Okay, hi guys. So this video is going to be really long, I can already tell you that. I'm going to be talking about a ton of books today. Initially when I was thinking about this video, I was thinking, "I'm going to make a time limit where I can only talk about the plot for 30 seconds or 60 seconds or whatever" and that just made me really anxious even thinking about it, I didn't want you guys to feel anxious watching it, so I hope that this is just a chill video. You can put me on the background, maybe clean up your room a little bit, get some snacks, do some stretching maybe. We're just going to talk about YA slash new adult fantasy. I am not going to be talking about these books because I have only read one book in the series but I can tell you that I really really enjoyed some of these books. All of these, I encourage you to read. I'm just simply not talking about them because I haven't, I haven't read enough of this series yet, we're talking about the series as a whole. In 2020, pretty much all that I did was read young adult or fantasy in some way so I'm going to go over the 16 series series? series? How I'm gonna divide this up: we are going to be doing the bottom seven, the top seven, and the top two. I know that doesn't make sense but that's how we're gonna do it. Within those categories, within the top seven and within the bottom seven, there is no particular order. Do not make me order sixteen series. I will not do it, I can't, except for you know what - you know what number one's gonna be. Some of these are not finished, I will put down below if the series is finished or not or if I simply haven't finished them. Is that all? Yes. These are gonna be pretty much no spoiler. Longest intro ever - let's jump in. Okay starting off with the bottom seven and I actually, as I'm looking at this now, I realized that the very first series I'm going to talk about... isn't a fantasy! I don't know why it's on this list, I don't know why I thought that it was a fantasy but it is actually just a young adult series. There's no magic in this but I'm still going to talk about it because I already wrote it down and I have you here, so let's talk about it. I read The Selection and this is a finished series but I actually only read three of the [five] because the final two books actually have a big time jump and you're following sort of the next generation and I wasn't interested in reliving the selection again. And I'm not saying The Selection is a bad book, I'm just saying wasn't ready to go down that road again. The Selection is often compared to the bachelorette or the bachelor because it takes place in very far in the future in the United States after society kind of collapsed and they revamped society to have a essentially a caste system. So if you are ranked number one, you are royalty, all the way down until I think it's level eight where you are basically like an untouchable. You are, you can't even get work, you aren't even good enough to be a servant. Our main girl America is ranked number five so they're still pretty low, they're really struggling and her family are technically in the artist class so she is a musician and a singer. The prince, once he becomes marrying age, he basically has like the bachelorette happen, or the bachelor? I don't, I don't watch this show so I don't know which one it is. He just takes a bunch of eligible young ladies, he takes all their pictures and then he picks them out and he gets a group of them to come to his palace and live there until he picks a bride and that's what his dad and mom did that's what he's gonna do and of course America gets picked. The thing about this book is that it was just really easy. Like I could tell what was going to happen and all of the crisis moments you knew how it was going to be resolved and you knew that it was going to be resolved quickly and cleanly and it really was. It was just a book that I wasn't worried for any of the characters at any point. I was just like, yep it's all gonna work out in the end. If that plot interests you, I would recommend that you read it. It was fun, you know what that's what it is. I'm not usually really into that so I wasn't super enthused by it but it wasn't like a bad book at all and it's not a fantasy so let's move on because I can't understand why I put that on my list. Past Cari is a mess. The first actual YA slash new adult fantasy that I read is the Serpent and Dove and the sequel Blood and Honey. And this is an unfinished series, there will be a third - I don't know how many there will be but unfinished. And this takes place in a French-speaking place where there are witches and there are normal people and within the normal people there is a class called Chaussers who are kind of like warrior-priests. They're very conservative, very religious, they're kind of like monks. They are celibate, they can't get married, etc. The head dude is like a bishop I think. Of course our main girl is a witch - kind of undercover, she keeps it on the down-low. And she's basically kind of like - a thief is what she does, she doesn't like to use her magic and she just kind of, you know, does her thing. She has a little run in with the law, whoopsy daisy, and for some reason she has to marry a Chausser and I actually heard from Cindy's review of the book - which you can watch, which was quite funny - that the author is a big fan of Sarah J Maas and you can feel that, to the point where some of the characters, like some of the dialogue, and some of the
