Book Review: Renegades: Supernova

                                                              Supernova Review 

Supernova is the third and final book in the Renegades trilogy, this one starts off shortly after the end of the last book with Ace arrested, Nova having stolen Ace's old helmet, Max in the hospital and a large part of headquarters being destroyed. Nova now has to continue to pretend to be a renegade which is something that she wasn't planning to do after stealing the helmet which makes her more in danger of being discovered than ever before since she left clues behind she wouldn't have if she thought she would be sticking around after her mission was complete. Nova using Agent N when she stole the helmet alerts the renegades that Nightmare is working as a double agent in their organization which increases the odds Nova being found out. Some of the renegades loosing their powers because Agent N ends up causing problems for the renegades with how the fallout from this incident shows how unprepared they are for their enemy to get a hold of a weapon that they created or how deal with their heroes once they don't have powers anymore.  Another thing that makes Nova's life more difficult is that Adrian now wants to capture Nightmare more than he ever he did before since he believes she tried to kill Max. 

In this books both Nova and Adrian's secret identities are revealed and they both have to deal with how they feel about that and the consequences of the other people on their sides knowing the others secret identity. Nova finally figures out what kind of person Ace is once she succeeds at bring him back to power leads to a battle that is more like a slaughter.

Overall I loved this book it was a good conclusion to the series and it ended up with the characters in a place that I was happy with. There were problems that I had with this book despite loving such as Nova's naivety about Ace, Nova being far too willing to let Adrian be tortured and murdered and  Adrian being far too forgiving of Nova for this, and there not being enough time at the end of the book to deal with the emotional fallout of everything that happened in the last half of the book. Please tell me your thoughts on this book or series as a whole in the comment section below.

Book Review: American Panda

                                                         American Panda Review 

American Panda is about a seventeen year old Taiwanese girl named Mei who graduated early and is attending college at MIT. Mei wants to maintain her traditional parents approval which means that she has to become a doctor despite the fact that she's a germaphobe and can't stomach the idea of dealing with anyone's bodily fluids, and maintain her parents approval also means giving up her dreams of teaching dance and opening a studio. Another area of Mei's life in which her parents get a say and she doesn't is her love life which is something she'd rather put off at having at all since she's not interested in the guys that her mother thinks is right for her. 

Mei uses the freedom of living away from home to get a job teaching dance as a part time job, meeting up with her brother that her family had disowned several years ago for dating someone they didn't approve and having a flirty friendship with a Japanese boy named Darren who she knows her parents wouldn't approve of. Keeping so many secrets from her parents is something Mei hasn't done before which makes her very stressed now that she is keeping so many from them whenever she talks to them. 

Overall I really liked this book, I think this book told a good story about Mei figuring out when to stay true to herself and I like that she was able to build a stronger relationship with her mother by being honest about what she really wanted. I also liked the romance in this book but it took up less time than I was expecting it to. Please tell me your thoughts in the comment section below. 

Book Review: Daisy Jones and the Six

                                                 Daisy Jones and the Six Review

Daisy Jones and the Six is the story of a fictional music group that was big in the 1970s and the story is told as if it's an interview with various people telling their version of what happened that led the group to getting together and falling apart. The book starts off telling us about who Daisy Jones was, Daisy was the daughter of wealthy but neglectful parents which led her to sneaking out her house to hang out on the Sunset strip since she was a young teen at all the music clubs and since she was so beautiful she got a way with it. Daisy becomes a bit of a groupie after awhile and sometime after this she becomes interested in writing her own music and since Daisy a pretty good singer and good looking she soon gets a record deal but she isn't allowed to sing any of her own songs which leads to her trying to get out of her record contract which doesn't work out for her. 

Around this same time period The Six is also becoming a band of it's own and while they take longer to get offered a record contract with not being from LA or having wealthy parents or hanging with rock stars it instead starts off with Billy and Graham Dunne and a few guys playing songs where ever they can get a gig and this leads to them eventually touring and getting attention from a record company out in LA. Along the way there were members that left and members that joined one member was a keyboardist named Karen who had already been in a different band before joining The Six but preferred their band since she felt more respected as a musician by them. Billy who is the lead singer as well as the song writer was given a record deal where he had pretty much full creative control over and the album ends up doing pretty well, the tour doesn't end up to great for him. During the tour Billy ends up sinking pretty far into alcoholism and drug addictions and it seemed like he was headed to an early grave until his wife Camila ended up giving him an ultimatum to either get clean or get out of her their recently born daughter's life for good, he chooses to get clean. 

