My top five books of 2017

Hello! Well, November wasn’t the best month for writing, I didn’t win NaNoWriMo, in fact I only managed to crack 10k (which is an achievement in itself and I’m still pretty pleased with my progress). I’m attempting my first contemporary YA novel so it’s not flowing as easily as a fantasy maybe would, I’ve thrown in a few fantastical elements (because, why not) but I’m really trying to get the vibe right and it’s just a bit slower going than I’m used to.

But enough about my Nano fail, you’re here for my top five books of 2017! I’m cheating a little bit here, these aren’t all 2017 new releases, but books I’ve personally read this year and loved. So, if you’re looking for the perfect gift for a book lover check out these fabulous reads, and you might even get them a little cheaper because they’re not brand new! (You’re welcome.)

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (2017)

Let’s start with my Book of the Year 2017, the dreamy, magical and brutal Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor. If you’re a Laini fan already and loved the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series, you’ll adore this new novel in her signature style of YA fantasy (and the sequel is coming in 2018!).

Lazlo Strange is a librarian who, after years of reading about incredible adventures in far off lands, finally gets to go on one (every book lover’s dream). A war between gods and men years ago left an entire generation of orphans, all given the surname Strange as a permanent reminder of their status, and resulted in an entire city disappearing into legend, known only as Weep, as the memory if its true name is erased from history.

Lazlo dreams of a blue-skinned goddess, but he doesn’t discover his true destiny until a mythical hero named Godslayer arrives and Lazlo is whisked away on the journey of a lifetime.

It’s beautiful, captivating and utterly, utterly heartbreaking. You’re going to love it! (Don’t @ me when you’re a broken heap of feels.)

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (2017)

Looking for a hilarious historical romp across Europe? You’ve come to the right place. The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is the funniest book I’ve read all year, but it’s also touching and heartwarming with a diverse cast of awesome characters.

Monty (a.k.a. Henry Montague) is the son of an English aristocrat, a loveable rogue, and completely in love with his best friend, Percy. After getting kicked out of boarding school for one transgression too many, Monty’s father sends him on a tour of Europe as a last ditch attempt to “straighten” him out before grooming him to take over the family business. Percy and Monty’s sister, Felicity tag along for what turns into a thrilling race against time across the continent.

The characters in this novel are some of the most inclusive and diverse I’ve ever come across in one single story. Percy is an epileptic, which was very misunderstood during this time period, and not only that but he’s dark-skinned and constantly assumed to be a servant despite his noble status. Felicity falls somewhere on the asexual/aromantic spectrum, and Monty is gay, which was illegal and considered a sin at the time (not least by Monty’s father).

If you’re looking for a funny and gripping historical read, you can’t go wrong with this one.

Nevernight (2016) & Godsgrave (2017) by Jay Kristoff

Can’t get enough of bloody, brutal fantasy? Pick up the Nevernight series by Jay Kristoff! It doesn’t get darker or more satisfyingly murderous than this.

Read my spoiler free review for Nevernight.

Mia Corvere is out for revenge, the kind that’s best served cold. After watching her father hanged for treason after a failed rebellion against the corrupt government, her mother and baby brother were thrown into the Philosopher’s Stone – a terrifying prison built into a mountainside. Mia is taken in and trained up by a cranky old antiques dealer with a secret life as a hired killer. Years later she’s finally ready to be inducted into the most brutal school for assassins in the Republic – the Red Church.

Like Hogwarts, but for murderers, the Red Church is a hidden sect that trains young assassins in the many skills necessary to be an elite killer. With only two Blade positions available, every student is out to win and every day could be Mia’s last. Can she achieve her lifelong goal of becoming a Blade of the Red Church and avenging her father’s death by killing the two officials who ordered it?

This is a super dark, sexy and graphic series, jam-packed with jaw-dropping fantasy elements and shocking twists and turns. Don’t expect a YA friendly experience, despite the protagonist’s young age, but if you’re OK with steamy sex scenes and visceral torture and murder then you’ve found your perfect series.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (2011)

Fans of Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle or The Wolves of Mercy Falls, if you haven’t read The Scorpio Races you are missing out. This is my official favourite Stiefvater book, it’s a standalone fantasy about flesh-eating water horses and the jockeys who race them every November.

Read my spoiler free review of The Scorpio Races.

Puck is an orphan with two brothers and a family home she won’t let them lose just because the island of Thisby is tiny and there are no jobs to be had. Sean is a talented horse racer with a winning capaill uisce (water horse) and a famous father whose name weighs heavy on his shoulders. When November rolls around again, both enter the Scorpio Races in the hopes of winning the prize money. But catching, training and riding a water horse isn’t easy, in fact every year in November someone dies. But who will survive, and who will win the coveted prize money and escape their personal prison?