scenes even, it just felt like a kind of watered-down Sarah J Maas. It's got the forced marriage trope, it's got the one character being super conservative and celibate and the other one being like all sexy, it's got the enemies to lovers trope, it's got the oops there's only one bed trope. you know. And of course there is this huge rift between the witches and the not witches, throughout the novel it kind of reaches this boiling point and there's going to be a little fight and that's all I can really tell you about it. The thing that I didn't really love about this series is that as I said it was kind of like a watered down Sarah j Maas so it felt like something I had already read but that wasn't really good and also this is definitely supposed to be a plot point, like it's part of the series, but one of the characters really changes their personality - it's as if you don't even know them anymore and I know, I know it's part of the plot but to have it go for the whole book it was kind of, I don't know it just for me it was a little annoying to read. Also in the second book, I don't know if maybe I was just reading it wrong but for the first book you were kind of there for everything, like chronologically everything made sense, but in the second book there were suddenly times where like she needs to get from point A to point B and in the first book we would have been there for the whole journey but in the second one it's like she just gets there overnight like - I don't know, it the chronology, the pacing of the plot was very weird. There were just points that were missing. The first book was whatever, the second book I didn't like. I am
going to read the third book because I want to know what happens but yeah that's Serpent and Dove - meh but okay. It had all the ingredients. Okay next up is The Mortal Instruments and I did actually reread this. It's like five, six books or something like that. I read this back in high school and rereading it again I was like, man, I am surprised that my high school self finished this. It is Cassandra Clare's, I think it's her first novel ever? It is her first series within The Shadowhunter world and shadowhunters are people who are descended from angels and they fight demons, and normal people aka mundanes, can't see them. They can't see this entire world that exists, so like vampires, werewolves, shadowhunters, etc invisible. Demons, invisible. Until we meet Clary who is our mundane girl who just one day sees a bunch of shadowhunters and they see her see them and they're like 'this doesn't make sense' So the book is basically her discovering her past, unlocking a lot of secrets that her mother kept from her, finding her mother, stuff is going down in the shadowhunter world - as it always is, they don't ever get a break. The reason it's in the bottom seven is because number one, this, I believe like I said I think this is her first fully published work - you can feel that she came straight from fan fiction and that's not to say anything negative against fan fiction but it was just a lot longer than it needed to be as fan fiction tends to be, and it had some tropes that got her in a bit of trouble I would say. She definitely plays on the potential incest trope which didn't need to happen, there could have been, there were other things she could have done. She chose that one, it's her book that's her thing. And there was so much world-building in this. So much world building. That being said, if you read that book, the rest of the world, the rest of the series within that world, are really rich. You can go into them knowing everything, so it's cool that she created this really rich world but also it was just, you know, like five books Cassie, it's a lot. I liked the first book because it had my vampires, I had my werewolves, it had, you know, everything that it needed, but then once it got into the whole like incest thing I was like - you know, we could resolve this in other ways. There's literally a war going on. [I just want to tell you that some people have war in their country] I also think that some of her other work is so much stronger and really impacted me so I'm a little bit harder on the ones that didn't impact me as much. That is Mortal Instruments. If you haven't read it yet and it's in the shadowhunter world you might like it and they show up in other books - these characters - so it helps to read them all. She's crafty like that, you gotta read all of
her books. Next on my lower tier is Throne of Glass. So many of you guys really like Throne of Glass, I'm so sorry but it is another long series. I didn't finish. It essentially follows our main girl who has just been taken out of prison because she is an assassin...and this is gonna be a really bad plot summary because like I said it's really long. She gets taken out of
