#CBR10 Book 10: "Making Up" by Lucy Parker

Page count: 330 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Disclaimer! This was an ARC granted to me through NetGalley. It has in no way influenced my review. 

Beatrix "Trix" Lane may be tiny, but she also used to be fierce and confident and very ambitious. Until her former boyfriend pretty much broke her down entirely and left her a pale shadow of herself. Now that the star of the fancy acrobatic West End show she's in has been possibly permanently damaged after a fall, Trix has a chance at the lead role, but she's no longer sure she's acrobatic or talented enough. To add to her stress levels, the person who annoys her the most in the world, Leo Magasiva, has just been hired on to the show's makeup team.

While he's quite the special effects wizard, Leo Magasiva has career issues of his own, after a very famous film star neglected to disclose an allergy and Leo's makeup job caused a horrible allergic reaction. Leo was fired and blacklisted, and now needs to really prove himself, preferably by winning first prize in the UK SFX makeup artistry championship. He's secured his younger sister an internship with the theatre, but she appears to have had a complete personality transplant after a year in New York and is now behaving like a stuck-up brat and doing her very best to piss off not only Leo, but everyone around her. So having to work in close quarters, and as it turns out, sharing living quarters with Trix Lane, is not exactly his idea of fun.

Trix and Leo used to be friends growing up, until Trix got a scholarship to a fancy boarding school and left Leo behind forever. They nevertheless seemed to run into each other all over the place over the years, constantly sniping and trying to one-up one another. Now, working on the same show and living across the hall from one another, their snarky rivalry is brought to a head, and before long, they've moved from hate to something else entirely. They may have a long history, but is there any chance of a future together? If Leo wins his SFX championship, it means a lucrative contract in LA, while if Trix gets the starring role in The Festival of Masks, she's staying in London indefinitely.

Lucy Parker's Act Like It was one of my favourite romances (and books in general) of 2016, and the follow-up, Pretty Face, was one of the few really memorable romances of all of 2017, and an even better book than the first in the London Celebrities series. So when I saw a tweet from Ms. Parker saying that her new book, Making Up, was available upon request from NetGalley, I requested it immediately and crossed my fingers that I would be lucky enough to be granted a copy. While I read and review a LOT of romance, being granted an ARC was by no means a certainty, as I have a pretty bad track-record with reviewing my NetGalley books before the deadlines. However, the book gods smiled up on me, and even though the book isn't out until the end of May, I have been lucky enough to read it.

Of all of the three Lucy Parker books I've read so far, this is probably the weakest. It has a lot of good thing going for it, but was not as instantly likable to me as Act Like It and it lacked the emotional depth of Pretty Face. It has a lot of the things Ms. Parker does well - a likable cast of characters, great banter, competence porn (both Leo and Trix are very good at what they do, for all that Trix' confidence and self-esteem has been entirely eroded by her d*ck of an ex-boyfriend). I thought the initial conflict between Trix and Leo was solved a little bit too quickly and that the readers could have been given a bit more insight into the situation with Leo's bratty sister earlier in the story, but I liked the book and for those readers who have read and enjoyed Pretty Face, it might be nice to know that there are extended cameos from Trix' best friend Lily and her fiancee Luc, who actually get married in this book. Lucy Parker is a talented enough writer that while I would rank this third of her three books, it's still a very enjoyable read and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 9: "The Hating Game" by Sally Thorne

Page count: 387 pages
Audio book length: 11hrs 29mins
Rating: 5 stars

This is my fourth re-read of The Hating Game, and my original review for the book can be found here. Also this book will contain mild spoilers for the story, so if you haven't read it, drop everything and come back once you have (it's awesome, I promise), you may want to avoid this until then.

It's difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what I find so comforting about this book, but it really does work for me on every level. This was my favourite book of 2016, and I read it three times from early August when it came out until the end of that year. Now, having just had a baby, I spend quite a bit of the dark hours of the night breastfeeding. It's really rather time-consuming and both comforting and rather boring at the same time. As I'm as of yet not really proficient enough to feed my little boy and read on an e-reader (let alone hold a book), having audio books is a blessing, and as I occasionally doze off a bit, it's good to have something familiar and well-known to listen to, rather than something brand new.

