Review: Stitching Snow - R.C. Lewis

Stitching Snow
R.C. Lewis 
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction, Romance, Retelling, Dystopian
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Thanks to Disney-Hyperion for the eARC I received via Netgalley!

Stitching Snow was a very slow start for me. At the beginning of the story, Essie lives in a mining settlement where she cage fights for money and tinkers away at her robot friends in her spare time. Everything changes when a mysterious ship crashes near the settlement and she meets Dane, helping him to repair his ship. There's nothing inherently wrong with the beginning of the story; however, I felt as though too much emphasis was placed on Essie fixing things (stitching, as she calls it). So Essie stitched this bot, then Essie stitched the ship, then Essie stitched this other part of the ship, and so on. Meanwhile, I felt little to no attachment to any of these characters and I had no idea how this was a retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Fortunately, once the plot progresses past all this stitching, some more exciting and interesting plot things happen, bringing us to different places with different characters and a few things start to look like Snow White. There was still a lot of talk about stitching but she does a lot of stitching so it's not like it could be omitted entirely. At this point, I still really wanted more character development. In fact, up until about 80% through the book, I wasn't attached to the characters. One thing I really look for in a book is characters I care about so that definitely took away from my overall enjoyment. There were a lot of things happening to these characters throughout the entire book but a lot of their actions seemed rather flat an unmotivated.

With that being said, I did enjoy the last 20-25% of the book. Once I started caring about these characters and seeing a more interesting (in my opinion) plot unravel, I really started getting into it. Even though the characters were a bit mundane, I was invested in what they were doing and the outcome of the story.

R.C. Lewis clearly has potential and I think that her future work, based on the end of this book, could be really great and exciting. Unfortunately, with only about a quarter of this book being great, it earns 2.5 stars from me. The plot of Stitching Snow was interesting enough, with a very different twist on Snow White, but I wanted more in terms of character development. Overall, it was a decent story and I hope to see more from R.C. Lewis in the future.

- Kiersten

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Review: The Sorcery Code - Dima Zales

The Sorcery Code
Dima Zales
Series: The Sorcery Code, #1
Genre: Adult, Fantasy, Romance
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Word Rating: Rather meh
On Goodreads

There was a naked woman on the floor of Blaise’s study.

With an opening line like that, The Sorcery Code immediately grabs the reader’s attention. Blaise has been trying to create a magical object that will be able to interpret plain language and convert it directly to sorcery code, the language of the Spell Realm. Unknowingly, however, Blaise created Gala, a woman born from the Spell Realm. Neither Blaise nor Gala knows quite what she’s capable of, and throughout the story, we see Gala grow into herself and learn the full extent of her powers.

When it comes to this concept and the way it plays out in The Sorcery Code, is great. While reading, I wondered what was going to happen with Gala – it was clear to me what was happening to her, but she is naïve and hasn’t been “alive” for long so she could not figure it out right away. Gala was, by far, the most interesting character in this story. For her it was almost a coming of age tale as she realized what she was capable of, how she could use her abilities in good ways, and that there are consequences to her actions.

Being a sorcerer in The Sorcery Code is much like being a scientist in our world. Sorcerers don’t possess magical powers – sorcerers are those most skilled in mathematics and science. A sorcerer cannot simply just say a spell or wave their wand. In order to do magic, a sorcerer must do calculations and put in specific variables and coordinates depending on what he wants to accomplish.

As long as you wrote out the logic of the spell properly, then it was a simple dynamic of ‘if variable A is set to such and such value, action B happens.’

The way magic works in The Sorcery Code is really inventive and interesting to learn throughout the book. Although it was a lot of information and a bit confusing at first, it makes sense as the story progresses.

While Gala is adventurous and curious about the Physical Realm, the world she now lives in, Blaise is much more interested in the Spell Realm. Blaise is one of the best sorcerers of his day because of how intelligent he is. He is constantly researching and trying to find ways to make sorcery easier. Blaise is pretty much a nerd but in a way that puts you in awe over his passion and innovation. Although Blaise was much less interesting than Gala, I found that he was still rather interesting, mostly because his point of view was where we learned the most about sorcery and the world of The Sorcery Code.

Along with Gala and Blaise’s point of views, there’s also POVs for Augusta and Barson. I found these two characters much harder to connect with. While I appreciate seeing all their views and experiencing what’s happening in each of their lives, I think juggling four different perspectives made it harder to connect with the characters because there wasn’t a lot of time to really appreciate them. Barson was sort of interesting because he had a secret that I wanted to figure out, but I found Augusta a little hard to handle. While other characters had bigger plans for their actions, most of her actions were concerned with what she wanted above all else. Besides that, I found that Augusta just wasn’t all that interesting. I rarely cared what she was doing unless her actions were going to affect Gala.

While the concept (the reason I signed up to review for the book tour) and the beginning of this story grabbed my attention, I think the overall execution of the plot could have been better. When I read that first scene (which you can read on my The Sorcery Code Book Tour post here) I thought the book would be really fast paced. Unfortunately, there are a lot of fairly slow parts because there’s so much exposition for each character. There just wasn’t enough time to fully develop the characters and follow their stories with four different character POVs – especially because the characters were almost always completely separate from one another.

Overall, The Sorcery Code was by no means a bad book, I just felt very “meh” about it after reading. I didn’t quite fall in love with any of the characters and I felt no urgency to keep reading largely due to that. I think that as the beginning of a series (since the non-ending of this book NEEDS a sequel) this story has a lot of potential to be great, especially if Dima Zales continues to weave such a detailed and inventive world. Although The Sorcery Code is by no means my favorite book, I still enjoyed it and I think I’ll enjoy it even more after reading more in the series.

- Kiersten

How do you feel about multiple POVs?

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