prison and brought to the royal palace where - I don't know what else really happened - there's just like unrest and bad things and she has to find her place in the world...literally the description that I wrote. The plot just gets thicker and bigger and there's just there's so many characters, there's so much going on. The thing is, there's a lot of romance, you fall hard for the romantic character and then they don't end up together - classic Sarah J Maas - but it was just so many of them that I was like, listen, this is either going to be a romance or this is going to be like a kind of war story. Make one the main plot and make one the subplot, right? But they, it felt like it was two main plots and it was a lot for my brain to handle. I also, just for me personally, not super interested in like lots of war scenes. There were just a lot of fighting scenes, it kind of got a little much for me to the point where I started to skim and then they introduced a whole new troop of characters and at that point I was like 'who the hell are they?' I just felt really lost so if you are into a fantasy that that does have a lot of combat and politics, you might like it but for me it was just so much was going on that I... yes. Just a lot going on. Ooh next up is A Curse So Dark and Lonely and this is not finished - there are only two and I believe the third one will be coming out quite soon. The first book especially is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. We have one girl who is from DC and what's interesting about her is that she has cerebral palsy and that is brought throughout the plot, that she does have a physical disability which I thought was quite refreshing. She witnesses a kidnapping and she decides to stop it but instead of stopping it, she gets herself kidnapped. Oops. And she basically just gets taken into this fairytale world and it is only the prince dude and his one guard - I've forgotten everyone's names, I'm not going to talk about names at all in this video by the way, I've literally forgotten everyone's name. She slowly but surely finds out that she has to live there to hopefully fall in love you know - Beauty and the Beast - to hopefully fall in love and break the curse but these two guys, these just like bachelors living in this like
weird house, which is all like enchanted - there's always music, playing it's really weird - they're kind of like resigned: "We've run out of time, I don't really think you're gonna fall in love with me, just, you know, do whatever" It was very chill like he wasn't forcing himself on her but you know it was just a beauty and the beast retelling. It is what it is. The second one, however, did something that I don't super - I like love and hate this - when the second book (looking at you Sarah j Maas) a second book in the series makes you hate the characters that you were just taught to love in the first book. So the second one, I actually liked it more than the first one because this is not a classic beauty in the beast retelling. It actually follows a different character and I liked that character a lot more so if you didn't like the first one, I would implore you to try the second one out if you can get through a beauty and the beast retelling, I know a lot of people don't like that but I thought it was pretty refreshing. It's interesting that it has the connection between the real modern world and a fairy tale world, especially because there's a character that's a doctor and he's like - what what's going on?! Modern medicine - where is it!? - and I'm definitely excited to read the third one but yeah it was, it was one of those things where I definitely liked the second one more. A Curse So Dark and Lonely. Next is the Dark Artifices - artifices? - This is another one of Cassandra Clare's, another one that didn't hit me super hard because I have to compare it to her other series. Mortal Instruments took place mostly in New York City. The Dark Artifices - DA, DA takes place mostly in Los
Angeles, so we're at the LA kind of headquarters for shadowhunters and this family lives there and we're basically just kind of following their life, there's of course a romantic struggle. This takes place after the Mortal Instruments so we kind of see the aftermath of the war that we had just seen. There was this treaty brought up that pissed a lot of people off. Anybody who had a drop of fairy blood, fey blood, were exiled which includes some family members of this particular family. And after that, there's a lot going on, like things are just clearly not right. There's a lot of weird demon stuff going on, warlocks are starting to get sick, fairies start popping out of nowhere, like the Hunt people just start coming out. There's just a lot of stuff that they need to deal with. It was fine, it was very classic Cassie Clare. The characters, the banter, it was fun. I liked a lot of the characters. She does a very interesting job of representing different kinds of people. There were a couple characters that were definitely on the autistic spectrum, there were people who were of many different sexualities, she even has the possibility of a poly relationship, stuff like that. Love her
or hate her, she gives it a grand old try. There is, however, I swear to god I was thinking about making an entire separate video about this one scene which I'm not going to go into right now but there is like, there, Cassie, there is just one scene that takes place on a beach, a romantic scene on a beach, and it had me laughing out loud because it was supposed to be really romantic and I was just like howling because she was trying to be vague about certain things that were happening to the point where it was too vague and I was like 'what exactly happened on that beach???' and there's just things that don't match up and it's so funny. If you know the scene that I'm talking about, I swear to god I'm gonna make a whole separate video like just doing a dramatic reading of it because it doesn't make any sense and it is so funny. And yeah, you know it was just a good time. There are vampires that own a pizzeria. It's just, you know, stuff like that, it's interesting, it just didn't hit me as hard as the series that