 Alright, I think you get the point by now. So this is a compilation of book reviews, part two. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. First up, I'm gonna talk about Beastly. Now, I think most of you are probably semi-familiar with Beastly because you saw, or at least have heard of, the movie that came out that was made off of it. It had Vanessa Hudgens and Alex Pettyfer in it. And the movie's awful, obviously. And a few weeks ago, I was looking around and I saw that the book has sequels. And I thought, oh, okay, those will be hilariously bad. And so, I had never read the book before. So I got that, and I got the two sequels. And I read through the first book, and while there were some parts that were, like, just laughably awful, I looked up the meaning of Kyle online, and that clinched it. Kyle means handsome. I wasn't. I found a name that means ugly. Feo, who would name their kid that, but finally settled on Adrian, which means dark one. That was me, the dark one. Everyone, by which I mean Magda and Will, called me Adrian now. I was darkness. Like, that passage is, that's a work of art, okay? That deserves to be displayed alongside the Last Supper or the Taj Mahal or Hannah John Common. It's just too beautiful for human eyes. Overall, it's, like, it's fine. You know, it's a cute romance. It's not too horrendous in most ways. Like, you do really feel bad for the main character, Kyle, who, if you didn't know, Beastly is a rendition, a modern rendition of Beauty and the Beast, so Kyle is, like, the beast. He gets turned into this animal-like thing. And, you know, you feel bad for him a little bit, even though he is kind of a dick, and you see him turn into a much better person over the course of the story. Um, yeah, it's just, it's fine. Like, I could probably spend more time making fun of it, but the, I... What's the point? And then I did go into the sequel book, and I read about 75 pages of it, and it was definitely worse than Beastly, but it still wasn't awful. It was just kind of boring. There wasn't much in there that was hilariously bad or anything. And I was a little disappointed by that, because I was hoping it would be, like, another elixir where I can make this, you know, giant video just picking apart everything, and it would be a lot of fun, but it just really isn't even that. It's just... The sequels are just kind of dull, they're not my thing. The first book is perfectly fine, though, so if you're just looking for a cute romance, go ahead, check that one out, whatever. Okay, the camera angle felt a little awkward there, but... Okay, whatever. So next up is Article 5, and that one I read a couple of months ago, that was, like, right after I read Malazan, so I was... I was just on the lookout for something simpler and easier to put together that would take a lot less energy to read, you know? And so I read a couple of young adult things, and Article 5, like... I really wanted to like it, okay? It's one of those dystopian, like, Hunger Games knockoffs, you know what I'm talking about. There were tons of them all over the place a couple of years ago. And that one stood out just a little bit, though, because the main character is Ember, and she is just this teenage girl who's living in the United States as it is becoming more and more of a dictatorship. And one day, her and her mother are arrested and sent away, because one of the new laws that they've put in place is that children cannot be born out of wedlock, and Ember was born out of wedlock and her mom was unmarried, so they sent them to two separate reeducation camps, and then the majority of the story is just Ember escaping from the camp and then trying to escape the country. And the thing about that is that it's immediately different than a lot of its fellows, because in most of those, it's just like, hey, let's have a rebellion, cool. Whereas this one, it's like much more small scale. It's just a couple of characters saying we need to try and escape. And in addition to that, it actually is saying something about our modern-day world. It's actually saying something about our society, because the world that they're in, it's a horrible dictatorship, like I said, and there's constant war going on. We don't get a lot of detail about why the war is happening, but inside the United States, we can see that an extreme form of religion has taken hold. It's like they've gone back to an extremist Christian worldview. And so, yeah, the author is actually pointing at something and saying, hey, if we're not careful, this can be bad. And so whereas a lot of the other ones are just like, hey, society is structured weird, doesn't that kind of suck? This one actually is saying something. But beyond that, there's just not much in this book. Like, it's Ember, she falls in love with a cute soldier boy who helps her escape. They go out of the education camp. They go try and find her mom. They're going on a road trip. And it's just, there's not much there. You know, and Ember is kind of an annoying stupid bitch for a huge portion of the book as well. Like, at first, she was fine because like, you feel really bad for her and you do know that she remembers before things got this bad and you do get a sense of how normal people live under this system. And when she's in the reeducation camp, she is actually planning her escape and she's trying to figure out like, okay, how do I deal with this without losing my mind? You know, that sort of thing. And so at first she's fine, but once they're on the road trip, she's just dead weight up until the very end. Like the climax, she actually does some stuff, so that's better. But still, it's like, she's just an obnoxious character. So, and from what I understand, the sequels go into much more traditional territory where it's just like, hey, these two are trying to help out a rebellion now. And it's just, it's just kind of dumb at that point. So I will probably never read the sequels. My head canon is just that Ember and her friends got away and they lived the rest of their lives in Canada and then eventually the American regime just collapsed in on itself. Yeah, but I really wanted to like this one, but it just made too many missteps so I couldn't quite get there. Next we have Inheritance, which is the