Ash by Malinda Lo

Title: Ash
Author: Malinda Lo
Publisher: Hachette Book Group/Little, Brown and Company
Release Date: August 11, 2009
Pages: 264 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.

In the wake of her father's death, Ash is left at the mercy of her cruel stepmother. Consumed with grief, her only joy comes by the light of the dying hearth fire, rereading the fairy tales her mother once told her. In her dreams, someday the fairies will steal her away, as they are said to do. When she meets the dark and dangerous fairy Sidhean, she believes that her wish may be granted.

The day that Ash meets Kaisa, the King's Huntress, her heart beings to change. Instead of chasing fairies, Ash learns to hunt with Kaisa. Though their friendship is as delicate as a new bloom, it reawakens Ash's capacity for live--and her desire to live. But Sidhean has already claimed Ash for his own, and she must make a choice between fairy tale dreams and true love.

Entrancing, empowering, and romantic, Ash is about the connection between life and love, and solitude and death, where transformation can come from even the deepest grief.

Review:

Orphaned before she was even a teenager, Ash is no better than a slave in her stepmother's home, working to pay off the debt Lady Isobel believes she owes for being her father's daughter. Ever since she was a child growing up near the Wood, Ash has believed in fairy tales and stories the philosophers from another kingdom dismiss as nothing but follies. Upon venturing into the wood one night, Ash meets the fairy Sidhean and comes to develop a strange friendship with him that could become more. Her feelings only become more complicated after meeting Kaisa, the King's Huntress. One a fairy prince, one a beautiful huntress, both of them people Ash loves. Who should she choose?

Oh, how badly I needed this book to be good. My last book was a disaster and a half, so I ran to this in hopes it would cheer me up. Not to mention this lucky find in a used bookstore turned out to be signed by the author herself, which made me want the book to be wonderful even more. It didn't turn out as well and I'd hoped it would, but Ash was still a great retelling of the well-known Cinderella story.

Ash, Sidhean, Kaisa, and Ash's stepfamily all have the potential to be great characters, but their depths aren't explored deeply enough. I didn't have any real investment in the characters, and I didn't feel any true connections between the characters either. The romance of Ash and Kaisa was sweet, but I wasn't particularly attached to it or convinced by it.

Often, I wondered where the conflict was. Was the old vs. new theme also supposed to be the conflict of the book? There is no real plot, and Ash is not a strong enough character for the novel to be character-driven. Nevertheless, I kept turning the page in no small part due to the writing.

Ah, the writing. Sometimes, the narrative read as though a storyteller and I were sitting in front of a fire. The storyteller told me the story of Ash as I sat there basking in the fire's warmth, letting Ash's story come to mind and become more vivid with each word. Other times, it felt like nothing more than a story that overdosed on telling instead of showing. Some scenes like the hunt were vivid, but most of them failed to stick with me.

Speaking of the old vs. new theme, that had to be my favorite part of the book. Ash's choice to either cling to her old life (Sidhean) or embrace what was new and present (Kaisa), the conflict of the greenwitches and old ways with the philosophers and their new ways--above all else, this is what stayed with me. It may have been just a small piece of the story, but I still loved it. If you can be open-minded and not have a fit if a fairy tale retelling veers from the well-known tales, try Ash and see how you like it.

And a tip for readers? Always do research on a book you're considering or look at the copyright page at the very beginning of the book. After the small project I did on Goodreads reviews of Ash, I feel this is something everyone should keep in mind.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: Watched by Sharde Richardson

Clean by Amy Reed

Title: Clean

Author: Amy Reed
Publisher: Simon and Schuster/Simon Pulse

Release Date: August 9, 2011

Pages: 288 pages (hardcover)

How I Got the Book: Simon & Schuster Galley Grab

You’re probably wondering how I ended up here. I’m still wondering the same thing.

Olivia, Kelly, Christopher, Jason, and Eva have one thing in common: They're addicts. Addicts who have hit rock bottom and been stuck together in rehab to face their problems, face sobriety, and face themselves. None of them wants to be there. None of them wants to confront the truths about their pasts. And they certainly don’t want to share their darkest secrets and most desperate fears with a room of strangers. But they'll all have to deal with themselves and one another if they want to learn how to live. Because when you get that high, there's nowhere to go but down, down, down.

