Brief Book Reviews

[balloonhat]

My year of free 2-day shipping from Amazon ended. They're offering me 50% off the annual cost of the service ($40USD/reg $80USD), but I don't think I buy enough stuff from to justify the cost. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.

Finished Reads (since this post):

All ratings are out of 5 stars.

Comments

[balloonhat]

There wasn't even much build-up for some of the Elemental Masters books. Just... "whoops, well, their plan didn't work and so the villains died" within two pages or less. I didn't read the books closely enough to notice problems with depictions of transpersons (or maybe it's in one of the books I haven't read yet), since the stories themselves were often baffling. Lackey is not a terrible writer, and she does TRY, but her books aren't very inspired. There are Satanists in her Sleeping Beauty retelling, for example. Of the Elemental Masters books I've read, I think the Cinderella one has been the most successful (it's set during WWI), and even then, it wasn't VERY successful (2.5 stars).

Mostly I'm reading them because I'm always curious about fairy tale retellings, but these just... blergh.

The sexual abuse isn't graphically portrayed or sexualized, but Tan-Tan does experience it pretty young (like, 11-13 years old). And it is incest. I don't know why the book summary doesn't at least hint this, since the major point of the book is Tan-Tan's survival of her abuse.