The magical elements in this book are so well crafted and blended into the plot that you could almost believe them to be real. The capaill uisce don’t seem so incredible, the strange belief system held by the residents of the island isn’t as unusual as it might be in the hands of another author. Stiefvater’s skills at blending reality and fantasy come into the fore in this novel, forming a background to the most important part of any of her stories – the characters and their relationships with one another. The Scorpio Races combines the believable fantasy elements of Shiver with the essence of friendship and individuality from The Raven Boys. Read it and fall in love with Thisby and her complicated inhabitants.

And I Darken by Kiersten White (2016)

Alternate history? Check. Gender bent? Check. Diverse? Check. And I Darken is a twisted retelling of the Vlad the Impaler legend with Ladislav (Lada, for short) in the lead role as the Daughter of the Dragon.

Read my spoiler free review of And I Darken.

Lada and her brother Radu are dragged from their home in Wallachia and abandoned in the Ottoman court by their father. A born fighter, Lada takes to training like a fish to water and soon makes a name for herself amongst the soldiers. Radu, on the other hand, is softer and gentler, with a natural charm that Lada envies. The Dragwyla children are schooled alongside the sultan’s son, Mehmed, forming bonds that are tested and broken and mended over the years in dozens of ways. Because Mehmed and his father are the enemy, and both Lada and Radu must fight their feelings if they are ever to return to Wallachia and their father’s kingdom.

We’ve all heard the Dracula legend several times, and this is yet another version, but with such an exciting new take on the original as to feel like a completely new story. A female Vlad the Impaler is a fascinating concept, especially as women were considered more like property than people in this historical setting. White’s Lada is a feisty, independent and complicated character, and she isn’t always likeable, which only makes me love her more. I cannot wait to read the sequel, Now I Rise, which came out this summer, and find out how Lada becomes the legendary leader and brutal killer we all recognise from the history books.

And those are my five favourite books of 2017! Have you read any of these? Let me know which was your favourite book of the year in the comments.

There’s still a couple of weeks left of 2017, and I’m currently reading Leigh Bardugo’s The Language of Thorns, which is a collection of fairy tales and fables from her Grishaverse, and a very festive read for this time of year! I haven’t quite managed to read my yearly target of 36 books, I’ll be at 30 once I finish my current read, but that’s still a massive improvement on last year’s 22 books, so I’m counting it as a win.

Have an absolutely fantastic holiday season, however you choose to celebrate, and I’ll see you in 2018!

Lyndsey

Summer holiday TBR

Hello, hello! I haven’t done a TBR for a while so I thought I’d share with you all what I’m planning to read on my upcoming family holiday in Southeast Asia. I’m off to the Singapore Formula One and a cruise round Thailand and Malaysia with my mum, stepdad and two brothers – sadly my husband couldn’t get the time off work, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me!

If you’ve been here before, you’ll know I’m a huge fantasy fan, so it might surprise you to see the stack of contemporaries I plan to take away with me. I’ve been desperate to read more YA contemporary as so many amazing sounding books have been released this year.

Here are the books I’ll be packing next month for my holiday…

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

I’m dying to read this and will probably start at the airport or on the drive down, light permitting. I ordered it a few months ago but I’ve been trying to catch up with library books so it’s still sitting on my shelf giving me the eye.

If you haven’t read, or even heard of THUG, firstly, where have you been?! Secondly, it’s inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, and has been on the NY Times best seller list for 22 weeks. Twenty two! Everyone I know who’s read it absolutely raves about it, so I need to catch up and read this pronto.

It’s about a teenage girl called Starr who’s in the car when her friend is pulled over and then shot and killed by police. It’s a pretty heartbreaking, gut-wrenching read by all accounts so I’ll read this one first and then follow it up with some lighter, more easy-reading style novels to ease the pain. Oh, the joys of reading for pleasure!

One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus

I see this book everywhere online and it sounds like such a fun, thrilling mystery that I picked it up as soon as I saw it in Waterstones. It’s billed as a cross between The Breakfast Club and Gossip Girl, with a good, old-fashioned murder mystery thrown in – how awesome does that sound?

I’m hoping this will break me out of the THUG book hangover and give me a good whodunnit to mull over while I’m sunning on the beach with a cocktail.

Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon

I bought this book for my best friend’s birthday and with the movie coming out soon she let me borrow it when she was done (I’ll give it back soon, I promise!).

It sounds like a nice light-hearted read, even with the heavy subject matter of living life in a bubble, allergic to everything. I get the impression it’s more about the budding romance between the MC and her cute, new next-door neighbour, and learning to live life to the full even when the odds are against you.

The Scarecrow Queen by Melinda Salisbury

OK, so I couldn’t go away and not take at least one fantasy book… This is the last in the Sin Eater’s Daughter trilogy and it’s been sitting on my bookcase for months waiting for it’s moment to shine.