you're all waiting for me to talk about which will be coming later. If you liked people from her other series, a lot of people are in this - your faves will probably make a little cameo. And last in my bottom seven is The Vicious or the Villains series, I believe it is called. This is by VE Schwab. I believe it's only a duology, I don't know if she will continue it. But it takes place at a university where two best friends are really obsessed with this idea of EOs, I believe they're called, like "extraordinary" I think. I should have looked this up before, anyway! There are these people that have powers sort of like x-men. They do a bunch of experiments and try to figure out how to get powers of their own and, no spoilers, when they succeed the two of them end up splitting kind of as far apart as possible when it comes to what you should do with these powers. One is rather religious, he's kind of like a born again kind of person so he's very obsessed with god and morality and all this stuff and then the other one is kind of like....not. They kind of go their separate ways and they try and find a bunch of other people like them and stuff happens from there. It just didn't knock my socks off. Again, I'm also comparing it to Darker Shades of Magic by VE Schwab which I absolutely adore so it was kind of hard for her to beat herself. This one was rather dark. VE Schwab is very good at writing characters that are not good. Neither of the main characters are like the good character, they're both pretty horrible people and so the fact that she writes it like that it's very interesting. For my reading pleasure it's not my favorite thing. I like to really love and root for one particular character but I will hand it to her that she does that very well, she is able to create these complex not-very-great people. So yeah I would say great but not my favorite VE Schwab. Vicious. Okay, now for my top seven! First is the Daevabad trilogy. It is finally finished, I remember loving City of Brass, I really did love City
of Brass, Kingdom of Copper got complicated and confusing and I haven't actually read Empire of Gold yet. So what is it about? It begins in Cairo where our girl Nahri I believe her name is, she has a couple little itty bitty powers here and there but really all she does is she's kind of like a con woman - she does like minor crimes in order to, you know, live her life, do her thing. She accidentally does this - she's like paid to do a kind of dance? I forget what exactly happens, it's in the very beginning, but she accidentally summons a djinn. Whoops. So this djinn is named Dara and once that happens all hell kind of breaks loose, just a bunch of - a bunch of bad stuff happens. She ends up having to flee Cairo and Dara comes with her. Because she has summoned him, he is stuck with her even though you know they don't really get along, let's just say. A lot of the book is just their journey to Daevabad or the City of Brass. I forget exactly why they're going there but they go there and we learn that there is this kind of huge political feud going on. People have a lot of different loyalties, there's a magical element to it all of this stuff, different families that people believe should be in power and Nahri is smack dab in the middle of it. All the while, Dara is just his sassy little djinn self and I actually liked the characters. I really liked Dara is mainly what I remember really liking. I remember thinking that it was beautifully written, like once you get to the city, the way that she describes it I could see it so clearly, it was really cool, but it was quite complicated. Once you started talking about the politics, there were like temples, her family background and all this. There was just - there were so many moving parts and a lot of people had different names. Depending on who was talking to who, they would use different titles and different names so it got a little confusing especially when I would put it down and maybe not read it for a couple days and come back, I'd be like 'wait who is this, who is that?' Overall, I thought it was really good. I do really need to finish I believe it's Empire of Gold, but yeah it's one of those that if I'm gonna read the third one, I definitely have to read the first and second one over again because i don't remember a thing. So yeah, the Daevabad trilogy. Next up really quick is the Shadow and Bone trilogy which is finished and this is the first series within the Grishaverse by my queen Leigh Bardugo. It follows a girl named Alina who is just kind of a normal girl but she finds out that she has a real important power - real important - and she ends up getting tied into this really nasty fight between pretty much everybody. And she does not want to be there, she literally just wanted to make maps you know, she wanted to live her life. Doesn't get to do that. I've said this before but I didn't love, out of the main characters, I really wasn't emotionally attached to any of them. I didn't really like them as people. So it was not my favorite by Leigh Bardugo for sure but it was just really wonderful to be in that world. I do really love the Grishaverse that she created so it was nice to read that. Once you get further into the series there are a few standout characters that I do actually end up loving and then they will be continued in other series - oh my god! So yeah if you're just looking for a nice fantasy, like, pretty classic: girl thrust into the spotlight, having to be this heroine and, you know, signal of revolution and she doesn't really want to be and blah blah
