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sophia_sol) wrote2023-08-01 09:27 am
sophia_sol) wrote2023-08-01 09:27 am
Bloodmarked, by Tracy Deonn
First thing I've read for my Hugos homework! yes I feel like I'm behind already. I only have 2 months left!! Anyway this is the sort of book I wouldn't have chosen to read without external reason, and no it still isn't my thing but it's a really excellent version of that thing.
It's a modern YA urban fantasy written in first-person present-tense about a special girl with special secret magical powers experiencing a love triangle and trying to save the world. Which is great if that's your jam, we all have our well-used premises we like to read and this just doesn't happen to be mine! But it does some good stuff with it that makes me admire it at least, and definitely want to rec it to people for whom this type of book IS their jam.
I appreciate that it's drawing on Arthurian legend while also being anti-monarchy, for one thing. And has a black girl in the Arthur role!
Also it's about a girl having a complicated experience of her connection with her history and her family's traditions - there's both good and bad in such things, and the book is firmly on the side of having a choice about what to value in it.
I also appreciate that it's a book that understands that it's not actually GOOD to make teens be the only people who are able to access the secret special magic powers and in fact it's probably because there are adults who want to be able to manipulate them. Secret orders are a problem actually!
There's lots of good themes overall in fact.
And it seems promising about how it's going to handle the love triangle - a polyamorous answer does not seem out of the question, which is fun.
However it is the second book in a series and it ends on a cliffhanger so there's that.
I would call it a 4 or even 5 star book for people who enjoy the modern YA genre. I'm almost certainly going to rank it either first or second on my Hugo voting form in the YA category, because I do think it deserves recognition! But I'm tagging it 3 stars because that's the degree to which I personally enjoyed it.
It's a modern YA urban fantasy written in first-person present-tense about a special girl with special secret magical powers experiencing a love triangle and trying to save the world. Which is great if that's your jam, we all have our well-used premises we like to read and this just doesn't happen to be mine! But it does some good stuff with it that makes me admire it at least, and definitely want to rec it to people for whom this type of book IS their jam.
I appreciate that it's drawing on Arthurian legend while also being anti-monarchy, for one thing. And has a black girl in the Arthur role!
Also it's about a girl having a complicated experience of her connection with her history and her family's traditions - there's both good and bad in such things, and the book is firmly on the side of having a choice about what to value in it.
I also appreciate that it's a book that understands that it's not actually GOOD to make teens be the only people who are able to access the secret special magic powers and in fact it's probably because there are adults who want to be able to manipulate them. Secret orders are a problem actually!
There's lots of good themes overall in fact.
And it seems promising about how it's going to handle the love triangle - a polyamorous answer does not seem out of the question, which is fun.
However it is the second book in a series and it ends on a cliffhanger so there's that.
I would call it a 4 or even 5 star book for people who enjoy the modern YA genre. I'm almost certainly going to rank it either first or second on my Hugo voting form in the YA category, because I do think it deserves recognition! But I'm tagging it 3 stars because that's the degree to which I personally enjoyed it.
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I'm probably going to put The Scholomance #1 for Best Series, but that's partly because it's too intertextual to be standard YA--it gets a lot of its significance from multiple references to other texts & things in the real world. But I only vote for Lodestar occasionally, because I no longer really like YA, the characters are too young &, when realistic, exasperating. No longer my circus, I'm a poor judge of the monkeys.
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Scholomance.... sigh, it hooked me into caring in the last book in the trilogy, just enough to make me all the more frustrated with the ways in which it didn't quite live up to what I saw it as trying to do! So it's not going to be a #1 series for me, though it's also not end of the pack.
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