Two In The Hand...

Remember how this blog was supposed to be a book review/rating blog so I could look back and remember why I did or didn't like that one book and why I should or shouldn't recommend it to certain people?
Yeah. I'd forgotten, too.
SO! First of all, I'd like to comment on how sad it is that these two books I'm about to review were the ones to remind me.

Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers

Set in Brittany back when it was its own entity and feeling the threat of colonialism from the expanding French nation, this is a country torn religiously. While not the main point of the book, it does play a role in the minor conflict between the Catholic Church and the Old Gods - now in "hiding" as "saints" revered by the locals. One of these being Saint Mortaine, or the Old God of Death. Tradition holds that unwanted daughters born despite attempts at abortion are in fact Mortaine's children and that is why they lived. They are feared, reviled, and if they are lucky they make it to Mortaine's abbey where they are trained as assassins, meting out his justice as revealed through their Seer and the Abbess.
One of these young ladies is young Ismae (whose name, I'll admit here, was pretty much THE reason for me reading this book), a young woman given in marriage to a brute of a man who proceeds to beat her when he discovers the scar marking her as a Daughter. She is spirited away by some believers in the Old Gods and taken to the abbey where she becomes an assassin-in-training who's good enough to start going out on assignments, but average enough to be perplexed as to why she was chosen for these tasks.
On her first big assignment she is sent undercover to try and find out who in the Duchess of Brittany's private council is a traitor, and to kill him. Because that's how the Daughters of Mortaine roll. Death is justice, justice is death, yadda yadda. 
She's teamed up with the Duchess' half-brother who she unwillingly finds increasingly more attractive and wonderful which makes her hesitate despite being told to kill him on several occasions.

Ok, so because of her rough past with men (abusive father, abusive "husband") she dislikes men in general and this man in particular. Ah, what the heart will do to protect itself.
It honestly got really annoying how much she'd want to touch him, but recoil when he got close, y'know, all that nonsense. But it was literally every interaction with him (and that was a lot, since they were playing "lovers" for their cover), every look, every sound the man made threw her into this bipolar love-sick pandemonium. How did she get anything done??
I figured out who the traitor was long before she did, but stuck it out to see his motives. And they were surprisingly satisfactory and unsatisfactory all at once.
Constant references to sex - while not explicit - and violence make this a teen+ book. 

Icons by Margaret Stohl

In the future, we've been visited by aliens. Rather than violently attack everyone in all major cities on all major continents, they just pick one major city per continent and essentially shut it down. Totally. Stopping hearts instantaneously and everything. In North America, that city is L.A. - now referred to as the Hole - and there have been few survivors. Among them are children born on The Day with strange birthmarks which they have always somehow known to keep hidden. Two of them grew up outside the Hole on a small mission and on their birthday they are abducted and taken to the Embassy (the human-run liaison between humans and aliens) where they are tested and finally brought together with the other two kids "like them." Soon after, it is revealed that their existence is not nearly as secret as they'd all grown up thinking and that pretty much everyone wants them for some purpose, though whose is nefarious and whose they should side with they are unsure of.
So, supernatural abilities are cool (who doesn't want to be a superhero?!), except when they all involve emotional telepathy and manipulation. What fun is always knowing what everyone is thinking through their feelings? Think about it...
So, the names also reflect their abilities. I found this to be creative, yet trite. Something I did in middle school when I'd fantasize about writing my own fiction and I'd look up name meanings to match them to my character's personality/abilities. 
The drive to find out how they could possibly beat back the alien overlords/work together as a team when they don't even trust each other/etc., was not enough to finish this book. It may have been because I read it immediately after Grave Mercy (which, as I said, I only finished to find out the traitors motives), and so I wasn't willing to go the distance on this one. 
Wouldn't recommend it at all. But if I had to rate it, I'd go with pre-teen+. The violence has been minimal (aside from the sadistic teacher, but that's mostly innuendo), swearing minimal, no sexual content (up to page 244), so yeah. If you've got a reader who really wants to experience this dystopian world, go for it. But don't say I didn't warn you.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have other books to read. Hopefully I'll enjoy/blog about those.