Reviews tagging 'Murder'

The Cerulean by Amy Ewing

2 reviews

mxdegroot's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

*sells soul to kandra*

See my review of The Alcazar for further explanation.
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bluejayreads's review

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This book did not grip me from the start. It was very heavy on the YA Heroine tropes and moved very slowly. But I liked some things, so I kept giving it a chance. 

Sera is our YA Heroine. She feels like she doesn’t fit in, partially because she doesn’t have any aptitude for her society’s career options even though she’s almost of age. Everyone else views her as weird and agrees she doesn’t fit in, but the only thing actually weird about her is that her favorite thinking spot is at the very top of the temple spire. She has one friend who is perfectly normal and could fit in with the rest of society but chooses to be her friend because she is a kind and gentle person. Her archenemy is a mean girl in her age cohort who is prettier and more talented at the societal career options and is mean to her about it. If you’re keeping track, that description has seven YA Heroine tropes. I’ve read this same situation across so many YA books in high school that it almost completely prevented me from connecting with or caring about Sera. 

Sera’s world, however, was fascinating. It’s mostly explained through exposition, which probably would have gotten annoying if it wasn’t the main thing I cared about in the book. Sera’s people are all women, have blue hair and blue blood, they possess magic to heal and to share thoughts and feelings through touch, they live in a migrating city that tethers itself to different planets, and marriages are between three people instead of two. There was a lot of world building and I was really interested in this society. 

Plus I knew that things would change drastically once Sera jumped off the city. The story moved slowly and I didn’t really care about Sera, but the Cerulean society kept me interested enough to stick it out under Sera jumped, and I hoped the story would change for the better after that. 

Then Sera jumped, and the story changed to a whole new story. Now we’re following a set of twins on the planet, who seem to be living in a fictional version of the 1800s – sexism, railroads, corsets, etc. The twins are a boy whose name I cannot remember who wants to impress his father so he’ll let him be part of the family business (which may be producing plays?), the other is a girl who wants to be a scientist despite girls not being allowed to do that. There’s also some sort of racial/political/religious ideological conflict between their country and another one. I had very little idea what was going on, no idea who these people were, and no incentive to care. If this was who Sera was going to end up dealing with after she survived her fall, I really wasn’t interested. 

What really killed my enjoyment of this book was a lack of caring about the characters. Sera hit every female YA Protagonist trope and that immediately distanced me from her despite all the opportunity for connection her situation offered. And just when I was ready for the book to speed up and finally get into the meat of the story – and maybe for the changing situation to give me more reason to care about Sera – it switched to a whole new set of characters who I did not know or care about in a much less interesting world. 

I’m actually a little angry because I wanted this to be good. The idea behind the Cerulean and their floating city was what really interested me. There was a lot of potential there and I want to stay there and explore that world. Perhaps if Sera had hit fewer of the tropes (or this had been published years ago when I was more tolerant of YA Heroine tropes) I would have stuck it out longer. I love the idea of the Cerulean people and society, but unfortunately not much else about this book. 
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