As this book is one of my ultimate comfort reads now, it had the honour of being the first audio book I listened to as a mother. Katie Schorr's narration is really good and her voice has now become what I imagine Lucy's must be like. As this was my fourth time through the book, there was nothing really NEW that struck me, except perhaps that Josh really is spectacular and Lucy misses out on so much by not realising sooner 1) just how great he is and 2) that he's madly in love with her.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 8: "A Hope Divided" by Alyssa Cole

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Until she was thirteen, Marlie Lynch grew up with her mother, a freed slave and wise woman. After her white father's death, she was taken in by her half-sister and has been able to combine her knowledge of herbs and root magic with scientific principles. Three years into the American Civil War, Marlie and her half-sister are working surreptitiously to aid the cause of the Union, giving aid to runaway slaves and Freedmen, taking medicine and food to imprisoned Union soldiers, and with Marlie sending coded messages about troop movements and the Confederate Home Guard to the Resistance group the Loyal League.

Unfortunately for Marlie and her sister, their various anti-Confederate enterprises are endangered when Marlie's half-brother (and technically the heir) returns home with his unpleasant and racist wife, who is deeply loyal to the Confederate cause, to the point where she offers to let the Home Guard use their estate as their base of operations. While Marlie has always been a free woman, and has been treated more or less as a part of the family, she now sees how little protection she actually has, and how easily she can be ignored and mistreated because of the colour of her skin. Only a few trusted servants know that Marlie is hiding an escaping Union soldier, Ewan McCall in the laboratory in her private quarters. While McCall was imprisoned in the camp nearby, he and Marlie would exchange notes discussing ethics and philosophy. There was an attraction between them even before Marlie came to shelter him from danger in her rooms.

As Marlie's evil sister-in-law grows increasingly more controlling and jealous, and the cruel Captain of the Home Guard turns his eye more closely to Marlie, whose independence and spirit offends him, it becomes clear that Ewan can no longer stay on the Lynch farm and will have to escape. When Marlie's freedom is suddenly threatened as well, she has no choice but to go with him. While Marlie wants to believe that Ewan's feelings for her are true, she's very conflicted because of her own background, a product of the unequal union a slave-owner and her then enslaved mother. Can a relationship with a white man ever really last, no matter how sensitive and philosophical he seems?  Marlie has also dedicated her life to the healing and helping of others; how will she react when she discovers that Ewan was a torturer before he was taken prisoner?

This is the second book in Alyssa Cole's historical romance series The Loyal League, set during the American Civil War. As with the first book in the series, An Extraordinary Union, which I read back in July of last year, A Hope Divided was widely loved and gushed over on several romance review sites I follow. In the first book, we meet spies Malcolm McCall and Elle Burns, who work to bring down the Confederacy once and for all. Ewan McCall, the hero in this book, is Malcolm's younger brother, who clearly doesn't have the social graces of his brother (and frankly comes across as if he may be neuro-atypical). While he doesn't really want to fight, he believes in the Union cause enough that he joined the army, and was quickly discovered to have a knack for interrogation, due to his dispassionate and seemingly unfeeling manner. Ewan seems to have been very good at torture, but it's not something he enjoyed or is proud of, and he feels especially ashamed of having lost control of his temper and emotions when questioning the sadistic Captain of the Home Guard who later comes to plague Marlie's existence. 

Marlie also works for the Loyal League, but in a much less active role than Elle or Malcolm. With her white half-sister and some of their most loyal servants (all freed slaves), they do their best to help runaway slaves and Union soldiers get to the northern states, and Marlie sends coded letters, and feeds and treats wounded imprisoned Union soldiers, but otherwise has lived a very sheltered life on the family's farm. Her skin colour has always kept her from being a fully accepted part of the Lynch family, but she discovers how lucky and privileged her life has been when her half-brother's vicious and prejudiced wife takes control of the household and invites brutal and ruthless Home Guard soldiers to stay in their home. Her status as an intelligent and independent freedwoman and half white means nothing to these people and she grows increasingly more despairing due to their treatment of her.

Ms Cole has clearly done a huge amount of research for these books, and as I personally don't actually know the time period very well, it was very interesting to me to learn about all the various ways many of the people of the Southern states actually worked against the Confederate cause. While the romance between Marlie and Ewan is central to the book, both have a lot of emotional baggage before they are able to commit to anyone else, even before you add in the complications of an illegal bi-racial union. At one point in the story, I was honestly not sure how exactly they were going to find a satisfying HEA together, but I am very glad that they did.

