Miss Phi's Bookshelf: February 2016

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Judge It By Its Cover: Covers Revealed - February 2016

2/29/2016

book review

Review: Fire Falling

2/26/2016

Title:
Fire Falling
(Air Awakens #2)

Author:
Elise Kova

★★★★☆

4 out of 5 stars

Vhalla Yarl marches to war as property of the Solaris Empire. The Emperor counts on her to bring victory, the Senate counts on her death, and the only thing Vhalla can count on is the fight of her life. As she grapples with the ghosts of her past, new challenges in the present threaten to shatter the remnants of her fragile sanity. Will she maintain her humanity? Or will she truly become the Empire’s monster?

This review may contain minor spoilers regarding the first book of the Air Awakens series. Continue at your own risk.

This series has positioned itself as my favorite series of the moment, it has elemental magic, romance and several kick-ass moments that make it simply irresistible. Fire Falling continues the story of our favorite -and so far only- Windwalker, Vhalla Yarl, after losing her freedom to the empire; she is now considered a weapon and not a person, she marches to war in order to win her freedom back by winning the emperor's long lasting war.

Now, things get a little complicated here, Vhalla being a Windwalker is considered a threat to all, people judge her by the events transcurred at the end of Air Awakens and even though she wasn't the one to blame no one seems to believe her, they all despise and fear her. Vhalla really grows as a character, she has to be trained to be able to survive, to become a warrior and with it, the monster they all think she is. I am amazed, Vhalla is all I want my main characters to be, she does get affected by the circumstances surrounding her and is obligated to change, for better or worse.

The elemental magic is my favorite part of this series, the way it works and how elements differ from each other not only because their essence but what it allows others to do with it: creating illusions, healing, among others. We get to know more about it by meeting new characters or reading about them training, though not as much as I would have liked to, I feel most parts in this book were oriented to develop relationships between characters and we got not much world building. Also, even though Vhalla's quest to finding the Axe didn't go anywhere there was a lot of action, gory action, which I honestly liked, Fire Falling makes Vhalla badass.

The relationship between Aldrik and Vhalla is, of course, an important plot line in the story and all I can say about it is that what was cemented on book 1 gets to grow in book 2, things between them get a little complicated and some new characters may shake things a little; not to mention the Emperor's despise for Vhalla forces Aldrik to consider every move he makes in order to protect her from his father. Guys, they have become my OTP, their relationship is beautiful.

One of the best parts of this book has to be the ending, it got me like "what?!" but in a good way; it was unexpected and I had to lay in bed for a couple of minutes in order to able to process it. And here I am now, wondering where is the author going to take us next, what will happen to Aldrik and Vhalla, if their relationship will become serious or if there is going to be a relationship at all. But more importantly: will Vhalla complete her secret quest? And if she does, how is this going to affect the war?

Have you guys started this series yet? If you could be a bearer of elemental magic, which element would you choose? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy reading,

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Judge It By Its Cover: The Shadow Queen

2/20/2016

This cover is the reason this section even exists. No, seriously. About two months ago, we were browsing through Behance and we found a project from Sean Freeman, the designer who created the cover for The Shadow Queen. We immediately added it to our collections and decided to integrate a section in this blog that would allow us to combine our profession as Visual Information Designers with our love for books. The Shadow Queen was published on February 16th and now we finally get to talk about the cover!

When you buy a book, all you see is the final image, right there, finished, in front of you. Like we talked about on a previous post, if this design is good, you won't even stop and pay attention to it because it already conveyed the intended message. However, when you go behind the scenes and see what actually went into making this final product, you realize the process is no easy task and it is important to take a moment to appreciate it.

In fact, finding this project for the cover of The Shadow Queen is the reason the book is on our TBR list. Not only do we absolutely love the design, but getting to see the process actually raised its value. It's not only difficult to come up with a concept that will encapsulate the essence of a book, but to then have to figure out the best way to materialize it to get the desired outcome, that's where true creativity really shines.

This is a typography-based design and an image-based design at the same time. That is a really interesting thing to accomplish. You have a graphic element as the visual priority while at the same time having the type be at center stage, and they aren't competing with each other, instead they highlight one another in a truly perfect duet.

Simplicity was the first word that came to mind when we were trying to describe this cover. It's a very clean, uncluttered design and doesn't need any extra elements. This is also another reason why we loved seeing this project. For such a beautifully simple end result, everything behind it had to be incredibly complex.

There is also something to be said about the technique Freeman chose to create this cover. To get the realism of a carved apple, he actually carved an apple!

Needless to say, we can't wait to read this book and to then keep the beautiful cover on our bookshelf, looking awesome!

