Beautiful Redemption

by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

I was actually kind of disappointed in this book. Because I absolutely loved the first three books of this series, I had pretty high expectations for this one. To be fair, this book still has a lot of the elements I loved of the first three, namely the awesome characters. Link in particular is my favorite, but I really love all of them. I love Lena and Ethan together, which is a lot of the reason this book wasn't my favorite. The two of them were separated until the very end of the book and I didn't get to see them interact with each other. When they did finally get together, their major obstacle to being together was magically solved. They didn't even bother to try to explain how that happened and I don't know if I love or hate that fact. I guess it's a little of both.

SPOILER ALERT:
Ethan died at the end of the third book. I have to admit that, given that he's the narrator and all, I wasn't expecting him to actually die. But they did it. So most of the fourth book consists of Ethan fighting his way through the afterlife to try to get back to life. It was interesting, but not as interesting as the two of them would have been if I had gotten to see Ethan and Lena together. Ethan did get to meet some interesting characters in the afterlife, but ultimately he faced a lot of this battle alone (OK, so he had a crow with him for some of the journey but, given that crows can't talk, I'm not sure that that really counts).

That's really my only complaint about the book. Ultimately, it just wasn't as packed with action as the first three books. On a personal note, I had to deal with the passing of friend while reading this book so reading someone's interpretation of the afterlife while dealing with that was a little awkward. That wasn't the fault of the authors though. From an arbitrary perspective, their take on the afterlife was actually quite interesting.

All in all, it was a good book, but I think it was the weakest of the four.

Bring Up The Bodies

by Hilary Mantel

I loved this book every bit as much as I loved the first one. Probably more.

As it turns out, the title is not quite as creepy as it initially seems. They just say "bring up the bodies" when they mean "bring in the suspects for trial" so they're not actually dead yet. Although, by that point in the story, they're as good as dead, so I guess when you think about it, that really makes the title so much more creepy than it initially seems!

Seriously, though, this was another excellent read that kept me pressing the page button on my kindle until I was surprised to find myself at the end already! My one qualm with the first book was Mantel's liberal use of the pronoun "he" when I would get lost as to who was speaking when. She still does that, but makes a point of using "he; he Cromwell, said ..." which made it much easier for me to understand and enjoy. There were still a few confusing moments but, overall, I really enjoyed this book.

I don't know if it was the author's intention but I found it really hard to believe that just a few years passed from the beginning of the book until the end. Every time they talked about Wolsey I felt like all of that was ages and ages ago. Turns out, it was only a few years. I had known that Henry only kept Anne around for a few short years but I guess I forgot. This book does a really excellent job of packing in all of the things that happened while Anne was queen, which is what made me feel that so much more time had passed than a few years.

The most impressive part of this book, to me, was the way that everything was presented. Mantel had me so convinced that I was in Tudor England (or at least that she had been to Tudor England to research this book) that I found myself thinking, "Huh, I didn't know it happened that way. I always suspected it happened some other way," before remembering that this book is fiction and relies on speculation just as much as every other book about this time period that I've ever read. Well done, Mantel! You made me forget that I was reading fiction. In a good way.

The other thing that amazed me was that just reading about all of the stuff that Cromwell does makes me feel lazy. Sometimes I get home from a full day of work and make myself dinner and do laundry and pay my bills and I'm all "Look at me and all the stuff I can do!" And then there's Cromwell who is running the country while always making it seem as though Henry is the one running the country. Not to mention staying one step ahead of his enemies so they can't manage to bring him down. He hardly seems to sleep and he never gets sick because, as he puts it, he's not "allowed" to get sick. Seriously, the guy gives "workaholic" a new meaning.