blah, there's kind of like a love triangle, a lot of stuff going on. It was very good, it was fine, just doesn't ever live up to another work by Leigh Bardugo. So, Shadow and Bone. Next up, yes, it did make the top seven, wouldn't you know it. Me and this series, we have such a weird relationship. The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. Here's the thing, here's the thing guys: No, I have not read the latest book, there's - actually just came out very recently I believe - a prequel where we get to read the childhood stories of the main male character Cardan and, here's the thing about Cardan, I hate him in the first book oh my gosh I hate him in the first book but I actually recently kind of reread it I read the second and third one I really liked him in the second and third one so if we could just kind of erase Cardan from the first one or like change a couple things, we'd be grand, this would be even higher ranked. It is basically about a girl and her sisters who are taken back to Fairy. Jude is the main girl Jude's half sister is actually half fairy and her dad comes and is like 'all right all you back to Fairy' so Jude and her twin sister are human and they get raised in Fairyland and their father, their like kidnapped adopted father, is kind of a high-ranking general so she goes to school, she's raised alongside all these fairy kids, she is picked on a [ __ ] ton and all she wants to do is prove herself and become like a knight or like a soldier - she wants to gain their respect within Fairyland. Stuff goes down, stuff really goes down. There's you know a fight for the throne, all that stuff, I liked the world, I genuinely liked the world. I thought the politics - it was complex but it was easy to understand. Literally my only qualm was in the first book, the actions - oh my foot is asleep excuse me - the actions done by Cardan and the rest of his crew towards Jude were just too cruel. They were just a little too cruel and so it made me really not like Cardan as I was reading the rest of the series. So if you can get over that and you're interested in like Fae stuff, I thought this was very good, it read - it had a lot of classic fairy tale elements to it. Holly Black is like I think she's a fairy herself, I believe she even cut her ears to be Fae, so anyway, she knows what she's doing, you're in good hands if you like fairy stuff. So The Cruel Prince. Next up - I'm going to be really quick - is A Court of Thorns and
Roses. Yes, I liked it, come at me. How do I describe what happened? So the first book in the series is very much a beauty and the beast retelling. Feyre she makes little oopsy daisy, little mistake, and because of that, she is taken to the fairy lands. She is forced to just live in this palace with this dude who is basically the beast in this case and she learns that things are not going well, like there are weird monsters that keep coming into the castle grounds when they definitely
shouldn't be and stuff like that and she slowly starts to learn more about this curse that has been put on the land and all this stuff and like I said, classic beauty and the beast retelling. The series continues in a way that I will not spoil but there is basically a big ol threat to all of Fairyland, not just this particular kingdom, but everything - there's a hair - but everything. So she has to help and that's all I can say. Loved some of the characters, the banter, it's funny, it's got the Sarah J Maas lots and lots and lots and lots of romance going on, but at the same time there was just a lot of friendship building, it talks kind of about ptsd and trauma and stuff like that - I liked it, yeah I had a good time. Am I interested in reading the next one that's coming out this year? No because I believe follo- it's supposed to follow a character that I'm just not interested in. I'm okay with it ending where it ended so I will say that that series is finished but there is allegedly another kind of continuation coming this year. Next up is one that I actually haven't talked to you guys about. I know that I've talked about a lot of these before in other videos but I didn't talk about this one. I read the Cinder series and these are all retellings of different fairy tales. So obviously the first one is kind of a retelling of Cinderella but it takes place in
the way far future in I believe it's New Beijing. Our main girl Cinder is actually a cyborg - instead of losing a shoe she loses her foot - there is this whole weird war going on. The moon people are like not super chill, they're kind of like lurking up there being creepy, and then the earth people are dealing with a pandemic, a virus, a really bad flu. There's just a whole lot of weird stuff going on. Cinder ends up accidentally meeting the prince because he comes into her shop to ask her to fix his android because she's a really good mechanic and it continues from there. We end up meeting Scarlet who's a little red riding hood, sleeping beauty who lives in a satellite which I thought was really funny. I'm so sorry that I'm forgetting but we have a couple other people - the characters were fun, it was it was a fun time, there's specifically one character that reminds me a lot of Nikolai from Shadow and Bone so if you like Nikolai, I think you would like these characters. Overall, I thought it was just a fun fun little retelling. She had an idea, she went with it, I thought she ended it well. Was it really