final book in the Inheritance Cycle which started with Aragon. And the thing about Inheritance is that I've seen it get a lot of flak over the years for being like a crappy ending, like people didn't like it. They thought it was trash, it's just been trashed a lot. And honestly, I never understood why exactly. I guess I can get how the romance between Aragon and Aria never really materialized and a lot of people were hoping for that. But well, I was fine with it. You know, it kind of makes sense how it would go that way and I appreciate that it was doing something different. You know, Aria is like over a hundred years older than Aragon and he's only like 16, I think at this point. So to her, that's like a toddler being in love with her or in love with her as it would seem from her perspective. So that makes sense. A lot of people were kind of disappointed with the way they defeated Galvatorex. So I thought it was really creative, you know, rather than just being more powerful than this dude or finding this one secret weakness, they just did something creative. And I think a lot of people were just hoping for a more upbeat ending than what we got. Because what we got was a bit of a downer, you know, but like I mentioned in my villains video, the damage Galvatorex did doesn't go away just because he died, you know. So overall, I thought that the way this looked at the reconstruction of Allagasia and the way things were going to change going forward, I thought that was a much more mature way of looking at it than most other books aimed at this age range will get. And beyond that, I just thought a lot of the battles and stuff were cool. You know, the final confrontation with Galvatorex and all that, that was cool. So yeah, I don't have much else to say about it. I just think that inheritance was pretty good as a finale to a relatively big epic series. Next is The Legend Trilogy by Marie Lu. And I'm looking at all three books here. And this is another one of those kind of dystopian Hunger Games knockoffs, but it actually does some different stuff. I read these a couple of years ago. It was before I started this channel and I had, I guess I had more patience for that sort of thing at the time. But basically, it follows two characters, one named Day and one named June. And they live in a post-apocalyptic world in the Republic of America, which is like the western chunk of the United States. And that is, as always, a horrible authoritarian dictatorial regime where normal people live in horrifying poverty and all their freedoms are suppressed. And, you know, life is pretty miserable for the majority of the population. And Day is a wanted criminal who faked his death a while ago, and now he goes around just kind of making trouble. And I'll get to that a little bit more in a minute. And June is a, like a star student, I guess you'd say. Her older brother is in the military and he's very well respected in the officer corps. And then one day he's murdered and they think Day did it, so June goes hunting for him. And over the course of that, obviously they fall in love, okay? Like, you're just, you're not going to have this sort of story without them falling in love. And whatever, I'm not going to talk about that too much. And beyond that, they, June starts to see more and more of the darker side of her government since she realizes, you know what, maybe I should be resisting this, maybe I shouldn't just be helping this along, you know, that sort of thing. And then in the second and third books that deals with much more in-depth, like how do we change this system? And it's not just a rebellion is the thing. That's actually one huge positive that I would put in this book's favor is that without getting too deep into spoiler territory, near the second and third books, in the second and third books, things seem to look like they're going to reform on their own, without too much bloodshed, without too much violence. And I think that's great because, one, that's just a realistic way of looking at things, because we see in this government not everybody who is in there is, you know, straight up evil. Some of them actually do want to do good and they do want to fix things and make things better for the average person. So that's pretty great. And then in the latter part of the series, like in the climax, it gets back into like war and fighting and the main characters have to, you know, solve things. So in that regard, it's a little bit, I don't want to say cliched because it is doing it in a different way. And I don't want to, I don't want to harp on it too much as well because it's trying something a little bit different. And I always want to be forgiving about things that at least take a risk, you know? And the main thing though about the series that I didn't like was the climax because, you know, it just goes back into like more fighting and all that. And Day apparently has a brain tumor, which is going to kill him very soon, but he can still like run and do parkour like an expert and it's just kind of dumb. And none of the characters ever really face consequences for the things they do in the final chapters of the book. Like they commit war crimes and they even mention like, yeah, this is a war crime. We're going to get arrested if this ever gets out. And it gets out, but they never face any consequences for it. So it goes out with more of a fizzle than anything. And overall, I would just say the series is fine. You know, nothing spectacular, but it's fine. And I don't know if I can really recommend it to anybody unless the idea of like seeing a story from two different perspectives from the person being hunted and the one doing the hunting in this world, which is admittedly it is better put together than most of these dystopian YA worlds are. Like the Republic of America feels a lot like a fictional version of North Korea in the best way possible. It actually feels like a real place you could go. So yeah, that's good. Other than that, like I don't know if I can recommend it unless you're really looking for something up that alley. So then we have The Young Elites, which was also written by Marie Lou. And okay, so I reviewed the first book in this series about a year and a half ago. And just like Legend, I just said