February Mini-Reviews

Title: Gates of Thread and Stone

Author: Lori M. Lee

Series: Gates of Thread and Stone

Volume: 1
Release Date: August 5, 2014

Out of Ten: 5/10
Review: This book is hard for me to rate on a scale out of ten. I quite liked some of the ideas, though I wasn't as much of a fan of the execution. This book tries to do a lot of things, but it ultimately struggles to pull everything together into a cohesive story and world. There are steampunk and fantasy aspects, as well as dystopian aspects. All of these were almost too much for the story to carry. Part of it was that this book fails to breathe new life into the some of the tired tropes it employs, which rendered it predictable or just not engaging at some points. However, there were some parts of the core plot itself that I did enjoy, and, despite times where I nearly lost interest, I did manage to finish the book, though I'm not sure if I'll be picking up its sequel.

Title: The Rithmatist
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Series: Rithmatist
Volume: 1
Release Date: May 13, 2014
Out of Ten: 7/10
Review: This is my second Brandon Sanderson book, and I've found that I quite enjoy his storytelling. While The Rithmatist is marketed as young adult, and has a sixteen year old protagonist, it has the overall feel of a middle-grade novel and it had many of the features that I tend to appreciate about middle-grade fantasy novels. The world is a strange, imaginative one- one where small chalk drawings, when drawn by the right person in the right way, come to life, though they remain two dimensional. They're called chalkings, and the ones who draw them are called Rithmatists. The primary dangers in this world are also fairly small, two dimensional chalk creatures. This almost shouldn't work, but it does. Sanderson combines the chalklings with a more threatening antagonist, and hints that there is much more to the world. My only complaint is that the characters don't quite feel as complete as their vibrant world, but I'm hoping that I'll feel more connection to them in the next book, which I'm looking forward to picking up whenever it is released (which is slated to be in a while... a long while).