Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

The Guardian Test by Christina Soontornvat.
Into the Shadow Mist by Christina Soontornvat.
City of Wishes by Christina Soontornvat.
Temple of Secrets by Christina Soontornvat.

Quick synopsis: Set in what at first seems like a magical fantasy world, a young girl (Plum) has been accepted to an elite magical school that trains Guardians -- people who protect the natural world.

Brief opinion: I love this author so much! These books are meant for younger readers (they're Middle Grade books), but other than how short they are, I enjoyed them from start to finish. [Guardian Test was a read from last year, review here, but I read it again before moving on to the next three books.]

Plot:

The Guardian Test: Plum isn't like other girls. She lives on a small island with her grandparents and her goat. Also, she can talk to plants and they listen to her. One day she gets invited to a school to train to become a Guardian -- magical people who can transform into an animal, they're tasked with protecting the natural world so that humans won't destroy the environment (again).

Unlike the other students, she just doesn't seem to be able to learn to transform into her Guardian animal shape...

Into the Shadow Mist: Having passed the test in book 1, Plum and her friends are sent to another island for sort of an "intern" training stage. Something is destroying the trees there, but what could it be? Could it have anything to do with the largest island's overpopulation issues?

City of Wishes: Plum and the other students/her friends go to Nakhon City on that largest island mentioned in book 2. What could be causing the increasingly worse earthquakes there? Could it have to do with all the new high rises they're building on the island?

Temple of Secrets: Plum, the other students, the teachers, and a large number of non-Guardian island citizens have to save Lotus Island (the seat of the Guardians' magical powers) from a man who wants to turn it into a parking lot (and a supermarket and more high rises).

Writing/editing: As close to perfect as you can get! I spotted one minor editing issue in all four books -- three had no issues at all, the last one had the minor one (missing punctuation at the end of a line).

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Getting my minor (and unfair) dislike out of the way first: By book 4, I was tired of the strong pro-environment message, but that was the entire theme of the series. The Guardians are charged with the mission of preventing what happened in our current world to happen in their new world, so of course the environmental message would be a major part of the story. Of course I'm pro-environment, but four books in a row of it being the central message got to be a lot.

Other minor dislike: The books were way too short! About half as long as a Middle Grade book usually is, which already would be short. These four books together made up about one YA book.

Things I like would be a list so long I'd run out of space in this post. I LOVED the worldbuilding so much! That it seemed like real magic to the characters but adult readers could spot what the truth behind the "magic" must have been.

I loved getting hints about the "Old World" (our current modern Earth).

I don't usually care about or want illustrations in my story, but I really loved the style of these!

Related to the illustrations, race was never mentioned in the story (the characters seemed "colorblind" and saw only people), but in the pictures we could spot that the richest people, the ones in power, were all darker skinned. That was nice and subtle!

I enjoyed that there were elements from our world in the story's world, like bowing to elders and out of respect.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: Each of the four books gets the same rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️- Loved. I really hope there are going to be more books set in this world!

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Mason's Rats by Neal Asher. [I finished the story, but it was so short it doesn't need the whole review template. Also, my version of the "book" had only the one short story in it, but I couldn't find a cover image for it, so I used the "three short stories" cover.]

I picked up this "book" (short story) because the Love Death + Robots series did an episode based on it. There was nothing in the story that wasn't in the episode, and the episode did it better.

Super fast read, I feel guilty counting it in my book count for the year.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Okay

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DNF #10: Be Prepared (A Twisted Tale) by Farrah Rochon. Disney's Twisted Tales take well known movie stories and change elements in them -- it's sort of like official fanfiction. In this one Nala had to work with Scar for... some reason.

I would have enjoyed reading this, but there was some serious technical issue with my copy of the book and it was just impossible to read.