Daisy and the Six's paths first cross when she ends up being featured on one of The Six's songs which was the idea of the record execs not Billy which made him not happy about her being there from the start and well Daisy didn't appreciate the undeserved hostility which meant that the two were off to a bad start. The song ends up being a huge hit which leads to Daisy touring with the Six and the tour's success leads to Daisy joining the band for their third album and her second and since she told that she would be able write her own songs for her second album this means her and Billy end up writing the album together despite their dislike for each other.

Overall I loved this book, it had a really interesting story and characters that made me wish that this was based off a real band since I really wanted to listen to all the music that they talked about in it and see the album covers that were described as well. Please tell me your thoughts on this book in the comment section below. 

Book Review: The Diviners

                                                             The Diviners Review 

The Diviners is set in 1926 New York and the book starts off with an upper class girls birthday party which was a bit of a bore until she pulled out a ouija board and the group calls forth a ghost named naughty John and the fail to properly send his spirit away which will lead to trouble for our actually main characters later down the line. Evie O'Neil has been sent to live in New York after she uses her special ability to see memories of an objects owner when she holds it at a party a reveals that a son of an important figure in her home town got a girl pregnant out of wedlock and since Evie refuses to take back what she said since she knows what she said was true her parents send her to New York to live with her uncle. Evie's Uncle runs a museum that is about the occult as well as teaches classes about the subject which is why later on in the book he is brought in as a consultant about a series of murder and Evie ends up nosing her way into the investigation as well. 

Another main character we are introduced to early on in the book is Memphis Campbell  a young African American man who currently works for a man that runs a lot of speakeasies in Harlem as well as other forms of crime as the one who collects the money but what he's really passionate about is writing although he has never been satisfied enough with any of his writings to show it to anyone else. Memphis use to have the ability to heal people but he hasn't been able or rather refuses to even try to since he failed to save his mother's life after she fell ill. while Memphis himself isn't involved in the supernatural anymore he is still very aware of it and since it seems that his younger brother is psychic it doesn't seem like he can just live a normal life no matter how much he wants to. 

There are a number of other important characters that are introduced as the story goes on such as Sam Lloyd  a boy that around Evie's age who she meets right after she gets to New York when he kisses her and steals twenty dollars from her which leads her to disliking him and really wanting him to repay her. Sam very much seems like he will end up being Evie's love interest since the two of them often banter together, Evie is forced to work with him later on in the story and they both end up being vulnerable with each other later on. Another character is Mabel Rose  who is a friend that Evie has mostly interacted with as a pen pal before the story starts since Mabel lives in the same building as Evie's uncle. Mabel is a lot less bold and more well behaved than Evie and she has parents who are more interested in their causes than their daughter and all these things end up causing friction in their friendship later on. Theta Knight a dancer for the Ziegfeld Follies and Henry De Bois who is her roommate and pianist that she has a sibling like relationship are two more important characters. A young man named Jericho who was taken in by Evie's uncle and works with him is one of the few people who seems to dislike Evie from the start. 

Overall I loved this book, it had an interesting murder mystery plot as well as an interesting set of characters to follow and it also had an interesting mythology with the diviners being people who were just given some sort of power and all the rituals involving ghosts. Please tell me your thoughts on this book or series overall in the comment section below. 

Book Review: Vampire Academy: Blood Promise

                                                          Blood Promise Review 

Blood Promise is the fourth book in the Vampire Academy series and this book starts off several months after the events of the last book with Rose looking to find Dimitri who has recently turned into a strigoi(an evil vampire) since they promised each other that they kill the other if either of them were ever turned. Rose has decided that keeping her promise to Dimitri is more important than her future and Lissa so she has dropped out of school and given up her chance to be Lissa guardian in the future. The only lead that Rose has about where Dimitri is, is that he was in Russia which leads Rose to believe that he will go back to the village he grew up in but the only trouble is she can't remember it's name so this leads to Rose killing a lot of strigois but being nowhere near catching up with Dimitri. 