predictable? Yes. But there were enough twists and turns and enough kind of like subplots to keep me interested enough to read the whole thing and yeah I just I personally had a good time with it. I think especially for the age range that she was aiming for because it's kind of not young young adult but it's definitely on that end, I thought it was good. Next is a series we're going to talk about real quick and it is The Black Witch, that I talked about actually in my favorites of 2020 video and this is pretty much just your classic fantasy like YA fantasy. We follow our main girl who is raised in a super conservative society where you don't marry anyone outside of your race, you don't have sex until marriage and when you get married you don't just get married you get wand fasted so you, like if you even touch another person outside of your marriage you get horrifically scarred. I mean it's really conservative and straight-up racist. And her family is really into politics, her aunt is a really big player in politics and she comes to the farm where El? Ren? Rel? Rey? What's her name? Anyway, where our main girl is living with her uncle and her brothers, very secluded, and her aunt is like 'hey girl it's about time you get wand fasted' and her uncle is like 'no she has to go to school' - her uncle basically saves her from being married very young and she has to go to university and through that she meets all these people that she has been told are, you know, dirty or dangerous so a lot of the book is actually her overcoming a lot of the prejudices that she was raised with which I thought was pretty refreshing. I do think she was forgiven rather quickly. She had to like actually listen and she had to actually learn. I think that once people saw that she was doing actions to deal with her prejudices, to unlearn things, that's when people started to be like okay... When she was just sitting there like 'oh whoa was me, I'm actually poor you should be nice to me even though I'm racist' they were hard asses on her which I appreciated. And then of course there is some kind of uprising, I won't go into it too much, but did it have a lot of tropes that were super obvious? Yes, but some people read YA fantasy for those tropes. There is a love triangle, I'm just gonna tell it right here - the third book literally was written only to create a really horrific love triangle and I am pissed and I need to know what happens and we still have two more books to go - Hi friends, I'm editing this and I just found out that this is actually only gonna be four books so we only have one more book left. I don't know if she changed her mind or what happened exactly, I thought there was supposed to be five books but now there are her two novellas which I haven't read and there's only one book left which is supposedly coming out this year... and I would like it to end because I literally just can't stop thinking about who's gonna die because I've said it before but I need one of them to die because we're not doing one of these things where one of them lives sadly and alone. No. One of them needs like a heroic fiery death that's all I will - all I will accept. And finally in my top seven is Ember in the Ashes which I've talked about a lot. It takes place in a society that is loosely based off of ancient Rome apparently. There are a bunch of different kinds of people and mainly we learn about the Martials who are militant, and they have taken control of the kingdom and anyone who isn't a Martial had better just like keep their heads down shut up or they will get in big old trouble, they will get put in jail or just straight up killed etc. And then there are the Scholars who kind of used to be in power and now they are basically either have to just be like shut up keep your head down or they are part of the resistance and our main girl of course ends up being a part of the resistance. Not because she necessarily wants to make a big change but just because she wants to help her family. Part of her job is to go be a spy at the school for Martials. Then our main boy is a Martial who actually doesn't want to be a Martial but he is from a really influential family and so he kind of has to be. So they end up kind of bonding, helping each other out, and I can't say much more without spoiling it but it takes place across the entire world, there's a lot of running around, there's a lot of just really interesting things that happen but I read the last book and let me tell you, I didn't like how it ended and that's why it's not in my top two. I forget which video I talked about in but I mentioned that the author had written herself into a plot corner and I just didn't know how she was gonna get out of this corner. There's something that happens to a character and I'm like "they better resolve this, this is not how it ends she's got to fix this" and unless I read the ending wrong, because honest to god the ending was vague and I was confused so correct me if I'm wrong, but there is a thing that I wanted resolved that just wasn't resolved and there is no more series so that's the end of it I'm just gonna have to live with this. I really loved a lot of the characters, I loved the imagery, there was like an afterlife there were djinns, there were all these different things that happened so it was really rich but the way that it ended was not as strong as it began so it just kind of felt like a letdown. I would have loved a really strong ending even if it broke my heart, she just kind of left it so