Finally Heard

I finally got around to picking this up and blew through it in one day. I loved Finally Seen, the first in this series. 

Finally Heard picks up with Lina dealing with puberty issues, as well as phone envy. She and her best friend Carla are the only two kids in their class without phones. Lina's family being poor, she doesn't want to bother her mom about puberty stuff and its added expenses. 

The entire book is basically about both kids and adults dealing with phone-related problems. The puberty stuff comes in second to all of that. Lina's mom is using Instagram videos to up her bath bomb business, with the help of Lina, Carla and Finn. The three kids even start earning money to help smaller local businesses make advertising videos. Which would have been the wise time for Lina to buy herself some of the things she wants, like deodorant or a bra. I mean, at least get the deodorant. Maybe I missed a line or two about what she was doing with the money, but deodorant also doesn't cost $14.99 like whatever she was looking at. There are plenty of cheaper options. 

So Lina's mom becomes too content-obsessed to see what Lina's going through. Lina should just talk to her mom about her body problems but instead gets hooked into the algorithm's ability to keep sending you videos about things you looked up once on a slightly-related topic. Everyone gets hooked on their videos doing well with lots of likes and comments, though that eventually slides into mean comments and cyberbullying. Even with Lina's mom. Both Carla and Finn have their own issues, too, which I'm not going to go into for the sake of spoilers. Mostly on Carla's part.

I think this book deals with a lot of important phone-related topics for both adults and kids, though I didn't like it nearly as much as Finally Seen. It was still a fun read and I'm hoping Kelly Yang continues to give us more from Lina. I like the modern world setting as much as I like the Front Desk series' older setting. 

GIRLS SURVIVE Part 12

Okay, I got REALLY behind on these. These came out back in August and I read the four graphic novels, but not the two chapter books. 

So I don't remember much about them, but I'll try to recall what I can. 

This one is set in 2011 during an earthquake. I remember liking it, but that's about it. 

 

Blah, it's the Salem witch trials. I hardly ever like this topic. I don't remember liking it here. 

And the Titanic. Not a topic I dislike but definitely on the overdone side. 

I should have taken a few minutes to reread these before typing this. Alas. 

Okay, this one I remember better, mostly because I've never read another children's historical piece on the Hindenburg. 

I liked it. 

Okay, now on to the chapter books that I just read a few days ago. 

I enjoyed this book, but Chernobyl is such a big topic and shrinking it down to fit in such a small book didn't work very well. I liked it a lot, but was definitely left thinking it could have been four times as long. 

The same applies to this one. Tiananmen Square is another topic that's just plain too big for such a short book. 

I would definitely have read longer versions of all three of these topics, including the Hindenburg. 

These are the two brand new releases for this series, having just come out on the first. 

I had never heard of the Sandy Lake removal until this book. I'm very glad it was written by an Ojibwe author! I liked it as much as one can enjoy such a sad and depressing story. The characters were good, though I wished the sisters were developed a bit more. 

This one I really enjoyed. I give this series a lot of credit for touching on topics I've never read in any other series before. Even if I'm left wanting longer versions of the stories, at least they're being told in some way. 

Penny and her older brother are passengers on the Lusitania, which was bombed by the Germans during WWI. So this has some similarities to Titanic stories but also is totally different. Like they weren't underfilling the lifeboats. They couldn't actually reach them to get into them because of the angle of the ship's sinking. Penny is one of the most likeable characters in this entire series, as is her new friend Mary. 

Always pleased for more Girls Survive!

Fern's School for Wayward Fae 1

This book was amusingly tiny. Not thin, but the actual book is smaller than books typically are. It's cute. 

Fern's School for Wayward Fae is a school in the nowhere realm, which is between all the other realms. Demifae are taken there by Fern, a mysterious redhead. The students remain at the school until they turn sixteen, which is when they must pick a realm to live in. There's Earth, where several of the students are from, and Faerie, with its warring factions of Seelie vs. Unseelie. There are also a ton of other realms, but those are the main ones. 

Rosemary has the unwanted gift of being able to see when/how people die. She doesn't know the exact when, but if the person is a lot older, obviously it's going to be in the long off future. Naturally, she creeps people out, including her mother, who ends up sending her off to an institution. Thankfully, Fern gets her out of there and she's handed off to her new mentor, Dante. 

