The Mime Order - Samantha Shannon (2015)

3.5 stars

I bought this book as soon as I saw it because I was interested to see where the story could go after the last one, and I was pretty happy with it.

I think this book was on par with the last book but I found the first half kind of hard to get through, I was enjoying it when I was reading it, but when I wasn't I didn't have any desire to keep reading. It's similar to the last book in that it takes a while to remember what all the words and slang of that world mean, but once you're in it it's a bit weird when you're back in reality. I feel like this book was kind of unneccessarily long, a lot of the first half was really long and explanatory and when I reflect on the book I can't remember anything significant happening in the first half. My favourite character was once again Warden, I find his part of the story so much more interesting and unpredictable than anything that Paige is doing, and his history of the rephaite and ranthen was probably the most interesting part of the book apart from the final battle. I would recommend this series to people who like high fantasy series like Eragon.

Paige is back in London and although she doesn't want to she must go back into Jaxon's gang as he can protect her. She wants to expose the rephaite and government's corruption to the entire syndicate, but Jaxon won't let her. Soon the Underlord is murdered and his mollisher disappears so Jaxon applies for the position, and Paige considers fighting for the position herself but she doesn't have the money. She is approached by Errai and Pleione, two rephaite that were helping them in Sheol I and they tell her that if she finds Warden then they would consider an alliance to help bring down Nashira and the other rephaite. Paige uses a substance that Warden left her to find where he was captured - in the Rag and Bone Man's territory wherer she must go to and break him out of. Once she does that Warden gets her an alliance with the ranthen and she has their bankroll so she can go for Underqueen. She manages to defeat everyone in the battle for Underqueen, including Jaxon by taking control of his dreamscape and making him concede instead of killing him. In the process she learns that most of them were working for the Rag and Bone Man, including the temporary Underqueen herself, The Abbess, and they were all, including the old Underlord Hector, selling voyants to the government. She tells the syndicate this and is dubbed the Black Moth, Nashira however gets the government to hold some of the other Sheol I survivors hostage and broadcast them on TV to try to get her to turn herself in. She goes into a guard's dreamscape and uses him to go to talk to Nashira, but before anything can be decided Nashira brings out her new ally, Jaxon.

This Shattered World - Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner (2014)

5 stars

I bought this book after I finished These Broken Stars because the ending had me so invested in the story that I wanted to keep reading right away, and I was not disappoointed at all.

This book is told from two different perspectives than the last book but in the same style, this time from Jubilee and Flynn, with snippets of Jubilee's childhood at the start of each chapter. Ironically I think the other people in this book asides from them weren't really that neccessary because I loved them so much, but I absolutely loved the connection between them and Tarver and it makes me think that the focus of the third book will be the Knave of Hearts person they mentioned. The plot of this book is so much better than the last one as I just could not put it down, but I understand that they had to lay the groundwork for it with the first book so I strongly suggest that if you were kinda into the first book but didn't like all the constant travelling that you finish it and get to this one. My favourite character was Jubilee, I love strong female characters and she is such a great example of one that thinking back on this book all I can remember iss how much I loved her. I would recommend this series to anyone who likes young adult fantasy and romance.

Jubilee is a soldier and Flynn is a rebel on Avon, a planet that's never fully terraformed and is known for driving soldiers that are posted there too long to go insane. Jubilee has lasted the longest on the planet and is at her normal bar when she is kidnapped by Flynn Cormac who wants her to tell him about a secret base that he's seen in the swamp, she knows nothing about it and when he takes her to the island it's on nothing is there, but Jubilee sees a flash of the building appear and she picks up a microchip with a LaRoux symbol on it. Flynn then decides to take her back to the rebel base and try to trade her back to the army for some much needed medicine for their people. When he gets back the other leader of the rebels, McBride, is trying to rouse the civillians to go storm the base because he says they've taken Flynn. He calms the crowd, as he wants everything resolved peacefully, but then McBride finds Jubilee and nearly beats her to death before Flynn saves her. She tells him about the microchip and they decide to try to do something about it together so Jubilee calls her old captain, Tarver Merendsen. Tarver and Lilac tell them what happened to them with the whispers, which they realize are whats on Avon and Tarver tells them that if they plan on infiltrating the base they also have to tell the world that LaRoux are behind it. McBride slaughters a bunch of his own people while Jubilee is unconcious and he tells everyone that she is who did it so that they'll march against the army base. Jubilee and Tarver manage to break into the whispers building but one of them soon takes over Flynn's body and tells Jubilee that humans have taught them cruelty and separation so that's what they will show in return. It turns out that one of the whispers knew Jubilee as a child and is what has been taking her dreams, because it considers her a friend. It tells her to destroy them as they've become cruel and aren't one being anymore which is how they're supposed to be, he fends off the one in Flynn's body long enough for Jubilee to shoot the machinery that was holding them together. The war between the rebels and the army has come to a battle on the island that the whispers were held on and Jubilee gets shot trying to get to the loudspeaker to broadcast to everyone, so Flynn must do it on his own and he manages to talk everyone down from war and expose LaRoux industries. Jubilee lives and she and Flynn see the clouds start to clear on Avon now that LaRoux is leaving their planet alome.

More Than This - Patrick Ness (2013)

2.5 stars

Mac bought this for me for my birthday and I'd heard so many good things about it that I ended up being pretty disappointed.

I really wanted to like this book, but I just found that it made me really uncomfortable for the majority of the book when it's just Seth and his depressing thoughts of the afterlife. The parts of the book that I enjoyed were his flashbacks to his life and the parts where he's with Tomasz and Regine. It gave me a similar creepy feeling to what I had when I read Gone but this one was less due to people and more about the world I guess, I'm not really sure what it was about the book that gave me such a weird feeling, but I think the explanation for Seth's situation was way too late in the plot to give me any solace. My favourite character in this book was Tomasz by a mile, he managed to bring a smile to my face in every bleak situation they faced and I don't know how anyone could dislike him. I would recommend this to someone who likes young adult fiction with lots of introspection and reflection and isn't bothered by a seemingly apocalyptic setting.

A boy drowns. He dies. He then wakes up outside his old childhood home in England wrapped in bandages and thirstier than he's ever been before. The town he is in is deserted with no one in sight and everything covered in dust and overgrown as though it had seen no life for years. The boy soon starts to remember his life, including his name; Seth, and why he drowned; he killed himself. After raiding a grocery store and still finding no people around he goes to kill himself again, this time by jumping off a mountain, however he is stopped by Tomasz and Regine people who are also there and are running from the man in black who then appears and tries to kill them. They learn that they were all killed by a blow to a specific spot on the back of their heads and Regine thinks that they were in an online reality when the real world went to shit, Seth still thinks that they're all in hell. The man in black follows them multiple times after that and they manage to escape him in each one until Seth breaks into the prison, where Tomasz awoke from and said that there were thousands of other coffins just like theirs in it. Seth finds thousands of people in what seems to be comas in their coffin like things and the man in black is some sort of robot that maintains them. They then manage to destroy the man in black and Seth goes back to the virtual reality world to try to bring people back to the real one.