Sandy
This was very cute and funny story. I say its appropriate for all ages, while learning about Huda's personal journey in discovering love (romantic and self) you also get to learn about many aspects of Islamic culture.
I learned:
When a hijab is normally worn and when it isn't
The rules for gender relations.
What is an arranged marriage and that arranged does not equal forced.
Forced marriages are not allowed in Islam
The rules/steps for courtship (so many Jane Austen parallels)
The different parts of a Muslim wedding
Things I already knew:
How funny Huda's comics are (go follow “yesimhotinthis” on instagram)
how geeky her and her husband are
It's a quick read being a graphic memoir, I read it one sitting and longed for more details. It would make a cute coffee table book for guests to read (if I had a coffee table).
In the world of Graceling there are two distinct kinds of people - those that are graced and those that are not. The skills of the graced from what I have seen so far in this first book of Kristin Cashore's fantasy series are not as flamboyant or should I say obvious as what you would find in, for example, a comic book. There are no lasers shooting out of people's eyes, or tornado's being formed with a mere thought, the gracelings are what I would describe as unnaturally gifted. A normal person gifted in fighting would beat his or her opponent with almost ease, a person graced in fighting could have a broken arm, be faced off against five people and would still never lose a fight. The gracelings could be the most talented dancers, swimmers, runners, singers, weavers etc. or they could have far more dangerous talents.
Katsa's grace allowed her to kill a man when she was eight years old with one hand and from this moment on she has been used by her uncle, King Reyard, to strike fear into the heart of anyone who wrongs him. This along with her particular grace has made others who have not even met Katsa fear her, and her upbringing has not made Katsa the most typical of noble ladies. Still, Katsa despite not seeing herself as anything more than a tyrant leads covert operations where she helps people who need it and more and more recently she is finding it much more difficult to carry out her uncle's orders. And what really sets things off is while on a mission Katsa encounters a graced fighter who unexpectedly helps her unravel the peculiarities of her own grace as well as the shocking secrets of a foreign kingdom.
The story of Graceling for me was truly about not allowing yourself to be shaped by other people's predetermined thoughts of who you are and about being able to achieve anything as long as you never give up despite the odds. Graceling was also filled with such a diverse combination of awesome characters that ranged from brilliant to kick butt that I can't wait to meet them again in Fire and Bitterblue.
I listened to the audiobook, which was beautifully read by the author. An honest, sometimes, heart wrenching and other times heart warming look at a woman's life struck unexpectedly by cancer in a time when things were starting to kick off. Suleika speaks of the mysterious symptoms, the long arduous battle with cancer and learning to adjust to the land of the well after she is in remission. This book really showed me how flawed and wonderful people can be.
Funny, sexy and cute! A light and wonderful read that also dealt with important topics of grief and anxiety.
Loved it. I missed this world so much. Lovable and witty characters, cute astrals, and spooky things in the woods. I hope this series is successful and that the original series gets a chance to continue.
I love this duology. I hope the author continues more in this world at least I want to see more of Adela Silver and Maud going monster hunting.
Beautiful artwork lots of visuals and minimal dialogue and narration used to tell the story which suits the folklore.
It was a decent read. It may have probably been best if I started from the beginning of the series as opposed to starting with book #5 but I understood what was going on. Both Jack and Annie are travelers who travel to different places through pictures in books by the use of a Magical tree house that belongs to Morgan Le Fey. In Night of the Ninjas the siblings realize that Morgan needs their help. The magical librarian has left behind an unfinished message for them with clues, they must find four things and to do this they must travel back to ancient Japan where ninjas and samurai were quite common.
I like ninjas so I borrowed the book from my friend and read it in about 15 minutes, a nice read but not interesting enough for me to continue onto the next book to find out how Jack and Annie will help Morgan. If I was the intended target reader though I'm sure I would have enjoyed this much more :).
Cute and feel good. Whimsical and heart warming. Did not give 5 stars because it didn't grip me.
3.5
Great writing, I cringed and tensed up when I was supposed to.
If this was set in the 1950s (because that's what it felt like and not the 90s) then I would say it felt very realistic like I could picture this actually happening and the characters acting they way they did, if I suspended my disbelief that vampires existed. This had a lot more serious topics then I expected, it brought issues of class, race, sexual assault, child abuse and domestic abuse. There was even gas lighting.
The women were there for each other when it came to “normal” matters like arranging care for an elderly parent but when it came to the supernatural aspect of the book it took much longer then I liked for everyone to ban together. Based off the title of the book and the premise I thought there was going to be more of group of friends taking on this evil entity but that really didn't happen until the end of the book and it was mostly the main character having to handle things on her own.
If you get the chance listen to this one on audio. It was a great listen. Not sure i liked the reveal at the end but it didn't change my overall feelings for the book too much to alter the rating.
Lovely illustrations and a glimpse into a world I knew nothing about. This is a cute little story about a pair of siblings that live on the Tapajos river where the community moves every rainy season to higher ground. Unfortunately in the haste of moving the family forgets their tortoise and the kids secretly go back to their deserted home to rescue Titi!
This was a nice cozy fantasy read. If you loved The House on the Cerulean Sea and fairytalew I think will love this story as well.