Review:

Five different teenagers, five different sets of problems, and one adolescent rehab center. They're all here to conquer their demons and beat their various addictions. Kelly, pretty and well-liked, has a cocaine and alcohol addiction and related issues with sex. Homeschooled Christian boy Christopher is outside his small world for the first time while he's in treatment for meth and cocaine addictions. Jason is an alcoholic carrying a lot of guilt for what happened to his family while he was drunk one day. Still reeling from her mother's death and feeling neglected by her father, Eva relies on pills and marijuana to get by. And Olivia has anorexia and a problem with diet pills thanks to pressure to be perfect, especially from her mother.

Through short chapters, revelations during Group, personal essays, and what they tell each other, all five characters become well-developed and their conflicts, feelings, and problems were laid out bare. The real standout to me was Eva, who lacked any ability to associate the her of now and the her of the past, the one that used drugs and smoked marijuana.  When she writes about how she ended up in rehab, she writes in third-person rather than first-person like everyone else. Everyone has their own voice and the messages they send are true.

I was surprised at just how quickly I read Clean; just a day and a half after starting it, I was done. We start out with hints of what landed each teen in rehab, acting as lures to keep us going because we want to know more. The short chapters work well with this and the book doesn't have the feeling of dragging on and the writing wastes no time. There's concentration on introspection, how fellow addicts in the rehab affect them, and their own pasts. No long spiels of describing anything unnecessary. If only other books had that kind of focus rather than spending two pages describing a room.

Addictions, whether to drugs or alcohol or another substance, aren't as easy to break as snapping your fingers and saying, "Okay! I'm cured!" People don't always understand that and it has become especially obvious in the time since the death of singer Amy Winehouse by what many suspect to be a drug overdose. As demonstrated at one point in the book, not everyone can get sober. Some of them relapse after leaving or even while still in rehab. It's not just about the substance they're abusing; it's about the deeper issues that led them to use those substances too. That's the big point of the book. Each character has their own reasons that, while they never make the drug and alcohol use okay, make them sympathetic and relatable.

The book even took a moment to touch on through Shirley the privilege these teens don't realize they have because they're white and have money. I'm not supposed to quote ARC copies, but this is just too amazing and true-to-life not to quote: "The only things you have going for you are race and money and the fact that someone cares enough about you to get you help instead of just throwing you out on the street and letting you destroy yourself (Clean, ARC p. 114-115)."

While I loved this book, I still had some issues with it. My expertise on how an addict behaves while going through withdrawal only stretches as far as what I've seen on reality television (not too reliable, huh?) and personal experience from growing up with an alcoholic, but I wasn't seeing very many withdrawal symptoms. Close to the end of the book, Jason's dad calls his daughter a retard and no one calls him out on it; they just mutter their condolences. Being the designated butthole of the book doesn't make it okay for him to say that. Then I wanted to know how the characters did when it was all over. Who stayed sober? Who relapsed? That sort of resolution, as depressing as it has the potential to be for the characters that relapsed, would make Clean feel more complete.

Clean has the potential to be a real tearjerker and for those who grew up with someone who had an addiction, it can be especially familiar and touching. There's no graphic drug use or description of it, in case you're wondering. They talk about using, but don't go into it much because they're not in rehab to talk about how it felt to be on drugs. Even if it makes them uncomfortable, I think people should read this book. And now I want my own copy so I can come back to it and reread it.

4 stars!

What am I reading next?: Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Title: Beauty QueensAuthor: Libba Bray
Publisher: Scholastic, Inc./Scholastic Press
Release Date: May 24th, 2011
Pages: 400 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Amazon Vine

The fifty contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras. But sadly, their airplane had another idea crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner.

What's a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program--or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan--or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?

Welcome to the heart of non-exfoliated darkness. Your tour guide? None other than Libba Bray, the hilarious, sensational, Printz Award-winning author of A Great and Terrible Beauty and Going Bovine. The result is a novel that will make you laugh, make you think, and make you never see beauty the same way again.

