The Saucy Wenches Book Club

Pierce Brown’s Red Rising trilogy is a roller-coaster ride of action-packed space opera that kept me gasping and guessing right up until the last page.

About what would happen next (I was usually wrong).
About who would live to fight another day.
About whether I’d survive the next round of heart palpitations to finish the story.

These books ripped my heart to shreds and stomped all over the pieces a few times. But as a trilogy, they soared with intricate plots, flat-out amazing world building — that expanded with each book, and a hellaciously satisfying ending. The characters were diverse and often offbeat, with fascinating histories and a continuously evolving social dynamic that drove many plots.

This is rollicking sci-fi epic at its best, augmented with the excellent social and political commentary and philosophical introspection I expect in dystopian drama. If that whets your appetite for literary adventure, I hope you’ll let me tell you more about each book below. Minimal sp…

Violence is a tool. It is meant to shock. To change. Instead, they normalize and celebrate it. And create a culture of exploitation where they are so entitled to sex and power that when they are told no, they pull a sword and do as they like.
~ Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Ruza.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a beautiful book you’re about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.”
~ Laini Taylor,
Strange the Dreamer

The dream chooses the dreamer,
not the other way around. Strange the Dreamer tells the story of Lazlo Strange, a young orphan boy in a faraway land who dreams of magic.

Lazlo is obsessed with Weep, a mythical, Unseen city that has become “lost” because everyone has forgotten it. He remembers the exact moment when the city’s real name and history disappeared from the minds of everyone around him, so he knows what others no longer believe – that magic exists, because only magic could erase Weep from the world.

Lazlo also knows that fairy tales are real. And his dreams are magic. What he never foresees is how much the life he dreams for himself will become a magical fairy tale.

Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.
~ Laini Taylor, Muse of Nightmares

Amezrou. Once upon a time, a little boy in a frost-rimed orchard had roared it out like thunder, like an avalanche, like the war cry of the seraphim who had cleansed the world of demons, only to have it stolen from his mind between one slash of his apple bough sword and the next. Now it was back, and it felt, as it ever had, like calligraphy, if calligraphy were written in honey.
~ Laini Taylor, Muse of Nightmares

Now that 2018 is behind us (and I hope the door SMACKED it on the way out), we can finally let out a big sigh of relief and reflect on some of the finer points of the year.

I don’t know about you, but I spent every single unscheduled minute with my nose buried deeply in a book, intent on escape into exotic realms or adventures. On the plus side, that means I read a lot of books that enthralled me. So I want to share four that I thought were particularly good, but never had time to review, before embarking on a new year of discoveries.

These books were deviations from the usual types of urban fantasy and dystopian sci-fi I read most of the year. They were from four different genres, led by strong but quite diverse female characters: an immortal witch goddess, a socially awkward orphan, an identity-swapping avenger, and backstabbing corporate ladder climbers. I wasn’t specifically looking for books about women, but isn’t it great that there are such a variety of female protagonists to…

For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions.
~ Laini Taylor,
Strange the Dreamer

It was true what Hermes said. Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

~ Madeline Miller, Circe

But strangers aren't family. Meg will never be there. I'll never belong. I'll be a stranger everywhere I go for the rest of my life.

Jane Doe
~~Victoria Helen Stone

That would make a good bumper sticker, actually. My other car is a big penis. My creative talents are wasted in law.

~ Victoria Helen Stone, Jane Doe

Which of us are willing to lose ourselves enough to give another person a chance? I can’t lose myself. I don’t have enough feelings to fuel the fantasy or ignore the warnings.

~ Victoria Helen Stone, Jane Doe

People cause pain. Even good people hurt those they love. We all do it because we can't help it. Most of us aren't evil; we're just stupid and flawed and not careful with others.

Jane Doe
~~Victoria Helen Stone

In case it's unclear, I'm not a believer. 

Where I grew up, everyone believed in God. Everyone worshipped Jesus. And they were all poor and miserable and suffering. They lost jobs and children and dignity, but that only made them pray harder. I recognize a con when I see one.

Jane Doe
~~Victoria Helen Stone

“You’re sexy as hell,” he says. Lots of men have said this to me. They like a woman with no shame. We’re rare, you see, because we’re told to be ashamed of everything every day by everyone. Ashamed to give them what they want, ashamed not to want to give it to them. Ashamed to show our average bodies, ashamed not to have a perfect one. I have no idea how normal women date. The world seems like it’d be an unbearable place for people with real feelings.

~ Victoria Helen Stone, Jane Doe

Frankly, fictional people appeal far more to me than real people do. In fiction, the choices have to make sense. The timeline proceeds rationally. Emotions are explained to me. Characters feel the way they are supposed to feel in response to the actions of others. Nobody stays in a bad situation because of inertia or low self-esteem. That would make for a truly shitty story. But in real life … God, in real life people so rarely behave in ways that improve their circumstances.

Why?

Why, why, why? This is one of those things I’ll never understand. All I know is books are better.

~ Victoria Helen Stone, Jane Doe

Erections and guilt can’t exist in the same plane. One makes way for the other.

~ Victoria Helen Stone, Jane Doe

“I have to create, or it was all for nothing. I have to create, or I will crumple up with despair and never leave my bed. I have to create because I have no other way of voicing this.” Her hand rested on her heart, and my eyes burned. “It is hard,” the weaver said, her stare never leaving mine, “and it hurts, but if I were to stop, if I were to let this loom or the spindle go silent …” She broke my gaze at last to look to her tapestry. “Then there would be no Hope shining in the Void.” ~ A Court of Frost and Starlight, Sarah J. Maas

The Saucy Wenches Book of the Month for May is A Court of Frost and Starlight, book 3.1 in the wildly popular PNR series A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.

If you’ve already read ACoTaR, then you’re probably as anxious as I am to get your hot little hands on the next book. So is Wench Kathi, who got hooked after I enthused about it.

If you haven’t read ACoTaR, wonder why it has so many new fans, and are waffling about whether to try it, we’re both here to pique your interest light a fire under you! You can thank us later!

We just loved these books! They made us giddy with anticipation, like in our early Wench days, when we first fangirled into the wee hours over our extraordinary discoveries like Cat and Bones, Mac and Barrons, Ethan and Merit, Jamie and Claire... *dreamy sigh*  These books sparked that special kind of excitement we rarely feel when we read now, and made us realize how much we’ve missed it.
“The first book is a magical fairy tale. The second is an ep…

When I read Annihilation last fall, I was intrigued, repulsed, mystified, enchanted, horrified, compelled, absorbed, and ultimately so unable to articulate what had happened that I didn’t attempt a review. But it has never stopped growing on me, new insights twining around in my brain. It’s insidious.

Then the movie happened. I. Had. To. Go. I didn’t think anyone could film the book, and I was on Cloud 9 when I saw the abundance of rave critical reviews. It got compared to Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey! It got called “stunning” and the “Best Sci-Fi Film in Years” that “ranks among great philosophical sci-fi”! And though there were many differences from the book, it sounded almost as batshitcrazybrilliant as the book!!

Which means there are now two equally haunting versions of this story for me to wonder WTF happened.

I might not have all the answers, but I’ve certainly enjoyed replaying scenes in my mind and pondering the possibilities. And I suspect that’s what’s importa…