I found Alexander Gordon Smith’s The Fury to be more exhaustingly long than fun, but his Escape from Furnace series is one of my most favourite ever. In fact, my ratings of the first two books have jumped from a 3 and a 2 to a 4 and a 3, respectively. So I was excited and hesitant at the same time to start this book. In fact, I was more hesitant, because Smith is an awesome guy! When I made an audition video two years ago if his Escape from Furnace series was ever made into a movie, he made such a sweet response, so I want to remain loyal to him if I can. Thankfully, I don’t need to preach. His newest series starts off very nicely.
 
Hellraisers: The Devil’s Engine is a two-person book about a juvenile named Marlow Green who likes to scratch rocket ships on fancy schmancy cars, and Pan, short for Pandora, a girl with a ticking clock both on her wrist; she doesn’t have much left, and in her fists; she’s a no-nonsense Navy Seal kind of girl. It’s mainly about Marlow, though, who everyone calls, even he calls himself, a coward, who always runs away when the going gets bloody. And he has asthma, making him have to cover himself up from others when he needs a breather, which immediately makes him at least a little sympathetic because he has a special weakness, something we feel each of us has (not exactly Marlow's, just a weakness we might have that sets us apart). After a day of some particularly gigantic trouble, a truck pretty much melds into a monster of steel and oil and glob with its logo as one eye, and all of a sudden, he's recruited by the Hellraisers to walk a tight rope with the devil himself, or the devil's engine.
 
I remember Smith mentioned in the Q&A of his masterpiece Lockdown that he feigned asthma attacks at gym class in school, so maybe he has asthma too. He probably does. No wonder he’s able to make us feel like the air is thin or Marlow is suffocating. 
 
I also like how this time, Smith seems to have not followed this rule he sets for himself. He feels that people die and that not letting them die is cheating. I half agree with him, and even though there’s a scene that kind of reeks of early demise before anything really good, thankfully Smith doesn’t throw away his characters like single-usage shaving razors, which is what would probably happen if a story as deadly as this came into the universe.
 
The best moments of this book are when Marlow is on display, trying to balance a friendship with his BFF Charlie Alvarez, who must’ve grown really attached to him quickly if he became the friend he is to Marlow in his umpteenth school, or when Marlow’s trying to make things up to his mom. There’s a conflict Marlow faces about whether or not he should let Charlie be with a troublemaker like him and it really rockets most of the experience. I also won't spoil something Marlow "learns" how to do in this book, but the result brought one of the most fun and relatable experiences of the early year that reminded me of all the fun I had when I first read "Michael Vey" and "The Rig", two books I read way back when I was fifteen and starting up my book reviewing path. I also even found his idea of the supernatural realistic enough to imagine myself alongside Marlow as he was, well, my parents would say "causing trouble".
 
Something I had a mixed reaction to is the action pretty much begins on Page 1, and I mean the end of the world. I'm not the biggest fan of books that start too many things off at once before we can read the buildup, but sometimes that comes in handy. For this case, we get to see right when Marlow and Pan are close to meeting up. I sometimes felt like Pan had a separate story we should've had more of a chance for us to hear about, and this book is not as terrifying or even as cute as Lockdown was. But it's hard for me to rant on a book like this when I'm in a way loyal to Mr. Smith. We've messaged on Facebook, and he's an incredible, inspirational author. Which may seem like my review is biased, but my note to people who feel like they'll hurt an author's feelings: Don't write a review. It's always easier to say something brutal about a book when you have no connection to that author. But thankfully, Hellraisers is good enough for me to not have to go up on that inner conflict.

Hellraisers is a thrill show that brings out monsters attributable to the most grotesque of them all and yet still has quite the funny bone, which sometimes comes out as a weird combination, but the result is a hell-of-a-fun weird, and the cliffhanger surprisingly sent me a shiver.

One Man Guy by Michael Barakiva was the ultimate LGBT book for me. It was irresistibly cute, believable, satirized without completely bashing folks completely devoted to religion, gave an inner conflict about whether skipping school was right (considering the protagonist's parents put him in summer school to begin with) and actually kind of angry. I wasn't expecting this book to be as good, but I was sure after everyone said it was cute as well that I would also like it. Welp, both are right, but saying it's not as good as OMG would be a cynical way to look at this terrific book.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda is about two lives Simon is living. One is with a boy he met on the internet who refers to himself as "Blue", from a website where people can have secret identities and reveal stuff about them. Simon goes by "Jacques". And for a while now, they've been chatting together in their pseudonyms, and is the only place where both boys can admit they're gay. The other life is one where a guy named Martin finds out about Simon's gay talk with Blue when he forgets to log out of the school computer and takes screenshots of one of the emails as blackmail. Why is so that Simon can put him up with his best friend Abby. But Simon's friends are their own risk all the same. There's basically a quartet of best friends in Simon's life, with whom he hasn't revealed his secret to yet. In it, there's Abby, Nick, and Leah. Nick and Abby are dating, but there's a very jealous Leah in the mix and this conflict is threatening all of them.