Review:

After their Corporation plane crashes on a desert island, the fourteen surviving beauty queens of the Corporation-sponsored Miss Teen Dream beauty pageant must fend for themselves and find a way to either make a home out of the island or be rescued. Between their clashes and practicing for the pageant, they come to rely on one another and discover themselves now that they're away from the pressures put on them by society and even their own families. But just beyond the forest, there is a Corporation compound planning an illegal arms deal with a dictator. These women aren't going down without a fight once they're discovered and plan to save the day, along with get the hell off that island.

When I read this just over a month ago, I loved it. Hell, I was over the MOON for it. After time to think about it, I fell out of love with this book. It isn't as great as I first thought it was and it would be a travesty if I didn't correct myself and make my true opinion known. Looking back at my old review, I'm wondering why I felt the way I did and I'm left without answers. My old review feels kind of... well, forced. Like I was blinded by the hype and forcing myself to say it because I just couldn't imagine not liking it.

There were a few funny points, but this satire wasn't as funny as I thought it was. The characters, starting out as stereotypes, all got their moment of depth but none of the moments were very well. The messages of female empowerment, that women and diversity should be celebrated and people should accept themselves as they are, are awesome, but they're not presented well. It's more like they're preached at me.

Preachy. Yeah, that's the one word I would use to describe this book. All of the values and ideas felt like they were being preached and thrown at me, not smoothly woven into the story. I support and believe in all that stuff already, so there's no need to preach it all to me. The magic of satire is that it makes people think about the subject, right? With Beauty Queens, all the ideas are presented to you and the reader doesn't have to think. The magic of it goes out just like that.

What wins the book for me even a little bit is that I did have soft spots for three of the characters (Adina, Petra, and Shanti) and that I liked most of the footnotes in the book. The ideas are great, but the way they're presented isn't.

In the end, Beauty Queens now leaves me speechless, and not in the way people want to be left speechless. This review itself is an example because this has to be one of the shortest reviews I've ever written. There's not much I can say or go in-depth about. (Also, I'm trying to cut down on my babbling.)

2 stars!

What am I reading next?: Chime by Franny Billingsley

Eona by Alison Goodman

Title: Eona
Author: Alison Goodman
Publisher: Viking Juvenile
Release Date: April 19th, 2011
Pages: 637 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.

Once she was Eon, a girl disguised as a boy, risking her life for the chance to become a Dragoneye apprentice.Now she is Eona, the Mirror Dragoneye, her country's savior--but she has an even more dangerous secret.

She cannot control her power.

Each time she tries to bond with her Mirror Dragon,she becomes a conduit for the ten spirit dragons whose Dragoneyes were murdered by Lord Ido. Their anguish floods through her, twisting her ability into a force that destroys the land and its people.

And another force of destruction is on her trail.

Along with Ryko and Lady Dela, Eona is on the run from High Lord Sethon's army. Sethon has declared himself Emperor. In order to stop him,the renegades must find Kygo, the young Peal Emperor, who needs Eona's power if he is to wrest back his throne.

Eona, with its pulse-pounding drama, thrilling fight scenes, sizzling tension--and many surprises--brings to a close an epic story.

Review:

High Lord Sethon has declared himself Emperor after a coup, though the true Pearl Emperor Kygo has escaped. Eona, her identity as a woman revealed, Lady Dela, and islander rebel Ryko have also escaped and must find Kygo. He'll need Eona's power to take back his throne, but Eona can't control her power. Every time she tries to connect with her dragon, the ten dragons of the murdered Dragoneyes attack her. In need of training if Sethon is to be defeated, Eona and the resistance are forced to rescue Lord Ido, the murderous Rat Dragoneye and a power-hungry man. Torn in a million different directions by truth, power, loyalty, and more, Eona will have to make decisions that could save the empire or bring it to ruins.

Finding the words to describe this book is difficult, so I apologize if I ever seem muddled or nonsensical.

