Archive for Two Stars
STEEL by Carrie Vaughn Book Review
Publication Date: March 1st 2011 by HarperTeen
Rating: 
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Book Summary: It was a slender length of rusted steel, tapered to a point at one end and jagged at the other, as if it had broken. A thousand people would step over it and think it trash, but not her.
This was the tip of a rapier.
Sixteen-year-old Jill has fought in dozens of fencing tournaments, but she has never held a sharpened blade. When she finds a corroded sword piece on a Caribbean beach, she is instantly intrigued and pockets it as her own personal treasure.
The broken tip holds secrets, though, and it transports Jill through time to the deck of a pirate ship. Stranded in the past and surrounded by strangers, she is forced to sign on as crew. But a pirate’s life is bloody and brief, and as Jill learns about the dark magic that brought her there, she forms a desperate scheme to get home—one that risks everything in a duel to the death with a villainous pirate captain.
Time travel, swordplay, and romance combine in an original high-seas adventure from New York Times bestseller Carrie Vaughn.
Book Review Overview:
- Highlight of the book are definitely the fencing and sword-fighting scenes
- Would have loved more on Captain Cooper and Edmund Blane; felt that Blane was a little flat
- Time travel just happens and is never really explained
Jill stumbles upon a a broken rusted blade that washed upon the shores of the Bahamas. Intrigued by the blade, Jill pockets it and wonders where it came from. During a boat ride with her family, a wave pitches Jill into the ocean and she suddenly finds herself transported back into the early 18th century on a ship full of pirates. STEEL by Carrie Vaughn is a novel full of swordplay and pirates but fails to truly captivate the reader.
As a former high school fencer, I have to admit that I just loved the fencing and sword-fighting scenes in STEEL by Carrie Vaughn. For me, the sword scenes were the main highlight of the book. Vaughn takes sword fighting seriously; it’s not just slashing swords and steel on steel. Vaughn uses fencing terminology and stresses the fact that this is where the sport originated. The terminology is probably a bit hard to get used to for someone who’s never fenced before, so I thought it was handy to have the glossary at the end of STEEL that described terms such as redoublement and passé.
But despite the fact that I enjoyed the fencing scenes, STEEL failed to capture my attention most of the time. STEEL is under 300 pages and told from the third person perspective, with Jill as the single main character viewpoint. I just didn’t enjoy this novel coming from Jill’s perspective. I didn’t really understand her role in STEEL. Yes, she brought back a shard of Blane’s sword by accident – but that’s it. Nothing about Jill is special.
To be honest, I would have loved reading this novel from the perspective of Captain Cooper – or even better, Edmund Blane. The story is really about them and their fierce rivalry. Captain Cooper is such an interesting character since you usually don’t read about revered female pirate captains. I found her back story fascinating and I wished that she had been more central to the story. Furthermore, for a villain, I felt like Blain was such a flat character. You always just heard about how terrible he is, but you never really get to hear it from his point of view.
There’s a smudge of romance in this book and I honestly thought it was quite unnecessary. Why can’t guys and girls just remain friends? The romance didn’t satisfy me in any way, and I just felt a bit irritated that it was in the story at all.
The last detail that bothered me about STEEL is that the time travel aspect is something that just happens. Vaughn unfortunately does very little to explain the phenomena and just relies on the reader’s imagination to believe that Jill can just fall into the ocean and get magically transported back to the 18th century. The device may work on some readers, but it failed to impress me. I feel like Jill just blended in so well into the time period, and no one really questioned her. I’d expect that many of her mannerisms and speech differed from the pirates, but it was never really brought up in the book.
I honestly wanted to like STEEL more than I did. I had pretty good expectations for this one because I generally love time travel and pirate books. However, the combination of the two just didn’t work out for me in STEEL by Carrie Vaughn. I would still recommend readers who are interested in this novel to give it a shot and to Borrow It from your public library. But for those who want a little more romance and minus the time travel, there’s always TO CATCH A PIRATE by Jade Parker (you can read my book review here).
Other Book Reviews:
Good Books and Good Wine
Into the Book
Novel Thoughts
About the Author
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Find the Author
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Vaughn was born into a military family and has lived all over the U.S. She received a BA from Occidental College, after which she went on to work too many jobs to count until she went back to school to receive her MA from University of Colorado at Boulder. She currently lives in Boulder, CO.
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Book Review, Two Stars - Audience: Young Adult, Author: Carrie Vaughn, Book: Steel, Borrow It, Genre: Historical, Genre: Time Travel, Publisher: HarperTeen | 
1238 words
FAIRY TALE WEDDINGS by Debbie Macomber Book Review
Publication Date: November 24th 2009 by Mira
Summary: Fairy Tales Can Come True
Cindy and the Prince
Thorndike Prince—handsome, levelheaded, successful—is a high-ranking New York City executive. Cindy Territo is the janitor who cleans his office after hours. There’s no reason they’d ever meet, no reason he’d even notice her—until, on a whim and a dare, Cindy crashes his company’s Christmas ball. She dances with her Prince and then, like a proper Cinderella, flees at midnight, leaving her heart behind….
Some Kind of Wonderful
Beautiful inside and out, New York socialite Judy Lovin values family over fortune and fame. So when her father’s business collapses and his most powerful enemy offers to help—in exchange for Judy’s company—she agrees to join John McFarland on his remote Caribbean island. It isn’t long before she discovers that John’s far from the beast he seems to be!