There's a whirlwind of getting to know the school and its handful of inhabitants. Some are Seelie, so imagine the fairy tale-type fairies. The nice ones. Some are Unseelie, like Rosemary's new roommate. Trym is a banshee, who screams every night at 3:33am, so her roommates all have to wear enchanted earplugs or...die. One of the Unseelie is half-vampire, another half-ghost. (No, they don't explain the logistics, but at least Rosemary briefly wonders how that works.) Another is something that can travel through shadows. 

Rosemary becomes closest to Essie, who's a djinn and learning his wish-granting powers. When he goes missing, she's determined the adults aren't telling them the truth, so she, Trym and two other students are off to the rescue, which involves a lot of realm-hopping in search of the passage to Earth. 

I really enjoyed this. I like all the different abilities and the faerie politics. It ended on quite the cliffhanger, too. It's a quick read, but not too quick. I'd say it's middle grade, but definitely also adult-friendly. 

Forever Fairies 1-4

I am such a sucker for anything fairy, even teeny little books for 7–10-year-olds. 

The four fairies in these books wake up and climb out of their flowers on the same day. They're referred to as Sprout Wings and they join the older fairies in the Forever Tree. They'll be going through a series of four tryouts to see which pod each fairy will place into. The pods are sort of like Disney Fairies and their talents, only there are only four.

Lulu is the sporty one, so of course the pod for her is the Flutterflies. Lulu is better at flying than the others, so she's a perfect fit. Each of the tryouts features some mishap the fairies have to surpass, often involving troll characters that aren't bad, but tend to cause a lot of trouble. 

Nova is the fairy who loves animals, so she wants to be part of the Shimmerbuds. These are the fairies that make medicines and help heal animals. 

Coco's dream pod is the Twinklestars, who are the bakers. 

Coco and Nova are my two faves, although I like Zali a lot, too. 

And finally, little Zali wants to be in the Sparkleberries, who are the creative fairies. 

The illustrations are cute. The stories are cute. It's no Disney Fairies, but it was a fun read. 

Goddess Girls Super Special 2

After all these years, it's the final Goddess Girls book. Sigh. 

I was pleased the final was another super special. I still love that these are called super specials. Very BSC. However, I was not a fan of the plot. 

The girls argue over what exactly happened on Athena's first day at MoA, so they get the bright idea to travel back in time to see. Athena's spell goes awry and they end up 1,111 years in the future. In Rome. And meet their Roman counterparts. 

The girls have mixed feelings about Rome. Persephone is the most open-minded, interested in learning all she can before they leave. Athena and Minerva clash over how the Romans changed the Trojan War story. Artemis and Diana mostly get along, though Artemis is the most disturbed meeting someone so like her. Aphrodite and Venus like each other a lot, but Aphrodite feels Venus is better than her, as well as Mars being better than Ares. 

The book is mostly them checking out Roman culture, spending time with their counterparts, and then trying to figure out how to get home. 

It's not a bad book, but spending time away from MoA with brand new characters isn't what I wanted from a world I'm going to have to say goodbye to. I would have liked time with each of the past characters, even a brief cameo or mention on how they're doing. Just to wrap things up somehow. I'm going to miss Goddess Girls. It was a really fun series.

Daughters of Shadow & Blood 3

I got really behind on my reviews thanks to the hurricane wiping out our wifi for almost a month. 

I can't remember when I finished any of these, and my memories are a bit fuzzy now, but I wanted to make little posts on them anyway.

This is the final volume of the Daughters of Shadow & Blood trilogy. Three wives of Dracula, three books. 

Elizabeth is the fair wife. Her backstory is set in 1878 when she's visiting Berlin with her husband, who's some sort of diplomat. I think they were English. Elizabeth gets caught up in a murder mystery that seems to have some sort of connection to her missing father. Her backstory is the least interesting of the three wives. 

In the present, the action is heating up. Adam's ex-girlfriend Clara has been abducted by the vampire that has been a presence in the past two books. You know, the one that seems to be Dracula? Yeah, he isn't. He's Jonathan Harker. He and Elizabeth are working together to find the same medallion everyone wants. So we've got Clara stuck with those two while Adam and Arkady are trying to save her and find the medallion. Everyone's all together at the end, including Elena and Yasamin, the first brides. 

Turns out Dracula was trapped in some sort of spell by Elizabeth and Jonathan. They aged him and made him forget his life. I think that's how it went. Adam manages to break the spell and ends up turning vamp himself. I forget how they undo this. Ugh. I shouldn't do book reviews this long after reading. Anyway. I can't remember what happens to Jonathan, but Elizabeth is cursed by Dracula with the same spell. In the past, she was the one who killed her dad and she's easily the most evil of the three brides. Dracula and Yasamin go off together. Adam's spell is undone and I think he and Clara got back together. 

