Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige

Series: Stealing Snow (bk. 1)

Genera(s): Fantasy/Paranormal Romance

Subjects: witches, winter, magic, supernatural

Setting: Up-state New York and another world called Algid

POV/Tense: 1^st person POV, past tense: Snow

Age/Grade Level: Teen

Length: 370 pgs.

HC/PB: Hardcover

List Price: $18.99

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Summary/ product description: “First kisses sometimes wake slumbering princesses, undo spells, and spark happily ever afters.

Mine broke Bale.

Seventeen-year-old Snow has spent her life locked in Whittaker Psychiatric—but she isn’t crazy. And that’s not the worst of it. Her very first kiss proves anything but innocent…when Bale, her only love, turns violent.

Despite Snow knowing that Bale would never truly hurt her, he is taken away—dashing her last hope for any sort of future in the mental ward she calls home. With nowhere else to turn, Snow finds herself drawn to a strange new orderly who whispers secrets in the night about a mysterious past and a kingdom that’s hers for the taking—if only she can find her way past the iron gates to the Tree that has been haunting her dreams.

Beyond the Tree lies Algid, a land far away from the real world, frozen by a ruthless king. And there too await the River Witch, a village boy named Kai, the charming thief Jagger, and a prophecy that Snow will save them all.”

My Review:  Stealing Snow is the first book in a new series by Danielle Paige, author of Dorothy Must Die. The book has a very similar subject matter, though rather than being a sequel series to a older piece a literature like Dorothy Must Die, it’s a loose retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen that feels kind of like the movie Frozen meet Dorothy Must Die, so it’s more like Snow-King-Must-Die this time. Much like her other series, there are witches and magic. There’s a lot of humor and modernized things in this fantasy world (like a night club and snow mobiles). It take some of the fantasy clichés and bring life to them. It’s a very fun read.

There were a lot of characters in this book. The main character Snow lived in an insane asylum for most of her life and feel abandoned by her mother, who only visits rarely. Snow was sent there after trying to drag a childhood friend through a mirror because she took Through the Looking Glass literally. Snow has pale skin, brown eyes, and white-blond hair streaked with white-gray, supposedly from the pills, but Snow doesn’t think so. She names the different pills she’s given after the Seven Dwarf, which is hilarious since her name is Snow. The asylum has a lot of odd people in it, including Magpie, the kleptomaniac, a girl called Wing who thinks she can fly, and a guy who thinks he can “blink” through time. Then there’s Bale, her boyfriend. He’s a pyromaniac and he tried choking her, so now they’ve been separated.

One night, a mysterious new orderly named Jagger shows up and tells her to go to the Tree. Something happens to Bale that night. He suddenly disappears and she goes outside to the tree and ends up in a world called Algid. There she meets a River Witch named Nepenthe, a young architect named Kai, and a nature witch named Gerd. Snow stays in a house with them for a while so the River Witch can teach Snow to control her snow powers. Kai shows Snow the town and tells her about Algid. Snow learns about a prophecy about a Snow Princess, about herself.

Snow runs into Jagger again, who introduces her to the Robbers, who are all female, except for him. Their queen’s named Margot, there a girl named Howl’s who go a great voice, and a girl named Fathom who Snow saw selling potions when she was with Kai. Margot claims she can help Snow get Bale back, but she must first help them get a piece of the king’s mirror that is with Snow’s cousin, the duchess. Snow trains hard for complete control of her power and learns to be Robber.

Think book was crazy and epic, but sometimes I did get a little confused and disappointed in how things kept changing. I loved the world building for it’s descriptions and crazy colors, but something felt inconsistent, like the technology, but maybe it was just magic. Some things felt to ridiculous and frivolous, which was okay for Dorothy Must Die, because Oz is just a crazy place, but I wanted something more High Fantasy, like Snow Like Ashes and Six of Crows, but as a parallel world. I did enjoy the book and want to read the sequel.

I recommend this book to fans of Danielle Paige, the movie Frozen, Snow Like Ashes by Sara Raasch, Six of Crows and the Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo, The Young Elites by Marie Lu, Cold Spell by Jackson Pierce, Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, the World Walker trilogy by Josephine Angelini, and any unique YA fantasy series out there.

Cover Art Review: I like the cover, but it reminds me too much of Cold Spell by Jackson Pierce.

The Revival by Chris Weitz

Series: The Young World Trilogy (bk. 3) Final Book

Genera(s): Dystopian Sci-fi

Subjects: post-apocalyptic, survival, viruses, love, adventure

Setting: New York City

POV/Tense: 1st person past tense rotating between Jefferson, Donna, Peter, Evan and Kath, mainly, and interludes from Brainbox, Rab, and Imani

Age/Grade Level: Teen

Length: 258 pgs.

HC/PB: Hardcover

List Price: $18.99

Publisher: Hachette: Little, Brown

Summary/ product description: “The teens survived a mysterious catastrophe in The Young World, brought the cure back home in The New Order, and now must forge a new world in this fast-paced conclusion from acclaimed film director Chris Weitz.

The teens forge a new world in this epic conclusion to The Young World trilogy.

After the emotional cliffhanger of The New Order, shocking events take place for Donna, Jefferson, Kath, and their tribe as they face their greatest challenge yet--how to hold the new city-state of New York against a ruthless attack from the Old World.

Heart-stopping action and exciting new revelations will leave readers hungry for the final installment in the series.”

