Four London Book Tag

Disclaimer: You’ll either like this or you’ll love this. There’s really no other option.

Welcome one, welcome all to the Four London Book Tag! *screams internally* We honestly can’t believe it’s finally here. So, we came up with the idea all the way back in November to do this tag, but school and procrastination and life got in the way so it didn’t happen. Then we thought we’d have it up and running for the release of A Conjuring of Light in February, but that didn’t happen.

HAPPILY, THOUGH, TODAY IS MS. SCHWAB’S BIRTHDAY (something the confirmed to us yesterday on Instagram because we didn’t believe Wikepedia. It’s not always reliable) AND WE THOUGHT WE JUST HAD TO FINISH CREATING THIS TAG ONCE AND FOR ALL IN HONOUR OF HER REACHING THE THIRD DECADE.

We’ve heard that the thirties are quite fun.

Now, obviously the Four London Book Tag is based upon the Four Londons of Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy. Grey, Red, White and Black. There will be questions related to each London with pretty graphics as we go along and we’re so ecstatic and oh my gods let’s get going. We can’t wait any longer!

Isn’t it gorgeous? *insert heart eyes here*

Like Lila with the Stone’s Throw in her regular old grey London, she just can’t seem to get away from the place. No matter how many times she runs away to seek adventure and get herself a ship. So, we wondered what book/series is essentially the Stone’s Throw for us in literary form? And the answer is, The Twilight Saga.

We know. We know what you’re thinking. The Twilight Saga? Seriously? We thought you had better taste and we do. We have great taste, but seriously. No matter how many times we marvel at the shocking differences between book Bella and movie Bella and no matter how many times we cringe at the existence of Jacob Black and Edward’s my poor soul thing we sporadically open up our copy of Breaking Dawn or New Moon and read.

It just has this spark of magic that we are drawn to.

Lila said goodbye to Grey London with a wave and a grin and never looked back. She was done. She was over it. She wanted bigger and better things.

We said goodbye to the Lorien Legacies series only a little while ago with the final book, but we’d kind of left the series long before that and we have no intention of ever reading the books again. Never, ever, ever. We will not read the Lorien Legacies books again in our celestial lifetime because there are bigger and better things for us to read.

Examples of such are:

• Godsgrave. It’s the sequel to Nevernight and we won’t be seeing it til September. But it’s all good. No, seriously. It’s ALL GOOD. We can look at the beautiful ARC cover and final cover designed by Kerby Rosanes on Instagram whenever we like. WE’RE NOT STRESSING OVER THE FACT THAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE IN THEIR POSSESSION ADVANCE COPIES OF THE STABBY BOOK. We’re not stressing. You are.
• Renegades. Marissa Meyer is diving into the world of Superheroes and Super-villains with Renegades and it’s exciting and the cover is beautiful and we’ve read an excerpt and we know that we’ll likely love the villains more than the heroes. Who wouldn’t?
• And finally, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock. We received an ARC for it the other day on NetGalley and we’re only forty something pages in. It feels like a classic. Yes.

We had an answer planned for this…

Hold on…

Wait *plays holding music*

Grey London is the only London that’s basically devoid of magic. It’s dead or it’s dying and very few people can access that scraps of power that are left. But ignore all that.

WE HAVE FOUND OUR ANSWER and it’s Teardrop by Lauren Kate. It had such a pretty cover and we always judge books by their covers (we’re not superficial…OK, we are, but we always have this notion that when a book cover is pretty more money has been spent on it? You understand. We know you do.)

And it had a great concept. A girl who would flood the world when she cries. Oh my gods, yes. It’s like the Sept being blown up by Cersei with Wildfire in episode 6×10 of Game of Thrones except better because Margaery doesn’t die. It failed though. Failed so hard.

There are many forms of Aven (blessed) in the Shades of Magic books. There are the priests and the Antari. Both have a different form of magic. The Antari can control all forms expertly and equally. The priests are similar in that the have access to all forms, but they’re not particularly talented at any of them.

