Seasons of War, a review

Seasons of War by Derek Landy is the 13th book in the Skulduggery Pleasant series, and a reread for me along with the Dead Famous Readalong. If you want to see my original review, click here, if you just wanna see my reread thoughts then scroll on!

This read was what I like to call a helluva ride. We had SO much in here. We have different dimensions, Tanith joining up with the Dead Men, Val dealing with her PTSD in multiple awful ways and being forced into good ones, and Omen being adorkable as always.

I loved being in the alternate dimension through this book. It let Landy play with bringing back characters and playing out alternative events without screwing with the established timeline, as well as letting us see how the characters would react to things after they’ve had time to grow and develop compared to their younger selves earlier on in the series.

Our protagonist, Valkyrie Cain, has been through a lot by this point. She’s been battling monsters and getting in magical fights since she was 12 years old, and what I love about Landy is that he’s had this impact her. She’s not just brushed it off and gotten on with things. Or at least, that only lasts for the duration of the battle. After that? Well she has a normal reaction. Meaning severe trauma and PTSD. And she tries to deal with it on her own, that goes about as well as you’d expect. I love that Landy addresses this, he includes it in the narrative and has it impact how she reacts in other battles and situations, and that’s just so rarely seen from our badass characters.

I also really enjoyed the portrayal of Darquesse after the events of the last book (look this is damn difficult to do without spoilers by book 13). The day to day thoughts and concerns of those who worship her brought some much needed levity to the book and did a great job of breaking up the more serious scenes.

Omen, as always, was so lovely to read from. He started out so desperate to have adventures and ended up having the same reaction most of us probably would: dear god get me out of here. But at the same time he’s such an adorable bean that he doesn’t want to leave people in trouble. He also immediately thinks the best of people, and in relation to a certain someone (no really, unless you’ve read it I can’t say) I think he’s making a mistake. But I guess we’ll see.

On CAWPILE I rated this reread: Characters: 10, Atmosphere: 8, Writing: 8, Plot: 8, Intrigue: 7, Logic: 7, and Enjoyment: 9 which gives an overall score of 8.14 and a 4.5* rating.

I’m super excited to delve into my reread of the penultimate Skulduggery novel and I’m so excited and nervous for the final book! Ironically this is actually publishing on the day of the last books release (Until the End, out 14th April 2022) and I most likely have been reading that book all day! Even when I maybe should’ve been at work! Have you been keeping up to date with the series? Let me know your thoughts!

Highlight here for trigger warnings: death, war, murder, violence, grief, PTSD[end].

February Reading Wrap Up

I’ve been having such a productive time with reading so far this year! I’ve read 14 books this month, including everything that I set out to read on my tbr. Which is just bizarre to me but I’m not complaining at all!

First up I read Binti via audiobook, starting and finishing it on the 1st of Feb. My audio files were corrupted and so played in the wrong order, meaning I lost a bit of the flow of the book. But despite this I still enjoyed it, and I think that says a lot for this novella!

The Princess Bride is another audiobook I read this month, and again I read this one all in one day on the 1st of Feb. I watched the film at the tail end of 2021 and decided to try out the book too. The film is a really faithful adaptation and both are so much fun!

Brown Girl Dreaming was my first read for the Missy Elliott Readathon hosted by KaShay from Shay with the Hobbies. I read this one all in one day too (look it was a good time at work for listening to an audiobook while getting on with shit) and found it super interesting.

Then I beta read a book for the lovely Pablo Suarez which is currently titled The Broken Oath and I loved it! It’s a fantastic fantasy short novel/novella which has been desperate for more books in this world. So excited for when more of you get to read this!

The Ivory Key was a cheeky second book that Illumicrate included in January’s box, and I wanted to read it straight away. This is a fantastic YA fantasy with Indian culture throughout. I highly recommend it and I’m so glad that I had something to motivate me to pick this up!

Then I read a book by our lovely Hannah O’Donnell at LadetteM, Fatlip, which was such an easy read and an enjoyable one too. I think more people need to pick this one up.

My MIL (mother in law) loaned me Piranesi in January and I wanted to read it this month to give back to her. This book was amazing. It’s so weird and confusing and engrossing and I simultaneously want more from this world and don’t want anyone to touch it in case they ruin it!

