2.5 of 5 Stars!
On Thin Ice by Julie Cross
Blurb:
Brooke Parker never expected to find herself in the tiny town of Juniper Falls, Minnesota. Of course, she also never expected to lose her dad. Or for her mom to lose herself. Brooke feels like she’s losing it…until she finds Juniper Falls hockey. Juniper Falls girls’ hockey, that is.
Jake Hammond, current prince of Juniper Falls, captain of the hockey team, and player with the best chance of scoring it big, is on top of the world. Until one hazing ritual gone wrong lands him injured, sitting on the sidelines, and―shocking even to him―finding himself enjoying his “punishment” as assistant coach for the girls’ team.
As Jake and Brooke grow closer, he finds the quiet new girl is hiding a persona full of life, ideas, and experiences bigger and broader than anything he’s ever known. But to Jake, hockey’s never just been a game. It’s his whole life. And leveraging the game for a shot at their future might be more than he can give.
Each book in the Juniper Falls series is STANDALONE:
* Off the Ice
* Breaking the Ice
* On Thin Ice
My Review:
Have I mentioned how much I love this series?? I was so excited when I heard the series would be continuing with On Thin Ice and the yummy Jake Hammond.
Brook is the new girl, the quiet girl with the messed up past and the screwed up parents, neither of which she wants to talk about. But that's okay, because she's really interested in listening lately. Meanwhile, Jake is finally a senior, top of the food chain in school and hockey. Captain is in his sights and he's hoping for a good scholarship. But with senior year comes a hockey team tradition Jake would rather forget about. When the tradition goes horribly wrong and Brooke witnesses the whole thing Jake and Brooke will form an unlikely truce that blooms into trading secrets and confiding in each other and eventually into love.
While they spend more and more time together Jake's life is imploding, his spot on the hockey team seems less important than before, and keeping quiet about things he thinks is wrong becomes increasingly harder while Brooke is just trying to start his life over again.
Overall, I loved this book so much and I was shipping Brooke and Jake from the beginning. The reader also gets to see the couples from the first two books but On Thin Ice is a standalone, you don't need to read the previous books to understand this one (even though I highly recommend Off the Ice and Breaking the Ice!). If you love Contemporary YA Sports Romance, this book is a must for you!
My Rating:
Cover: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (I love the orange color of this cover and the couple depicting Brooke and Jake are perfect)
Summary/Tagline: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 ("Small town boy, meet city girl" is not a bad tagline but it doesn't tell much about the magnificent story inside or the struggles of the characters)
Characters: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (Brooke and Jake are both well-developed characters with real-life struggles that they must overcome. I like Jake's struggle to make his father, his coach, his teammates, and the town proud of him while wanting to tell the truth about what really happened and the guilt and responsibility he feels. Brooke is adjusting to life in a much smaller town, her mother's depression, life with her grandmother who seems all up in her business, and her father's arrest - each in their own would be a major thing but she handles all of it so well.)
Worldbuilding: 🌟🌟🌟 It's contemporary YA romance. There isn't much worldbuilding to develop other than telling the reader that it's a small, hockey obsessed town. Like, really hockey obsessed. Not that it isn't done well, because it is. It's relatable when you live in a small town like I do.
Story: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (This is not just a one-dimensional romance, or a sports romance. Yes, two characters fall in love, yes there is a sport that they both play, but it goes deeper than that. It talks about the weight of expectations, hopes, and dreams of the many being pinned on the few, how snap judgments in a small town can ostracize you whether the talk is true or not, generations of hazing within an organization (in this case a hockey team), and the influence of coaches and other adults on teenagers and how the pressure from them makes you question what is right or wrong.)
Overall:
🌟🌟🌟🌟
4.4 of 5 Stars!
Gunslinger Girl by Lyndsay Ely
James Patterson presents a bold new heroine—a cross between Katniss Everdeen and Annie Oakley: Serendipity Jones, the fastest sharpshooter in tomorrow's West.
Seventeen-year-old Serendipity "Pity" Jones inherited two things from her mother: a pair of six shooters and perfect aim. She's been offered a life of fame and fortune in Cessation, a glittering city where lawlessness is a way of life. But the price she pays for her freedom may be too great....
In this extraordinary debut from Lyndsay Ely, the West is once again wild after a Second Civil War fractures the U.S. into a broken, dangerous land. Pity's struggle against the dark and twisted underbelly of a corrupt city will haunt you long after the final bullet is shot.
My Review:
Cover: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (I love how colorful this cover is and how it looks old-times yet you can see a city skyline in the background behind the cover model. I love the pink woven into the model's hair and her clothing gives you a sense of the old west despite this being a futuristic dystopian novel.)
Summary/Tagline: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (The blurb convinced me to read this book even though I usually don't like dystopian novels or westerns. It made me want to find out more.)
Characters: 🌟🌟 (While I appreciated Pity's struggles I had a hard time liking her as a character. There was nothing unique about her. She's a sharpshooter with great aim, but so is Amani in Rebel of the Sands which I enjoyed much more than this book. She's another beautiful girl slated for a marriage that she doesn't want until she runs away and finds herself in a western show type thing. It's a trope I see a lot, the whole "maybe the grass will be greener on the other side, oh wait it isn't" thing.)
Worldbuilding: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (While I struggled with the characters, I loved the worldbuilding in this one. It's a crazy wild-west-meets-dystopia mash up and I could see it so clearly. The mix of new technology and old western style, dusty towns and glittering, dangerous cities.)
Story: 🌟🌟🌟(I'm torn about the story. I've read this book twice, once in physical format and once on audiobook and I find that when I don't connect with the main character it makes it harder to finish a book, even if I like the worldbuilding or premise. This book felt ununiquely unique. It had the awesome mashup of worlds but it was bogged down by worn-out tropes and themes that have been seen so many times before. I struggled to get through this one both times and honestly if it weren't for the cover, blurb, and James Patterson's imprint, I might not have picked this one up at all if I knew what lay inside beforehand.)
Overall: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 4 of 5 Stars!
My Rating:
🌟🌟🌟🌟
4 of 5 Stars!
Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston
Blurb:
Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09—one of the last remaining illegal Metals—has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him.
Ana’s desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn’t care what he’ll sacrifice to keep them.
When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them—and the coordinates—and not everyone wants them captured alive.
What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives—and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana’s past returns, she must face an impossible choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?
My Review:
Cover: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (I love most sci-fi covers and this one doesn't disappoint. The colors, the spacecraft - this cover begs to be picked up from the shelf)
Summary/Tagline: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ("A girl without a past. A boy without a future." This makes the book sound mysterious without even knowing what the book is about. Why doesn't the girl have a past? Why won't the boy have a future? It begs you to crack it open and see why)
Characters: 🌟 (I've heard this book is an Anastasia retelling, but as I DNF'd this one I will never know. Judging by the main character's name and the tagline I can see that's the direction the author was going. As for the boy... she's in love with a glitching metal boy, that much I got, but I'm kind of over the girl falls in love with a machine thing. There's nothing here that I haven't seen in other sci-fi or other Anastasia retellings.)
Worldbuilding: 🌟 (Again, I DNF'd this book fairly quickly so I didn't get to see much of the worldbuilding but what I did read wasn't very unique.)
Story: 🌟(Again, nothing unique here. There's been a flood of Anastasia retellings hitting the shelves over the past year or so ranging from historical fantasy to sci-fi and this one wasn't one of the better ones. And as far as sci-fi goes, it's not Defy the Stars (which I could compare it to romance-wise.)
Overall: 🌟🌟.6 of 5 Stars!
My Rating:
🌟🌟
2.6 of 5 stars!
