A Tale of Two Trilogies and a Winner!

First off,

We Have a Winner!  Congratulations to Jill L!  She has won the Driscoll's berry coupon giveaway!

Secondly,  I hope each and every one of you is having a wonderful Easter Week!

Public Service Announcement:  Don't forget - This Friday is Meat Friday! 

Now for some book reviews:

The third installment of Jennifer Niesen's The Ascendance Trilogy is out!  And it's awesome!

Young King Jaron and his landlocked country of Carthya are being attacked on all sides, by all of his enemies who have banded together against him.

With a few friends at his back, and lots of witty comments along the way, Jaron must face incredible odds while injured and grieving a devastating loss.

As usual, Nielsen combines great dialogue with action-packed adventure.  I was particularly impressed with Jaron's invocation of "the saints" as he leads his people into battle and his concept of an afterlife for those who've lived virtuously.

I'd say these books are appropriate for ten and up?  In The Shadow Throne, you will find battlefield violence, some tortuous beatings, death, blood, and the occasional kiss (maybe twice?).  You will also find sacrifice, true love, loss, and responsibility, not to mention an epic surprise ending.

I reviewed Part One:  The False Prince here and Part Two:  The Runaway King here.  You should definitely begin at the beginning.

Technically speaking, The Lunar Chronicles is a series, not a trilogy, with Part 4:  Winter yet to be released.

I greatly enjoyed Cinder, had some issues with Scarlet, and was delighted to find Cress not only resolves one of my qualms, but is a better book (than Scarlet) with better characters overall.

Cress is Marissa Meyer's sci-fi re-telling of Rapunzel, complete with a blind "prince."

Cress is a shell, which is like the Lunar version of a "squib."  Lunars, the race of people that populates the moon, generally have the ability to control the minds of Earthens.  But Cress doesn't.

She does have a gift for technology and hacking, which is why she has spent the last seven years of her life alone, in a satellite, monitoring all of Earth's secrets for the evil queen and cloaking the Lunar ships that are set to invade Earth.

Scarlet is only in this book briefly as she is captured by the Lunars and imprisoned on the moon.  In those brief moments, she mentally re-hashes her one night of passion with Wolf and makes it seem as though perhaps it was just some passionate kisses.

In my opinion, the best scene in Cress, is when she and Captain Thorne (again, the likeness to Captain Jack Harkness was striking) crash land on Earth.  Thorne has been blinded in a fight, and Cress has never been to the surface.  He must ascertain their location and manage their survival through the eyes of someone who has never seen an animal in real life, or the sky, or the sun.

Her total naivete and innocence is the perfect foil for his brash womanizing attitude and their romance is one of the greatest things about this series.

Unlike the previous two volumes, Cress is very clean.  Focused on fighting the evil Queen Levana and stopping her marriage to Cinder's heartthrob Emperor Kai, Cinder, Wolf, Cress, Thorne, and the lovable droid Iko face the impossible.

This series is definitely "young adult."  I'll let my high school kids read it, I'd probably let an 8th grader read it, but with the joking sex change reference in Cinder, and the love scene and references to porn (which is frowned upon) in Scarlet, I'd definitely reserve this series for teens.

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