hi! My name is penny and as usual I'm here to talk about some bookish things
specifically today I'm going to talk a little bit more in depth about the last
one thousand pages of YA fantasy that I've read. Actually I think I've got
about 2,000 pages here but I just read so much fantasy that it's been
collecting up I'm a little bit behind on these thousand pages videos, where I
group a thousand pages of a particular genre together and then talk about
them in a little bit more depth then I have time to in my wrap ups. However
although it is two thousand-ish pages it is only four books. So as usual I'm
going to talk about them from worst to best and try to tell you what it's about,
what I liked, and what I didn't like, and who I think might like this book. I am
however having a bit of a debate with myself about which is the worst of these
four books because the lowest two are both series and yet I'm thinking of
continuing the one I think is the worst and not continuing the second worst and
does that even make sense? Why am i making my decisions like this? Anyway,
let's just talk about them in the order and question my decisions later. The
first book I'm gonna talk about is Eldest by Christopher Paolini. This is
the second book in the Inheritance Cycle which is this series all about dragons.
Specifically this young boy finds a dragon egg and becomes the first dragon
rider in a really long time. It's set in a world where there are dwarves and elves
and all those classic fantasy creatures as well as an evil king that he's
obviously working up towards taking down. I listened to this on audiobook which
thank goodness because apparently it's a 700 page book. That's really long. And if I
had to tell you what exactly happened in this book I mean I probably couldn't cause
its spoilers for the first book but does 700 pages worth of stuff happen? No ,I
don't think so. Mostly he is spending this book training with the elves and
learning some stuff. I did think that there were some good twists in the story
but when the twists weren't happening I found it quite hard to feel
engaged and I also felt like it jumped into things very quickly and didn't really
give me much of a recap of what was going on. There's a lot of characters to
keep track of which would probably be fine if you were engaged but because I'm
not, I keep forgetting who different people are. Also Christopher Paolini was
very young when he wrote the series so my hope is that this is going to
continue to improve as the series goes on. I don't think the second book proved
that that's what's going to happen but I'm still hopeful and I guess that's why
I'm thinking of continuing this series and not continuing the next series that
I'm going to talk about because I just have much more hope for this series. It
could be that in the end I'm going to be disappointed and I think when I finish
the fourth book in the series - I think there's four books? - when I finish then
I will let you know how I found the series as a whole. I really want to like
the series because I do really like dragons and I don't think the concept of
the Dragons or the way the dragons are written in this book is bad. I quite like
the Dragons. I think the main problem I have with this series is that I don't
really care for the main character Eragon because Eragon is just typical,
boring, whiny guy. As far as who I would recommend the series to, I think I'm gonna
hold off on that until I finish this series but so far my general thoughts
are if you are new to fantasy and you really love dragons then you might still
get some enjoyment out of this. So the next worst series that I read was Bloodwitch
by Susan Dennard. So this is the third book in the Truth
Witch series or I think it's actually called the Wiitchlands, and it's a story
initially about these two witches that are best friends. One of them is a thread
witch who has the ability to see the different threads between different
people and the other is a truth witch who's able to see whether people are
telling the truth or lying. And in this world there's also a bunch of other
people with witch powers. So different elemental powers,
there's sight witches who can see the future, word witches who can communicate
over long distances. Just all sorts of different witch powers which I do really
like the different witch powers and there's a lot of world-building in the
series so the world is very rich and complex but at the same time I
just don't feel like the characters are very realistic. In this third book
obviously we're following a blood witch who has the ability to manipulate and
track people's blood. He can also heal himself super fast and
he... what is he even doing in this book? I don't know. it seemed like it was quite
a long book, it was quite a long book, like five hundred and something pages
and personally I felt again like not much happened during that time. There is
a lot of drama that's been set up in some of the previous books and so
they're dealing with that but it follows quite a few different characters and
each one of those characters really didn't make much progress at all within
this book. I think in the end the thing that's pushing me just stop reading this
series is that I found each successive book more and more boring. And initially
I was willing to push through because I thought it was just going to be a
trilogy however now I believe it's going to be at least a 5 book series if not
longer and I don't think I'm willing to read it if it goes on that long. Mainly I
think because the writing style is just not something that I enjoy. And I know
there are absolutely plenty of other people who love this series so obviously that
writing style is something that some people enjoy, it's just not for me.
Additionally I did listen to the audiobook for this and it was weird.
Because we have this American narrator and yet all the characters are being
voiced as European or Indian or Russian or Middle Eastern, all those kind of
accents. So it seemed really weird that the narrator was American. The story is
told in third-person but it's usually told from a particular person's
perspective, so you're able to see their thoughts. And it would be very
off-putting when you're hearing somebody's thoughts and then suddenly
they're speaking in a completely different accent from what they were
thinking in. I kept waiting for one of the characters to actually have this
American accent but none of them did and so I don't really understand why then
narrator wasn't one of the main accents being used by the characters? I think
that put me off quite a lot. Cause I was hoping that I could continue this series by
using the audio books to make it a little bit easier to get through but I
just don't think it's gonna happen. So as I said, some people do really love
this series so it's obviously for some people. I think you're probably best to
try and sample the first chapter and see whether you think the writing is
something you can put up with for five or possibly more books. I would also say
that people that like the series seem to also like the Falling Kingdoms series
which I also hated. So possibly if you like Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes
you might like the Witchlands series. So the next book we have to talk about is
Stardust by Neil Gaiman. So I read this as part of the Book Junkie Trials. A lot of
people will have read it for that recently because it was the group book
and I do know that a lot of people were quite disappointed in this and I think a
large part of that was because they watched the movie first. And I have to
admit that the movie is a lot better than the book. Personally I read the book
first. I did watch the trailer before I read the book and I think that helped me
to have the characters pictured in my head a little bit and I think also it
made me anticipate that some cool things were going to happen so it helped me to
get through some of the slower parts of the story. So what is Stardust about? Stardust
starts in this small little village which has a wall next to it over which there
is this fairy land type place and every 9 years in this fairy land next to the
wall there is a market and the people from kind of the regular world can go
over there and get some magical things. But the rest of the time you're not
allowed to go over the wall. In the story we follow this young guy named Tristran.
