Ooh, year end review? I'm game!

Thunderhead and The Toll by Neal Shusterman's (the Scythe series)

I'd read book 1 in December 2021 and wrapped up the last two in the new year. The ideas and worldbuilding in it kept me going but I was ready to be done. It played with a lot of very fun concepts, but ultimately most of the characters and plot threads were quite stale and went nowhere. The end of the 2nd book set up some crazy opportunities for storytelling but the 3rd book went nowhere. All of the drama hinged on everyone in the room being ignorant, gullible, complacent morons. I got sick of reading the villain's "evil genius" plans being praised as a credible threat when there were 5 ignored solutions to every dire situation.

Points for an attempt at nonbinary inclusion in the 3rd book, but the execution was clunky and I felt like the character didn't get to shine much (though nobody really got to shine in that trainwreck of a 3rd book)

Sounds like it's being optioned for a movie series. I'm honestly excited - it's fertile ground for adaptation, though I hope they don't try to target YA audiences with it since the main theme of the book (murder, i.e. deliberately killing people to death) would have to be at least somewhat censored and would take away from the impact it has in the books.

Once Upon a Crime by Dawn Stewardson
I lost my group's fantasy league and had to read a Harlequin romance/crime thriller. It was the most mediocre book I've ever read. It wasn't even entertainingly bad or naughty or anything - just totally mediocre. A lot of emotional weight was wrung out of "will she still love me after I've spent all those long years in jail for a crime I didn't commit?" and then they get together on day 2 out of prison. Whatever, sure.

Avatar: Rise of Kyoshi and Avatar: Shadow of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee
Very fun! If you liked Avatar and Korra, these are worth a read. They do a great job of building on the world of Avatar without wallowing in it, and telling their own unique story. Kyoshi is a very compelling character. I was worried that the bending and the combat wouldn't translate to prose, but I honestly think it's even more evocative here than in the graphic novels (The Promise, The Search, etc). The storytelling is a little formulaic and the 2nd one took awhile to get going, but overall I still recommend these to any Avatar fan. They're quick, fun reads.

The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir
I've made my love for this series quite plain on here and I stand by it. I struggled with the first 1/3 of Gideon the Ninth but once I got into it, I was in love with the series. It's one of those stories that I really can't compare to anything else, and I think everyone should at least give it a try. It has the tagline "lesbian necromancers in space" but that's really just a blurb for the cover (the author didn't write that line and doesn't think of it that way).

A lot of complex themes and character arcs, a lot of depth I didn't expect from what sounds like a very pulpy premise. I truly do recommend this series to everyone - but you'll definitely know by the end of the 1st book if it's worth continuing for you.

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
A friend recommended this one after we had a conversation about fantasy magic systems and worldbuilding. I found it worth reading, I'm still thinking about it and will probably read the second one. However, I did basically text the friend every week or so with commentary, and very little of it was positive. The storytelling doesn't really grab me and the themes are very shallow, but Sanderson seemingly compensated for this by repeating them over and over and over. I can't count the number of times Vin thought about her brother and how he'd betrayed her, or the number of times she recalled that she used to not wear dresses, but now she does (gasp!). Felt very repetitive and like I was just waiting for things to happen.

The oppression of the skaa was also too far into the "misery porn" realm for me. I recognize that truly horrendous and sadistic people exist even in the real world, but the story's fixation on that cruelty sucked me right out - at one point, I was questioning how it would be physically possible to enact this cruelty without society grinding to a halt - at a certain point, the nobility is expending all their effort just to torture the skaa with seemingly no advantage. If there's a bigger picture here or a secret to be revealed in later books, then I'm not impressed with how long it's taking to show up.

Also also, I listened to it on audiobook and the actor pronounces it as "ska", identical to the music genre, so I just couldn't ever take the situation 100% seriously. You wrote this in 2006, Sanderson, you're telling me you weren't aware of the similarity?

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Still reading this first book of the series, am very close to the end. Le Guin's prose is maybe my favorite in the world. It took me a while to shift my brain back into "High Fantasy" language, but I am entranced by this story and by the language it uses. Le Guin was a genius. She deserved every accolade she won, and many that she was passed over for.