Roar by Cora Carmack

In a land ruled and shaped by violent magical storms, power lies with those who control them.

Aurora Pavan comes from one of the oldest Stormling families in existence. Long ago, the ungifted pledged fealty and service to her family in exchange for safe haven, and a kingdom was carved out from the wildlands and sustained by magic capable of repelling the world’s deadliest foes. As the sole heir of Pavan, Aurora’s been groomed to be the perfect queen. She’s intelligent and brave and honorable. But she’s yet to show any trace of the magic she’ll need to protect her people.

To keep her secret and save her crown, Aurora’s mother arranges for her to marry a dark and brooding Stormling prince from another kingdom. At first, the prince seems like the perfect solution to all her problems. He’ll guarantee her spot as the next queen and be the champion her people need to remain safe. But the more secrets Aurora uncovers about him, the more a future with him frightens her. When she dons a disguise and sneaks out of the palace one night to spy on him, she stumbles upon a black market dealing in the very thing she lacks—storm magic. And the people selling it? They’re not Stormlings. They’re storm hunters.

Legend says that her ancestors first gained their magic by facing a storm and stealing part of its essence. And when a handsome young storm hunter reveals he was born without magic, but possesses it now, Aurora realizes there’s a third option for her future besides ruin or marriage. 

She might not have magic now, but she can steal it if she’s brave enough. 

Challenge a tempest. Survive it. And you become its master.


Rating: 1/5 Stars


Welcome to the YA Frozen retelling!!!!!!!!! Where Elsa doesn’t have a sister… but there’s a guy who says she looks like his dead sister, so of course he wants to fuck her.



I would like to add Roar to the list of books that have shot themselves in the foot with ridiculous ending, right next to Everything Everything. And also in the list of stupid names where America Singer lives, because who the fuck would call herself Roar????

To be honest what called to me was the summary, you have Aurora the Princess of a magical Kingdom where powerful sentient storms wreak havoc. As a royal, Aurora should be able to kill these storms just like her mother the Queen does and protect the Kingdom (although to be honest they just seem to be protecting only the city surrounding the castle, what about the rest? Or is that all the Kingdom? That small patch of land?) but Aurora is completely magic-free. In order to protect her Kingdom she’s marrying a vicious and powerful Prince from another land, resigning herself as nothing more than a decorative figure without power. But when she meets a stormhunter who claims he didn’t have magic before, Aurora realizes that just because she wasn’t born with magic, doesn’t mean that she can’t make a destiny for herself.

I am a sucker for stories about character who work their butts off. I’m serious, I absolutely hate reading about special characters that are born incredibly powerful (who are usually idiots who “don’t want to have powers!!!11!!! and only want to live a normal life *shudders*) but haven’t done anything to earn it. I don’t buy it, I mean they didn’t do anything for that power, they didn’t fight or even trained for it they just woke up one morning and BOOM specialist snowflake to ever flake. It’s one of my pet peeves, I mean DO SHIT PEOPLE, earn your motherfucking praise.

So yeah, I was excited about this book because from the Blurb Aurora didn’t seem so bad. Most YA Princess whine and complain with this sort of shit, but the girl knew that the Kingdom needed someone to protect them from the storms so if she couldn’t do it, the best she could do was marry someone who could, that was basically her only choice. So maybe she wasn’t thrilled about it, but she was determined to carry it through for the sake of her Kingdom and I liked that. I liked her.

At least that is, until we meet the Oh So Terrible Prince:

Moments later Cassius Locke melted out of the shadows, looking more like a villain than a prince—dressed all in black with dark hair and eyes to match.

The second this smooth-talking drool-wiping sexy motherfucker appears, I knew I was fucked. Or more precisely, the book was fucked but I was fucked because I knew the book was not I thought it would be. We wouldn’t get a cool heroine trying to find her own destiny, instead we would get a beautiful, blushing, flimsy and idiotic heroine who would get flutters in her chest and heat in her lady parts whenever the love interest were around. A girl who wouldn’t go out to chase her own destiny but that would turn out to be THE MOST POWERFUL STORM MAGIC GURL IN ALLLLL THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD. 


Aurora is beautiful, breathtakingly beautiful, YA bullshit-beautiful. She’s also fierce and determined! Until the guys appear and she becomes a blabbering idiot. To be fair, I always blame this behaviour to the lack of sex education in YA worlds. For some reason, and even in fantasy girls always have to be virgins and pure, why is that? Let the girl have some lovers, or at least a masturbatory guide for dummies and I swear they won’t blush and get “tingling” feelings every time they look at someone hot. Poor girls are horny, just let them be!

Let’s talk about Cassius, Love interest Number 1 (out of 3):.He is the perfect amalgamation of Kylo Ren and Hans from Frozen. You don’t even need to picture him, I made this just for you guys:



He’s is COLD. He is CRUEL. He was raised in a court of lies and manipulation, with a horrible family that only cares about POWER. He’s UNFEELING, he only wants freedom from his family, power of his own so he marries Aurora. He is a CAT and she a BIRD and he will not-

“You don’t deserve someone like me,” he said... “But you are mine all the same.”

