The Falconer by Elizabeth May

November 20, 2017 by Leelynn @ Sometimes Leelynn Reads ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

“A riveting world, a fierce heroine, and electrifying action–I burned through this sparkling debut!” —Sarah J. Maas, New York Times bestselling author

Edinburgh, 1844. Beautiful Aileana Kameron only looks the part of an aristocratic young lady. In fact, she’s spent the year since her mother died developing her ability to sense the presence of sìthichean, a faery race bent on slaughtering humans. She has a secret mission: to destroy the faery who murdered her mother. But when she learns she’s a Falconer, the last in a line of female warriors and the sole hope of preventing a powerful faery population from massacring all of humanity, her quest for revenge gets a whole lot more complicated. Now in paperback, this electrifying thriller—the first volume of a trilogy from an exciting new voice in young adult fantasy—blends romance and action with steampunk technology and Scottish lore in a deliciously addictive read.

“Crimson suits you best.”

I stumbled across this book at the library here in Virginia, and when I read the synopsis of it, I knew that I had to try it out. Lo and behold, it would end up being one of my favorite books this year.

For one thing, the steampunk aspect of this book, paired with 17th Century Scotland was something that I didn’t expect to work so well but it really did. Maybe the only thing that kind of messed me up was that I would keep forgetting that Aileana was Scottish until she’d say “Aye”. It was as if I was in an entirely new world filled with the infamous Fae creatures that I’ve come to learn and love – well some of them anyway – in an entirely new light that was nice to hear about.

Let me start off by saying that I personally liked Aileana. Yes, she’s actually a proper Lady, with money, status, and a title that not all women can say they have. If she were to get married, her husband would probably inherit a lot of wealth and prestige. However, ever since her mother was murdered right in front of her eyes, she had no desire to be a part of that world anymore. She had vengeance in her heart, almost to the point of hatred, and all she wanted to do was find the Fae that killed her mother and exact her revenge. In the meantime, she did what she could: taking care of the other dangerous Fae around Edinburgh so that the human casualty rate wasn’t ridiculously high.

But how did she go from a lady that only cared about society’s parties, to someone that would spend her days inventing new weapons and her nights slaying the Fae?

She had a mysterious teacher, one that wasn’t all that human himself. She spent an entire year training with him, a Fae named Kiaran, one of the most powerful breeds of Fae in existence. But what she didn’t know was that there was something far worse at stake, and all of her nights that she spent fighting alone behind Kiaran’s back would make her a target, and the real fight would begin. She would have to put aside her revenge plans and figure out how a barely trained Falconer, a breed of warrior woman that have the power to kill the Fae, would be able to save the world on her own.

Aileana was an interesting protagonist. She had no problem letting us know that she was in pain, and having the memory of her mother killed right in front of her eyes was something that she couldn’t let go of so easily. Anything that even resembled her mother would bring her back to that night, and it would fill her with such a rage that it was almost dangerous to be around her. She knew that, and she tried to suppress it as much as she could around Kiaran so that he wouldn’t know her weakness. It was something that despite all of her efforts, she just could not let it go. She felt like it was her fault that her mother was murdered because she didn’t do anything to stop it. It led her to go out the next night and immediately try to kill a different Fae, and while she almost died, it was a good thing that Kiaran found her. She was thoroughly untrained that first night she tried to fight, and even though she knew it, she still wanted to satisfy the lust for death in her heart. The more she would kill, the happier she felt, even if it was just in that moment when the light would leave her victim’s eyes.

I also liked the fact that she is an inventor. She created her very own flying machine, even though it seems like many of the rich families have at least one of their own. She designed and created her own, with a bat as the inspiration for its wings. She created all of the weapons she would use against the Fae. It was something that she would do with her mother, and even though her mother was gone, she kept up this important hobby that would become useful to her in her future battles. All in all, I liked her personality and her ingenuity.

One of the things that confused me though was how sometimes the chapters would jump through time. One chapter would end with a certain event going on and the next chapter would start off hours or even half a day later. It made me feel like I was missing something, or that I needed to go back and make sure that I didn’t skip a page or something like that. I understand that not all chapters have to take place back to back but it still left me confused. The ending as well was one that I didn’t understand. It ended up abruptly that I had to go back and see what happened, and yet I still didn’t quite get it. Something definitely happened, but hopefully the next book will be able to explain it better than this first one did.

Rated: 4/5 ★

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 ★