Caighlan Smith

I love mythology and stories with labyrinths in them, so I really should have loved this book, but I just never really connected with the main character. She was so timid and such a doormat pretty much from the get go. Something kept me reading, though, even when there was what I felt was gratuitous violence, and by the end, she had grown a bit of a backbone, and showed some promise. She began to learn to count on herself and she learned survival skills, both of which she could have used throughout the book, but I was glad she started to change at last. Like I said, something kept me reading, and I look forward to seeing how she does in the next book in the series.

3/5 stars.… (més)

Another entry in the Tor collection that is an intriguing enough vignette, but isn't really a story. Three generations of women live in a house in some sub-optimal future, the world and society sketched as the kind of rough-and-ready, everyday harshness of an existence so many people in history have learned to live with, without ever filling in the details - perhaps somewhere between 1930s Dustbowl, Gibsonian sprawl and Mad Max outback. Mother and daughter are securing the house against a coming Storm ( although it is not the ecological disaster we expect ) while Granny Ma wanders around in her dementia, reciting social media references from her youth that may as well be Aramaic to her grand daughter.… (més)

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Just seeing Icarus and labyrinth, I was extremely excited! Being a huge Greek mythology nerd (and a classics minor student in uni), I knew I needed to read this, thinking it would be heavily mythology based. Surprisingly, it wasn’t really. Instead, Children of Icarus by Caighlan Smith is more of a general YA dystopian novel, which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing. Just different from what the short synopsis seemed to suggest.

There’s a nameless narrator that is by far the worst character of the novel up until the last 20%. This really killed the book for me. I just couldn’t get behind her at all. In fact, I actually put the book down and had to stop because I was just so annoyed by her, I preferred cooking my weekly lunches for work than continue. Why is she annoying? I’ll probably whinge about it in detail on the spoiler vlog tomorrow, but mainly, her inability to do anything. There was no personality in her. No nothing for the majority of the story.

That said, you might be wondering how it managed to get three and a half stars from me. You might be thinking pffft, free title, of course it got higher than three stars. Nope. Just because the narrator was dull, doesn’t mean the book was. The story was very interesting and there were just enough bits of mythology and Greek-ness to keep me hooked. Side characters Elle and Addie were super interesting and I wanted more of them. I also wanted more of Theo and to see if Theo and Nameless could start a relationship, or if Nameless and Ryan would since the author kept thrusting them together. But nothing happened because the narrator is pretty much nothing.

The last 33% of the book really bumped the stars up. The Executioner was amazing and then the mind freak that happens right at the very end, I was just speechless. I could not believe that was how the book would end, just as it was getting good. Just as Nameless started to hint at becoming someone, something.

If you’re seriously into YA dystopian, you’ll really enjoy Children of Icarus by Caighlan Smith. If you’re just a casual fan, you might wanna wait and check it out at the library. If there’s the potential of a sequel being released, then I’d say definitely give it a shot.

// I received this title for free in exchange for an honest review //… (més)