Red Queen, Victoria Aveyard

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard 

This is the third time that I have the first novel of the series. I read it for the first time a couple of weeks after it came out and I completely fell in love with it, I was charmed by the different abilities of the characters and by the simple, yet different welcoming that the author offered us from the very beginning. The relationship that I have with this book made me go above and beyond that, I completely fell in love with the way the three main characters worked and progressed throughout the novel. A year afterward, Glass Sword came out and I read the first book once again before reading the new installment and once again I was completely lost in this dystopian, yet fantastical world. So, two years forward, I have decided that since the series ended, it was time for me to take the time once again and re-enter the world that became so dear to me. Now that I read it years later, I did notice different aspects of it that have made me simply enjoy more the story. 
Red Queen happens in a country that we come to know as Nortia, its society is divided in two: Silvers and Reds, these being the color of the people´s blood. Yet, Silvers have different abilities, some families are able to control fire, enter people´s minds or even control metal. Our main character, Mare, is a Red and as a consequence, her family is extremely poor, which is the common life for Reds. All of Mare´s brothers have been sent to war as a consequence of them not being able to find a job and Mare is sure that her fate is the same since she wasn´t able to get a job and cooperates to her household by stealing from other people, specially Silvers. By her desperate attempt to save not only herself but her best friend, she makes the choice to connect with people that are working in the underground market and she soon realizes that there is a whole new world out there that is trying to make a change for the society. Yet, Mare moves on with her life and her life completely changes when she meets a young man that she was about to steal from. After somehow getting a job at the palace, Mare´s life changes when she realizes that she is completely different from what she was thinking. She has the complete power to control lighting.
First, I want to talk about Aveyard´s incredible way of narrating and writing a novel. The first thing that has caught my attention every single time that I have read this novel is the intricate way in which she describes and exhibits, not only Nortia but the society that they live in. She is able to take this complex bubble, which holds a whole world, and presents it in a way that every single detail seems fascinating, and I truly believe that it has nothing to do with the story being super creative, which it is, but it has to do completely with the fact that her writing is just so incredible because the words that she uses makes it seem as if it was real. 
Also, I loved the perfect mix she was able to get between romance and action, meaning that it wasn´t just too full of action or dramatic scenes like most dystopian novels do, but it had several romantic scenes that made me swoon over the two princes that I absolutely love at the moment. Something that I want to point out is that since she was able to reach a balance between the different type of scenes, we did get only a few scenes for each prince, but those were just so memorable and showcased them greatly that I believe that any more scenes would have been too much. Also, Aveyard did a great job giving the stepbrothers a distinction because every word and movement that was narrated matched the character, which I thought would be very hard to achieve in a novel that is so complex as this one.
Red Queen is pretty fast paced and I really enjoyed that because I don´t like following the same problem over and over again, so Aveyard was always able to keep my mind going and wandering around the different problems and important scenes that were happening throughout the novel. 
I think the only thing that I felt a little disappointed with was that it followed the typical dystopian pattern. In the sense that it first introduced everything and then, problems and more problems happened and several of them were pretty easy to predict beforehand and the surprise factor was not always present, but I do understand that dystopian novels are harder to write and therefore, the similar pattern is usually the easiest way to get the novel done. 
On the other hand, I want to discuss the characters. I am not going to talk a lot about them since I preferred to discover different aspects of their personalities as the story went on since they all have only small scenes throughout the novel that truly make them shine. But I would like to mention that I absolutely adored the different powers that each house had and the way those powers changed their personalities and the way they acted regarding their surroundings. 
I think I didn´t hate Mare, I just disliked her because she is like other dystopian female leads. She acts without thinking about things and later blaming herself and she is too headstrong, which causes her to get into trouble and get emotionally hurt. Yet, I highly enjoyed her personal comments because they were usually funny and it felt nice to be able to laugh after going through so much with the characters and the atmosphere.
Lastly, I want to mention how I found it so detailed the ways that the characters were planned because every single detail about each one of them was so intricate that it truly enhanced the reading experience for me. 
Overall, Red Queen is a super creative, fun and swoony first installment to a series that will take you to another world, which you will find fascinating and inspiring after following characters that are sometimes heartwarming and other times heartwrenching, all while delivering to give you laughs and tears. 