It's much better than it sounds. Even though Elizabeth's backstory wasn't that engaging, the action-packed stuff in the present day makes up for it. I enjoyed this trilogy a lot. 

The Games Gods Play

 Hoo boy, I devoured in roughly two days. Would have been a single day if I hadn't had work! 

Owen has developed a world where different pantheons of deities all exist and seem to play an active role in human lives. The focus of the book is the Greek pantheon, but there are various mentions that indicate they're far from the only gods. The Greeks are the focus of the main character's world, though it's unclear how this works exactly. The Greeks are favored in San Francisco, but there's no mention of the US being Greek-focused or if it's different in each location or what. It's not important to the story, but it would be some interesting world-building. I quite like the inclusion of all the gods, so this is a world I'd like to see more from. 

The main character is 23-year-old Lyra Keres. Lyra's mother's water broke in Zeus's temple and, in characteristic Greek myth whim fashion, he cursed baby Lyra to be unlovable. She was given to the Order of Thieves at age three by parents that didn't give a shit about her except as something to pay off their debts. Kids are frequently given to the order so others can pay off debts they owe them. Lyra has long since paid off her debt but chooses to stay with the order because she has nowhere else to go. However, she did poorly in her thief training, so she functions as the order's clerk. 

The book opens right before the start of the Crucible. This is a tradition that happens once every hundred years. The Greek deities apparently fought a war sometime in the past that was really damaging, so they developed this tournament to pick which god would rule for the next hundred years. Each god picks a human to be their champion and take part in twelve different labors, each devised by one of the twelve Olympians. It's sort of like the Hunger Games but with a better purpose and the other humans don't get to watch it on TV. 

After some teasing and embarrassment by an asshole thief, Lyra storms off to Zeus's temple and is about to chuck a rock when she's stopped by Hades. A short time later, he shocks her by choosing her as his champion for the Crucible. The big problem for Lyra is that Hades has never chosen a champion before. As King of the Underworld, he opted not to vie for King of the Gods as well. But now he has a secret motivation and he's chosen Lyra to help him fulfill it. And most of the other gods are pissed about it.

The book switches between Lyra's drama with Hades and her own struggles within herself to the different labors and the heartbreak that comes with them. These aren't easy labors. They're deadly. I loved all the different gifts the gods gave their champions and the ones they could earn for the labor prizes. 

I'm trying not to do spoilers, because this is a really good read and I recommend it. But I have to mention a couple things. 

I think the author had some hate for Athena. I've never read such a nasty characterization of her. The most irritating thing for me with this entire book was that the author somehow in her research missed that Athena is gray-eyed. She's got brown eyes in the book and that took me out of the story with a good bit of irritation for a while. If you're doing enough research to come up with these obscure relics, you really should have seen a reference to gray-eyed Athena somewhere. And then stick by that! I'm so sick of Athena and Anne Shirley losing their gray eyes. 

I'm a pretty diehard Hades/Persephone fan. I've always supported them. So I'm not a huge fan of Lyra/Hades. (Pretty sure this isn't a spoiler. If you didn't see that coming, you're not familiar with this type of book.) It's explained away as Hades thinking of Persephone as a younger sister, which I suppose works, but then there's the added problem of Lyra's curse. Hades pretty clearly is attracted to this mere mortal from the very beginning. Hades, who isn't known for trysting with mortals, unlike the majority of the pantheon, which is one of the reasons I like him. And Lyra, who is cursed to be unlovable, somehow has this curse not even remotely affect Hades? Does it not work on gods? It isn't explained. I was starting to think she was never actually cursed and it was all in her head, with her distancing herself from others being the actual reason no one is close to her. Her friend says something to back this up, so I really thought I was right, but Lyra ends up using her curse to survive a labor. So she is definitely cursed and it just doesn't affect Hades with zero explanation because the author wanted to pair them, I guess. Between that and her behaving like no 23-year-old virgin ever would during their one sex scene, it's clear that the author skirts into bad writing territory just so she can have her couple. Compromising your writing to get what you want is never a good look and that combined with my other nitpicks and my attachment to Hades/Persephone all makes it harder for me to support him and Lyra. I don't dislike Lyra by any means, and while Hades is no Lore Olympus Hades (the very bestest Hades), I still like him. I just don't like the cost the author paid to force them into a couple. 

That said, I obviously mostly loved this to read it that quickly. It's not a short book. I'm looking forward to the sequel, especially with the cliffhanger we were left on.