The mythos of the world Eona takes place in was carefully constructed and laid out in Eon--the twelve dragons and their relationships to the Dragoneyes, the purpose of the Imperial Pearl, and what the Dragoneyes can do with their power. In Eona, almost everything the reader knew is turned upside-down because nothing was what it seemed to be in the first book. All these reversals, especially in the relationships between the dragons and their Dragoneyes, make perfect sense in their execution and make the stakes even higher.

It takes a good while for the story to get to its climax, but intense battles are throughout and don't make it feel like there's a long wait. In the meantime, Eona and the other characters get some development. Some of the decisions Eona made in the book and the sheer amount of lying/secret-keeping she does boggled my poor mind. Seeing what could have been if Eona had a moral compass like Lord Ido's basically nonexistent one is very easy and she does some seriously bad things without thinking much on it. Considering her situation, where she's come from, and the problems she could cause herself by dwelling on it, I'm tenuously okay with that.

Romance takes a huge step up in this book, and it almost feels too sudden, like it's happening just because Eona is now known to be a woman. Eona's relationships with Kygo and Lord Ido are both refreshingly, wonderfully complex; while one is based on romantic feelings and troubled by trust issues, the other is mainly driven by attraction and power and is nowhere near healthy. For the first time in more than a few months, reading about love/lust-driven relationships sent a thrill through my system. I didn't even mind that there was a love triangle! I wish I could have seen more of Lady Dela and Ryko's relationship, though the latter put some serious effort into pushing Lady Dela away.

This book had me so enraptured that I had my head in it for four out of six classes for three days straight, unable to put it away because Eona and her sometimes-slow, sometimes-rapidly-paced story wouldn't let me. (Don't worry about any neglected schoolwork; my grades will be fine.) I was so mentally exhausted in the very best way upon finishing the book that I put my head on my desk and sat like that for twenty minutes. For about an hour after that, I was all smiley and floating. I know you don't want to hear about any of that, but I'm detailing it for a reason: I've never a reaction like this to any book in my life. Sobbing like a baby? Yes. This? No.

A day later, everything about this book is still bouncing around in my head, from the characters to the decisions Eona made that weren't always very ethical and were never easy. I felt that the preceding book Eon had its flaws, but Eona more than made up for them. There's no doubt I'll be coming back to this book (and maybe a few specific scenes) for a reread at a later time and enjoy the severe mental exhaustion all over again. This is a must for any fantasy or dragon fans looking for something new.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: Born at Midnight by CC Hunter

Eon by Alison Goodman

Title: Eon
Author: Alison Goodman
Publisher: Firebird
Release Date: August 31st, 2010
Pages: 532 pages (trade paperback)
How I Got the Book: Christmas gift.

She has a powerful secret... with deadly consequences.

For years, Eon's life has been focused on magical study and sword-work, with one goal: that he be chosen as a Dragoneye, an apprentice to one of the twelve energy dragons of Good fortune.

But Eon has a dangerous secret. He is actually Eona, a sixteen-year-old girl who has been masquerading as a twelve-year-old boy. Females are forbidden to use Dragon Magic; the penalty is death.

When Eona's secret threatens to come to light, she and her allies are plunged into grave danger and a struggle for the Imperial throne. Eona must find the strength and inner power to battle those who want to take her magic... and her life.

Review:

After years of training, it is time for Eon to take the final test to see if the Rat Dragon chooses him as the new apprentice. Many hopes are riding on his success: Those of his master Brannon, who has used up much of his fortune sponsoring Eon and Eon's own hopes of escaping poverty for good and never having to worry about going back. All he has to do is be chosen and keep his greatest secret: he is truly a girl named Eona. When the day comes, she is chosen not by the Rat Dragon, but by the Mirror Dragon, the dragon that has been lost for five hundred years. Thrust into the workings of the court and forced to be a pawn in the battle for the Imperial throne, Eona must keep her gender secret to keep her life and fight against the machinations of Lord Ido, who has something terrible planned for the empire.

After some reviewers I trust pointed this book out to me through advertising its sequel Eona, I knew I had to read it. A beautiful cover, a good premise (which, when combined, usually does not bode well for a book anymore), lots of good reviews for it... How could I resist? A week of reading later, I'm begging for April to get here faster so I can read the sequel and learn the answers to all my burning questions.

