Bookends About Born Wicked

Title: Born Wicked
Author: Jessica Spotswood
Source: bought on amazon
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review Summary: A creative, engaging alternate history with great characters but not a very proactive protagonist.

Imagine there were witches and that they came to the new world, lured by the promise of religious freedom. Imagine next that, in a backlash against the witches leadership, a male dominated society was formed in which women were expected to be uneducated and subservient. This is the world in which Cate Cahill and her sisters, born witches, struggle to survive. As the time for Cate to choose marriage or the Sisterhood, her promise to protect her sisters becomes ever harder to keep.

Bookends About Abandon

Title: Abandon
Author: Meg Cabot
Source: bought for book signing
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review Summary: In a lot of ways this is a fairly typical YA romance with a strong heroine, but it’s also well written, enjoyable, and made unique by its’ basis in mythology and the heroine’s unique voice.

Like Dead Beautiful, Meg Cabot’s Abandon trilogy is a re-telling of the Persephone myth, although in this case only the starting point of the story really comes from the myth. The Greek gods aren’t part of the story at all and while a lot of elements of the Greek underworld are used, even the basic explanation for the way the Underworld works is different. What is the same is that the lord of the underworld does fall in love with our heroine, Pierce. He does kidnap her, in a way, but in his defense she’s already dead in this version. She manages to escape and is resuscitated by her doctors; which of these events is the cause and which the effect is left for the reader to determine. Unfortunately for Pierce, escaping the underworld doesn’t resolve anything.  She now has trouble fitting back into her old life and still has to deal with the lord of the underworld appearing to “help” her, usually causing her some trouble himself as well.

Bookends About Bitterblue

Title: Bitterblue
Author: Kristin Cashore
Source: library
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Series: Graceling|Fire|Bitterblue (you are here)
Review Summary: Unlike Fire, this is definitely it’s own, very enjoyable story with unique new characters.  I loved the first half at least as much as Graceling but the ending was very anti-climatic.

Although Bitterblue follows Fire in publication order, this book is actually a direct sequel to Graceling.  Young Princess Bitterblue has taken over as ruler of Monsea following the defeat of her evil of father.  Despite her advisers’ desire to forget her father ever existed, Bitterblue is doing her best to help her kingdom recover from his crimes.  She eventually begins to sneak out of the castle on her own to learn more about the state of the kingdom.  As she does, it becomes clear that her advisers’ have not been telling her the whole truth and may have ulterior motives for burying the crimes of her father’s reign.