While the first book in the series was good, I think I liked this one even more, and will be excited to see what Alyssa Cole has in store in her next novel (I'm wondering if the next book will be about the third McCall sibling, the sister). 

Judging a book by its cover: Now, this is a lovely cover for a romance novel and I really like it. The cover model portraying our heroine looks confidently out at the reader, surrounded by the herbs and tools of her trade. I cannot speak for the accuracy of her dress (Civil War era America not being one of the historical periods I know a lot about), but there's no unlaced back, nor implausible amounts of skirts (while still showing a remarkable amount of leg). Just a beautiful, confident woman at her work desk. I don't know if Ms. Cole has any say in the choices of these covers (most authors don't), but either way, she's lucked out.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 7: "The Soldier's Scoundrel" by Cat Sebastian

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Jack Turner and his siblings grew up in the slums of London and they have all worked hard to get out from under the criminal enterprises of their parents. Jack's sister is a dressmaker, while his brother seems to keep very posh and rarefied company these days. Jack uses some of the skills he's learned over the years to help women in trouble. He can locate stolen items, deal with blackmail claims, even make an unpleasant husband disappear to somewhere far away - his only rule is that the women who hire him not question his methods, and let him deal with the guilty party, without involving the authorities. His services are not available to gentlemen or nobles of any kind.

So when Oliver Rivington, formerly a captain in his Majesty's army, shows up in Jack's offices, convinced that Jack has to be some sort of con artist who has swindled Oliver's sister out of a large sum of money, Jack wants nothing to do with him. He lets Oliver sit in on an interview with a Mrs Wraxhall, who claims she's being blackmailed and needs Jack's help. Still convinced that Jack Turner is a no-good scoundrel, Oliver takes it upon himself to befriend Mr. Wraxhall, to make sure Turner isn't able to take advantage of the couple, but he soon discovers, like Jack, that there is a lot more to Mrs. Wraxhall's dilemma than first meets the eye and while Oliver doesn't initially approve of the man and his methods, he also can't seem to stay away from him. Jack has no intention of getting involved with some pampered nobleman's son, but as they start investigating the case together, neither of them can deny their attraction.

This is Cat Sebastian's debut, and in the last year, I've seen so many positive reviews of this and her follow-up books on a number of websites. While there are quite a few authors out there who write M/M romance now, many of them self-publish. That Ms. Sebastian's books are actually published by Avon intrigued me (even if the covers of the books are usually quite bad) and when I found this and the sequel on sale, I snapped it up immediately. I've only now found the time to read one, and based on this book, I'm glad to have more to look forward to.

Both Jack and Oliver are well-rounded and interesting characters. Oliver has fought all over Europe during the Napoleonic war, and is thoroughly heart-sick of all the violence and deplorable behaviour he's been witness to. He struggles with a painful leg injury, and until he confronts Jack and gets more and more interested in both the man and his investigation, he's not really had a lot to focus on or care about.

Jack shares his office space and private rooms in a building with his sister, whose dressmaker studio seems to be on the ground floor. They share a servant and eat most of their meals together. It's quite clear that his sister cares deeply for Jack, but worries about him, especially his homosexual proclivities. That's one thing Jack and Oliver have in common, despite being different in so many other ways, not just social status. They both have very caring and possibly surprisingly, for the time period, supportive younger sisters, who don't seem to care with whom they fall in love, even when homosexuality among men was still very much illegal (obviously women couldn't be gay - some women just lived their whole lives as spinsters with other spinster companions - nothing strange going on there).

The plot of the book is quite slow, and while there is a mystery to be solved, it unfolds slowly, with Jack and Oliver travelling around the countryside getting more besotted with one another. It almost felt a bit jarring when the danger gets ramped up rather suddenly towards the end of the book, and there are gunshots and wounds to be tended. This is also one of those stories where one party is so very convinced of their unworthiness of the other that they do everything they can to convince their lover that their union is impossible and it takes far longer than should be necessary for them to actually find their HEA at the end.

I still liked the book a lot, and will eagerly be reading more of Ms. Sebastian's novels in the future.