Some novels jump right in at the start and others stumble. Eon? It had a really bad stumble due to a hole in the premise. Short version: dragons only take apprentices born in their year (Rat Dragon takes person born in the Year of the Rat). Eona is born in the year of the Mirror Dragon, but poses as being born in the Year of the Rat. People can be fooled, but not the dragons, who realize that she is a girl and know her real name, so they know her true age too. Everyone should have been smart enough to know it would not work. This was all a badly done set-up so that Eona would have a reason for being taught as a candidate and the mess shows through clearly. Oh, and I don't believe it is a good idea to start thinking about what people see when they look at you when you're in the middle of a battle in which your teacher is fighting dirty to try and injure you! You can do that after you've had your butt kicked, not before.

After we got past the first hundred pages where most of the bumps were, the novel really hit its stride as we settled into the court intrigue. The structure of the court and the traditions of it rang true, even if they were difficult to put together in my head sometimes. The prose is rather plain, but it is acceptable in this book. Certain elements of the story such as the Contraires (they said they had a male and female soul, but it kept getting implied the rest of the book that it was a woman's spirit in a man's body) were unclear to be, but were much clearer than they would have been in Goodman went for the fancy prose.

Lady Dela's story of being a Contraire and how she has suffered for it was, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the book, even if little time was spent on it. This is the first time I've seen a transgender person in any book and Lady Dela made a wonderful representation. The feminist element to this book, about how hard it is to live as a woman in such a patriarchal society, rang true in both Eona's struggles and Lady Dela's. The power of women had a huge part to play in this book and I'm looking forward to seeing the developments in the sequel.

And no romance at all! This will put certain readers (read: many girls my age) off a book, but not me. I prefer books to be romance-free, but I often pick up ones with romance in them anyways because it's near-impossible to escape and I won't let something like that keep me from reading a book that sounds interesting. Want a break from the lovey-dovey for a story that concentrates on the plot? Eon is something you should think about trying. There are the barest hints of a set-up for future romance, but some may pick up on them and some won't. They are so small that they may end up amounting to nothing at all.

The characterization left a lot to be desired. Eona felt like just a tool of the plot instead of a true character. If you asked me to describe her personality, I would not be able to come up with an answer. She is being thrown around by the plot in order to advance itself instead of her advancing the plot herself, and this is not something books should do. I asked multiple times in this book, "What was their motivation?" I wanted to see why Lord Ido was the way he was. Don't need a sob story, just some decent background info. The only people who felt halfway real were Lady Dela, our novel's transgender/crossdressing supporting character, and her bodyguard Ryko. Those two were the characters I cared about.

I really did like this book by the end of it and would have given it a better rating, but such a huge hole in the premise doesn't go unpunished in the rating. The sequel Eona comes out in April 2011 and I am so getting it. If you're looking for a descriptive, enjoyable novel that isn't afraid to take its time, this might be the book for you. Eon left off on a huge cliffhanger and I refuse to just leave it hanging and never know what happens.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Wildthorn by Jane Eagland

Title: Wildthorn
Author: Jane Eagland
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Release Date: February 9th, 2009
Pages: 350 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it in a bookstore

Louisa Cosgrove is Louisa Cosgrove--not Lucy Childs. Or is she?

A horse-drawn carriage takes her to the wrong place: Wildthorn Hall, an asylum for the insane.

This must be a great misunderstanding. They strip her naked, of everything--undo her whalebone corset hook by hook. They take her identity. But she is still seventeen--still Louisa Cosgrove--isn't she?

To untangle the mysterious, wretched present, she remembers the past.

I wished I were a boy.

Locked away in the dingy bowels of the hall, she feels a fire burn inside her. She remembers her cousin. She remembers Papa.

I want to be a doctor.

She is determined to escape--and only love will set her free.

