Review: ROOTS GREW WILD by Erica Hoffmeister

Rating: 4/5 stars

Roots Grew Wild is a short collection of free-verse poems that come together to tell a coming-of-age story of a girl and her family in the Midwest.

I especially enjoyed the writing style that Hoffmeister uses. Her writing evokes a lot of imagery through her ethereal sentences. I love the juxtaposition of roots to mean both familial roots and tree roots. She uses beautiful nature descriptions and earthy imagery alongside the story of the girl to create the tone.

Oftentimes with modern poetry, I don’t feel like there is much substance, unfortunately. There are broken sentences and missing punctuation to create an aesthetic and a *mood* but the poems lack actual meaning to me. That’s not how I felt with Roots Grew Wild. This collection is actually substantial and meaningful, and that is one of the main reasons I enjoyed it so much. The author has shared her experiences but has also written about them in a way that the reader can experience them too, feel her feelings, see the same sights. I love how evocative it is. These poems were written to transport the reader to another time and witness the main character’s emotions. I could relate to her feelings and connect with her.

I would recommend this short book if you like beautiful poetry collections that tell a deeper story and have beautiful descriptions of nature. It’s one I’ll be rereading in the future.

Review: THE BLACK PRISM by Brent Weeks

Rating: 5/5 stars

In The Black Prism, magic is based on colors, where drafters can create a solid form from the different colors in light waves. Each color creates a different texture and has a different property. But the more you draft color, the closer you come to your death because the magic is slowly killing you.

I have been looking forward to reading the Lightbringer series for quite a while, and that small bit about how the magic system worked was all I knew before starting. I didn’t know about the plot at all, but knowing about the color magic that slowly kills its user was enough to hook me into reading the book. While I’ve been excited to read this series, I’ve also felt a bit intimidated because each book is 600-700 pages and I knew it would be a commitment. I shouldn’t have been scared to start the series though because this book was so easy to read. I fell right into the story, even with the new and complex magic system, and I found myself engrossed in the plot and the characters and the magic. I usually can’t sit and read for hours on end but with this book I found it to be easy to do just that. I never wanted to put it down, but life’s duties kept calling.

I actually started this book by reading through the whole glossary and appendix because, a few chapters in, I already had questions and I didn’t want to be confused. This helped me understand the magic system and the world right from the beginning, which I found to be super useful. This is one of those books that I constantly kept referencing the information at the back to keep everything straight in my mind, and I’m so glad the author included these reference materials.

I’m also grateful for the map because I love to reference locations as they’re mentioned in the story. The only problem I had was that the map is upside down—South is at the top—and it took me five minutes of staring at it to realize this. I hope this has some important meaning we find out later because otherwise what’s the point of an upside-down map?

The description of the Chromeria with colorful buildings that turn to always be facing the sun sounds so neat and I wish I could see a city like that in real life, or at least some fanart depiction of it. But as much as I love the Chromeria so far, I feel like it is actually not a very good place.

This book had some pretty great characters. Gavin was a really neat protagonist. I enjoyed learning about him as the Prism and what those duties entail as far as keeping all the colors balanced in the world. He has a lot of secrets, and I loved discovering snippets of these throughout the story. For example, what are his seven purposes? I really want to know!

I also rather enjoyed Kip and the mystery surrounding his parentage because it was clear from the beginning that Gavin wasn’t telling anyone the full story. We got bits and pieces along the way, and I love a good mystery aspect in a book. Although I will say that Kip was rather impulsive at times. He would blurt out offensive statements then immediately be like “crap why did I say that?” I just wasn’t sure why he was acting that way but I guess that’s just who he is.

I still don’t know how I feel about Dazen. It’s interesting that we learned right from the beginning that he wasn’t dead as everyone suspected, and I’m curious to see how this will play out in future books. Because of very spoilery reasons, I actually feel sorry for him right now.

Karris was okay. I mostly just felt like she was angry the whole time, but I guess part of that can be expected because of her history with Gavin. I kept waiting for her to learn the full truth because I wanted so badly to see her reaction. I think I will like her more as the series progresses.

I really liked Liv from the first chapter. And knowing what her mission was and that the Prism didn’t know what or who she was in the beginning just added to the suspense and made me even more excited to keep reading about her. Plus I really like that she’s a superviolet drafter. For some reason, that’s the most interesting color to me, so I loved seeing what she could do with it. Also, she has me very intrigued with what she could do given her position at the end of the book. I’m very excited to see her character progression.

Even though I know Lord Omnichrome is the villain and a terrible person, I can’t help but agree with some of his ideals. What he says about the Chromeria makes sense in a way. The good are not always fully good and the bad are not always fully bad. I’m very curious to see how his beliefs affect other characters and the rest of the story in other books.

One minor problem I had was the writing style at times. Weeks’s writing was good for the most part but occasionally he would explain something and I wouldn’t understand what he was saying and I would be confused about that aspect of the world or magic system. I did have to reread a few paragraphs because of this issue, but for the most part, I thought the writing was good.