Now, this is spoilers for the first 20 pages, but this book takes place in the middle of pretty much all of Simon and Blue's friendship. I knew going in this was going to be a book with email messaging but what I expected was for them to meet at the beginning but this more or less begins with Martin's blackmail. I also didn't really find the nickname Simon gives him as a result really that funny, and there were occasional times where I wished the book acknowledged anyone straight can fall in love with someone of the same gender and vice versa. Just something I'm looking for in a book lately. But, you know what? Screw it. As I said, this book is terrific. And sweet-toothed for Oreos. Mmmm. I personally find they're delicious yet sometimes have not enough of the creamy inside and sometimes stick to my teeth. I still eat them and love them. 

I just can't get over how relatable this book is. There are the fears of coming out, of course, but there's also the heartbreak of potentially ending a long-lasting friendship, and a character is embarrassed from rejection when asked for a date...Yeah, when that happens, you feel like you were hit by a car in the heart for a while, don't you? These high-schoolers get angry, shy, surprised, supportive, sad, you name it, it's in there.

There's also a part where some people find out about Simon's interest in boys, and the reaction was spot-on. Some people make fun of him; one guy pretend-kisses him to mock him. Simon blushed and I blushed with him, as upset as he was. At the same time, he has more supporters than mockers. In fact, there are two girls he doesn't really know that come up and hug him and exchange numbers with him. Aaawww. 

I was skeptical about the amount of emails in this book because I'd recently read a book called Ten Things I Hate About Me, where the email messages were not horrid but too repetitive, adding a secret friend but not having as much of a punch. The emails here are much better, primarily because they test boundaries and might make some people jealous of Simon and Blue. 

I won't spoil how this book ends, but I just adore it. It couldn't have gone better. It proves how powering friendship and real friendship can be, it's cuter than it has any right to be, and there's an apology hidden in there that made me grab my heart waiting for it to stop pumping.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda is a book where you laugh at it and enjoy it as you read it, and then allows you to cuddle up with it after when you look back at it. 

When I began this book, I wasn’t sure what to make of a sequel to one of my favourite books of last year being 150 pages shorter. Well, the result is a book that doesn’t destroy the franchise but doesn’t help it either, and it doesn’t really have to do with the length.
 
So, in the last book, Dorothy Must Die, the other girl from Kansas, pink-haired Amy Gumm, was as close as monkeys are to humans to slaying Dorothy Gale, the princess of Oz that turned corrupt. However, now Dorothy has gone missing and Oz is in ruins, but Amy now knows the keys to killing her; remove the tin woodman’s heart, steal the scarecrow’s brain, and take the lion’s courage. And one of those is complete, but now Amy is not sure who to trust; the flying monkeys who rescued her and are now flying her away, or the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked, who gave Amy the job in the first place.
 
The worst part of this book happens kind of overly early. Like the first instalment, there is a main character death that was so passed off I half expected that character to return like in The Huntsman: Winter’s War. Too bad. It’s a shame, because it took me out of a big portion of the otherwise well done sequel to Dorothy Must Die. There’s also the fact that when Amy talks about how she wished she had some company, she includes the name of a long gone character, once again giving us a vibe that person will return, but somehow I doubt it at this point. And one thing I was disappointed in is this character that was in the first book and she isn't mentioned though she seemed very important, not just to the plot but to Amy. 
 
This still has the adventure feel of Dorothy Must Die, however, and I never really knew what would happen next. Once again, clever and mystical surroundings engulf us in the magical world of Oz, from a slime that Amy actually calls the best thing she’s ever tasted, jumping onto a rainbow, which sounds like a ripoff but isn’t, and there are still some chances that Danielle Paige takes us to insure us that the best is yet to come. I also loved the Land of Lost Things. (Just imagine if Star was there, too. I'm not sure if it would work that way, but it should've.) I imagined myself going there, and Danielle Paige has some good tricks up her typing fingers to make us unsure what's under there. And there's a small side story involving Glinda with a scene involving Amy and Dorothy side by side, not working together but sitting apart from each other. That was chilling. And I'm still going to finish this series. I sort of promised myself that the minute I bought the first book.

And the ending’s quite nice, and a little bit weird. So many things happen at once I think I’ll have to reread the ending before I move on to Yellow Brick War. Just, for most of its long second act, The Wicked Will Rise is a filler episode in the Dorothy Must Die series with an out-of-place title.

I had put this book off for quite a while, because I was in a debate with myself. Primarily, if I should finish the Grisha trilogy before this book. That mainly comes from the fact I hated Siege and Storm and all of a sudden wasn't sure if Leigh Bardugo could write a long book that would keep my interest. Well, I've finally decided to give it a shot, and here's my long awaited review.