Where there talent lies is in balancing the elements to heal and grows.

It was really tough finding the right book for this and in the end we couldn’t decide on just one, so we have two.

The Deviants by C. J. Skuse is a book that will tear your itty bitty heart out and rip it all up while making you love it. And the Original Ginny Moon is the most fabulous gem that was sent to us all the way from Canada by its publisher. The main character is a girl with autism and we love her.

We love her so much.

Kell’s coat is the most fantastic piece of clothing that we’ve ever read about and we so want it. You can change it up whenever you like and there just might be an infinite amount of forms for it to take.

The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon who is a goddess is a book we’ve read…four times and we manage to have a new opinion on it every single time we finish the last line. They’re all positive opinions. They’re just all different. One of the questions we always ask our self about it is where on earth is our dearest Michael? WHERE IS HE?

Holland and Kell to a greater extent are loved and feared simultaneously. People look at them and marvel at their power, but they also fear them because tiny, tiny mortals don’t like sentient beings to be able to do more than them. Be more than them.

Similarly, we adore the world of Harry Potter in the time of Voldemort. There is so much love and resilience and magic and (our emotions are overloading) stuff that we are unable to not smile when we think of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley and everything.

But if we were in that world when people are disappearing and Dementors are running loose and something as basic as your parentage can make you a target or a lesser being to be killed then we think we’d curl up and cry.

At the beginning of the series White London was even worse than Grey London is some respects. To take the throne, you had to kill. The hygiene of the general populace was terrible and Astrid or Athos Dane could bind you a bury you at whatever moment they saw fit.

By the end of the trilogy, after we’d developed a burning love for dear old Holland and shrivelled into a patch of nothing when he died, White London took a breath and exhaled life back into the world.

SO, WHAT BOOK/SERIES WAS MEH AT THE START? The first two Throne of Glass novels, that’s what. So many exclamation marks and mehdom (we’re trademarking that word).

AND WHAT WAS FULL OF LIFE AT THE END? The third and fourth Throne of Glass novels, that’s what. We’re ignoring Empire of Storms and the destruction it levelled on the series due to the fact that our love burns bright for Manon and Elide and Lysandra in books three and four. We just can’t let anything taint that.

(If you turn your screen at just the right angle you can read what we’ve written here, but if you’re feeling lazy we’ll repeat our demand/question/whatever).

A book/series that you would kill for.

Harry Potter. ‘Nuff said.

White London was dying. Holland saved it. May the potentially ungratefully denizens of the palest of London’s mourn his soul.

We’d save Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because for some reason over the last few years it has become our favourite Harry Potter book with Deathly Hallows close behind. We’d bring with us a copy of HP6 into Armageddon or Ragnorak or The End of Days or The Rapture no matter what.

We have a few reasons for this.

1. It’s orange and we could pretend that we have that valuable resource called fire so little people would come close to us and then in their devastation upon their realisation that we do not in fact carry heat, we’d rob them of all their goods. Not their clothes though. Ew.
2. We’d need a boy like Draco to keep us warm at night…get your minds out of the gutter.
3. Hermione would still manage to be the only other being that we’d enjoy having a conversation with because she is an intellectual.
4. And Luna. OBVIOUSLY LUNA.

Osaron and his massive ego consumed the people in Black London and tried to consume all of the population of Red London (White London and Grey London just weren’t good enough. Rude) but he failed and only consumed a few. They died horrible deaths. It was exciting.

A book series that utterly consumed us was the Shades of Magic trilogy! We stayed up for a great deal of the night over in Wales reading A Conjuring of Light even though we knew we had to be up at 6:30am and we knew that we’d have a very day ahead of us, but we didn’t care. We revelled in our exhaustion and devoured half of the book.

We also reviewed it, so, here.

Every good person in all the Londons that mater aka Red and White know that Black London is to be treated as if it is the plague. *cough* someone tell Kell *cough* and there are some books which we absolutely stay away from.

SOME OF THOSE BOOKS ARE WRITTEN BY RAINBOW ROWELL.

