 1 Comment

Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.

After her mother’s suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas. Lane knew little of her mother’s mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran fast and far away.

Eleven years later, Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run too? Or something worse? Unable to resist his pleas, Lane returns to help search, and to ease her guilt at having left Allegra behind. Her homecoming may mean a second chance with the boyfriend whose heart she broke that long ago summer. But it also means facing the devastating secret that made her flee, one she may not be strong enough to run from again.

As it weaves between Lane’s first Roanoke summer and her return, The Roanoke Girls shocks and tantalizes, twisting its way through revelation after mesmerizing revelation, exploring the secrets families keep and the fierce and terrible love that both binds them together and rips them apart.

“One summer is enough. Hell, sometimes one day is all it takes to change your life.”

I should start off by saying that this is not a book that I would normally read, nor pick up from the library. Really the only reason I started reading this book was because it was my book club’s monthly pick, a brand new book club that I joined here in Norfolk, Virginia. Usually for books that I wouldn’t normally pick, I wouldn’t even pick it up. But here I go, trying something new in a place I’m not used to, so yay me! Oh, and I don’t regret finishing this book at all, but trust me when I say it was not a happy book whatsoever.

I don’t know if this counts as “cheating” but I got through this book by listening to the audiobook. Honestly, I feel like if I read it the normal way, I probably wouldn’t have felt the same emotions that I did while listening to it every time I went for a drive. I’m not sure if it was necessarily a good thing listening to this book before and after work, or even heading off to job interviews, since the subject of this book is anything but inspiring or positive, but it worked. I couldn’t get enough of it, and all I wanted to do was figure out what the heck was going to happen next.

This book was dirty. It was grimy. It was terrible in the sense that nothing good came out of this book. Nothing good happened to the characters, and the characters themselves weren’t people you really wanted to root for.

There is something extremely special about all of the Roanoke Girls, but being special in that way is not a good thing. Not by a long shot. Amy Engel hints at it throughout the entire book, with Lane’s story weaving between the past and the present almost seamlessly. Her past story is about her first time at Roanoke, that summer she was sent there after she lost her mother, back when she was 15 years old and thought she was completely alone. Her present, when she finally returns back to Roanoke after eleven years, to find out what happened to her cousin Allegra. It’s interesting to see how the events of the past end up tying into the present.

Is Lane a good person? Is Allegra a good person? Are any of the Roanoke girls “good”? Is anyone considered completely “good”?

I believe the answer is “no” for all of those questions, but the answer can also be “it depends”. Sure, they all have elements of good in them, but they are also cursed with something terrible, something that makes them both irresistible and hauntingly doomed. Dramatic, right? Well that’s how this book was, in such a raw and unapologetic type of way that made me say, “Well, damn.”

Not only do you get to hear from Lane, but there are some moments in between her story that you catch a glimpse into the minds of the other Roanoke girls. It’s so brief, and you may not get a full picture out of their little moments, but it may help explain what happened to them, whether they died or they just disappeared.

If it really was just a disappearance.

This is a book that you have to read to appreciate it. It’s not the kind of book that you want spoiled to you, because it will lose its desired effect. It’s a mystery after all, but I will say that if you are triggered by sexual abuse, suicide, or even drug abuse, I wouldn’t recommend reading it.

Rated: 4/5 ★

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas – Book Review

September 25, 2017 by Leelynn @ Sometimes Leelynn Reads ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Feyre’s survival rests upon her ability to hunt and kill – the forest where she lives is a cold, bleak place in the long winter months. So when she spots a deer in the forest being pursued by a wolf, she cannot resist fighting it for the flesh. But to do so, she must kill the predator and killing something so precious comes at a price …

Dragged to a magical kingdom for the murder of a faerie, Feyre discovers that her captor, his face obscured by a jewelled mask, is hiding far more than his piercing green eyes would suggest. Feyre’s presence at the court is closely guarded, and as she begins to learn why, her feelings for him turn from hostility to passion and the faerie lands become an even more dangerous place. Feyre must fight to break an ancient curse, or she will lose him forever.

“There are those who seek me a lifetime but never we meet,
And those I kiss but who trample me beneath ungrateful feet.

At times I seem to favor the clever and the fair,
But I bless all those who are brave enough to dare.

By large, my ministrations are soft-handed and sweet,
But scorned, I become a difficult beast to defeat.

For though each of my strikes lands a powerful blow,
When I kill, I do it slow…

From everything that I’ve heard with this book, I had very high expectations. This was one of the books that was talked about in every single book group that I’m in on Facebook, with everyone completely in awe of this series and recommending it everywhere they go. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book get this much hype before, and I also think that this was the reason why I put off reading it for so long. I guess it’s just something about me but whenever a book gets too much hype, then I won’t read it until the hype is brought down or whatever the case be. Then eventually I forgot about it and it took years until I finally remembered this series for a book club. So thanks to the book club, I ended up buying the entire series and began my journey into Prythian.

One of the elements that seemed to be interesting after reading Hunted was that this also had some sort of Beauty and the Beast retelling. It seemed to be a story that a lot of people wanted to emulate in their books, and this was no different. I did like the fact that Feyre was a hunter as well, even if she only became one out of necessity and not enjoyment. It was also interesting to see that even though Feyre’s family did come from money before the events of this book, she wasn’t as educated and well-read as her fellow Belle counterparts.

In keeping with tradition, Feyre (spelled Fayre in English) means “Beautiful”, so there’s that as well.

I know that I’m in for such a wild ride here, and for the most part of me reading through this book I was at the edge of my seat. Especially towards the ending when Feyre had to go through her three trials, I was completely rooting for her and hoping that she would be able to break the curse that ravaged Prythian and all the Fae that lived there. Also her time within the Spring Court, her exploring the area and spending time with both Lucien and Tamlin was enjoyable to read as well. I personally like Lucien more than Tamlin, but that could also be because of all the comments people will say about Tamlin in the next two books. But without that outside influence, I thought that Tamlin was doing his best to figure out how to love again, or even how to like someone that wasn’t a Fae again. He started to become more “human” in an aspect, and I liked that he was able to open up to Feyre in a way that didn’t seem possible at the time.

I also loved seeing such a bad ass woman – even if she was an evil bitch – and no, I am definitely not talking about Feyre. Yes, she was pretty bad ass at some parts, especially with how she learned how to protect her family and feed them when her sisters and her father wouldn’t do anything to help out. She was basically the core of her family, and the only reason that they survived for as long as they did. I feel like they treated her like shit because she was the only one that would get her hands dirty and hunt for them. Her sisters were not always kind to her, and her father was pretty much useless. She deserved better, and I feel like her leaving her home to live out her days in Prythian was a complete blessing for her.

I can’t wait to read the rest, and my brain is so damn tired from everything else that I’ve been doing lately, but just know that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and now I understand the hype. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend doing it before the year is over.

Rated: 5/5 ★