The Midnight Star starts about a year after the end of The Rose Society, with Adelina suffering from the voices in her head, hallucinations and nightmares. But she’s succeeded in her conquests and is now the Queen of the Sealands, continuing her search for her sister Violetta. For every new territory she conquers in her search, Adelina becomes more and more villainous. She’s a cruel queen who makes the laws very lenient for the marked, but harsh to the point of death for the unmarked. From the mistreated and manipulated young girl we first met in The Young Elites, Adelina has now been transferred into a fully fledged cruel and tyrannical villain. But somehow, I still rooted for her and her struggle with the unstable powers and hallucinations and feelings for Magiano.

This is definitely one of the darkest series I’ve ever read and some parts just broke my heart, but I loved that Marie Lu didn’t even try to make it feel good in any ways. She didn’t add a hero or a love overcoming everything. Instead, none of the characters were simply good or bad, everything was much more complicated and interesting than that. It was so great to see all the major characters from all the previous books come together to surpass the big final hurdle and putting their differences aside, whether they were rivals, enemies or friends. In this series, Marie Lu has created a world full of surprised and characters that you care for even though they’re not very good and likeable, which is so impressive to pull off as an author.

I won’t say anything about the ending to risk spoil it, but simply state that it was the perfect ending to the story. It would have been wrong with a happy ever after ending to this dark series, but Marie Lu gave us a powerful and bittersweet ending that was both dark and light, which was more than I could have dared to hope for.

All in all, The Midnight Star was my favorite book in the series and an intense, dark, and thrilling conclusion to a fascinating, utterly unique and heartbreaking fantasy series.

Rating:
4.5 bittersweet stars rounding up to 5

Get your own copy:
Bookshop.org
Amazon
Book Depository

​Author info:
Marie Lu

Landline was a cute Christmas story with a magical twist, but it wasn’t as good as Rainbow Rowell’s other books. But still, it was a heart-warming, fast, feel-good read perfect for cold Winter days!

Landline takes place during the week of Christmas. Georgie is forced to choose between the career opportunity of a lifetime and spending Christmas with her family. To further complicate the decision, she and her husband Neal are having relationship problems. So, when Neal and the children leaves for the airport, and Georgie stays behind, it might just be the end of her marriage. But calling to check in on her family, she somehow finds herself on a magical time-traveling phone, calling the Neal she met and fell in love with all those years ago. It feels like she’s been given a second chance to love… or to break things off even before they started.

I really enjoyed the Christmas setting and the way the relationship between Georgie and her husband was presented over time. Except the magical time-travelling phone, it was a very relatable contemporary read, with flashbacks showing how they fell in love and how the complications of a grown-up relationship and raising a family impacted their feelings over time.

​My main problem was that I never really rooted for neither Georgie or Neal, so I wasn’t as drawn into the story as I would have wished for. But all in all, this was a really unique, warm-hearted and lovely book.

Rating:
​3 stars

Get your own copy:
Bookshop.org
Amazon
Book Depository

​Author info:
Rainbow Rowell