Read you soon,

___________________
About the designer:

Sean Freeman lives in East London, he creates typographic designs and illustrations for a varied range of clients, from advertising to music, editorial and publishing. His work has been featured in numerous books and magazines and is known to be unique, considered both dynamic and organic. See this project HERE

top 5 wednesdays

T5W: Best Suggested Books You Loved

2/17/2016

adult

Review: Mercy Thompson Series (books 1-4)

2/13/2016

Mercy Thompson Series
books reviewed:
1. Moon Called
2. Blood Bound
3. Iron Kissed
4. Bone Crossed

Author:
Patricia Briggs

★★★☆☆

3.5 out of 5 stars

Mercedes "Mercy" Thompson is a talented Volkswagen mechanic living in the Tri-Cities area of Washington. She also happens to be a walker, a magical being with the power to shift into a coyote at will. Mercy's next-door neighbor is a werewolf. Her former boss is a gremlin. And she's fixing a bus for a vampire. This is the world of Mercy Thompson, one that looks a lot like ours but is populated by those things that go bump in the night. And Mercy's connection to those things is about to get her into some serious hot water...

This is one of those series that I avoided for a long time due to its sexualized covers -which I shall discuss more on a future Judge it by its cover post- but after reading several reviews pointing out how the covers were misleading, I decided to give it a shot and here I am. You might be wondering why there's only one review, well you see, I read the first four books front to back one after the other, so it is a little bit hard for me to separate them without constantly referring to one another or repeating myself. So I will start with a quote:

When we are first introduced to Mercy on Moon Called, the author describes her as a strong hardworking independent woman with a shapeshifting power. She is funny, a smart ass, knows her limits, excels at being a mechanic, and when she gets closely involved with a death-threatening paranormal mysteries she has no other option but to solve them. I like Mercy even though she has the tendency of putting herself at risk over and over again.

One of the things I found hard to get used to was to the fact that she had to be submissive when she was around werewolves, especially male ones. Apparently werewolves are stuck in another century and think females are meant to be as strong or important as their male partner is, I thought this was retrograde thinking and Mercy herself says it several times, I understand it works for the story and was meant to be like that but it feels as if Mercy was the only important female in this alpha male world.

When it comes to the romance I really liked what the author did with the love triangle and this might be a first time for me. Mercy has to choose between what she once considered the love of her life, and her stubborn neighbor, both of them seem to respect Mercy and once I moved through this series I realized it was obvious whom she was gonna choose, but her reasons, her way of thinking about it was very grounded.

I really enjoyed reading about Mercy's adventures in the first two books, the third one was a little bit boring but the ending was shocking enough to make me want to keep reading, but when I made it to the fourth book I found it hard to believe Mercy hadn't really change even though there's more than enough reasons for her to do so. Which made me think if there's a possibility for the story to get better, she has already been hunted by a demon, threatened and hunted by the vampires, solved a murder, chosen between two extremely hot werewolves that fancied her and fed her cat.

My rating for this series is 3.5 out of 5, where the first two books are a solid 4 and the other two are a 3.

Did you like this review? Have you guys read this series? Should I give the rest of the books a chance? Let me know what you think in the comments below and happy reading.

book review

Review: Winter

2/12/2016

Title:
Winter
(The Lunar Chronicles #4)

Author:
Marissa Meyer

★★★☆☆

3 out of 5 stars

Princess Winter is admired by the Lunar people for her grace and kindness, and despite the scars that mar her face, her beauty is said to be even more breathtaking than that of her stepmother, Queen Levana.

Winter despises her stepmother, and knows Levana won’t approve of her feelings for her childhood friend—the handsome palace guard, Jacin. But Winter isn’t as weak as Levana believes her to be and she’s been undermining her stepmother’s wishes for years. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even have the power to launch a revolution and win a war that’s been raging for far too long.

Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter defeat Levana and find their happily ever afters?

I am not a fan of the Lunar Chronicles, part of me struggles to see why people love it so much. I even read all the books patiently waiting for the series to get better, hoping I would find out what it was that I missing and get to love this series as much as everybody else seems to.

Needless to say, I wasn't impressed with the story since the very beginning, I have said it before and I will say it again, all the books in the Lunar Chronicles follow the exact same formula: heroine that excels in doing something, with a strong female figure -for good or bad- and a charming love interest. I had high expectations after finished reading Cress, I thought Winter was going to be the exception to this rule and it was highly disappointing to find out that even though her character was slightly different from the rest - because that girl is crazy- Winter felt like a stranger in what was supposed to be her story, and now that I think about it, she was useless to Cinder's cause, she was her looks, a public figure that speaks of kindness and change but doesn't do anything herself.

Truth be told, I thought this book dragged too much, it was 800+ pages long and the characters were just running around talking about revolution but what kind of revolution forms and rises in just mere days? Was it all a distraction so the reader would fail to notice the lack of world building and how weak the relationships actually were? I thought Cinder's group was funny and the way they acted when they were all together, were some of my favorite parts during the series, I laughed countless times, however it wasn't enough for it to add so depth to the story itself, I still can't understand how all the couples managed to be so crazy in love when they barely had time to talk since they got separated so many times.

Can we also talk about how shallow it was for the villain to be a woman who hates herself because she is scarred? I noticed how important it was to the cause for people to see Levana as she actually was: "ugly". Her looks didn't make her less or more of a person, her actions did, why is it so important for her to look broken/scarred in order for her to be evil? I get that Lunars are shallow, but can someone please explain me why? Cause the non-existent world-building failed to do so.

