Liv Gritten

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It had all the elements that should have made me love it. Greek mythology, action, a team of misfits and a hunger games-esque competition. But three months on I'm still only 3/4 of the way through with no motivation to pick it up. Maybe it just feels like another YA that's been done too many times? The characters somehow didn't come alive for me. It's not a bad read...its just not a memorable one.

Ironically loses much of the magic of the original book and film by being far too heavy handed with 'magical visual effects'. The magic of the original is intrinsic to the garden being brought to life from winter to spring as Mary and dickon tend to it, as a symbol of the family coming back to life as she befriends her cousin, Colin, and reunites him with his father. Unlike the original, the plot of this film is all over the place, like it doesn't really know what it wants to be about. None of the characters in this film accurately portray the nature's of the original characters, almost as if the writers created entirely new ones and inserted them into the Secret Garden story. The film is slow and spends way too much time on magical special effects and not nearly enough on the growing bond between the children (or even Martha and Mary) and what little there is feels very contrived. It feels as though half way through the movie the director suddenly realised this is a story about children finding a garden and becoming each others family, and was like 'oh, geez, better start getting onto that hey.' Nothing really hits home or gets you in the feels with this version the way that the 1993 version does. Goes to show that less is more and no amount of bells and whistles can save a story that fails to connect emotionally. Go watch the 1993 version. It definitely stands the test of time :)

I've really enjoyed the ACOTAR and TOG sagas my Maas, so was really looking forward to Crescent City. I wouldn't say this is her strongest work. It took quite a while to really get into it, I didn't feel the same level of attachment as I've had with characters in her other series, and Bryce definitely wasn't as strong a main character as Aelin or Feyre. I think the main problems I had with the novel were the characters and flow. I know Maas characters tend to come with a high level of sass, but the characters of Crescent City seem to spend more time flipping each other off over trivial comments than solving crime. Their behaviour is a bit too high school and the arrogance without wit or humour gets a bit tedious. They started to feel like they were all the same cut-out character stuffed into different species and genders. I guess Maas tried to make Bryce flawed, but even then, I felt like she came across as a bit of a trope. The other main issue I tend to find with Maas' writing is her telling rather than showing, particularly in exposition dumps or shameless 'one up one down' descriptions of a characters beauty and physical assets. She usually gets away with this in other series by spreading it out in between action or internal monologues, but in Crescent City its just a bit too blatant, too frequent, and kind of pulls you out of the story. Overall I just didn't fall in love with this world and its people the way I have with other Maas stories, but each to their own and I guess there's always room for development in the sequel.