I couldn't finish it. I got up to 83 pages and decided my time was better spent reading something else. I didn't love the main character any more and I had no interest in all the new characters that appeared. (The cover is still gorgeous though).
I don't know how many years its been since I've read The Bartimaeus Trilogy but I loved those books from the very first time I read The Amulet of Samarkand and was most excited to find out that a graphic novel version had been created. Thank-you Andrea of Aine's Realm for buying me a copy of this book ^_^.
The Amulet of Samarkand starts off the same way the novel did with the summoning of Bartimaeus the djinn by a young twelve year old magician. This is surprising because someone so young does not normally contain the skill to summon a djinn of Bartimaeus' level. And Bartimaeus isn't very happy to be taking orders from a kid especially when the kid orders him to steal an item from another magician. You know which item I'm talking about right? ;)
With a lot of trouble and witty dialogue Bartimaeus steals the amulet and gives it to the boy but unfortunately for him he has more work to do. And what had started off as a simple plan to humiliate a rival immediately twists into something a twelve year old boy cannot handle.
The story is told from alternating POVs and we quickly learn that the boy, Nathaniel, was sold by his parents when he was six years old to become a magician, this is in fact very normal in the world of The Bartimaeus Trilogy which is set in an alternate England where the Government is controlled by Magicians who have the ability to summon djinn and think themselves better than Commoners (non magic folk). I find this a bit funny because Magicians are not born, you have to study for years and develop skills to become one, so all Magicians were Commoners at one point.
For a book that was a lot thinner than the novel the story was adapted very well, both Nathaniel and Bartimaeus' characters were exactly as I remembered them from the books as well as the many side characters and the world of the books were shown and described thoroughly enough that readers who have not read the novels will not feel as if anything was left out. And lets not forget the story, I wondered if the whole thing would be told in this first volume and surprisingly it was but the story did not feel incomplete are rushed which I appreciated greatly.
The only thing I can complain about what that there were moments when dialogue was not needed, there was a lot of narration on Bartimaeus part and I know it was doing this to show his amusing and sarcastic side (because I enjoyed his narration) but there were some parts that were just describing things that were being shown to me through the art so those parts were repetitive. Other than those few parts however I loved this book.
So pick it up if you're looking for a smart, entertaining read with mystery, action and charm :)
You always have to be careful with your expectations when starting a book because a book can either meet them, fall short of them, or exceed them, so it is best you go in with no expectations at all. I, of course, had expectations, I had heard reviews and seen the movie trailer. For the longest time, I had an urge to read this book because it sounded good, but I hadn't read this book because it sounded scary and I don't do scary. But well I saw the movie trailer (Sandra Bullock!), and then the Kindle edition went on sale for $2.99 US. So I told myself if you can get through the book then maybe you can watch the movie.
The premise of Bird Box is scary. A mother of two four-year-old children has to make it 20 miles down a river to a haven blindfolded because if she opens her eyes, she will see something that will make her kill those closest to her and then herself. We don't know what this thing is but its real and it's out there.
Luckily for me, this book wasn't as scary as I thought it was going to be, but that was also the disappointing part. I could have read this book a long time ago. I never really cared all that much about the characters, we didn't learn much about them before the Problem starting. I didn't need to see their lives before the timeline in the book but other than Tom we never learned much about their back story including Malorie's and she's the main character. I mean I don't need to like a character, but I have to them interesting and to find them interesting I need to know about them. I would have loved to learn more about Cheryl and Felix and Jules, even Don. I wanted to understand more of why he was the way he was. In survivor horror, I liked learning what makes a character tick and seeing how people react to situations differently especially since the real danger isn't what you cannot see but how people act when they do see whatever is outside.
There were a few creepy moments in this book it did have me compelled to finish it because I needed to know what happened at the end, but it didn't get GOOD for me until the last twenty per cent.
Quick, fast paced and intense. This time around I knew the kids were going to be OK because this is a series so I wasn't as scared for them as I was when reading Small Spaces I just didn't know how they were going to make it out of this situation. Read it nearly all in one sitting and will be reading the next book.
This was such a great book -insert crying emoji- i don't know how to properly express my love for this story but it was sooo gooood. Our heroine Cassiopeia accidentally releases a Mayan god of death named Hun-Kame from a prison and embarks on a quest with him across Mexico and California so he can win back his throne and its set in the 1920s! She's stubborn and craving adventure and escape from her boring life where she cleans and and does her mean grandfather's and male cousins bidding, he's a newly awaken angry immortal engaging with the human world more than he has ever done before and is on a quest with a young woman who isn't afraid to give him attitude. There is adventure, humor, Mayan mythology, Mexican history, magic and a slow burn romance.
So great. Gave me a book hangover. Protagonist was hilarious. Necromancers in space. Locked room murder mystery. If I can string more words together I'll update later with better review.
I thought i already wrote a review for this. When i first listened to atomic habits I thought the fact that the author provided supplements to help you track habits and told you how to build systems was great. And it is on paper but his methods don't work for me. he has some good nuggets of information like how just because you find something boring doesn't mean you no longer want to do it. Like say you want to write a story but after the initial rush a motivation has left you it feels boring to work on your story. It doesn't mean you no longer want to write it, that feeling of boredom is normal and doesn't mean you should give up.