it was fine. You know, there was not much in there worth celebrating but there wasn't much in there worth attacking either. You know, it was just fine, you know. The only two things that I would say were actually genuinely really good were the villain, Taryn Santoro, who I mentioned in my Top 10 Villains list. And he is genuinely fantastic. And number two was the climax of the first book because it ends in such a way where I was really taken by surprise and I was like, wow, I wasn't expecting that. That was some crazy stuff. And then in the second and third books, it goes in a much different direction than I would have expected. So okay, I liked it. So the story of this one is that it's like a medieval fantasy world and a while before the story starts, this thing called the blood fever goes through the world and kills tons and tons of people. But some of the people who get infected don't die and in fact they actually get powers afterwards including the main character, Adelina. And she tries to run away from home to avoid being sold off by her father but he catches her, she accidentally kills him and then she's about to get burned at the stake by the Inquisition and by Taryn because she's an abomination, demons, all that kind of stuff. But then she gets saved by the prince of her country who also has powers and he tells her, hey, my sister stole my throne, helped me get it back and you get to live and she's like, okay, cool. And so the majority of the first book is just them trying to get that back. But then once you get into the second book, it's Adelina saying like, you know what, I'm tired of everybody's shit. I don't want to just help others out. I want to take this throne for myself. And then without giving too much away, the story goes in a much darker direction and it goes up much more into Adelina's psyche. And then the third book, it's kind of shifts focus again and it's all about like, okay, there's a greater threat now, let's set aside this fighting and try and save the world. And I think that they all float into one another fairly well and I think that Adelina is a good enough main character to hold things together and Taren is definitely a good enough villain to hold things together. Overall, just like with Legend, only to a greater extent, I have to give it props for at least trying different stuff because I was really expecting the whole series to just be about them trying to take back the throne and give it to the prince. But no, it changes focus a couple of times. It goes in directions I wasn't expecting and it does stuff I hadn't really seen before. So even if it doesn't work 100% of the time, I gotta give a credit for trying something different. And the worst part of the series by a pretty big margin is the actual pros of it though because most of it is Adelina's first-person perspective and it's told in present tense as well, which I think present tense works fine when it's first person but then it switches to other characters' third person and it's still present tense and it just feels really, really awkward and it's difficult to keep track of things and I just, yeah, I didn't like it. But basically I just want to say that after reading the majority of Marie Lou's published works, I gotta say I think she's being held back by writing in Young Adult because a lot of her ideas could be much better explored by an older audience I think or if she was writing for an older audience and if she had a bigger page count because Adelina in the Young Elites kinda starts going crazy at one point but it's just treated so, I don't know, it's shown to you so bluntly I guess where she's like literally hearing voices that are telling her to do bad things and that also kinda takes away from the impact of Adelina doing bad things because, well, it kinda gives her an out. It's like, whoa, whoa, the voice is told her to do it. She's just crazy, she can't help it whereas a lot of the other times it actually goes into her abusive childhood and why she would not want to feel powerless like this so it makes more sense and I just feel like stuff like that could be much better explored in a longer fantasy series that was aimed at an older audience. Then we have Railhead which is something that I've really never, ever heard talked about and I can see why. It's not terrible but it's just not much of anything really. The setting of this one is kinda interesting it's like humans have colonized a bunch of planets and stuff but rather than getting between them using space travel they have these gates which, you know, they're like wormholes they teleport you from one place to another and in order to get through the gates you have to be on these specially designed trains which the trains are kinda weird because the way they make them they're kind of alive and they all have personalities and stuff and so, you know, when you're going around the trains will be talking and some of them will be like sadistic and want to kill people some of them will just be really nice and friendly it's kinda bizarre and also beyond that the whole of human space is actually controlled by a group of artificial intelligences which exist in the future version of the internet and I mean, that's... both of those are really cool ideas and then we have the main character who's a guy named Zen and he is... he's just kind of an asshole, you know, like he's a petty thief who rides the rails, goes around to different planets steal stuff and then comes back home to live off of it and he doesn't do this because he's forced to or anything he's not an orphan he is very poor but he has opportunities to get a job he just really doesn't want to because he finds this lifestyle much more exciting and much more rewarding, I guess so right off the bat, we have a setting and a main character that are really really interesting and unique but the thing is that the book never really goes all in on any of that like Zen, for example as the story goes on he just kinda turns into a good guy later on and I'm not saying that somebody turning into a better person has to be a compelling character because it certainly can but the thing is that I liked Zen at the beginning because he was kind of a dick, you know he wasn't an awful person, he was just kind of a dick it