The Rose Society by Marie Lu

Once upon a time, a girl had a father, a prince, a society of friends. Then they betrayed her, and she destroyed them all…

The Rose Society by Marie Lu is the sequel to the highly acclaimed and really damn awesome The Young Elites, the story of children who are stricken with a blood fever and come out the other side maimed, but gifted with incredible powers.

The story picks up where we last left Adelina Amouteru, now known and feared as the White Wolf – and she’s got her heart set on revenge. Gathering her own team of Young Elites, she moves to strike down the Inquisition Axis who tried to kill her in the past.

But there is a darkness inside her that keeps growing – and it’s so hard to cling to the good when your very existence roots itself in evil.

The Rose Society is absolutely awesome. Everyone and their mother by now knows that I loved The Young Elites. Very much. And it is always such a delight when a sequel is everything you wanted and more.

Somehow, The Rose Society manages to be darker than The Young Elites – which is extremely impressive.

The emotive and incredibly descriptive narrative follows Adelina into her incredible troubled head space, as she slowly becomes more and more twisted due to her abilities. You feel Adelina’s pain and despair throughout the entire novel, and although you’re troubled by her decisions, Marie Lu’s incredible writing lets you sympathise and understand her entirely.

Your morals and emotions are constantly pushed, torn between despairing for Adelina and how the Daggers have cast her out, to being so frustrated that her anger and darkness are only making matters worse. You feel genuinely as torn as she does about turning against them and fighting them, about her glimmer of hope that things could be okay again – but knowing deep down they won’t be.

This book also explores more of this incredible world Lu has built – there are more Young Elites in this book joining Adelina, all of whom are absolutely wonderful, shelled out characters who are rich and full of life and story without engulfing the main plot. They have these absolutely fascinating, unique personas and these fantastic new powers – everything is just so original and wonderfully crafted.

I’m so excited to see more of these new Elites and explore their relationships – and of course, I’m always excited to see the old Elites and the Daggers – even if I’m so utterly torn in how I feel about them.

And, finally, the end revelation is absolutely damn perfect for a middle arc in a series – it doesn’t leave on an irritating cliffhanger – but it has left us with an intense revelation which makes us desperate for the next part.

Overall, The Rose Society is perfect. It’s dark, gritty, edge-of-your-seat action and drama throughout most of the novel. This beautiful fantasy world is built with incredible narrative and wonderful characters that are put together masterfully by Marie Lu. It pulls no punches, with a narrative that makes you flinch and yet yearn for more of this action filled world. Watching the main character descend into a dark, villainous headspace, feeding the darkness in her is troubling, and yet you feel desperate for more, unable to turn away from what Adelina is becoming.

I honestly could not recommend this series enough, and I am beyond excited for the release of “The Midnight Star.”

Fare thee well,

Fran

 

Deadpool.

(Alternative title: Why Deadpool and His Red Suited Booty Deserve Everything)

It’s safe to say that Deadpool is one of the highest anticipated movies of 2016, and with damn good cause.

The Deadpool movie has been in the works for over 11 years now – work on the movie began in 2004. 2004. That is an insane amount of time for a movie to remain in development hell, especially a movie that was so wanted and begged for by the fandom.

There were multiple issues with Deadpool and the studios that were interested – could we make it an R-Rating? How do we not repeat the same mistakes? How do we introduce all these elements from the Deadpool comics, namely his fourth-wall breaking? Over and over again, Deadpool seemed to hit a brick wall. IMDB would tease dates, at one point reading 2014 before resorting back to those Godawful “????” they put in the place when nothing is decided. It honestly looked like fans were never going to get this damn movie, and they seemed to accept it bitterly.

Until that faithful day in July 2014. When some sweet, beautiful, adonis of a human being leaked the Deadpool test footage online. You know the one I mean.

That’s right. And try as they might to get it off the internet (and oh, they did try.) no one seemed to be able to stop it – this awesome two minute long piece of everything fans have been begging for. So Blur Studio did what anyone would do in that situation – they said “fuckit.” and released this footage officially.

And thus, from there, the high demand, the excitement and the now renewed desire of the fans became too much to ignore, and little more than a month later it was announced that Deadpool was officially in production.

And now here we are. It’s February 2016. And Deadpool has broken a tonne of Box Office Records in North America, including 20th Century Fox opening weekend (Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith held it before then, let’s just all think about that.), R-Rated Opening Weekend, and R-Rated Opening Weekend (last held by The Matrix: Reloaded). And let me tell you: it goddamn deserves it.

