Ten Second Reviws

Edenbrooke

By Julianne Donaldson

Marianne goes to spend some time in the country, visiting friends that her more beautiful and talented twin sister has made, battling highwaymen, fortune hunters, catty women and flirty men. For as silly as some (most?) of Edenbrooke is, I have to confess that when Marianne overheard Philip "complaining" about her and making it sound like he hated her guts (even though we all knew it was actually the complete opposite) something deep in the reptilian, instinctual part of my brain went "Mmm, good".  The heart wants what it wants.  And my heart wants contrived situations in which two people in love think that the other person hates them.  Angst, what a delight! Anyway, 'tis a very silly, slight book, but man, sometimes that's kind of what you need. 

Darkdawn

By Jay Kristoff

For some reason all my formatting is fucking up today (like just moving things on its own) so we'll see how long I can stand it.  Long story short: if you've read this far, you may as well read Darkdawn.  It's good enough.  I read (and liked) the first one, but it definitely didn't seem like we were going to be getting into a whole thing about the Moon in book one.  Mostly it seemed like a pretty straight-forward revenge tale.  Not that there's anything wrong with the Moon, it just seems like we took a hard left somewhere.  Anyway, this book is mostly a road trip, and there is a lot (far too much for my taste) of bantering/griping/star-crossed romance.  Plus, people die like every few chapters, which takes some of the emotion out of all the deaths.  And I don't think that's intentional. Anyway, the bad guy gets super powerful on dark magic but is defeated anyway, Mia's little brother decides he can love this mysterious, murderous sister he doesn't remember who drags him all over creation, narrowly escaping death multiple times and who insists on calling him a different name and telling him he's adopted,  somehow the person that Mia loves comes back from  the dead (no, the other one) to live happily ever after, and the moon is back in the sky and only one sun, so even though like 90% of the people who met/helped Mia along the way are dead, yay? Boo on the changed solar system though, I thought three suns was cool.