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Book Review, Two Stars - Amortentia Reviews, Audience: Adult, Author: Debbie Macomber, Book: Fairy Tale Weddings, Genre: Romance, Publisher: Mira | 262 words
TEMPEST by Julie Cross
Series: Tempest, #1
Publication Date: January 17th 2012 by St. Martin’s Griffin
Rating: |
Summary: The year is 2009. Nineteen-year-old Jackson Meyer is a normal guy… he’s in college, has a girlfriend… and he can travel back through time. But it’s not like the movies – nothing changes in the present after his jumps, there’s no space-time continuum issues or broken flux capacitors – it’s just harmless fun.
That is… until the day strangers burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, and during a struggle with Jackson, Holly is fatally shot. In his panic, Jackson jumps back two years to 2007, but this is not like his previous time jumps. Now he’s stuck in 2007 and can’t get back to the future.
Desperate to somehow return to 2009 to save Holly but unable to return to his rightful year, Jackson settles into 2007 and learns what he can about his abilities.
But it’s not long before the people who shot Holly in 2009 come looking for Jackson in the past, and these “Enemies of Time” will stop at nothing to recruit this powerful young time-traveler. Recruit… or kill him.
Piecing together the clues about his father, the Enemies of Time, and himself, Jackson must decide how far he’s willing to go to save Holly… and possibly the entire world.
Book Review Overview:
- The chemistry between Jackson and Holly was lacking
- Overall, it was too convoluted. Time travel beyond logic.
- I started out really liking the book but grew to like it less and less as it progressed.
Talk about book hype. TEMPEST was already stirring up a lot of buzz way back in September 2011 when I first heard about this book. The film rights had been sold to Summit Entertainment a long time ago. It seems like the publisher is pushing this book quite hard, so when I was given the chance to review it through NetGalley, I jumped at the chance. After all, I do love time travel.
I honestly would have loved to see TEMPEST revolving more around the family dynamics rather than revolving around Holly. I loved Jackson as a protagonist, but to be honest, I just found his chemistry with Holly really lacking. We do see the evolution of their relationship but I just didn’t feel the spark between them. On the other hand, the moment that Jackson mentioned that he had a twin sister, I felt the love between the two siblings immediately. I think a novel revolving around Jackson and Courtney would have been more effective because of the stronger ties between them. Holly, I was not a fan of, but I liked Courtney immensely.
Backtracking, I do like Jackson as a protagonist. There is a need for more male protagonists in the genre (and in my TBR pile…) so reading from a male perspective was refreshing. I like the fact that Jackson was 19 and in college. The majority of the novel does take place 2 years in the past so really the college scenes are minimal.
I started out enjoying TEMPEST immensely. I am a big fan of time travel and I get excited whenever I hear about a new time travel book in YA. I was hooked into the novel straight from the beginning. At first, it was fun trying to figure out what was going on. After Holly is fatally shot, Jackson finds himself traveling back in time to 2007 instead of sticking around to find out what happens to Holly. 2007 is two years in the past and Holly and Jackson have not yet met. Jackson tries to adapt to his life back in 2007 and tries to figure out how to get back to the future. It was nearing towards the end of Jackson’s 2007 experience when everything went downhill for me.
I like logic. One of the cool things about science fiction is that some authors have the ability to come up with such fantastic theories as to how some things such as time travel can work. I think that for a science fiction novel to truly work, it has to have some scientific accuracy or even realism. The theories have to make at least a little sense in the reader’s mind.
I think some time travel stories can just skirt around explanations without having to dive through complex physics. And it can still work. (I’m thinking Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series here.) But if you’re going to attempt to nitpick at the science behind time travel, you have to have a concrete theory. You can’t just spew mumbo jumbo that contradicts itself a million times. One of my biggest problems with TEMPEST was that the theories behind time travel were just everywhere. I know that Jackson himself tells Holly (and I guess the readers) to abandon everything that you know about time travel. Easier said than done.
Cross mixes in parallel universes on top of time travel and it just creates a huge mess. There is no linear timeline of events. There are so many parallel stories that by the end of the book, the first half of the novel essentially did not exist. It didn’t happen. At one point, I literally just stopped trying to make sense of the mess because it was just impossible. If I were to use TEMPEST as a textbook for time travel, I’d end up more confused than I was if I hadn’t tried to learn the theory.
Bottom line, I did not love this book though I wish I had. The novel just became too convoluted to make sense logically. For me, it was over-hyped and just did not live up to my expectations.
Why I’m Biased: I had very high expectations for this book and it just didn’t live up to it. I guess I also put certain expectations toward time travel novels.
Other Reviews:
Nice Girls Read Books
Poetry to Prose
About the Author
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Find the Author
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Julie lives in central Illinois with her husband and three children where she works as a YMCA Gymnastics Program Director. She never considered writing professionally until May of 2009. Since then, she hasn’t gone a day without writing.
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Book Review, Two Stars - Audience: Young Adult, Author: Julie Cross, Book: Tempest, Borrow It, Genre: Science Fiction, Genre: Time Travel, Publisher: St Martin's Griffin | 1318 words
- Action Packed
- Hahaha Funny
- Keeps You Guessing
- Heartwarmer
- Makes You Think
- Masterful World-Building
- Must Buy
- Page-Turner
- Poetic Prose
- Romantic Read
- Tear-Jerker
