3/5: Boy oh boy, I did not like this. And it was such a letdown after The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I contemplated two-starring it, but it's competent enough, just hugely disappointing...

5/5: OK, I loved this, but it was also very clearly written for me. My pal Jay, who might read this review at some point, said something like, "If you're an Elder Millennial woman who grew up on Harry...

3/5: I'm a fan of Draven's work (I am really fond of the first two books of the trilogy that begins with Phoenix Unbound), but this felt like juvenilia. (Weirdly, it appears to fall smack in the middl...

4/5: This is a very good swing at B&tB (yes, I know I'm on a kick lately, leave me alone). The twist with this one is that Beauty is a rape survivor -- the actual assault is never explicitly shown on ...

4/5: This was so close, so close, to matching in quality the greatest B&tB retelling of all time (Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong). Dok...

3/5: LOL this one is bad!! But it's bad in such an interesting way that I can't bear to 2-star it! I'm something of a connoisseur of B&tB retellings, and I'm not sure any retelling has comprehensive...

5/5: This book is like if you plopped the cast of Howl's Moving Castle* into Uprooted -- and the effects are surprisingly great. (The author admits the influence of both of these works, so I'm not mak...

4/5: This was a very straight-ahead retelling of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon." The intended reader age is much younger than I thought -- I'm seeing this listed as YA, but honestly it felt more ...

4/5: This is quite a short novel; I banged through it in one sitting of less than three hours. The premise is simple: on a fictional island off the coast of the Carolinas circa 2000, the "quick brown ...