open and so unresolved that I was just like... So Ember in the Ashes was a great ride, not my favorite ending but an excellent series if you haven't read it yet, and now to my top two. I can put this away because I know what they are. Let's talk about it. Alright the reason why the other Cassandra Clares were ranked so low is because we're gonna talk about The Infernal Devices series. Yes, I believe there's three and it takes place in kind of Victorian London. Because of that a lot of the imagery and a lot of even the magic is tied to it's almost like steampunk ish. The whole idea of clockwork, it's a lot of small machinery and stuff like that. I just thought it was quite cool a very interesting take on it And apparently Cassandra Clare got the idea for this book, she was in a car doing press stuff in London for the Mortal Instruments and she just saw these two people on a bridge and she looked at them and she was like ha - and then poof the story came to her. So I just think it's also very romantic how the story even popped into her brain so I give it extra points just for that, for its genesis moment. It takes place in the shadowhunter world that I already talked about and it follows a girl named Tessa who has this weird family thing going on and she ends up having to live in this horrifying house. There's just a bunch of stuff that goes down there and she ends up getting rescued by the shadowhunters and she is taken to their headquarters to kind of be safe until they figure out what the hell is going on because not only was her house creepy as hell, but it was also literally demonic which is what the shadowhunters love. So they were like 'we'll deal with this, of course
we'll take care of the demons for you, we love doing that' She stays there and kind of forms a friendship with all the people in the house and she ends up being kind of in the center of this really not great little demon thing that's going on. I just thought it was a really great story, honest to god the main plot is mostly the romance that happens and it is honestly the most well done love triangle I have ever read. It was great, the characters were funny, I
honestly, I love Cassandra Clare's dialogue she has the wittiest, just these one-liners that are really funny, really entertaining, I genuinely enjoy it so if you are looking for fantasy and adventure but also heartbreak, so much heartbreak, The Infernal Devices, it's just like a classic if you're into YA fantasy you've gotta. So there's that. And last but not least of course, you knew it, you can stop the video here, bye guys thanks for watching, we're talking about Six of Crows. Six of Crows is a heist YA fantasy novel by Leigh Bardugo and basically these six people band together to steal something in order to give whoever they're working for a little advantage when it comes to this weird new drug trade that is happening and the drug trade is actually affecting the people who have magic in this world. There are people who have magic, the grisha, and then there are people who don't. And this new weird drug that is going around strongly and negatively affects the grisha so there's a lot of reason why they want to get it into the right hands but mainly it's just they want their money. And the characters are so great, I've said it so much and Six of Crows, if you haven't read it yet, it's a duology, it's two books, read them please. Put that on your list of things to do for 2021. Read Six of Crows. Thanks. And that is the end! You have reached it, wow, I have to really hold myself back because I do actually want to talk about a couple of the one-off books that I've read so maybe another, in another video I will but once again these are the other books in a series that I haven't finished yet. I've only read one book out of the series but again these were all, I will recommend them all to you. There they are. And if you've reached this point and you're like "gee Cari, I'm not surprised but this list is real hite!" Yes. YA fantasy is hella overrun with white authors, this is a really white list, I agree, but actually I'm already off to a good start - I have coming
up in January, I have a couple YA fantasies science fiction, coming your way which are written by own voices, BIPOC authors, so hopefully next year the list will be a hell of a lot less white but that being said if you are interested in books by BIPOC or own voices authors, there is a bookstore called Amplify Bookstore - it is based out of Australia and they focus on BIPOC authors. If you follow their instagram they have a lot of really good recommendations stuff like that but they have a little discount code for you this isn't sponsored but they made a discount code CARI10 for 10% off until the end of January and they have global shipping so if you're interested in getting some physical books and supporting some diverse authors check them out, 10% off! And yes if I didn't mention a series let me know down below which one I've missed. A lot of them i might have actually read previously so you know Darker Shade of Magic all that good stuff but if not leave your recommendations down below. I'm losing my mind and I'm losing my voice so thank you for joining me, I hope that this gave you some series to jump into and I will see you guys next time. I gotta like relax my face, my cheeks hurt, yeah thank you again and I hope you enjoyed your snack or your stretching or whatever activities you were doing while watching this and I will see you next time thanks as always, bye!