would be like if they tried to make a third Deadpool movie and in that movie, Deadpool decided you know what, I don't want to kill people anymore I want to go around and help people and then he stops making such dark jokes and all that okay, maybe it's nice to see him become a better person but you would be losing out on all the stuff that made him a good character to begin with and same with the government structure and the setting of this world is that they never go all in with it, you know it's just kinda like the AI are really just in the background and they tell other people what to do so the real face of everything is an emperor it's just like, it's missed potential you know, and there is one character in here who is really really interesting his name is uh, Raven and he's really cool but I don't think he's gonna play a role in this series going forward because I know there are sequels to this but I don't know if I'm ever gonna read them so overall it's fine, I guess like no, no, that's it, it's fine maximum ride forever so I talked about this one in my the rise and fall of maximum ride video and I'm not gonna go into super deep detail here because I feel like I've already said enough there but basically maximum ride forever is the final book in the maximum ride series and what I do wanna say is that while this is a bad ending it's better than it could have been because originally the series was going to end with Angel which was book 7 and then it was going to end with Nevermore which was book 8 and then it, maximum ride forever came out and that's for real the last one and the thing is if it had ended with Angel or Nevermore there still would have been a lot of plot threads that hadn't been wrapped up properly whereas with maximum ride forever once I got to the end it was bad but I wasn't wondering like well wait, what happened to that guy did people wind up doing or what happened to this place like we knew, we had all the answers to that so that was not, I don't wanna say satisfying but like it's much better than it could have been the only other thing I will say about this book is that at the end of the last one the world got destroyed because the heroes failed to save it and so this one is showing them deal with the consequences of that failure and that is a ballsy move on James Patterson's part I'll give him that the issue with it like I said in my other video is that like it's it makes all their struggles before this seem kinda pointless though because they spent many books trying to save the world and so it just, I don't know it does, it's a double edged sword there but you know it did it did something right and it did wrap up the whole story so I guess it could have been a lot worse but it's still pretty bad and finally I wanna talk about the cheerleaders now I did bring this one up in my response to Elliott Brooks video not that long ago and I'm not gonna get into details here cause I don't wanna get demonetized here too but basically it deals with some really really dark dark stuff that teenagers sometimes have to put up with and it's uh it's not treated with kid loves I'll say that it's treated very respectfully, very maturely and it it did make me extremely angry while reading but it also gave me a new perspective by the end I was thinking like wow that's that's uh that's something so the plot to this if you didn't know is basically just that there's a teenage girl named Monica who five years before the story starts a bunch of cheerleaders all died at her high school including her older sister there were two of them that died in a car crash two of them were murdered and her sister committed suicide and she discovered some evidence that says like hey maybe these were all connected and maybe the police got something wrong when they were investigating so the story is just her going over the mystery of what happened and like I said a lot of dark stuff that's the main reason that I love this book so much because I did give it you know five stars and even with the five stars I will admit that there are issues like every book that I love that much is going to have issues like that and in this case the mystery really isn't that good I mean I've read worse but like the reveal of what's going on is kind of cheesy but also kind of like sad and realistic and you're thinking oh man that I guess that's how life works sometimes there are a couple of little tiny details throughout the book that are inconsistent like for example at one point there's a character who's mentioned to be 24 but then later they say he's 27 and that's not a huge deal on its own but this is a mystery story and when you're writing a mystery everything has to line up perfectly because every little detail could be important and every little detail could be the one that makes the reader go ah ha and figure out what's going on and so yeah little inconsistencies like that are a huge huge problem in a mystery story but I mean at the end of the day I'm not going to be looking back on that I'm going to be looking back at like the character of Monica and how she dealt with a lot of nasty shit that was thrown her way and how she grew up looking at that gave me a different perspective on stuff that happened in my own life and well obviously that's not going to be the same for everybody you know like at the end of the day all reviews are opinion obviously but still like this one I guess if it sounds like a fun mystery to you maybe not fun but if the idea of murder mystery kind of appeals to you go ahead and check it out it's it's fine in that regard but if it doesn't then I don't know if the rest will appeal to you more as much as it did to me so that's all for today there will probably be a part 3 at some point I don't know if there will be a part 4 because like I have a long list of stuff I want to get to but I don't know if it's long enough for part 4 I don't know we'll see but you know thanks for watching thanks to all my patrons including Abhiraj Singh Apo Sevalainen Christopher Hawken David Martinez Joseph Penderraft and Melanie Austin and all the others whose names you see here you guys are great thanks to everyone else who watched I think I already said that whatever please continue watching like comments blah blah blah bye