It’s not just the sheer amount of time it took to even get this movie made (11 years. Most pets don’t live that long. I was twelve for Christ’s sake.) but the marketing strategies were pretty damn great.

You already knew from the go that Deadpool was not going to be like other superhero movies – it was going to be a lot cruder. From the moment they revealed the costume in a photoshoot which involved Ryan Reynolds lying on a bearskin rug to the 12 Days of Deadpool, to awesome PSA’s like this;

I can safely say Deadpool had a solid, clear marketing strategy from day one. It was so perfectly executed, and because of that, and because of the sheer perfection of the film itself – it deserves every record it broke upon release.

And hey, if you want to know exactly how awesome the film is, my lovely friend wrote a pretty sick review here.

Fare thee well,

Fran

 

(All images were taken from the official Deadpool Facebook Page!)

Three Series You Should Read This Year

It’s 2016 (no shit.), and chances are if you have a Goodreads account, you’ve set up your Goodreads Reading Challenge 2016.

In response to this, I thought it’d be good to share with all of you some series I have read/am reading that I think you should all add to your shelves – Goodreads and real life.

Chaos Walking  – Patrick Ness

The Chaos Walking series is a trilogy by Patrick Ness – I recently finished and wrote a review on the second book The Ask and The Answer, and I’ve also reviewed the first, The Knife of Never Letting Go, and only three days ago did I finally complete the concluding novel, Monsters of Men. 

This series is unspeakably awesome. The premise centres around a boy named Todd who’s growing up in a town where everyone can hear each others thoughts – it’s called The Noise, and it is a disease that was passed to the humans from the planet which made everyone able to hear each others thoughts – and wiped out all of the woman.

Then everything changes when Todd finds a spot where there is no Noise, and a girl standing in the midst of it.

This series is so absolutely stunning. It’s raw, it’s incredibly written and everything from the characters to the world building are incredible. The ending is so fucking gut wrenching and I damn near threw my book across a packed tube (justifiable.) and I’m just so. Torn up. You know when your life just feels better having read a series? This is one of those for me.

Read it, love it, sob a lot and get back to me.

The Young Elites – Marie Lu

The Young Elites is a recent series, with it’s second book The Rose Society only coming out recently. This story follows a young woman from an abusive home who has been marked by a blood disease that left her with a scar where her eye should be – and with incredible supernatural abilities.

This is one of the darkest books I’ve ever read – riddled with abuse, graphic violence and intense fight scenes, it is constantly gripping and never boring. It’s also got an incredible cast of characters, diverse and most with their own Elite powers.

On top of that, the main character is dark – she isn’t a poor fragile songbird who finds these beautiful powers – she’s a tragic, angry person with a fury in her and dark, destructive powers.

The first book left me desperate for more – it broke my heart in so many ways, with such a gut-wrenching and unexpected ending. I was in bits.

I’ve also heard very good things about Marie Lu’s other trilogy, the Legend trilogy – so that’s next on my series to read list.

Shades of Magic – Victoria Schwab 

There isn’t much I can say about the Shades of Magic series other than the fact that the first book, A Darker Shade of Magic is probably one of my favourite books of all time ever. This isn’t an exaggeration or hyperbolic -I fell hard for this magical world.

My full review of A Darker Shade of Magic can be found earlier in my blog so you get the full scale, but in short;

Kell is the last of his kind, a blood magician, who can travel through universes, between the four versions of London in existence.

However, when an artifact from the abandoned Black London makes its way into Kell’s life, it’s up to him to take it back – which can be difficult when a thief has decided to join you for the ride.

I can’t emphasise enough how much I loved A Darker Shade of Magic – it left me yearning for so much more, then low and be-damn-hold, A Gathering of Shadows will be coming out February 23rd this year. I’m so excited I can barely contain it – getting to go back to this incredible world, with such inventive, diverse characters? That’s a genuine gift.

(Oh also it is GETTING A TV SERIES!!! And Victoria is writing the pilot – follow her on Twitter for more updates! And also because she’s super nice.)

So, there we go – three series I could not recommend more highly to you in 2016. I’ll also sneakily drop in here that you should for sure be reading Saga because God knows what kind of hell you’re living in without this graphic novel in your life.

Let me know if you’ve read any of these – or, let me know what you’re reading! I’m always looking for new books to splurge on.

Fare thee well,

Fran