Ehhh fall in love with her? *sigh* damn idiot. 

So bachelor number 1 is the cold prince, who of course will immediately fall in love with Aurora’s purity, because everybody here are fucking idiots. The minute he lies eyes on her he lusts, he “can’t help himself” teasing her and touching her and throwing her over his shoulder and do a lot of stupid shit.
He’s quickly gone though.

Bachelor Number 2 is even worse, if you can imagine, and that is because the fucker has the NERVE to think himself a nice guy? Locke definitely has a saviour complex, to the point where he goes as far as hurting Aurora to then save her.

I’m not even going to make a joke about him, everything from his narrative disturbed me. He sees Aurora as his dead sister, and still his dick gets hard when she blushes or shows her vulnerability (I’m paraphrasing here, though it’s not exactly a stretch). He forces Aurora to “let him help her” which means bossing her around for her own sake and marking her as his territory to protect her. Everything about him disgusted me, and it doesn’t get any better. What little character development Aurora goes through is hindered by this guy and the fact that she finds his behaviour not only acceptable but romantic and heroic.

And it sucks even more because Aurora, after discovering that the evil prince was evil (I still don’t get why that was a surprise for her, she even knew he was evil before he flirted with her) Aurora says that what she wanted the most was to belong to herself, not so much to her Mother and the Court, but to be her own person and now she’s stuck with evil prince who uses her for power.

She had hoped that when all was said and done, she could finally belong to herself

So Aurora flees a life trapped to an evil Prince that controls her, only to fall to the hands of Locke who also controls her…



I can’t say I would recommend this book to anybody, I know that many people loved it so if you think this is your thing go for it! It just wasn’t mine.

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

Her story is a phenomenon. Her life is a disaster.

In the real world, Eliza Mirk is shy, weird, and friendless. Online, she’s LadyConstellation, the anonymous creator of the wildly popular webcomic Monstrous Sea. Eliza can’t imagine enjoying the real world as much as she loves the online one, and she has no desire to try.

Then Wallace Warland, Monstrous Sea’s biggest fanfiction writer, transfers to her school. Wallace thinks Eliza is just another fan, and as he draws her out of her shell, she begins to wonder if a life offline might be worthwhile.

But when Eliza’s secret is accidentally shared with the world, everything she’s built—her story, her relationship with Wallace, and even her sanity—begins to fall apart.






Rating: 2/5 Stars

“Please don’t. Please. I can’t lose anyone else to this stupid turn.”

Then I understand what I was going to do, and what it would have done to Wallace, and I start to cry too.

Yeah sure, don’t kill yourself because it would make your boyfriend, the guy who drove you to this horrible point in your life, feel bad. Yeah let’s make this suicide attempt all about him because it’s very fucking healthy and not at all disturbing.



Eliza and Her Monsters is a book that should have appealed to me. It deals with anxiety, depression, fandom and suicide attempts all things I know so very well. And yet here I come with my two star rating, once again the only one in a sea of thousands who loved this book. Why is that?

My issue with this book was that it as shallow. Little thought and research was put into the very things this book is praised for: the representation of mental illness and the cool fandom/webcomic aspect. 

The book begins slow, with Eliza and her life orbiting around her webcomic Monstrous Sea and not much else, then she meets a shy guy who turns out to be a famous fanfic writer of her comic and romance begins. Up until 70% the story was dull, being familiar with fandoms, fanfics and the like I didn’t find anything new or entertaining in the book and got bored. But then Eliza’s secret identity is revealed and we get a really dumb, Hannah Montana situation in which everybody now knows about Eliza being famous and it’s chaos.

I found the revelation to be dumb, maybe things are different in the US but I was imagining something like that happening here and honestly, nobody would have given a fuck about Eliza being LadyConstellation so the whole drama that accompanied it was ridiculously over the top, like a Disney after school especial.

Then we get to the part where her boyfriend gets a book deal to put Monstrous Sea into book format, with Eliza’s “permission” but they only want to do it once the comic is finished. Boyfriend gets pissed because Eliza is having a mental breakdown and a writer’s block to boot, so he starts yelling about how she has a perfect life and can pay for college after she has worked her ass off for years making the comic, so she should just draw a shitty ending so he can make money by ripping off her original work… and then gets more pissed when she says she can’t do it.

Things get better with her family, she connects with her brothers and parents a bit more and starts enjoying things she used to hate because she was so consumed with Monstrous Sea. She starts to be a bit happier and healthier, until she visits Wallace and he just HAS to tell her how ANGRY he is at her, because now that she’s feeling like shit she ruined his life by not letting him make money off her hard work.



But then, after Eliza thinks and decides against committing suicide, Wallace has to show up, angry again, because if Eliza killed herself he would feel guilty and that’s how Eliza realizes that suicide is not the way!!!!!

The fucking end