We haven’t read anything by her because the potential level of cutesy is to high. It makes us recoil.

Some of you are probably calling us heathen right now, but lol. We don’t care. We’re secure in our reading choices. We are…we know it…

someone please pass us a Rainbow Rowell book…

someone please…

someone.

Magic man Osaron is a puppet master. He says buy me a rake, you do it. He says shove that rake in your eye, you do it. He says call me you crazy magic lover boy, you do-  wait, what?

We’re getting carried away with our self *insert blush here*

J. K Rowling is the Osaron to our money. When we discovered that The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm were written by her, we persuaded our Life-Giver to buy them for us immediately. We didn’t even have to bed. And when Career of Evil came out, it was something like eighteen euro, but we got it there and then.

We fretted for about thirty seconds, but still. We bought it, read forty pages of it and somehow forgot to ever open it up again. We plan on fixing that soon!

AND THAT IS IT FOR THE FOUR LONDONS, BUT DON’T WORRY. WE’RE NOT DONE YET. THERE’S A BONUS ROUND AND THEN INFO ON PARTICIPATION. ALSO, WE’RE GOING TO TAG A WHOLE BUNCH OF PEOPLE AND HOPE THEY DON’T SHOOT US.

What character/s from the Shades of Magic trilogy would you like to see have a spinoff?

Our answer is definitely Nasi who was introduced to us in A Conjuring of Light in White London and we think she’ll become Queen and turn out to be just like the priests of Red London because she’ll be able to balance the elements, but obviously she won’t be a priest because SHE’LL BE QUEEN! And she’ll create and order of women who will do cool stuff and, and-

We hope you’re reading this Victoria!

If you could rule one of the four Londons, which one would you rule?

White London. Definitely White London. It’s somehow managed to become our favourite London and also we couldn’t bare to take Rhy or any future Maresh children of the throne. He and Alucard would have glorious children. Never mind the fact that neither of them can carry a child.

Of course, we’d wait til Nasi was done ruling. White London would totally keep the whole strongest person rules thing, but it would do away with the you must kill the weaker person thing. We simply don’t have the energy for that much killing.

So, the demands/questions are done and there’s just a couple of things left to sort out.

One: We uploaded some of our designs on to our Society6 store because we love them. And you can get gorgeous pillows and tote bags and other things and support us because we’re poor.

Two: YOU CAN ALSO PARTICIPATE IN THE FOUR LONDON BOOK TAG. To do so all you must do is use our prompts because they’re vital. You can use our graphics as well, if you want as long as you reference us, but you don’t have to! We’re 99% sure that all of you can create your own stunning graphics.

(Do you really want to pull your hair out though? Do you want to look like a hairless cat?)

We also ask that you link back to us and/or comment you link here in the comments so we can check out your brilliants answers!

We have a whole bunch of people that we need to tag and the first one is Victoria Schwab herself (ambitious we know)! If you are indeed reading this, you wonderfully creative woman, we want to thank you for creating such an immersive world which magic and blades and secrets and wonder.

This is a birthday gift, so sorts to you, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND THANK YOU!

Next up we have the creators of all the amazing blogs that we read *adoring emoji*

Cait from Paper Fury, Anna from A Literary Potion, Stacee from Adventures of A Book Junkee, Aentee from Read at Midnight, Ashleigh from A Frolic Through Fiction AND EVERYONE ELSE!

There are so many of you with blogs, but it’s almost midnight and we’re running out of birthday hours here! Consider yourself all tagged! We promise to start commenting on your stuff again soon. Summer is here and we’re ready to pester you all *evil laughter*

THAT’S IT GUYS. THIS POST IS OFFICIALLY DONE. It’s an immense beast totally at 2,500 and something words and we couldn’t be more proud of our self. We’ll see you all again on Tuesday because we have a schedule now. Tuesdays and Fridays for all our stuff and every other day for ARC reviews and the like.

Arkon, Annie and a creator (it feels good to say that again)