Nelson Mandela once said that it always seems impossible until it’s done. This book is a fairy tale about an impossible adventure in which princess Marra seeks to help her sister. The sister is stuck into a forced marriage with a king who is torturing her. He is protected by an immortal and almighty fairy godmother and other less visible forces, like an army, and is untouchable. Marra will start a decades long journey where he’ll find support by people and entities with magical powers. Will they succeed on time? After all, a recurring theme in the book is that you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.
If I were to compare it to other books, Nettle & Bone is reminiscent of Uprooted by Naomi Novik and the first Witcher novel.
Nettle & Bone is an excellent little fantasy with a simple idea and a complex magical system based on millenias of superstition and fairytales. It’s written in a young adult style but covers adult themes like domestic violence. Not sure how to classify it. Fantasy, I guess.
Defiant is the final book 4 from the Skyward series. The series has other works, written in cooperation with Janci Patterson, that can continue indefinitely but Defiant ends the whole thing. It’s reasonably translated as “Towards The End” in Bulgarian.
Skyward is about Spensa Nightshade, a teenage girl who wants to become a fighter pilot on a world that suffers a constant attack by alien drones. She has some special skills that develop over time, and she becomes one of the best pilots humans have ever seen. Her growth makes the first 3 books very interesting, although she gets nerfed from time when she faces new and more skillful opponents. I rated the first 3 parts with clear 5/5s and they were very enjoyable.
Book 4 is an exception and doesn’t get the full score.
You get all the wonderful world building, which is signature by Brandon Sanderson, his great storytelling and then you glue it with super-heroism and random nerfs to get this beautiful hardwood hardcover book spoiled. Spensa, who started the series as an underdog with a dream, is now comparable to strength to the Infinity Gauntlet Thanos. She practices instant no-energy teleportation and instant telekinesis of objects with unrestricted mass, can read minds, project herself elsewhere, and is likely immortal through respawning like a demon from Julie Kagawa’s Shadow of the Fox series. There are objectively no reasons for the book to last longer than 5 pages – Spensa can teleport the heads of her enemies 50 centimeters to the right and it would just end without her leaving her room. As if that was not enough, she’s in constant contact with two immortal, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient AIs.
What are all those overpowered characters fighting for in 460 pages? Their enemies deserve the highest honors for lasting that long by using trickery and deception. The TL;DR is that they fight with boxes.
I think the Skyward world is exhausted and do not expect a continuation but Brandon Sanderson is a genius and can come up with a problem difficult enough for his demigod characters to resolve.
I gave this book 5*/5 on Goodreads but it’s probably closer to 3.5*/5 due to the lack of balance in the force.
2024 was the first year in which I managed to go over 100 books. This was a major achievement for me and a result of several circumstances:
I reengaged with the gamebook community, which is full of voracious readers (and writers)
I discovered the Thraxas and Stephanie Plum series that are super interesting and each book is short, single-thread, bubblegum-ish
A few of my friends were inspired to read a lot this year so I was not alone on this journey
I ignored several of the latest books by Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie, Zachary Pike, J.K. Rowling, Liu Cixin just because they were too long. Maybe I go back to these works in 2025. Or 2035. Not soon. Ignoring enormous books by otherwise great authors seems to be a good strategy. TL;DR.
Here are the best finds from reading 111 books and 36217 pages:
Best Series
Thraxas by Martin Scott – a Pratchett-style comic fantasy series, which I completed entirely in 2024. There are some hints of exploitation in the first 2-3 books.
The jade city is a place where a small group of people can use the local high-grade Jade to obtain superpowers. Most people, including the foreigners, cannot use jade without losing their minds or can’t sense it at all. The power makes them greedy and hungry for more.
Two jade-controlling gangs are about to clash and break the long-lasting peaceful rivalry in the city. We’ll see the development of the conflict from the point of view of various participants – the old generation, the new generation, the power hungry, and the one who succumb to the greed.
Jade City, like many other POV books, introduces lots of context switching and is a slow read. My copy traveled to Blagoevgrad, Kyoto, and Lisbon until I finally completed it. It’s hard to say if all POVs served a purpose. I think most did.
4.5*/5 – I liked it but it took effort to complete.
Viv is a powerful orc who wants to be a mercenary but somehow ends up in the bookstore business.
Legends & Lattes showed us Viv at the end of her career, tired of killing, and really motivated to run her own business. Bookshops & Bonedust shows us Viv at the beginning of her career, as motivated to run her own business as the other Viv. Why did she ever become a mercenary? That’s unclear. She can do it in book 0.1, there’s no point to pursue a career of head cutting somewhere between book 0.1 and book 1. Her motivation is unclear and her path is circular. We’ve now seen the beginning at the end, and they are the same point.
Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree is a bubblegum, the easiest type of books to read. I struggled to reach the end but I appreciate the sweetness of the story, so for the purpose of this blog, it gets the middle score – 4/5.
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