Review: The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

I attempted to review the first three books of the Raven Cycle, with varying degrees of success, so I figure I ought to make an effort with the finale as well. Preserve some continuity and all that.

Plus, THE RAVEN KING forced me to expand my Top 12 list into a Top 16¹. It’s serious between us, y’all, and I’d like to mark the occasion.

At the same time, though, this was a 6-star read. 5 stars is my “I loved it to the point of incoherence and/or verbosity” rating. 6 stars dials the incoherence angle right the hell up, especially when we’re talking about a highly anticipated finale I really, really don’t want to spoil for y’all.

So we’re taking the Short, Gushy, Ungrammatical route, with the understanding that I might imply some stuff about the other three books but I won’t get all, “OMG LEMME DESCRIBE THIS EXTREMELY VITAL SCENE” on you.

Review: The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

THE SNOW QUEEN demands two reviews.

The Short, Gushy, Ungrammatical Version:

OMG y’all perfect book is perfect seriously I lost track of the number of times I whispered 'this is perfect' as I read because there were SO FRICKIN' MANY OF THEM like it’s an SF adaptation of Anderson’s 'Snow Queen' okay and I have this weird thing for that story but that didn’t even matter to me at first because I’m kind of an oblivious dumbass and I fell in love with the book before I realized what was going on and once I did was filled with TERROR and AWE and EMOTIONS because omg the characters are fantastic and I was SO WORRIED ABOUT THEM and also the worldbuilding you guys so many ideas and science fictional thingies that feel more like fantasy because there’s all this tension between mysticism and technology and also there’s the whole fairy tale adaptation angle and my heart hurts now IT IS PERFECT EVERYTHING IS PERFECT OMG HOW AM I EVEN SUPPOSED TO WRITE COHERENT THINGS ABOUT THIS BOOK IT IS JUST PERFECT.