My Review:  The Revival is the finale to the Young World trilogy. If you have not read this series, it’s set in a post-epidemic version of New York City in which only kids and teen survived the plaque. I recommend this to fans of the Gone series by Michael Grant, The 5th Wave, The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maximum Ride, Quarantine by Lex Thomas, Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne, No Easy Way Out by Dayna Lorentz, Inhuman by Kat Fall, The Murder Complex by Lindsey Cummings, Taken by Erin Bowman, and other dystopian book.

Donna is back in New York City and with her comes some of the people she met in Cambridge, including Rab, the guy “seduced” her to get information. There’s Titch who’s a burly guy, there’s Guja, a Nepalese mercenary, and a few other. Jefferson, the leader of the group of kids who lived in Washington Square, was pinning for Donna to come back and Kath says he should get over her. Kath and Jefferson had a thing for a while. Peter is mad that Chapel, a guy who he thought her was in love with, betrayed him, and possibly also just seduced him for information. Evan, Kath’s brother, from Uptown, is a sociopath and has some nefarious plans.

This book series is full of humor and action. This is one of the most fun dystopian book series you will ever read. It’s a little bit like the Gone series at first, minus the super power. I love that we get different first person perspectives. The male POV are in a serif and female in san-serif a typeface. The chapter headers have a weapon silhouette behind the character name. I recall the first book was all Jefferson and Donna, but here we get Peter, Kath, Evan, Imani, Brainbox, and Rab. Some of them only get 1 or 2 chapters.

This book also brings up a lot of social issues like race, gender and sexuality, and it does it with humor. Some of the characters are clearly a bit racist, but most are just trying to survive and don’t care about that stuff. There’s just a extremely diverse cast of characters that the author created, maybe unreality so. I don’t think that it’s a very realist story, even if there was a virus that killed all the adult and kids had to survive. Yes, there would be cliques and gangs, but some of the story does seem silly, but this is fiction and I enjoyed it.

The book ended in an acceptable way. We didn’t get to see what happed 6 months later or whatever future would happen, but the character definitely had some kind of resolution. A climatic scene, and showdown, some sad deaths, some romance. It’s a pretty good finale and I will miss this series, but there’s always more to read.

Cover Art Review: Cool cover, as always with this series. I like that awesome samurai sword that the guy in the middle, who is probably Jefferson, is holding.

Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

Series: The Red Queen Trilogy (bk. 2)

Genera(s): Dystopian Sci-fi/Fantasy/Paranormal Romance

Subjects: abilities, superpowers, supernatural, magic, war, rebellions

Setting: Norta (All of New England, New York, Pennsylvania)

POV/Tense: 1st person POV, present tense: Mare Barrow

Age/Grade Level: Teen

Length: 440 pgs.

HC/PB: Hardcover

List Price: $19.99

Publisher: HarperTeen

Summary/ product description: “Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control.

The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors.

But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat.

Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?”

My Review: The Glass Sword is the sequel to Red Queen. I really enjoyed Red Queen. It was exciting and unique. This book for me suffers a bit of a sequel slump. There’s a lot of cool stuff in it, but it lacks some of the excitement of the first book. I think finding other Newbloods with abilities is cool in an X-men kind of way, but it becomes hard to keep track of them. I had to make a list to keep track of characters, their appearance and powers. Some stuff is just brushed over to quickly. It’s possible that this sequel was less exciting because it took me a week to read it because I was so busy with school and work. It’s kind of a long book with too many little words on each page (each page could easily be 2 pages).

I did enjoy it though. I loved all the different abilities, from illusions to invulnerability, the Newbloods had powers that no Silver had. The training and the missions were pretty awesome. There are a lot of similarities with other series about people with special abilities, like The Young Elites series by Marie Lu, but that was high fantasy, and this is dystopian-fantasy. The world building is amazing and it’s about 350 years I the future. Global warming happened, as well as nuclear warfare, and radiation possibly resulting in the existence of the Silvers. It’s never explained completely.

There’s some romance, but I don’t think there’s enough. Cal seems like a great guy, despite being the prince. He’s like a Fire-Bender in Avatar. His brother is kind of evil, what with tricking Mare, and making Cal kill his father. I was kind of hoping Maven was secretly a Whisperer like his mother, and other pretended to be a Burner, but I’m mistaken. Mare is a badass, but less likable in the sequel. I guess she’s more flawed with all the stuff she had to go though. Kind of like Adelina in The Young Elites. The book got a lot more exciting and fast near the end, when Mare’s team tries to break out the Newbloods that Maven captured, as well as wrongly imprisoned Silvers. It makes up for all the slow parts that could have easily been left out and made this book shorter. So, I give this sequel 4 stars.

I recommend Red Queen to fans of the following types of books. Books about rebellions, dystopian or otherwise: The Young Elites or Legend by Marie Lu, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Pawn by Aimee Carter, Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Page. Dystopian books with fantasy elements: The Selection by Kiera Cass, Crewel by Gennifer Albin, The Jewel by Amy Ewing, Defiance by C.J. Redwine. Books in which superpowers/magic powers play a big role: Glitch by Heather Anastasiu, Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi, Illusive by Emily Lloyd Jones, Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson, Blackout by Robsion Wells, Starcrossed by Josephine Angelini (also has character with lightning powers). Unique fantasy books: Snow Like Ashes by Sarah Raasch, Shadow and Bone by Leugh Bardugo, Incarnate by Jodi Meadows

Cover Art Review: I love the simple photo illustration of the glass sword-crown dripping blood. The cover is a larger size and it’s metallic and the background mimics light blue silk. The crown and title is embossed.