K.N. Salustro's Blog

It’s been almost a year since I last posted anything here. Truth is, WordPress glitched and I couldn’t get to my Dashboard for several months, and then I stopped trying and eventually just… forgot about it. I wandered back over today and did the blogger equivalent of “turning it off and on again” and voila, I have access again.

To be honest, I didn’t miss WordPress.

I’ve been focusing on a lot of other things, to the point where I don’t really want to continue posting over here. I’ll keep ...

Once more, I am delightfully creeped out by a T. Kingfisher book. Maybe a little more on the creeped out side than delighted this time around, but I’m counting that as a good thing in a horror book.

I’ll say again that I am a horror lightweight, so your mileage may vary, but I personally found this to be wildly imaginative and horrifying in all the right places, even more so because the author understood how and when to juxtapose those moments with spaces that were supposed to be quiet an...

This is one of those rare books that I did not want to finish, because I was enjoying it so much. Deeply satisfying and fantastically rich all the way through, I cannot recommend this one enough.

What starts out as a retelling of Rumplestiltskin evolves into a beautifully told story of love and courage and learning to find strength in the most unexpected places. I loved main characters Miryem, Wanda, and Irina, and seeing each of them face their own monsters and triumphs in the frozen Sta...

5 stars on Goodreads, 4.5 in my mind

Continuing the Emperor’s Edge series, this was a fun, action-packed installment that I really enjoyed, but with a major cliffhanger ending in more ways than one. Plot, character, relationships, which genre this series actually fits under… a lot of ways. Lindsay Buroker is a fast author, though, (and kind of my self-publishing hero / idol, if I’m honest) so the next book is ready and waiting in the store. But I think I would’ve liked a little more resol...

One of my pirate research books, this one was a very informative read that answered several questions I had about the daily lives of pirates, most of them mundane questions like “what did Golden Age pirates do when they WEREN’T plundering ships?” It doesn’t provide as much of a historical context as The Pirate World does, but at the same time, manages to provide a bit of a deeper dive into some of the non-white, non-male pirates only briefly mentioned in the other book.

So, this one was v...

This is another fun installment in the Monster Haven series, but I wasn’t as enthralled with it as I was the first two.

It might’ve been too much fun in some ways, with characters (especially Zoey) being snarky instead of proactive. We see a lot of how much Zoey cares for the Hidden that come to her for help, but when one of them is abducted, there’s no real sense of urgency to their rescue. I think the problem with that is no one ever stops for a second to say, “Hey, can we figure out a ...

This book started slow for me and took a while to get into the main plot again, but it was a wild, heart-wrenching ride. Laia and Helene have excellent arcs, and I loved spending more time with these characters.

Elias, though…

I wanted to smack him on the upside of the head a few times at the beginning of the book. Dude is forced into a supernatural job that is very, VERY explicit in its requirements, and he is somehow surprised when failing to meet said requirements results in the mos...

I’m honestly shocked that I didn’t have this book in my life at a much younger age. Greek gods? Legends and monsters? Plot twists and snarky humor built around mythology?

Honestly, if it had ticked any more boxes, I think I would’ve written this book off as simply too good to be true, and refused to believe that it actually existed. But it does and it is WONDERFUL.

There are a few awkward moments in the narration, and maybe points where Percy was a little TOO snarky for me, but wow was...

Whew, what a cool and captivating book. It was nice to read a fully contained story from McGuire, but make no mistake, the scope is sweeping and the stakes are high. How could they not be when a pair of siblings are learning how to manipulate time?

There’s a lot of heartbreak in this book, running parallel to the need to keep going in the face of it. Roger and Dodger have to learn to embrace that need rather than resist it, and it’s fascinating watching them evolve and learn about themsel...

3 stars on Goodreads, 2.5 in my mind

Hear me out before you grab your torches and pitchforks.

So, this was an interesting read. Mostly because I really wasn’t that into it for the first 90% of the volume. The art style feels like standard sketchy comic style that, honestly, I have never really enjoyed. That goes beyond the roughness of the style. I think it’s the inconsistency across the pages along with the conscious decision to focus in on the more grotesque elements, even just on so...