Sunday, June 17, 2012

Reviews of May's New Releases

In May, I had three books to read which were either a continuation of or the conclusion to series that I have been reading.

Insurgent by Veronica Roth

This book is the second book in the Divergent trilogy. Divergent was stunning; this book less so. I enjoyed Insurgent a great deal but not nearly as much as Divergent. Divergent is full of discovery as Tris explores her new faction and develops relationships with the other initiates. During Insurgent, Tris is catapulted from one faction to another, which makes the book seem disjointed.

The book is full of fighting. The ending disappointed me because it is too eerily similar to another series. I won't state which series since that mention would be a major spoiler, but seeing the similarity makes me less interested in reading the final book. I feel like I have been there before. Despite that disappointment, I will be reading the third book in the trilogy and expect to enjoy it.

The Enchantress by Michael Scott

This was the sixth and final book in The Secrets of Nicholas Flamel series. The Nicholas Flamel series consists of six books that take place over approximately two weeks. These books are incredibly detailed and have a ton of information about every mythical creature from every ancient religion. The books are vastly informative about those myths.

By either the second or third book in the series, the reader realizes that the conclusion to the series is going to involve time travel. The time travel happens as expected, but I was left with lingering feelings of one character's path not making sense. I can't really explain this without getting into spoilers. I look forward to reading discussions about this in the Flamel website forums.

I felt that the conclusion of this book could have had more explanation. The bulk of the book involved fighting, and those scenes could have been significantly shortened.

Despite my problem with the time travel aspect and the unnecessary fighting in this book, I greatly enjoyed the entire Nicholas Flamel series and highly recommend it.

The Serpent's Shadow by Rick Riordan

The Serpent's Shadow
is the third and final book in the Kane Chronicles series. Before beginning this book, I opted not to refresh my memory by reading parts of the second book. I did not enjoy the second book as much as I did the first book, and I had no desire to revisit the second book. This did cause me to have no idea who some of the characters in the third book are, and quite frankly, I did not care.

During the entire first half of this book, I felt like I had already read the same story twice in the first two books of the Kane Chronicles series. I found it a bit boring. At slightly more than halfway into the book, I began to enjoy the story a lot more. I then became more bored again towards the end since the final battle seemed to be a retread of previous final battles.

The Kane Chronicles series is not nearly as good as the Percy Jackson series, although I did enjoy it to some degree.

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