Books I've Rated 5 / 5
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 Note Re: Rowling
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Career of Evil
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 Note Re: Rowling
Original Review
Rowling (as Galbraith) is really a fantastic storyteller. This book is pure genre fiction, no doubt, but it's also very well executed. I particularly enjoyed this installment, in which Rowling's own convictions (many of which I share) shone through without ever seeming heavy-handed or detracting from the story. -
Between the World and Me
Finished
Brutal but excellent. I’d recommend it to anyone and everyone. I’m not sure I understood all of it, but I plan to keep especially those passages in mind as I continue to learn and grow.
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Uprooted
Finished
I really enjoyed this book. I’d been looking, for a while, for the next book that would capture me, make me care about the characters and really look forward to picking it up again – which hadn’t happened since I finished Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy – and this was it.
I don’t know if this book is YA. It’s hard to tell at a certain point. The vocabulary is good but probably not overly challenging. The subject matter borders on adult? But in a fantasy genre that appears to mark itself as “adult” by competing to show misery and depravity (“historical accuracy”), or at least requires massive tomes with hundreds of characters, a book like this feels out of place. Like Gaiman’s Stardust, it’s got more of a fairy tale than a strict “fantasy” feel. In the end I’d categorize this as YA-appropriate but probably not a YA book.
Like Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series, this book opts for a Slavic backdrop rather than the obligatory Anglo-Saxon/Arthurian roots of the vast majority of fantasy, but I thought it was better executed here than in Bardugo’s books (her first, at least) – it felt more authentic, for whatever reason. Even though I think largely the names and myths of the book could’ve been replaced with Anglo equivalents and succeeded nearly as well, the way this universe blended “real” Slavic myths like Baba Jaga into this fictional world, and built the magic and the adventure around those sensibilities (the magic wood, the creatures that inhabited it, the way the songs are sung like traditional folk melodies rather than epic castings) really worked well.
A note: with place names like Rosya, Polna, and Venizia (or something like that) I constantly found myself trying to fit this adventure into real-life Eastern Europe. At the end of the day though, my conclusion was that this world drew inspiration from ours, but was not intended to be one and the same. Maybe I missed it. But if Polna is Poland, what is its capital, Kralia (which seems closest to, say, Kraljevo in Serbia, as far as I can tell)?
Another thing I liked about the book was that while it existed in a kind of fairy-tale world, I was never fully sure what to expect. The adventure wasn’t laid out before me when I started the book, and it didn’t turn out to do what I did expect. Yet with that said, I rarely felt like the new developments were forced or overt maneuverings of the author – it was just a well-built narrative.
This book wasn’t perfect. I felt a bit let down by the climax – by the partial explanation/history that was unveiled, and by the underlying concepts there. Not overly so, but just a little. I had been built up: I wanted to know! To know more, to understand better.
I want to give this 4.5 stars because I have read better books, certainly. But this was so fun, so well-crafted. 4 stars would be too low. So… 5 it is.
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The Sparrow
Finished
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The Magicians
Finished
I don’t have much to say about this other than that I really enjoyed it. At times Grossman’s style of writing and especially the way he discusses magic, its effects, and the various denizens of the magical world reminded me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is (in my eyes) a very positive comparison.
It was a lot of fun to read, but also… I’m not an expert on books or literature, but it wasn’t beach reading. It wasn’t a challenge to get through like so much esteemed “literature,” but it is all the same very well-written and thought-provoking. I’m pretty excited to pick up The Magician King.
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Mockingjay
Finished
I guess there are no real spoilers in this but it certainly could give one expectations so I’m marking this as having spoilers.
I was hesitant after the second book, which I enjoyed but which seemed to lean a bit heavily on the conventions of the first. Also, the second and the third books are far more dark and violent than the first. As I approached the ending of Mockingjay, I became more and more curious (not just as an invested reader, but as a creative person, someone who is interested in telling stories … wow, that all sounds silly) about how Collins was going to end the trilogy. With everything that had happened, it would take a lot to justify the whole thing.
She very, very much did it.
I’m very fascinated by this whole series being aimed at young adults, but I think there was a lot that happened in this series, a lot was said, and it ended exactly how it had to. With everything that had happened, it couldn’t be a happy ending, but it would be far too easy to end the series with a simple, tragic ending. I thought she might go for a meaningless end, by simply killing Katniss and maybe everybody else. Just because of all of the preceding events. It might have been interesting, and I was preparing myself for something like that. I was not prepared for what actually happened and I’m glad, because it was perfect and not obvious.
The way Collins wrapped up this series validated everything that happened in it without trivializing any of it, and it proved that she knew what she was doing. I love Harry Potter (and yes, I know they’re very different things), and I liked how Rowling ended that series but she left a lot of things that didn’t set quite right. This ending seemed to fit together perfectly, partially because it had little to tie up. There was some deus ex machina, some stuff that might have seemed contrived, if there weren’t precedent for it throughout the series. And all of this has elevated this series to one of my favorites of all time. We’ll see if I’m just coming down from the experience of the series, or if this opinion endures. But I loved it.
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Finished
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A Man Without a Country
Finished