Judging a book by its cover: I agree with Narfna, my book twin on the internet, that Avon just doesn't seem to know what to do when they have to put two men on the cover instead of the standard pairing of a man and a woman. First of all, neither of the cover models look particularly like anyone inside the book (although that's pretty par the course for any romance). Secondly, they both just look so awkward. If I hadn't seen the book and author raved about on a number of romance review sites, it's unlikely I'd have picked it up on my own.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 6: "Speak Easy, Speak Love" by McKelle George

Page count: 432 pages
Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads, because I'm lazy, and it sums up the book nicely:

Six teenagers' lives intertwine during one thrilling summer full of romantic misunderstandings and dangerous deals in this sparkling retelling of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

After she is kicked out of boarding-school, seventeen-year-old Beatrice goes to her uncle's estate in Long Island. But Hey Nonny Nonny is more than just a rundown old mansion. Beatrice's cousin, Hero, runs a struggling speakeasy out of the basement - one that might not survive the summer. 

Along with Prince, a poor young man determined to prove his worth; his brother, John, a dark and dangerous agent of the local mob; Benedick, a handsome trust-fund kid trying to become a writer; and Maggie, a beautiful and talented singer; Beatrice and Hero throw all their efforts into planning a massive party to save the speakeasy. Despite all their worries, the summer is beautiful, love is in the air and Beatrice and Benedick are caught up in a romantic battle of wits that their friends may be quietly orchestrating in the background.

Hilariously clever and utterly charming, McKelle George's debut novel is full of intrigue and 1920s charm. 

In the end notes of this novel, McKelle George refers to Much Ado About Nothing as Shakespeare's most romantic play. I don't think she's wrong, and despite Hero being rather a drip in the play (and the way her storyline resolves isn't really romantic at all - she should have told Claudio where to stuff it), but the banter between Beatrice and Benedick is solid gold and one of the best examples of enemies to lovers I can think of. Back in December 2016, I read a modern YA adaptation of the play, The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You, which I liked a lot. When I saw this reviewed on Forever Young Adult, I was intrigued (1920s America is a time period I really don't know all that much about). What I can tell you (having read the end notes and seen the bibliography at the back of the book), Ms George seems to have really done her research before writing the novel.

The Lily Anderson modern adaptation was obviously a lot more loosely based on the play. Here, every chapter heading is taken from the play, and despite being set in a very different time period than the original, with a much more diverse cast, Speak Easy, Speak Love really does follow the major beats of the play very faithfully. In the original, it's clear that Beatrice and Benedick have a long history of bickering, here they meet for the first time towards the beginning of the novel. Beatrice wants to become a doctor, but money troubles has made it impossible for to complete her schooling. She cannot understand how Benedick can skip out on his final exams and blithely ignore his graduation, throwing away the privilege and opportunity he has because of his dreams of becoming a writer.

Margaret, or Maggie, is not Hero's faithful servant here, but an ambitious young black woman who dreams of becoming a jazz singer. In the play, John is pretty much an irredeemable villain, trying to ruin everything for everyone else for no particularly good reason (as far as the audience is told). Ms George has made him a much more complex character, although his motivations and the reasons for many of his actions are only gradually revealed, but his rivalry with his brother is a lot more nuanced and he's a lot more than just a stock bootlegging mob member. The author even finds a creative way to incorporate Dogberry and Verges, the rather silly comic relief characters in a believable way, which I was rather impressed with.

As I said, the whole "Hero is ruined" story strand of the original play is not one I'm overly fond of, so I was very interested in seeing how Ms. George was going to deal with it. In Lily Anderson's book, the "Hero" character is accused of cheating and temporarily expelled from her fancy prep school. In this book, I really liked the slightly convoluted way it came about that she was accused of faithlessness, and temporarily abandoned by some of her supporters, but even better how she is eventually and much more believably redeemed (no faked deaths here).

This is McKelle George's debut novel and I think she did a really good job with it. I'm absolutely going to keep an eye out for whatever she decides to write next.