The first real break Rose gets in her mission to find Dimitri is when she encounters an alchemist(person that cleans up after guardians and have some small amount of power that they must use to help the guardians and the moroi) named Sydney who has been cleaning the strigoi bodies Rose had been leaving around the city. Sydney doesn't really want to help Rose find Dimitri's village but her bosses thinks it's a good idea so she has to help Rose out anyway. Once Rose gets to the village she tells Dimitri's family that he's dead and then spends a good amount of time deciding whether she just wants to mourn him or if she wants to still find and try to kill the strigoi version of him and probably die herself in the process. 

In this book we also get to see how Lissa is doing with Rose missing and she is understandably not doing so well with having no idea were her best friend who is currently on a suicide mission and refuses to contact anyone at the academy is and rather dislikes that their bond only goes one way since she's unable to sense whether or not Rose is alive or not. Lissa ends up making friends with a new girl named Avery who encourages Lissa to be a party girl which is what she was like before her and Rose ran away but it doesn't quite seem like the character we have known for the last three books. 

Overall I liked this book although I will admit that I preferred Lissa's storyline to Rose's since I don't ship Rose and Dimitri and her whole storyline this book was being consumed by that relationship which only made me dislike it more. I thought it was a bit strange how many scenes from the past they add in this book about Rose and Dimitri's relationship that don't feel like they have a place in the first three book because while I don't like Rose and Dimitri's relationship I know that most of the fandom does so I was surprised by the level of insecurity this showed an the author's behalf about how underwritten this relationship really was in the previous books. Please tell me your thoughts about this book or series as a whole in the comment section below. 

Book Review: Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between

                                  Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between Review 

Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between is about the last night before Clare and Aidan a couple of high school sweethearts head off to college on opposites sides of the country. The couple hasn't broken up yet since they still love each other although Clare has never said it but Clare thinks that the practical thing to do is to break up since she believes that it's what's going to happen in the end anyways and Aidan on the other hand thinks that even though it will take hard work that their love is strong enough to survive a long distance relationship. The night starts off as lighthearted trip down memory lane of their relationship and high school life in general with the two of them trying to get the other to agree to their point of view. 

As the night goes on and the reality that starting tomorrow that they'll be living entirely separate lives come tomorrow tensions began to rise when Clare finds out that Aidan has kept a secret from her and Aidan begins to think that reason that Clare is so eager to break up with him isn't to save them both pain but because she never saw him as anything but her high school boyfriend. As the night goes on the nostalgia begins to have a bitter hint to it as it becomes clearer that the relationship is on it's last legs whether it's what either of them wants or not. 

Overall I thought this was an interesting idea for a story and one I'm sure many people could relate to. I thought that are main characters were well fleshed out and I also enjoyed their friends and their story as well even though it was given much less page time than the main romance story. Please tell me your thoughts on this book in the comment section down below. 

Book Review: The Similars

                                                            The Similars Review

The Similars is about how Emmaline Chance who is returning for a new year at prestigious high school boarding school after her best friend Oliver committed suicide over the summer, there is a group of new students coming to the school who are clones that were created without the consent from the people whose DNA was used or the family of those people. The group of clones are referred to as the Similars and most of the the similars originals are also students at this school which makes the group somewhat of an unwelcome addition to the school. Emmaline at first is accepting of the similars since it's not their faults that they were created but then she meets Levi who is a clone of Oliver and it's just too much for her to handle having to deal with someone who looks just like her best friend but who acts entirely differently and shares none of the memories of the life she had with Oliver. 

Emmaline wants nothing to do with Levi and after she gets mad at Levi for stealing Oliver's face, a matter he had no say in, he doesn't want anything to do with her either but circumstance forces the two of them together. After getting to know Levi more as his own person she starts to care for him in a way that is different from the way in which she cared for Oliver. Throughout this time Emmaline is also learning that the similars are different from ordinary clones and that the school seems to have a lot of secrets of their own that leaves Emmaline wary of who she can and can't trust. 

Overall this was a good book that had an interesting premise, world and character conflict that were all set up well from the start. The book does a good job at making you care about the characters and at setting up mysteries in the world around the characters. Please tell me your thoughts about this book in the comment section down below.