What do You think about Grave Mercy (2012)?
This is fantasy, history, romance and murder mystery with suspense, intrigue, and female empowerment. Ismae is a girl of action who doesn't sit still or get pushed around. She's always fighting, spying, taking risks and crossing lines but does so with a strong sense of duty and responsibility. She is, after all, a trained assassin. She seeks to kill justly and do what's right, but where magic and betrayal collide, the lines around what is right, becomes blurry. The romance is well-developed and compelling, rebels against the cloying insta-love that appears too frequently in our genre, and truly has substance embedded in character, not just chance and good looks. I like romance served with a hearty side of emotional conflict, and this one had as much as there could be, yet parts of it sneak up on you subtly. Over the course of the book, Ismae gains learns to let emotions seep through her wall of hard logic and pragmatism, and also develops critical thinking - learning to appreciate those she trusts and obeys while acknowledging they are only human, and to think for herself despite everything she's always been taught. The first of these is about finding balancing in her personality which we all could use, and the second is a theme which teenagers and young adults grapple with. This was a unique and unforgettable highlight of this year's readings!
—kailautner
I feel like this was hoping for Kill Bill and getting Snow White. The writing is okay for a YA novel, but I felt like I was reading the Snow White version of Kill Bill. If this book hadn't been a YA novel I think I would have enjoyed it more. I felt like the characters and the happenings, the assassins training, the poisoning, the killing all of it was understated because it was YA so it didn't feel real and I didn't really connect to them. If I was a non-well read teenager I might have enjoyed it a whole lot more. Also I predicted all the major plot points fairly early on and one or two things haven't come to pass in this book so I might have to read the other two in order to see if I was right.
—anca
This book is amazing! I love the relationship between the hero and the heroine, it's very cute!
—Andrea
I got about 50 pages in, and I just wasn't feeling it at all. Disappointing.
—Spongyrachel