Overall, I thought Winter was the weakest book in the series, too long and too shallow, it didn't add meaning to the relationships between the characters, but if you were looking for a happy ending this book will certainly has it.

The One Lovely Blog Award: We were nominated!

2/09/2016

Last week, we were nominated for "The One Lovely Blog Award". Pretty big deal for us! A huge THANK YOU goes out to Charity Rowell-Stansbury for nominating us! Go check out her blog: "ON MY KINDLE".

As per the rules of receiving this nomination, we will now state 7 random facts about ourselves and nominate 7 blogs.

1. Some people have "viewing parties" for their favorite TV Show, we have "reading parties". Ok, not so much parties (cause it's just the two of us) but there are books we would have never read without each other, because some of the best conversations we've ever had were about books, so now we do it on purpose. We call it our VIP book club. Some titles include: The Hunger Games (trilogy), Divergent (trilogy), Daughter of Smoke & Bone (trilogy), The Others (series) and Ready Player One.

2. We live in different countries now and have been apart for over 3 years (Miss Phi lives in Mexico and Gphx Geek in the U.S). Somehow we have managed to not only keep our friendship but continue to grow together and make it stronger.

3. We aren't only best friends, but also colleagues, co-workers and business partners. In fact, the reason we are even friends to begin with is because we make a really good team. We work together on freelance design projects under the name Cyan & Magenta: Visual Information Design.

4. We are gamers and love playing video games together. We miss "Couch co-op Fridays"! Some of our fave titles (that we've played together) include: Tomb Raider (Legend, Underworld, Survivor and can't wait to play Rise of the Tomb Raider), Fable (all), Resident Evil (4, 5 & 6) and Dance Central (1, 2 & 3).

5. We are highly sensitive towards animals (snakes and frogs only okay from very very far away, though). In fact, watching any movie with a dog in it is incredibly stressful for us. The fear that the dog might die is real! Confession: We cried during "Bolt". We both have dogs (Miss Phi has a schnauzer named Bruno and Gphx Geek a hound mix named Mason) and they mean everything to us.

6. We both really enjoy combining our love for design with the rest of our interests. This blog is a great example of that. We also love creating things for or inspired by: games, TV shows, music and movies. In fact, recently we were commissioned to create an emblem design for a player-organization on Star Citizen.

7. We love the Zombie genre (books, graphic novels, games, tv and movies) and we are pretty sure we could survive the zombie apocalypse, as long as Gphx Geek is in charge of the sniper and Miss Phi has the machine gun.

Some of these aren't super new blogs, but we'll nominate them anyway, because we found something special about them and think they should be featured:

Read you soon,

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Judge It By It's Cover: The Invisible Cover

2/06/2016

When we tell people we are Visual Information Designers, we are often met with raised eyebrows and questions like: “Is that like art or something?”. The truth is, “Graphic Design” just isn’t a good enough term anymore to properly label anything that has to visually convey a message. Like a book cover, for example; it is not art, it is information design; and if you’ve ever read Edward Tufte, you know that good design should be as nearly invisible as possible.

What? Invisible design? But that is logically impossible. No! Invisible design means that you will spend the least amount of time looking at the presentation and maximize the time focused on the content -or information- because the design was perfectly planned so that you didn’t have to spend any time figuring it out. Now, if we apply this principle to designing book covers, it means that the best of them will immediately tell you what you are about to read and you won’t even have time to think about it.

Ok, it may not be as simple as it sounds; so we’ll give you an example. Last week, when we wrote about great books with bad covers, we almost mentioned “Black Iris” by Leah Reader. We’ve heard this is a fantastic read and it has received a lot of praise and amazing reviews; we wish the cover would reflect that. The thing is, all we can see and focus on is what the designer did on Photoshop.

To be completely blunt, we immediately started picturing the PSD Layers and mentally clicking “layer style”, then “outer glow” options on the menu. In fact, when we discussed this cover, we realized we could probably recreate it (or come very close)…and we did.

Why is this so bad? Technically, we could recreate any book cover if we spent enough time analyzing it. The thing about this one, though, is that the design process is so obvious and in-your-face that we couldn’t focus on what it was trying to tell us, and therefore, it failed at doing its job as information design.

To further illustrate our point, we compared the cover of “Black Iris” with that of “The Martian” and “Cinder”. You may think these are completely different and have absolutely nothing in common, but actually, they all have the same basic composition: background, representative element, typography. They all have a non-white background, followed by it’s main element (or the thing that represents something about the book) in the middle and then the title and author in the foreground.

The big difference here is that book covers like “The Martian” and “Cinder”, while using the same basic composition and elements, show that invisible design is definitely possible to accomplish. Designs like these are not only beautiful, but functional and purposeful and those are the best kind…the only kind, actually. Just remember: “Good design is clear thinking made visible.” - Edward Tufte

Read you next time,