I am very confused about how I am supposed to rate this book. I enjoyed it, it kept me on my toes but I felt something was missing. Still, it was a very enjoyable read that loved up to the hype.

I absolutely loved this. I loved the characters and their relationships, the atmosphere, the positive female empowerment, all of it was captivating. If I have one complaint it is that I felt that the ending was a little rushed and some things were either not resolved or resolved too quickly. However, I still greatly enjoyed reading about Rhen and her path to finding where she belonged.

What a fun, fresh adventure! I love YA because they are more entertaining than television. Mary Weber cooked up an amazing adventure complete with crazy mazes and slightly crazed fellows. Plus ghouls, anyone? The only downfall is that I wanted to read more about this world. I would love to see another story set in this land she created!
Also, this book was definitely #girlpower but in a way that was fresh and perfectly feminist. Meaning the females get choose what is best for them (not just females are better than males which I feel so many #girlpower books do). Thank you Mary for this book!

I LOVE Mary Weber. LOVELOVELOVE her. I will happily promote what she writes. But this book just was not for me. I tried really hard to read it, but just could not get into the story. I think I'm just over the Hunger Games/big competition angle. I am excited for more Mary Weber books to come. I am only rating this because the form made me.

I went into this book expecting something like Maze Runner with a more feministic vibe to it and did not get that at all. In reality, the maze/labyrinth aspect was only a very short portion of this book and it didn't even start until about halfway through. The rest of this book dealt with this mysterious plague and Rhen dissecting and violating dead bodies. It just wasn't what I had signed up for at all.

I also couldn't really connect with any of the characters and they all felt kind of flat to me. I just didn't think there was anything special about them and even when they were in the labyrinth, I was expecting something exciting but to be honest, it was very chill. I didn't feel that sense of urgency or anticipating as to what will happen next.

There was also this romance in this book that felt really awkward but at the same time, I kind of understand because there was this history between the two of them but as the reader, I didn't get that history nor was there any flashback or explanations about said history. So for me, it felt rushed and forced. There was also this annoying amount of staring from Rhen's part at someone's automatically perfect lips. Like, what. I didn't need that repeated 100000x.

Overall, this book was mediocre. I didn't get what I had expected, the characters were nothing special, the romance was meh and the plot itself was okay at best.

This book sounded so good i couldnt wait to read its but unfortunately I couldnt get into its tryed 3 times but never finished its. Its like getting something off wish.com the cover is brilliant but content is a disappointement.

Hovering somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars.

The Scorpio Races meets The Hunger Games, <i>To Best the Boys</i> was an entertaining and exciting read, but at times it felt a little undeveloped.

The feel of this story was so interesting! A fun mix of science and fantasy. It was like magical realism with focus on the knowledge that science is just as important as magic... which I don’t think I’ve ever seen done before.

I always love when protagonists have a passion that is (for lack of a better term) “out-of-the-box”. Rhen’s love of science and anatomy was so inspiring.

Plus this was basically an entire book dedicated to Girl Power. I do love a good feminist story.

As much as I enjoyed this book, parts of it felt rushed, and I feel like it could have benefited from 50 more pages to help flesh out certain parts of the story.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Thomas Nelson through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

So the first part of the book, the first pages, really threw me off my game. I was definitely not expecting that start, but I ended up really loving the characters and story. I absolutely loved not only a strong female lead, but the puzzle aspect aswell. I loved the riddles and puzzles and the macabre feeling you get at the start. The fact that Rhen's parents were cool too, it's not something you see a lot in YA books. I will definitely be rereading this one soon!

Girl power! I really enjoyed this story because it had such a strong female presence in a male-dominated world. The story was entertaining and action-packed. There was great chemistry with the characters and would recommend this to everyone.

I received a copy of this book for a fair and honest review. This is a really compelling tale. I love science and took all the classes I could so I understand what she is wanting to accomplish in do what she and her cousin set out to do. I had to think about all the books that contain mazes and labyrinths. I did not like how the society is sent up that only males could go to school and females were taught to be wives. It is a search for a better life. It is well written and the description of the places is done wonderfully. Making the book much more enjoyable to read.

DNF
Thank you for the opportunity to read this title. Unfortunately, presently I have no interest in reading this title as I am in a YA slump. I may come back to it when I am in the mood in the future. I apologize for the convenience.

When a book is so utterly focused on one huge event then spends half the book discussing other matters, it's incredibly boring and by the time you get to the event (in this case, the maze) you're exasperated. It didn't feel as though there was that much of a focus on the maze in the end, it was more of a small obstacle the MC and her friends needed to overcome rather than the huge competition it was meant to be.
This book was supposed to celebrate strong, intelligent women but it fell very flat. The romance was cute, predictable but cute none the less. However the main character was so lacking to me in personality, she was your typical headstrong girl and that was it.
There was definite potential with this story as it contained some very unique and interesting ideas, but the execution was very lacking. A rather disappointing read.

A fresh, fun, quick read to quench your YA thirst! :) It’s not what I would usually read but I did enjoy myself and think others will too!

Simply excellent!

I loved this imaginative foray into the labyrinth and Mary Weber's creative mind. To Best the Boys has a positive message for girls and boys alike and tugs at the heartstrings in all the right ways. As some have pointed out, it is NOT a man-shaming book but it does uplift women and I loved that about this!

To me, this was a bit of a return to the Storm Siren trilogy in the way it was written and I really enjoyed that. It's definitely different, so you'll find a new experience in this book, but I just really enjoyed the characters, snarky whit, romance, and head-strong (in a positive way) characters.

