Dead or Alive, a review

The most recent Skulduggery Pleasant novel!!

If you follow my reviews you might be wondering why I’ve jumped from book 3 to book 14 in this series. So I’m one of the co-hosts for the Dead Famous Readalong where we’re reading the full Skulduggery Pleasant series, one book at a time. But I wasn’t going to not read this just because I’m rereading the beginning of the series!!!

I post my reviews in chronological order of when I read the books (unless it’s an ARC with a time limit) and so here we are. Dead or Alive. Book fourteen in the series.

This is so. So. So different to the early books! Of course I knew that logically but seeing it side by side with the early books put it into stark contrast!

This book is even darker than the ones that came before and has so much character development within it. Val herself? Wow. So much. And so much about so many side characters that I don’t want to mention because they might not even have been introduced depending on where you are in the series! This really goes down a certain route and leaves us on a cliffhanger that’s painful and I NEED the next book now thank you Landy.

There are so many plot points and strings all converging together by this point, and yet Landy is handling them deftly. Interweaving them to create a rich tapestry of utter chaos and I fucking love it.

I can’t even begin to explain how complicated this is becoming. Party because of spoilers and partly because I just don’t want to. That is too much effort. But Landy has managed these plot developments and twists and turns so well that it feels natural to read. You already know all of the information, you have all the puzzle pieces, Landy is just slotting them into place.

I’m so so excited for the final book in this series. I do hope we get some sort of happy ending. It’s Skulduggery so of course it’s not going to be sunshine, rainbows, and kittens. But I hope there is some vague semblance of peace. Both for the reader and the characters. But unfortunately, that’s not up to me.

For my CAWPILE ratings I gave this book:

Characters: 10

Atmosphere: 8

Writing: 8

Plot: 8

Intrigue: 9

Logic: 8

Enjoyment: 9

Which gives us an 8.57 and a pretty high 4 star rating!!

Highlight here for trigger warnings: violence, death, guns, mental illness, police brutality, xenophobia

I’m both so so excited and so sad that this series is coming to an end! Here’s hoping it’s a good one!!

A sequel that lives up to the hype of book 1

This is the second book in the amazing The Bone Season series, if you want to read my review of the first book check it out here! It took me around a year to get to this book, and if I’m being honest I was worried that it wasn’t going to be as amazing as the first. I had nothing to worry about! I started this book close to when I was traveling back down south on a long train journey after Christmas/Winter break and ended up having this as my train read, it’s around 500 pages long and I read this relatively slowly for me with many breaks etc. meaning that I finished it lying in bed after a long day. I gave this book 5*, I loved it, it messed with my head in the best way!

Now for bits that will SPOIL The Bone Season if you haven’t read it yet, so go pick it up from your library or buy it or borrow it from a really cool friend, read it and then come back and read the rest of my review! (NO spoilers for The Mime Order ahead, just book #1)

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We start the book following Paige after her escape from Sheol 1, as she returns to Jaxon and seems to be going back to the life she had in London pre-prison camp. But now Paige isn’t oblivious, now she knows, and she sees Rephaim crawling out from the shadows and into the city. She needs to save them all whilst they’re still in denial, and whilst on the run as a fugitive.

This book is insane, with so many twists and turns and different maneuvers, the ending, which I won’t spoil, screwed with my head and was written absolutely amazingly. I loved it so much! I wish that I had The Song Rising here with me at uni so I could get into the rest of the story already!! Samantha Shannon’s writing is gorgeous and encapsulating for the emotions you experience from the events she subjects you to. I sincerely recommend you read from her if you have not already.

Let me know if you’ve read this book, or The Song Rising, and tell me what you thought of it!