"Six Dangerous Outcasts. One Impossible Heist". That's the slogan at the start of this book and it's pretty accurate. First off, there's a thief named Kaz Brekker who is pretty much the most relentless and obnoxious protagonist since Enoch from Miss Peregrine. He then gets a small abduction from a businessman named Jan Van Yeck who informs him about a scientist named Bo Yul-Bayur who supposedly knows the formula for a drug called "jurda parem", which enhances the powers of Grisha ten-fold but also causes an addiction and craving almost impossible to get out of. And in case you didn't know, in this world, the Grisha, aka the magicians, and the Fjerdans, are pretty much mortal enemies. If Yul-Bayur is still alive, they're not sure, but the Ice Court is a place where the Fjerdans keep all their treasures, important documents, and most dangerous prisoners, but the reward is enough for Kaz to get a life that very few get to experience. To pull off this heist, though, he recruits five others. That's why it's called "Six" of Crows. And together, they are going to have to put aside their differences and make the heist of the Grisha universe!

As for the experience, just think of "Shadow and Bone" meets "This is Where it Ends" and that's the sort of book Six of Crows ends up being like. But let me say this isn't a book I think reluctant readers will immediately bite their teeth into and chew willingly. The first forty pages were kind of a pain to get through, because in the first chapter there's an unnecessarily giant handful of characters and then another amount in Chapter 2, and I was worried each character would be filled with a world of their own and have too many names to remember. And not only that, but Leigh Bardugo did something at the start I'm really not a fan of, and that's introduce all these characters and have conversations around them as if we know everything about them, and it's a little too much to process. I prefer when books show off characters one by one as the adventure goes along, so it flows better and each character gets a moment in the spotlight by themselves. So my initial reaction was bad. Then it picked up decently. 

Minor spoilers here: this book may be about a heist, but it's also about the six characters. By the 100th page, the amount of important characters are massively shortened down, and we start to get a clear enough feel for each of them. But Leigh Bardugo uses flashbacks and stories to do so. And there are lots of flashbacks in this book. My reaction to that was bad, but as it went along, I differentiated the characters very easily and found that Leigh somehow managed to not make a single character overwhelming in their stories, allowing each character to be seen as, well, a person. If you're a fan of books with unforgettable protagonists, this is the book for you, even if it won't seem that way at first. And for the most part, whatever these characters are feeling is important to whatever's going on in the present, and I probably would've liked this book less if it didn't do that and went chronologically because if that happened, I'd be half done and still wouldn't know what the heist was going to be.

And does this book have action? Yes. Is it action-packed? Kinda. Sometimes the flashbacks were welcoming, but there were other times where they were flat-out distracting from the main plot, to the point where I didn't feel there was a real big-dictator antagonist. And something comes up involving one of the characters. "He" does something unacceptable and I told myself after seeing that that I wasn't going to give this book any higher than a 2 1/2 if he doesn't get punished for what he did or realizes what he did was wrong. If that happens I won't spoil it, but yeah, for most of the book that really damaged my rating. And in a book like this where everyone seemed to love it, I ended up being kind of picky at small errors, like when they mention how a dark-skinned character is blond, how there's a bucket of water that's probably supposed to be urine because it was important there was ammonia in it, but I swear, it was water. And the biggest flaw of all is when Kaz ends up dislocating someone's arm, and he makes that person stay quiet or else he would never be able to wear the arm again, and he agrees, so Kaz leaves him to weep. Do you see what's wrong with that? No? Well, unless I read it wrong, Kaz just tore his whole arm off of his body. The amount of blood loss alone could cause him to die. How is he supposed to keep quiet when he's in that kind of pain? 

Now I know I sound very negative, but I promise, this is a positive review. One of my absolute favourite parts of Six of Crows is its great ideas for how to be a good thief, and very intricate and unhasty ideas to get in and out, like how to pick a lock the fastest; remove the hinges. And where the guards will look and when they tend to be where they are, the best logic, the list goes on. And the relationships between the characters are very effective, allowing the names of the six people to belong in fantasy but memorable and likeable. And Leigh Bardugo was able to make every relationship equally seerious. It's like she cooked up three cakes with the same enjoyment factors and the same size yet different-from-one-another ingredients. Jesper and Wylan are adorable in that brothers or cousins sort of charm, and the growth between Nina and Matthias is understandably confused, because of the fact they were together until something that might've been self-defence, or a misunderstanding. We don't really know, but since they're on a heist together, we're interested to see how they call a ceasefire. I also really enjoyed the premise of Nina and Matthias because of what Matthias was led to believe about Girsha in general. I think it's when Leigh goes through his mind about how Nina does and doesn't fit this stereotype when Six of Crows's writing is at its best.

It's also clear that Leigh Bardugo has tried very hard to make this an improvement over the Grisha trilogy, and a good book as a whole, so A for effort in putting the book together. As an author who's used flashbacks before, I know that juggling all these stories is hard and can be annoying. Bardugo tried very hard to write what she had to write and the way the book finished up was just enough to warrant a reccomendation, and the sequel Crooked Kingdom on my list of books to read. 

In the end, Six of Crows was a mixed bag of goodies for me. Read it if you like books with dimensional characters and like a plethora of oddball storytelling.