Review:

Louisa Cosgrove wants nothing more than to become a doctor like her father. Being that she lives in 1800s England, this is difficult because women still have their entire lives decided by the men in their lives and no medical school will take in women because they should be learning the womanly arts instead. She is on her way to the house of someone she will be acting as a companion and she is instead taken to Wildthorn Hall, an insane asylum. Treated as just another lunatic, Louisa struggles to keep sane and make someone believe that this is all a mistake and that she does not belong here while with the way she is acting, it only seems more and more like she does need a place among the residents and hellish halls of Wildthorn Hall.

I bought this book because someone I practically worship because of her literary critic skills and our similar reading tastes was gushing over this book. When I got it, I had no idea of the adult content in this novel except for one detail about Louisa that later emerges as a plot twist (and that was only because someone spoiled it for me a day after I bought the book). This novel is outside of my reading tastes in multiple ways and if I had not bought it blind, I would have passed this over for another novel. Thank God for going in blind because this novel was worth it!

I loved Louisa as a character. She was layered, had her flaws (impulsive to the extreme), and had her screwups. I felt for her when she tried to convince her doctor and the attendants that she wasn't crazy, she didn't belong there, and that her name was Louisa, not Lucy, but each time she did so, it made her seem more and more like a lunatic. That was quite the trap she was caught in and quite realistic. I can't begin to imagine how many other women were caught in the same hellish trap back then. Her plights were entirely sympathetic because none of them were truly her fault. She wanted to be who she wanted to be, not who everyone else wanted her to be.

What makes this story so terrifying is the reality of it. Men could easily have the women in their life locked up in the insane asylum for reasons such as not wanting them around the house or because the woman wants to become studious when women are not supposed to do that. Women had very little control over their lives and if a man decided to send a sane woman to an asylum for whatever reason, the woman was trapped. They had little to no hope of being freed. This was not just a fictional, dramatized account of a rare case; this was a fictional account of something completely nonfictional and even halfway normal.

A lot of adult subject matter gets brought into this novel that is a dark shadow in society that everyone knows about now, but was practically taboo to even think about back then. For example? Homosexuality, child pornography, rape, and teenage pregnancy. And that is only the beginning of it. I'm not sure why this is categorized as a young adult book because such subject matter exactly the things popular young adult lit is made of (at least within one novel). I'm fine with that because we need something different in the young adult world every now and then, but yeah. Not your average young adult novel. I wouldn't hand this to a fourteen-year-old kid or anyone younger than that. I might not even give it to a fifteen-year-old unless I felt they were mature enough!

I thought of this novel as predictable when I got to the three-hundredth page and in the course of those next fifty pages, what I thought I knew got revealed as being something completely unexpected. Isn't it wonderful when books do that and make sense while doing so? I do, and that is just what Wildthorn did.
I found it a bit sad that the thought was never explored that maybe Louisa actually was Lucy Childs and was ill enough to think she was someone else. The reader and Louisa are always certain that she is Louisa and not someone else. Even if it was just a quick bout of such an identity crisis, that little touch would have made a great book even greater.

Normally I wouldn't notice this, but it happened so many times throughout the novel that it stuck out like a sore thumb: if someone wronged Louisa at some point, they are screwed at a later point, like her older brother Tom and the attendant Weeks. This made me giggle because I remember seeing an item on a Mary Sue litmus test one that went just like that. Louisa certainly isn't a Sue, but the thought of that item came to mind and refused to leave. it didn't count against the book either; it was just fun to keep count of how many times it happened.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: Spirit Bound by Richelle Mead (but if I cannot finish the novel by the afternoon of December 7th, the next book I review will be Last Sacrifice by the same author because that is the day I get it and when it comes out. I fangirl Richelle's books like you have no idea.)

Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund

Title: Ascendant
Author: Diana Peterfreund
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release Date: September 28th, 2010
Pages: 392 pages (hardback)

Astrid Llewelyn is now a fully trained unicorn hunter, but she can't solve all her problems with just a bow and arrow. Her boyfriend, Giovanni, has decided to leave Rome, the Cloisters is in dire financial straits, her best friend's powers seem to be mysteriously disintegrating, and Astrid can't help but feel that school, home, and her hopes of becoming a scientist are nothing but impossible dreams.