He is infatuated with this girl that he barely knows. He ends up promising that
he's going to go and catch this a fallen star for her and the expectation is that
once he does that she'll marry him. I know that this premise puts people off
a little bit because in the beginning especially Tristran is kind of a bit of a
dick. Like the idea of falling in love with someone when you barely know them
and being so over the top is kind of annoying. But that's said, it's
very realistic for young people of any gender to act in this way. Or even
sometimes some of us older people make these kind of mistakes. And also the idea
of the book as that Tristan learns throughout the story what real
relationships are like. So it is written in a very fairy tale style. If you read a
lot of Neil Gaiman stuff I think it's pretty similar. It can be a little bit
self-indulgent when he goes on about bits that aren't necessarily relevant to the
story but I think in this book he actually did that less than he does in
some of his other books. I did especially love the Lords of Stormhold, especially
the dead ones. I thought they played a really interesting part in the story and
in the end everything was wrapped up really nicely. I do think that one thing
that the movie didn't do as well is the way that everything linked in together,
especially there is this one woman who is enslaved by this witch and there are
very specific criteria that need to happen in order for her to be freed and
I really liked how that was done so organically. And I think the movie
changed a few things so that wasn't quite as clear or as good in the movie.
But that said, the book really doesn't have much depth to it. It's 267 pages, so
it's pretty quick. It's a very surface level. Kind of a classic good versus evil
battle. And the movie definitely did a much better job of developing the
characters and keeping the action going throughout. I think the movie just did a
much better job of making the characters cool and interesting. And the movie had
some really good actors in it as well. So there was Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer
and Claire Danes and they're all really good actors so that helped the movie a lot
as well I think. I do think if you like fairy tale, whimsical stories and you
don't mind that the main character is sometimes an annoying
whiny guy, then you might really enjoy this book. Also I think if you haven't
seen the movie you might be more likely to like the book because you won't have
such high expectations for the book. So lastly, I'm going to talk about the Last
Magicians by Lisa Maxwell. This is the first book in a series and I only
gave it three stars, although I do wonder if I might have liked it more if I'd
gone in with lower expectations, or just more realistic expectations. Because I
went in thinking this was going to be an adult fantasy and that it was going
to be quite dark but actually it's a YA fantasy and there is quite a heavy
romance element and it definitely wasn't as dark as I was expecting. I think maybe
for a YA fantasy it is a bit dark... maybe? But it's definitely not as dark as some
of the stuff I like. I quite like it when things get quite dark and twisty. This
definitely wasn't at that level. But it was still okay! So we follow this young girl,
I forget her name, but she is a magician and she has the ability to move herself
through time and space. So in our current time the magicians are all trapped on
this particular Island and so this young girl gets sent back in time in
order to track down certain artifacts that they think will be able to help
them free themselves. So she goes back to this particular time where a certain
artifact was lost because another magician betrayed this other' group of
magicians... this is getting complicated... but she's basically trying to work out
who was the betrayer and get herself in there so that she can steal the item
instead. So there are a lot of different magicians in this story and they all
have different powers. I do think sometimes it was a little bit difficult
to figure out what different people's powers were for a little while and I
couldn't really tell whether that was intentional or not. Also as I said quite
heavy on the romance which isn't something I particularly enjoy. The at
the end the bad guy did give this massive monologue explaining exactly what he was
doing and why and it didn't seem very realistic and it was
also kind of boring so that was a bit disappointing but as I said it was
ok. I especially liked it once we got near the end. The romance kind of was put
on hold for a little bit or at least the amount of romance in there
fit with the story. But the pace really picked up, things started to get a little
bit tricksy which is what I want from stories that involve time travel and I
really loved how they wove together the different timelines and made everything
makes sense. I am going to continue the series because I think the way things
have been set up are going to really enable it to do some cool stuff in the
future. I really hope that it does. I do think that if you like YA fantasy and
you don't mind when there's quite a bit of romance...
perhaps if you like heist books? Any of those things I think you might really
enjoy this book. I would also recommend the audiobook because I listened to it on
audiobook and I quite enjoyed it. I know I said some negative things so it
doesn't sound like I enjoyed it but I did actually enjoy it. I just had these
expectations going in that kind of disrupted the reading experience for me.
So those are the last a thousand ish pages of why I fantasy that I read. Do
let me know if you've read any of these books. I would love to know what you
thought about them or otherwise whether you're interested in picking up any of
these. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you're having a wonderful day and I
will see you next time :)