4 1/2 out of 5 Stars 

Love, Sua

Paradox Bound, Peter Clines

Paradox Bound by Peter Clines 

Time-traveling through history and future. Doesn´t it sound exciting? I discovered this novel by searching for a book to request through Blogging For Books and the best thing about actually discovering it was that it isn´t the type of novel that I would pick for myself, I mean, it does sound super exciting and adventurous, but it just doesn´t seem like the type of novel that I like, which are usually romantic novels or contemporaries that make me laugh, or even some women fiction titles. I am going to admit that Paradox Bound surprised me in a very positive manner. The novel kept me intrigued and eager to know what happened next, although I didn´t absolutely love it, I fairly enjoyed. 
Peter Clines tells the story of Eli, who lives in Sanders, a small city in Maine, and encounters a strange woman and an old car in his neighborhood, which seems weird since there aren´t many visitors in his town. A couple of years pass and Eli keeps encountering the same mysterious woman, who always seems to look exactly the same and travels in the same vehicle throughout all those years! But he decided to change that one night when he encountered her while on the road with some of his old friends. Eli is the same awkward kid on the inside, except he is now an adult and actually has a job and when he encounters Harry, the strange woman that he keeps noticing throughout his life, Eli decides to approach her once again and after that, there is no turning back, he has invited himself in a journey that will change his life forever. 
After Eli approached Harry, a faceless man appears at his work the next day and he is wanting answers about Harry, that´s when he decides to go all the way to Boston to save her and tell her that men are looking for her. Once he finds her after a long chase from the faceless men, they are on the road finding the country´s dream, which gives the power to control the country and change it in any way they want to the person holding it.
When Harry realizes that she has no other option than to have Eli with her, she decides that it may not be that awful to have a companion, and soon before they can realize it, they are traveling through time and through the country in search of the most precious possession of any traveler: the dream. 
First of all, I want to apologize for the short summary, but the truth is that there are just too many things that make this exciting story that there isn´t  a specific point where I know what is too much to mention in a review, that´s why I have decided to keep it short to actually give the readers more freedom to understand and take in everything that happens in the novel. 
I want to talk about the characters first. 
I really liked Eli as the main character because he is different, he is not the perfect professional character that everyone expects to find in this type of stories, he is actually pretty normal and has a story that people could identify with. My favorite part of him was that it was shown how he was afraid of staying behind, but at the same time afraid of jumping to a lifestyle in the unknown, but at the same time, he always acted so passionately for the things he cared about and he was fearless when he needed to be. I think that I really enjoyed Eli´s character and this is something that has happened to me for the first time with these type of novels because I believe that novels that contain a lot of action and lot of things to narrate tend to forget a lot of how a character may change throughout the novel, yet I believe that Clines did an excellent job with Eli. 
On the other hand, I really liked Harry because she was fearless and although she was cold at times, there is something inside her that seemed so familiar and so soft and warm. Yet she has seen so many bad things that instead of breaking her made her become fearless and create a barrier for herself against everyone else. 
In addition, there are a lot of other characters throughout the novel with different traits and different things that change the story, but there are too many that it seems hard to talk about them all and actually review them.
Although I really enjoyed the many characters that were part of the story, I expected some more character development from every character and I know that it is very hard to do with characters that only appear once or twice in the novel, but I did come across with the realization that maybe the story was too focused on introducing the complicated story to the readers that it left very little opportunity for the characters to grow.
Moving on to the story itself, I found it a little bit confusing from time to time because there were too many things to understand at the same time in the story because the story is very broad and there is a lot to cover in a single novel, which at the same time was very interesting because it really felt like entering a new world. 
However, I did like how the author made everything in the story work and how he planned the novel throughout the pages and how we are given certain scenes and how everything is lined up because those are the things that make this story so unique and creative. 
On the other hand, I really enjoyed having several parts of the story told, for example, we got stories narrated in third person point of view but concentrated in a certain character, like Eli, Harry or Zeke. I think that by having these, readers got the chance to read about all the things that other characters were explaining in other chapters. 
Also, the plot is so creative and entertaining that it will be hard to put the book down, although it is a very heavy reading. 
Overall, Paradox Bound by Peter Clines is a fun and creative novel that narrates a story about time traveling while trying to save the world and all while overcoming personal fears and problems. The novel is similar to the many adventures that Dan Brown writes by including elements of adventure, culture and a new understanding, all of these under the pressure of saving people and staying alive. 
Paradox Bound will keep you reading until the very end. 
In addition, I would like to thank Blogging For Books and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to review this amazing novel. 

4 out of 5 stars 

Love, Sua