Judging a book by its cover: While I'm not entirely sure why the stylised silhouettes dissolve into artful swirls of smoke below thigh level, I generally really like this cover. It's got an art deco feel that suits the Jazz Age/Prohibition/swinging 1920s era the book is set in. I'm not sure which of the characters the silhouettes are supposed to portray (there are three main romantic couples in this book, after all), but I can't imagine that pragmatic tomboy Beatrice would ever wear such an elaborate flowery headdress as the female cover model. Now if she was in overalls, maybe.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 5: "Heart on Fire" by Amanda Bouchet

Page count: 448 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Spoiler warning! This is the third and final book in the trilogy, and will without a doubt contain spoilers for the earlier books in the series. Don't read this review if you want to remain unspoiled and aren't caught up with the previous two books. If you want to start at the beginning, book 1 (by far the best book in the series) is A Promise of Fire.

Cat and her warlord husband Griffin have defeated the rulers of tyrannical Tarva and united two thirds of the ancient realm of Thalyria. Their biggest challenge is still before them, however, with Cat's absolutely ruthless and megalomaniac mother ruling the third realm of Fisa with an iron fist. She's the only thing Cat truly fears and she's not about to let her long estranged daughter and the mortal Cat's chosen to share her life with topple her from her throne and remove her from power.

Before they can get far enough to mount an offencive against Fisa, it turns out that Cat and Griffin have challenges closer to home. Griffin's brother is none too happy about how his family's life has changed since Cat came into their lives and takes drastic steps to try to have her neutralised. It really doesn't go as he expects, but Griffin is left badly shaken by his betrayal (not to mention the revelation of some of the very, well divine, protectors Cat has had watching over her throughout her life).

Defeating the Queen of Fisa will take everything Cat and Griffin has, and it seems impossible that they are going to manage without losses along the way. It's quite clear that Cat has gifts from the gods much more powerful and unpredictable than she had been made aware of, but even they won't be much help if she doesn't learn to control them properly and get over her childhood terrors and survivor's guilt once and for all.

While I really enjoyed A Promise of Fire despite the rather problematic premise of Griffin kidnapping Cat and keeping her as his prisoner for much of the book, and Breath of Fire ended up being entertaining, again despite some problematic elements, and a rather unsatisfying beginning, sadly, I think this, the final book in the trilogy, is the weakest book in the series. The structure of the book is disjointed and after a lot of conflict of various kinds throughout the narrative, the final show-down ends up feeling rather anti-climactic and a bit too easy.

I've seen at least one other reviewer being annoyed at Cat and everyone around her refer to Cat's unborn (and yet creepily sentient) child as "Little Bean", which seems strange in a fantasy society with strong elements of Greek mythology. Pretty sure they had no idea what unborn children look like in the early stages of pregnancy. It felt very anachronistic.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from the conclusion of this trilogy, but it seems to me that both Cat and Griffin should maybe have spent less time being conflicted about their relationship at this stage and there's a few decisions they make that border on TSTL, where they are lucky to get out alive, and their various supporters should have kicked their asses for going off into dangerous situations on their own. There's an extended section where Cat is separated from everyone else she cares about for overreaching her new god-given powers which, while interesting, I felt went on for too long.

I also wish we'd gotten a little bit more resolution on the lives on some of the supporting cast, as I'm pretty sure (based on the preview of at the end of the book of what appears to be a new science fiction series) that this is Bouchet's last entry into this world. I'd have liked to have some hint as to what was in store for Griffin's various brothers and sisters, who have been important supporting characters throughout the series, but alas, that was not to be.

Judging a book by its cover: While it's nice to see a muscular and powerful looking woman with a sword on a cover for a fantasy romance, I'm not sure what's up with the flaming sword (with pregnancy brain, I'm pretty forgetful, but I'm 98% sure Cat doesn't have a flaming sword at any point in the book) or all the pastel coloured...smoke? The pink and turquoise doesn't really fit in with the warm red and orange tones of the rest of the cover.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 4: "The Cruel Prince" by Holly Black

Page count: 384 pages
Audio book length: 12hrs 36mins
Rating: 4 stars

When Jude was seven years old, her life and those of her sisters, were irrevocably changed. Lord Madoc, the Faerie King's general, showed up on their doorstep, intent on claiming back his long-lost heir and Jude and Taryn's parents were murdered as a result. Madoc took them and his daughter Vivienne to Elfhame, where they were all raised as part of his household.

