Month: March 2018

Book Review: Lies by Michael Grant

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61c1539c28b0c6b76a92c02b9c88c34eLies by Michael Grant  

Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction

Publishing Info: 2011 by Egmont Books (first published 2010)

Pages: 472

Star Rating: 4/5

Back Cover Summary:

66 Hours, 52 Minutes

Suddenly, it’s a world without adults and normal has crashed and burned. When life as you know it ends at 15, everything changes.

Tensions are growing in the FAYZ. The mutants are under attack. Food is scarce. Sam’s gone AWOL.

At night, a solitary figure roams the streets– the ghost of a boy with a whip hand, haunting the dreams of those he has tormented.

Then the town is deliberately set on fire… And through the flames, Sam sees the figure he dreads most–Drake. But that’s impossible: Drake is dead.

Lies is the third book in Michael Grant’s Gone series. I really wouldn’t recommend leaving big gaps between reading the books in this series. I read the first book in 2014 and the second book, Hunger, in 2015, so it’s been three years since I read it. There are so many characters and their individual storylines and arcs to keep track of, that it was hard to dip back in after so long away from the series. I read a summary of the first two books online which was helpful, but not quite the same as when you can remember more of the detail. So if you read this series, don’t leave it too long between reading each book like I have!

This is one of the grimmest YA series I have read. It really proves YA isn’t just about clichés and love triangles. It can be gritty, dark and meaningful. It’s so interesting watching how things play out in the FAYZ over the course of the series (it really is like a modern Lord of the Flies, with superpowers). It digs deep into how people would react in that kind of situation, how desperate they could become, and how ‘normal’ just collapses and becomes something totally different, something that’s more about survival than living. In this book, Astrid is still trying to get rules and laws into place to give the FAYZ more order, so life isn’t just about survival.

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Film Review: Tomb Raider

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tomb-raider-poster-alicia-vikanderFilm Review: Tomb Raider

Release date: 15th March 2018

Director: Roar Uthaug

Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Daniel Wu, Walton Goggins

Runtime: 120 minutes

Genre: Action, Adventure

Watched in: 2D

Rating: 3/5 stars

Tomb Raider is a reboot of the film franchise, loosely based on the reboot of the video game. This vision of Tomb Raider is a little different from the Angelina Jolie films you may be familiar with. Alicia Vikander portrays a young Lara Croft, unable to accept her father’s death, and living away from Croft Manor. In search of her father, she journeys to a remote island off the coast of Japan where he had been looking for the tomb of Himiko. Alicia Vikander does a great job playing Lara, but there are few other substantial performances to make the film come alive.

Those who have played the 2013 game will recognise some similarities here, but the film is quite loosely inspired by the game rather than being an adaptation of it. Some things are familiar like Lara’s bow and arrow, the climbing axe and some of the action sequences, for example when she is washed down the river. Otherwise, the film takes quite a different story to the game.

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Top 5 Wednesday: Favourite Science Fiction & Fantasy in Other Media

M.T.Wilson @ The Last Book on the Left4 Comments

It’s hard to only name five because SFF is my favourite genre! There are so many films I could name. If I was listing all my favourites, this would be a really long list. Such tough decisions, but here are the ones I have picked (in no particular order, because please don’t ask me to rank them too!). T5W is a group hosted on Goodreads, if you’d like to participate check it out here.

collagestarwars

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Book Review: Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray

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33154647Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray

Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction

Publishing Info: April 2017 by Hot Key Books (first published 2017)

Pages: 425

Star Rating: 4/5

Back Cover Summary:

Noemi is a young and fearless soldier of Genesis, a colony planet of a dying Earth. But the citizens of Genesis are rising up – they know that Earth’s settlers will only destroy this planet the way they destroyed their own. And so a terrible war has begun.

