ASRC 2021: Week 3

We hope you had a great holiday weekend. If you need a refresher on the rules, check out our initial blog post. We love hearing about what you're doing, so be sure to drop a comment down below. Once you do, fill out this form to enter for one of our great prizes.

Here's this week's Monopoly Board.

Current Literary Monopoly Board

Now for this week's staff participation:

Elizabeth: This week I rolled an eight and landed on Horror. This was a bit of a struggle for me. I hate horror. I don't do well with scary things. I settled upon Coraline by Neil Gaiman as my book for the week. It's a children's novel so it isn't at all gory. This book follows Coraline as she explores the house her family has moved into. She goes through a mysterious door and finds herself in another dimension where her "Other Mother" wants to consume her soul. I found this book to be decently creepy while not super scary. I give it 4/5 stars.

Elias: For this week, I rolled a five and landed on Fantasy, which is a genre I'm pretty familiar with so it wasn't hard to find a pick I thought I'd like. I'd recently read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi so I decided to check out the sequel, Children of Virtue and Vengeance. It wasn't quite what I was expecting and felt aimless, not in the way middle novels of a trilogy usually feel, but instead like there really wasn't much of a plan on how to pay off the hook of the first book. New characters take the forefront after being entirely absent in the previous book and old characters, like Tzain, are shunted off to the sidelines.

I think part of the problem of the novel is that we don't get any new perspectives. Rather than expanding, the book feels like its contracting and re-hashing the same interpersonal plots. It's all so frustrating and not in the way that was handled so well in the first novel. It's still a well-written novel, and the characters are strong enough on their own that I wanted to see them succeed, but the strife never felt earned and the climax was all at once too sudden and not sudden enough. I'll still read the final novel, as it seems to be tackling a whole new conflict, seeded in the first book, but I suspect it will be farther down my to-read list than it would have been otherwise.

I give it 3.5/5 stars.

We look forward to seeing what you've read and will see you back here next week!