One thing, though, that was kind of jarring about Weeks’s writing style was that thoughts in the first person were not italicized. It really threw me off for the first few chapters that I saw it, but it gradually became a normal part of the story and I stopped noticing it as much. I thought this was an interesting way to approach writing in third person, and even though I didn’t think I would like it, I did. It was kind of like third-person limited mixed with first-person.

Something else I didn’t really like was how long the final battle scene was. It was almost two hundred pages long, and by the end, I was just exhausted of reading about the drafters fighting. I much preferred the non-combat scenes of the book. I’m positive there will be many more fight scenes in the later books, so I can only hope they do not last as long or they are written in a way that is more entertaining to me. I was fine with the first three-fourths, but during the very ending I was just wanting to be done with battle and I didn’t really care what happened anymore.

This book was very compelling, not only because of the story itself, but also because each chapter ended on a cliffhanger but the next chapter would be a new character’s perspective. I had to keep reading to find out what happened next for each of the five character perspectives. It’s been awhile since I read a book like this, one where I was actually excited to know what would happen next in such a way.

Overall, I thought The Black Prism was a fantastic book. It has a very unique and impressive magic system, a well-built world, a great cast of characters, some mysterious aspects, intense fight scenes, vivid imagery, and a compelling plot. The writing did take some getting used to in the beginning, but eventually I came to enjoy it. I would recommend to anyone who is looking for an enthralling fast-paced epic fantasy. I’m very much looking forward to where this series takes me on its journey.

“Moments of beauty sustain us through hours of ugliness.”

How I Rate Books

Everyone rates books differently, and I want to talk about my method for how I rate books.

I use the five-star rating system, and I rate books based on how much I personally enjoy them and connect with the story. If I read a critically acclaimed novel that everyone seems to love that I'm not connecting with but I can see why other people would love it, I'm most likely going to give it a lower rating because it wasn't a book for me, and I'm not rating books based on how anyone else would like them but on how I like them. But if I can see reasons why a different audience might like a book that I'm just not interested in, I'll at least mention the good aspects in my review despite my lower rating. I always strive to be fair in my ratings and reviews.

Here is my reading scale: 
Favorite     5-stars     4-stars     3-stars     2-stars     1-star     Did-Not-Finish

So for how I rate books, I start every book with a three-star rating in mind. Three stars is the middle of the scale, and by starting each book with that rating, I'm giving every book a fair chance.

What I do is if I read a book and nothing jumps out at me as being good or nothing jumps out at me as being bad, if the book feels middle-of-the-road or average, or if I liked the book but thought it was nothing special, I keep it at three stars.

If I'm reading a book and I'm just not connecting with the characters, I'm confused by the plot, I don't like the writing style, I'm having an issue with how something was talked about or handled, or I'm becoming uninterested in continuing on with the story, I will lower my rating to two stars. If these problems become even worse or the book just starts to downright frustrate or anger me, I will lower the rating again to one star. If I feel yet again like these problems continue and there is no redemption and I am just wasting my time reading the book, I will mark it as did-not-finish.

A note about not finishing books: I very rarely decide to put a book down and not continue reading it. Most of the books I haven't finished in the past were because my library hold expired and I was busy and never got around to finishing the book, or because the story really wasn't holding my interest even if there was nothing that I explicitly disliked (read: I was bored). There have been only a very small handful of titles that I did not finish because I truly disliked the books and the thought of reading them just made me dread reading anything at all. I try to finish all the books I start, and I generally only read books I think I'm going to enjoy anyway, but every so often I need to permanently put down a book.

Now as for the higher ratings, whenever I'm reading a book and I start to like the writing, the characters, the flow of the story, whenever something sticks out in my mind, I will move my rating to four stars. This is my most common rating. Then if I keep reading and I become further impressed by some aspect of the story that really stands out to me, or I feel like I literally cannot put the book down (this is actually quite rare for me), or I just love everything about the story, I will bump my rating up again to five stars. Then, if a five-star book keeps blowing my mind and keeps me utterly obsessed about the story, even long after I finish it, and it's a book I know I'll want to read again and again, it becomes one of my favorite books. (I have a favorites shelf on Goodreads, and at the time of writing this post, there are only 18 books on that shelf.)

Sometimes a book will start out going downhill to two stars but then work its way back up to three stars and occasionally even up to four stars. Usually if this is the case, I will rate the book three stars because that is the average rating for my reading experience with that book. Sometimes I will also give half stars to books, although since Goodreads doesn't allow half stars, this is uncommon and only noted in my reviews on this blog. I use a half star if I feel that the one rating is too low but the next rating is too high, that there was just enough of something in the book to keep me from rating it one way or the other. On Goodreads, though, I am forced to select a full-star rating, so I choose whichever one I think most closely reflects my feelings for that book.

There's the breakdown for how I rate books. I start at three stars and work my way up or down the scale, depending on how my reading experience goes. I know my system is a bit different from how I've seen others rate books, but it's the system that works the best for how my mind works.