Finally I struggled my way through Double Cross, and that’s not to say this is a bad book. Just that I was struggling with it. This whole series (Noughts and Crosses) is a really rough one and I’ve not been in the mindset for it for a while. But it counted for quite a few of my Missy Elliott Readathon prompts and I did want to finally finish up my reread of the series. I still recommend this series, but I’m glad that book is finally done.

My Sister the Serial Killer is one I listened to. I started listening to it at “normal” speed but found myself utterly bored. So I sped it up. Thank god I did that or I would’ve DNFd it! This was a really fun book, although I think it focused a lot more on the inter-familial relationships than on the murder side of things.

My monthly reread of a Skulduggery book was Seasons of War this time, again with Bekka from Comic Book Sanctum. These more recent books I’ve only read once before so it was so interesting to reread this and get the reveals once again! So excited for Until the End.

With the aforementioned Hannah, we read Black Water Sister and (as Olivia predicted) I loved it! It totally wasn’t what I expected, but I loved the cultural influences of both Eastern and Western ideals as well as our protagonists character development. This one was in my mind every single day.

This Is How You Lose The Time War was one I was unsure about, as I’m not a big romance fan. But this incredibly slow burn combined with Sci-Fi/fantasy elements is right up my street. The prose is stunning and I found myself savouring this small book slowly. Utterly beautiful.

I like to read the Illumicrate book with the Discord group, and this month was no different. It was really interesting to see everyone’s reactions to This Woven Kingdom this time around because hoooooo boy. What was this book? I won’t lie, I enjoyed reading it and at points was reading past the daily allocated chapters because I wanted to know more. But at the same time there was no character development, ridiculous dodging around why or how events were achieved, and whilst there were some really interesting plot points they were mostly mentioned once and then never again. While other, more ridiculous, plot points were focused on. If you couldn’t tell I have a lot of thoughts about this one. It’s my lowest rated book of the month (2.5/5) and yet I’m still debating whether I’m going to carry on with the series or not. What is has told me is that I won’t be reading anything more from Mafi.

I FINALLY FINISHED Fall of Giants by Ken Follett AND I’M SO HAPPY!!! I know that I put finishing this on my March tbr but I actually sped through it last night (28th Feb) and finished it up! I have plenty of issues with this book, and the vast majority of them lay in how women are written and the ridiculous male gaze we’re forced to endure. But despite that it was interesting to read from a personal viewpoint. It was also interesting for me to read about WWI as I focused on WWII during my mandatory “obsessed with something in history” years.

And last but of course not least we have The Bridesmaid’s Survival Guide once again by our wonderful LadetteM. And again this is one I blasted through last night! I’ll say straight up that contemporary is not my usual genre, without some other factor motivating me I don’t pick the genre up. But this was so enjoyable. I found myself not wanting to put the book down and I could relate to so many of the characters. The love interest is god damn perfection and I found myself smiling and laughing through this. Another one that I hope finds a lot more readers!

And that’s it! She says after read 15 books 🙄 what a month! I started the month with 118 unread books on my tbr and I’m ending with 120. So apparently I need to unhaul 2 books. Wish me luck with that, it’s only the second month and already balancing the books has gotten tough! If you want to see more about the balancing action going on then keep an eye out on my BookTube channel for the video going up!

Seasons of War – a review

I’m gunna be blunt, this will be a short review. This is book THIRTEEN in the series and with the fact that I don’t want to do a spoiler filled review? Well there isn’t that much that can be said.

I will say, I really enjoy this. It was a lot of fun, I flew through it as expected and if you’ve read any of the other books in this surprisingly dark for a middle grade series then you know exactly what you’re getting into. Or more accurately, you know you’ve got no real clue.

In this book we encounter another dimension (again) and Landy utilises characters with glee that’ve been blocked off from him for years. There were a few moments where I was confused, one of which I gave up and tweeted Landy about because the cogs in my tiny brain just were not aligning, but despite this wee confusion I was still engrossed and really enjoying the book. There was so many new concepts delved into here, and some old ones brought back too.

A couple of points were shaky, I wasn’t so keen on the treatment of one longstanding character, and for one of our series-long villains… what on earth are they doing? Why Landy? That’s so odd! (I’m aware this is cryptic, this is why I said it’d be a short review. What on earth am I supposed to say??) but overall I still really enjoyed the book and I’m very excited to get to book 14! By the time you’ve read this I should hopefully have my grubby hands on the latest release, as my pre-order has been delayed by Waterstones due to manufacturing errors, and I might have even read it! You’ll just have to keep an eye out on my blog for the next ridiculously useless review of book 14!