Most humans in Elfhame are servants (or even slaves) be-glamoured not to realise that they're trapped in a magical realm. That Madoc has demanded that Jude and Taryn be raised alongside the children of the Fae, and treated as his own kin, is highly unusual. Vivi, his actual daughter, still does her best to provoke and oppose her father and scoff at Faerie traditions as much as she can. The twins, on the other hand, always so very aware of their otherness, do their best to fit in and adapt. Ten years after the death of their parents, Jude is wanting to fight in the trials to prove herself worthy to become a knight, while Taryn wants to find a faerie lord to marry. Vivi, on the other hand, keeps sneaking off to the mortal realm and has a human girlfriend who she's keeping secret from Madoc and her stepmother.

While many of the Faerie youths that Jude and Taryn are educated alongside are happy to mostly ignore them, there are others who don't like humans, and resent that the twins are given such elevated status. They take extra pleasure in torturing them and making their lives difficult. Chief among these are Cardan, the High King's youngest son, and his little band of hangers-on. When Cardan discovers that Jude wants to compete in the Knight trials, he steps up his harassment. He wants Jude to promise to bow out, and she only becomes more determined to defy him. As Taryn just wants to be left in peace, she keeps trying to persuade her sister to bow to the prince, to no avail. The sisters start growing apart.

Madoc has no intention of allowing Jude to become a knight, he says she's not ruthless enough. So when Jude gets an offer from one of the older of the High King's sons, an offer that can help keep her safe from Cardan and some of his more ruthless allies, she accepts, even if it might put her in danger of a different kind. Then there's an announcement that the High King will step down, and cede the throne to one of his heirs. Will this trigger a power struggle among the King's children?

The first Holly Black book I ever read was Tithe, back in 2010. While my absolute favourite of her books is about vampires, Ms Black has written about faeries a number of times, and they are not the pretty and romantic kind, but rather the dark, dangerous, yet oh so seductive ones that humans should stay far away from, but rarely can. So when I heard that her new series was also going to be about the Fae, I was excited.

When I say that these are not your nice, delicate sort of faeries, that's no joke. Even in the prologue of the book, defenceless children see their parents brutally struck down and then they are abducted by their parents' murderer. Some of the stuff that Cardan and his cronies put Jude through in the book was genuinely difficult to read about and while Prince Cardan is eventually given just a little bit of depth and backstory to make you understand both his strange hatred of Jude and his malicious cruelty (probably because he's clearly going to become a much more central character in the sequel), most of his friends seem to be just sadistic creeps.

There's also several descriptions of the very callous treatment the majority of faeries have for humans in general. While under the current High King, there are rules about making bargains with mortals before they can be lured away to Elfheim, it's also made clear that this was not always the case, and there are many who would love to go back to the old ways, where humans could be easily lured away and exploited, until they waste away for lack of rest and proper nourishment. Humans are playthings to most of the Fae, and it's really only the high position that Madoc has at court and his power that means he can demand that his faithless human wife's offspring be raised as his own flesh and blood.

While I liked Jude a lot, I would have loved a bit more characterisation of her two sisters. While as someone who is extremely averse to conflict myself, you'd think I'd sympathise with Taryn, she comes across as almost too cowardly and willing to submit, and Vivi's chief trait seems to be sullen defiance. I hope we get more insight into both characters in the sequels, as I the stubborn and headstrong loner protagonist, without friends or support of any kind get a bit boring after a while. To be fair, Jude does find herself some interesting allies as the plot progresses, but it would be sad if she becomes entirely estranged with her actual sisters.

This is not really a romantic book (unlike several of Black's previous novels), but there are absolutely hints of possible romantic interests in the books to come. The main story in this book is Jude's desperate struggle to amass enough power and influence for herself that she can survive in Elfheim without being harassed, while having to deal with increasing amounts of complicated intrigue along the way. She's certainly in a very different position at the end of the book than at the beginning, with all manner of interesting implications for the books to come.

Judging a book by its cover: There's a Barnes & Noble exclusive cover for this book, where the background is black, rather than white, and I think that one looks a lot more striking. It's not that I mind the white, but black and gold seems so much more dramatic, and there is a fair amount of drama in this book. They could also have put a more elaborate crown in the picture, the one described in the book is quite a lot more intricate than the one pictured here.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.