When Noemi meets Abel, one of Earth’s robotic mech warriors, she realizes that Abel himself may provide the key to Genesis’ salvation. Abel is bound by his programming to obey her – even though her plan could result in his destruction. But Abel is no ordinary mech. He’s a unique prototype, one with greater intelligence, skill and strength than any other. More than that, he has begun to develop emotions, a personality and even dreams. Noemi begins to realise that if Abel is less than human, he is more than a machine. If she destroys him, is it murder? And can a cold-blooded murder be redeemed by the protection of a world?

Stranded together in space, they go on a whirlwind adventure through Earth’s various colony worlds, alongside the countless Vagabonds who have given up planetary life altogether and sail forever between the stars. Each step brings them closer – both to each other and to the terrible decision Noemi will have to make about her world’s fate, and Abel’s.

When I received this book as a gift, I was really excited to read it. I love science fiction, but somehow have managed to only really read dystopian or apocalyptic sub-genre sci-fi. This is coincidental rather than deliberate, as I love space operas such as Star Wars and The Expanse on film and TV. So this book, although in one of my favourite genres, looked quite different to other sci-fi I’d read before.

Thank goodness I received it as a gift, because if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, it might have ended up back on the shelf. It’s important to note here that I absolutely loved this book. However, the opening chapters are definitely the weakest point for me. Therefore, if I’d picked it up in the bookshop and read the first few pages, or however much time I had to read, I might not have bought it. And that would have been a travesty because then I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy this amazing novel.

The problems I had with the opening chapters could partly be down to getting used to the writing style – the novel is told in chapters that alternate between the point of view of Noemi and Abel. However, I don’t think that’s totally the case with this one. Once the problematic first few chapters were out of the way, I instantly got into the way it was written, so I don’t think that’s what the issue was. There were two main issues.

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Author Interview: Sam Waterhouse

M.T.Wilson @ The Last Book on the Left1 Comment

Today, Sam Waterhouse joins me as part of the Of Legend and Lore blog tour. This collection of fairy tale retellings by members of the Just-Us League takes a fresh look at both well-known and lesser known tales.

JLA4BlogTour

Sam Waterhouse is a part-time writer with a full-time imagination from Hobart, Tasmania. ‘Wishes Between Worlds’ is his second published story, a futuristic retelling of ‘The Enchanted Quill’ fairy tale. He enjoys writing unusual characters, so a trickster, genie-esque crow was an opportunity too good to pass on.

Sam also contributed to the previous Just-Us League anthology Between Heroes and Villains with ‘Like You’, an original story where superpowers are treated as a disease to be eradicated.

You can follow Sam on Twitter (@SW_Wordologist).

What inspired your retelling?

I chose to retell ‘The Enchanted Quill’ partly because I like a good anthropomorphic character and partly because of how it portrays the power of the written word. I took a few liberties in the retelling – such as changing the setting to a spaceship during a multi-generational interstellar voyage and having Corvo play the part of trickster – but those were the two qualities I liked most about this particular fairy tale.

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February Book Haul!

M.T.Wilson @ The Last Book on the LeftLeave a comment

I had a good haul of books last month!

the-rose-and-the-dagger_1_fullsize

The Rose and the Dagger by Renee Ahdieh

Having read The Wrath and the Dawn, I wasn’t desperate to read the sequel, but invested enough to want to. So when I saw the Kindle edition discounted, I went for it. I’m curious to see where the story goes.

collageyoungelites

The Young Elites, The Rose Society, The Midnight Star (Young Elites trilogy) by Mary Lu

I saw these books as a pack of three for less than the price of one – I’ve never been one to resist a book bargain. The series I was originally interested in by Lu was Legend, but having read the back cover of The Young Elites I thought I would give this series a go.

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The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo

I have seen this book so many times in book shops and just fell in love with the beauty of it. It’s a lush hardcover with thick pages that are beautifully illustrated in colour. I loved Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone and Siege and Storm (I have yet to read the final book in the trilogy!). This book is a collection of short stories that are fairy tales from the Grishaverse.