This series incorporates a few fairy tales, including the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Sleeping Prince (both German in origin, funnily enough), but it gives them a fresh spin and sets them in a new fantasy world where the people have all but forgotten that fairy tales are real. This is one series where the second book was just as good, if not better than the first, so I’m really excited to see where book three takes us.

And that’s it for my holiday reading list, four books might not seem like many to some of you, or it might seem like a lot! I’m a pretty slow reader, but they’re all relatively slim and I can get through a book in two or three days on holiday, especially as the flights to Singapore will be about 16 hours in total!

What’s on your TBR this summer? Have you read any of these? Let me know what you thought in the comments, and recommend any other YA contemporaries you think I’ll love!

Lyndsey

I am a member of the Book Depository affiliate program, so if you click through and buy any of the books mentioned in this blog I might make a little commission, but I am not paid to review books and all reviews are my own opinions!

Review: The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

I finished The Raven Cycle series! I really enjoyed the series as a whole, and the final book was no different. If you haven’t read any of the first three books you can check out my reviews: The Raven Boys, The Dream Thieves, Blue Lily, Lily Blue. Obviously, there are spoilers for book one in the other two reviews etc. so only read on if you don’t mind being spoiled!

Onwards to my review of The Raven King…

TL;DR The gang’s search for Glendower comes to an end, Blue tests the truth of her prophecy, Piper Greenmantle tries to auction the demon off to the highest bidder and Ronan discovers the connection between his dream thief abilities and Cabeswater. Oh, and there’s lots of kissing.

Where do I start?? This was probably the strangest book in the series, and that’s really saying something. This series is one of the weirdest, eeriest and most magical I’ve ever read. It wasn’t perfect, but I almost loved it more for that.

The main plot lines from the previous books all come to some kind of resolution, even if it’s not quite what we hoped for or expected. The ending leaves a lot to the imagination, but for a series where imagination has been essential throughout, and dreams are an integral part of the narrative, I expected nothing less.

The hunt for Glendower comes to an end, our ships are all ready to make sail (I won’t tell you which ones do!) and the events set into motion in Blue Lily, Lily Blue finally come to a head. The demon found in the caves by Piper and Neeve draws a crowd of magical artefact enthusiasts to Henrietta, but its power puts the entire town in danger and only our favourite foursome can stop the creature.

There are plenty of shocking revelations about the group and their abilities, their ties to Cabeswater, and what Cabeswater really is. I was quite satisfied with what we learned in The Raven King, even if we were left with lots of questions to ponder on our own. I know a lot of readers found the ending really anticlimactic, and this book is certainly not my favourite of the series, I found it less action packed and gripping than the other three (Blue Lily, Lily Blue is my favourite, in case you’re wondering), but I still consider it a worthy finale in many ways. I don’t mind being left with questions, it means I’m still thinking about the book days later, rather than completely forgetting about it the instant I put it down.

Perhaps one of the reasons I wasn’t as frustrated as others when I finished this book is because I read it so long after it was originally published, had seen online how disappointed lots of readers were and could manage my expectations accordingly, and Maggie has recently announced a Ronan trilogy, which will hopefully answer some of my questions. Ronan and Adam have been my favourite characters from the beginning, so I’m really excited to read a trilogy focused on them rather than Blue and Gansey.

My favourite part of the book has nothing to do with our fantastic foursome, or the psychics from 300 Fox Way, or even the Grey Man. My absolute favourite part was when Henry Cheng (one of the Vancouver crowd who idolise Gansey) talked about the language barrier between his thoughts and his words:

“It wasn’t that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.”

And how his mother, Seondeok struggled to make herself understood in English and would always say “It is that…but also something more.”

“Something more explained perfectly why he could never say what he meant – something more, by its definition, would always be different than what you already had in your hand.”

It sums up beautifully what it’s like to speak another language and feel like you’re not quite yourself in your second language. You can’t say what you mean with as much clarity and simplicity as in your native language, and you feel like your personality is being filtered through your limited vocabulary. I speak Spanish and on my year abroad in Spain I didn’t feel like myself at all, there’s something about the words we use and the way we express ourselves with language that’s absolutely intrinsic to our identities.

I gave The Raven King 4 stars, as I say it’s not my favourite, in fact I’d go so far as to say it’s my least favourite of the four (and I struggled with a few things in The Dream Thieves) but for one of my new series obsessions that’s definitely not to say it was a bad book or I didn’t love it. The setting and characters are everything in The Raven Cycle, and the moody atmosphere coupled with the mystical elements give it such an intense and claustrophobic feel. I’d definitely recommend reading this series if you love YA fantasy and any of Maggie Stiefvater’s other books.

Have you read The Raven Cycle? Are you dying for the new Ronan trilogy, like me?

Lyndsey