The problem: there’s not that many good, current ones out there!

There are, admittedly, about half a million current YA series.  For some reason, the YA genre lends itself a little better to series.  It seems like most of these series right now are about paranormal stuff and vampires and… blah.  Spare me.  I did read Twilight, but there wasn’t any real love there and I can’t really handle the vampire/werewolf/yadda yadda thing as a whole so I just pass.

Here are the YA ones that I’ve read and enjoyed:

Harry Potter, of course.  I resisted the pull for a really long time but finally read them last year and fell in absolute love.  I’ve been thinking of doing a re-read of these because I straight devoured them the first time though and would like to go back for some savoring.

The Hunger Games series was pretty incredible.  I love a good dystopian novel any day, but a dystopian series? Yum.

The Gemma Doyle series is full of stuff that I’d never liked, but somehow I loved it.  It came to me highly recommended and I’m glad that I picked it up.  Good stuff.

And that’s pretty much it as far as more current series go.  There are a handful of classic ones that I loved growing up, but that’s another post entirely.

There have only been three adult series that I’ve found that I’ve liked very much.

I read The Dark Tower series last year with a couple of friends.  There are seven books and they are seriously incredible.  As a big Stephen King nerd, I was so impressed with how many of his books he tied into the series.  It kind of made everything come together.  The characters were incredible and so memorable and I was totally enamored the whole time.  Seriously great reading.

The Kingkiller Series is still being written.  The first one, The Name of the Wind, blew me away and I’ve been recommending the heck out of it and buying it as gifts and giving it away on my blog pretty much non-stop for over a year.  The next one comes out early next year and it’s going to be a big day for me.

I’m still not done with the Millennium series.  I’ve read the first two and thought that they were pretty great.  I’m waiting until the last one comes out in paperback before I get it, but I’ve heard that it’s great and I can’t wait to give it a go!

And that’s it. Sad, right? I’m not really very much into fantasy and it seems like all the big series are fantasy.   I’d love to get all wrapped up in a new series, but nothing is really calling my name right now.  Do you know of any great series that aren’t fantasy that I might enjoy?

The Book: The Sweet Far Thing, by Libba Bray

The Story: This is the last book of a trilogy.  If you haven’t read the first two, but plan to, you may want to skip this part.

This starts pretty soon after the last book left off.  Gemma and Co. are returning to Spence Academy after all that crazy stuff went down at the end of Rebel Angels.  They get back together and try to get back into the Realms.  They can’t.  They’re freaking out.

When they do finally find their way back in, Pippa seems creepy and she has a band of girls with her that Gemma and Co. befriend.  Gemma has all of the magic from the Realms and the girls use it for various things, none of them particularly useful.  Everyone in the Realms wants a piece of this cake, but Gemma isn’t ready to let go yet.

Gemma is having crazy visions of a lady in a purple dress.  The girls run around tricking people and doing crazy things.  The Realms are kind of going crazy and Gemma and Co. try to figure out how to fix it without destroying everything that they’ve done so far.

What I thought: I was seriously disappointed in this book. I really liked the first two but found this one almost unreadable.  It drug every thing out so far that I just lost interest.  ”We went into the realms. Then we came back. Then we went back in. Then we came back,” over and over and over.

By the second half of the book, when the action picked up, I didn’t even hardly care anymore. I just wanted it to be over.

To be fair to Libba Bray, I do enjoy her writing style and I liked the characters and how they were changing and growing. It tied up all the loose ends and had some good surprises. But these didn’t make up for all of the flaws.  This was my least favorite book of hers that I have read.

Conclusion: While I didn’t love this book, I did enjoy the series as a whole, so I still recommend it.