So when she's given the opportunity to leave the Cloisters and put her skills to use as part of a scientific quest to discover the Remedy, Astrid leaps at the chance. Finally, she can have exactly what she wants- or can she? At Gordian headquarters, deep in the French countryside, Astrid begins to question everything she thought she believed: her love for Giovanni, her loyalty to the Cloisters, and- most of all- her duty as a hunter. Should Astrid be saving the world from killer unicorns, or saving the unicorns from the world?

Review:

In the year since she was first attacked by a unicorn, much has changed with Astrid Llewelyn. She's become a trained unicorn hunter, gotten a great boyfriend, made friends with her fellow hunters, and saved the lives of countless people from killer unicorns. As unicorn sightings and attacks become more common, the changes in her life continue. Her cousin Phil is trying to get unicorns declared an endangered species while her mother is trying to glorify the hunters' existence by touring the television circuit; Giovanni is going back to America to go to college; the Cloisters is running out of money; Cory's powers are suddenly disappearing with no known cause; and Astrid is questioning all of the unicorn-killing she's been doing. When an offer comes along to stop killing unicorns and instead guard them for Gordian Pharmaceuticals, she jumps to accept it. While acting as the unicorn guard and dealing with life at Gordian, she comes to asks herself who needs the protection more: the unicorns or the humans.

I was a little worried about this book when I picked it up. I'd read a review of it at my favorite book review site and they didn't have very kind words for it, but because I thought Rampant, the first and previous book in the killer unicorn series, was great and the idea of murderous unicorns was awesome, I still wanted to give it a chance. I thought it was better than the reviewers said it was, but I still agree with many of the issues they had with Ascendant.

This book is incredibly introspective and much of the conflict is inner instead of outer- it was a nice break from the nonstop action or trying-to-be-action-and-failing action I see in most novels. A little inner conflict is great. Astrid is growing as a person and her relationships with almost every character are changing in some way while we discover more about the hunters' powers. One of the best parts of the book happened about three-fourths of the way through, when the powers that came with being a unicorn hunter became even more important (I will not talk about why because that would be a superspoiler, but trust me, it's good). Her most important growth occurs after this incident and watching her try to recover was hard, but I was so entranced that I couldn't stop reading.

At one point in this book, my eyes misted up, but I didn't cry. I will not spoil the event, but if development of those involved had been better, I have no doubt that it would have had me bawling. That's the difficult part of having so many hunters: it's hard to get development for everyone in, so when something happens to them, it's a little harder to feel for them because you didn't get to know them as well as you did others. I had to put the book down for a minute so that any tears that might have come wouldn't have gotten on the pages and ruined them.

If you tried to make me count how many times I rolled my eyes at Astrid and wanted to knock some sense into her, I would lose count quickly. But this is part of Astrid's charm because she's a human being. She has her ups and downs, she screws up and suffers the repercussions of her actions, and she's not perfect. She is just like any other person and even though she irritates me, I would rather have a heroine that makes mistakes and learns from them than someone who never learns or never makes mistakes at all. Characters like that are too perfect and Astrid is anything but perfect.

This book left many subplots unresolved like Cory's illness and the search for Seth, Phil's rapist from the previous book, among other things. At the moment, Diana isn't signed for a third killer unicorn book and (according to one rumor I heard, so I won't put much stock into it) she didn't realize this until she was nearly done with Ascendant. This could explain why there are so many unresolved problems, but even if she'd been signed for a third book, it was a little sloppy to leave so many open plot lines behind. It's fine for one major plot line to be unresolved when there's going to be a sequel, but leaving behind as many as this, sequel or no, was not a good idea.

There's one other bit that is very unclear, but due to the level of spoilerage there would be if I talked about it, I won't. I will tell you that it's at the end of the book and when you reach that point, I'm sure you'll recognize exactly what I'm talking about.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but the number of unresolved plot lines, combined with the likelihood that a sequel won't be coming any time soon, takes it down at notch. Honestly, I'm being too soft on this. I should be giving this two ukuleles, but I liked it so much that I was willing to shave one off. If a sequel does come, I hope it's able to clear up all of my unanswered questions and make that last thing I mentioned much clearer because I don't get it!

4 stars!