Trickey's Books

I shall try my best to keep my language clean, but I make no promises because I swear when I’m excited and talking about this book is very exciting. Before we start, I would like to thank author Elise Kova for providing a review copy of the box set! I'm going to review the set as a whole, but for now, I'm reviewing each book individually. Vortex Visions is the first book of the Vortex Chronicles. The story revolves around Vi, the crown princess of the Solaris Empire. She starts off in the North, where she’s been living since she was fourteen for political reasons. Vi makes an amazing main character: she’s funny, determined, and relatably flawed. She makes mistakes, she owns up to them, and she suffers the consequences in realistic ways. You get to know her character quickly, so nothing she does seems out of character for the rest of the book. Kova also perfectly captures the beauty of friendships between women with Vi’s closest friends, Jayme and Ellene. They’re constantly supp...

Crown of Crowns  by the illustrious Clara Loveman came out on August 11, 2020, and since then I've been helping build some hype towards the book! And today, I have the luck of having Clara Loveman herself answer some questions about her book and her writing process! Before we jump in, I'd like to share the Amazon blurb to jog your memory: In a kingdom where the ruling and lower classes live and die apart by law, a noblewoman and a commoner make a fatal mistake: they fall in love. Kaelyn, a young noblewoman, feels smothered under the harsh constraints of the Decens-Lenitas, the legal and moral code that governs the people of the Geniverd Kingdom. When she meets Roki, a handsome young man from the city with knowledge and aspirations beyond his status, Kaelyn realizes she’s not the only person trapped. She starts to question everything she thought she knew, including about the Gurnots, a group of rebels set on overthrowing the laws—people who the nobles have labeled as terrorists....

I recently got this stunning edition of The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna, and of course I jumped in and read it as soon as possible! First off: let me say this book is BRUTAL. It’s all about girls who are nearly impossible to kill, but they still suffer grisly injuries that would be lethal for anyone else, and Forna does not skimp on the descriptions. So this book is not for the faint of heart. If you don’t like gore, you might want to give this one a pass. However, if you don’t mind some bloody viscera on your pages, you might like this one! To expand on the premise a little bit: every year, girls of a certain age are given purity tests. If they bleed red, they live. If they bleed gold, they’re considered cursed, and they’re killed, often more than once to find their “final death.” Deka bleeds gold, and she’s tortured for weeks for her golden blood and to try and find the way to kill her for good before she’s taken away to join an army of girls like her that fight monsters to protect t...

 I've already announced the date for Clara Loveman's tour on my blog (September 2nd), but here's a little extra info now: Clara is answering questions for an exclusive interview! I have some fun questions, some about the book, and even one about writing! Remember to return to see it here! I'm so excited to share this! You can see me right underneath the 2nd September slot! This is my first blog tour so I don't know what to say except I'm so glad to be part of this! A short post today loves. See you soon!

I received this book as a free ARC in return for a positive review. I will start my review of A Curse of Ash and Embers by Jo Spurrier with this: it is utterly charming. It starts like a fairy tale: a girl is sent away from home to work as a maid and finds herself entrenched in magic, danger, and the path to her own destiny. The girl in question, Elodie, is also escaping an abusive home in the process, and we get to know her quickly. She’s smart despite never being allowed to go to school, and resourceful because she never got to go to school. Spurrier takes time to slow down and write detailed descriptions to set the scene, which is needed when Elodie reaches the Blackbone cottage and every page introduces more strange magic and hints towards more and more of a dark and twisted backstory to the witch’s cottage and what transpired there. On the subject of the magic, it’s all unique and nature-based, using both familiar herbs from the real world and odd creations of the author’s imagin...

I received this as a free ARC from Netgalley in return for an honest review. I always go into a book with the intent to enjoy it. Even when I saw how many poor reviews this got on Goodreads, I still went in expecting something good. Unfortunately, that isn’t what I got. Even worse, that was almost what I got. This book has such a unique and cool premise: a girl who was made of glass and stone to hunt ghosts for a coven of witches. Sounds awesome, right? That’s because it is! Every character who isn’t the main character is also awesome. They’re quirky, fun, flawed, and consistent. However, the main character is just a bland, edgy girl who goes from trusting no one to hopping on a stranger’s motorcycle in nothing flat. And don’t get me started on the plot. The pacing is wonky and hard to keep up with, with some problems solving themselves within a page and some being abandoned for the next shiny plot point. The prose also came so, so close to being amazing, but it’s littered with lines ...

We're suckers for animals here. That means we didn't turn away abandoned or orphaned animals for years. From a three-legged goat to a pair of ducks who weren't safe in their old house, we've taken care of a lot of animals over the years. Sadly. many of them have passed away, but we loved all of them dearly. Allow me to introduce you to some of the ones who are still with us! This is Stripes. Years ago, my mom looked out the window to see our now dearly-departed lab, Monty, with two little gray fuzzballs. She went outside to find that he had two kittens and he was gently cleaning and grooming them because he was an angel in the shape of a dog. Those kittens were taken in and we named them Trouble and Stripes. Trouble, sadly, passed away earlier this year, but Stripes is still kicking. I raised the two little brats in my room and would sometimes wake up to find them climbing out of their little enclosure. Now Stripes is the laziest cat in the world, and he likes to melt a...