If you enjoy Young Adult fiction at all and small hints of fantasy I think you'll LOVE this book!


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I received this book for free but was under no obligation to post a review. I do so under my own motivation and the opinions I have expressed in this review are honest and entirely my own.

This was not what I expecting.

It makes it really hard to review as it was so different from my expectations that it made it hard to read. The writing wasn't great, but it was tolerable. I honestly had a hard time with the characters and the world building.

In a word: Derivative.

I was skeptical of this book because the title was so hokey, even by YA standards, but the concept seemed decent so I decided to keep an open mind.

Unfortunately it was even more disappointing than I feared. Every single element of the plot of this book is derivative of something else in the genre. There is nothing here that you haven’t seen before.

The writing and pacing are fine, but the plot (in addition to being wholly unoriginal), is not engaging and a weaker version of every story it borrows from.

The riddles in the contest are, for lack of a better way to put it, stunningly stupid. They don’t really make sense, they’re not clever, and atmospherically, the environment of the contest fails to evoke much of anything.

And what was the point of all this? That a girl won a contest meant only for boys? Yay, I guess, but hardly groundbreaking in modern YA, where the ladies get the best of their male counterparts plenty often. That concept is satisfying when it’s done well, but this book fails to make the reader care much about anything.

I guess it’s a nice reminder to go back and reread Goblet of Fire or Gilded Cage or the Hunger Games or The Maze Runner or any of the many, many other books which it rips off that utilized the same concepts.

*ARC provided by NetGalley*

"Don’t let the beliefs of a backward system define you."

A fun and empowering read that shows how women should not be underestimated and to fight for what you believe in.

SUMMARY
In Pinsbury Port, there is a mysterious sickness running rampant through the lower class and killing them. Rhen Tellur has been assisting her father in investigating illnesses and creating cures for years. When Rhen's mother falls to the sickness, the clock begins ticking to find a cure. Every year for the past 54 years the citizens have been receiving a mysterious letter inviting young men to participate in a labyrinth competition for the chance to win a scholarship to the most prestigious all-male university. Rhen decides to pose as a boy and win the competition so that she can have access to the high-tech science equipment that will allow her to further her research into the illness. However, not everyone survives the labyrinth and no one is ready for a woman to participate.

REVIEW
I had a lot of fun reading this book because I am a huge fan of novels that include science and medicine. It started off very strong and Rhen's ambition gripped me immediately. She was a fierce main character and she had solid character development. I really enjoyed that she stood up for herself and didn't allow men to put her down. She was very relatable and Weber's writing allowed you to easily connect with her.

I also adored the female friendship between Rhen and Seleni that was woven into the story line. It was so pure and beautiful and you do not see enough of it in YA. Rhen wants to be scientist and doesn't particularly care about her social standing, while Seleni desires to be a housewife and keeping herself feminine. However, they are both equally strong and fierce women who support each other nonetheless. Their friendship was a highlight and I loved that Weber didn't just make it seem like a woman can only be strong if she castes away her femininity.

I also want to say that Beyrll had the most character devlopment and while I disliked his character in the beginning, I came to adore the heck out of him by the end.

My biggest issue and the reason why I had to bump down the star rating is the fact that the "main plot" does not even begin until halfway through the novel. You do not get to spend a lot of time in the labyrinth either - it was quite disappointing . There was not enough action and I expected a lot more suspense from the competition. All in all, the plot fell flat and moved very slowly - it really inhibited my enjoyment of the novel.

Overall, this was a fun read but nothing too special.

I found this book unfortunately unreadable. I couldn't get more than a few pages in without succumbing to confusion. Something about the sentence structure or word choice made it so difficult to follow along. Run-on sentences abounded. Inserted clarifications and asides cluttered up every description. The dialogue was baffling. Everything seemed to race along like a train going through a neighborhood, too fast to catch any meaningful details, everything blurring together. It was way too much work trying to imagine correct punctuation and sentence structure where there wasn't any.

I feel so guilty giving this two stars after the publisher was nice enough to give me a copy, but this just wasn’t my cup of tea. When I read the description for this book, I was expecting a high-stakes, action-packed adventure about a girl who enters a contest and kicks butt to the top. I thought I would be struggling to read the text through all my feminist tears. And although it is a very girl-power-y story, which I really appreciated, it was soooooooo not what I thought it was going to be. This felt more like a historical fiction novel with a fantasy twist and the action was in low supply. All of this necessarily isn't a bad thing and I can see why a lot of my friends love it, but it was just so different from what I had expected.

Some of the characters were great, especially Rhen who has a flair for science and the morbid, but everything was just so low key that I had a hard time getting into it. Plus, the romance aspect of the story felt very predictable and trope-ish to me. I almost wish it hadn’t even been a factor so we could put a bigger spotlight on Rhen.

I think I’m feeling this way because I had built it up in my head, which is my own fault, so maybe I’ll come back to it later and feel differently. But for now, this book just wasn’t my cup of tea.

YA with a strong female lead who tries to get ahead in a male driven society.
Every year in Pinsbury Port, a mysterious letter is sent out to all eligible-aged boys inviting them to compete for scholarship at the all-male Sternwick University. The poor and the rich alike look to see their name and how likely it is they will make it. Rhen Tellur opens to see if she can decide which substances the ink and parchment are created from. Even though Rhen is a girl, she wants to be a scientist like her father. She wants to help find a cure for the disease ravaging their town. When the disease hits home, she decides to compete for the scholarship. With the help of her cousin, she disguises herself to get the best of the boys competing and get the prize. Not everyone is willing to accept a girl in this competition and things turn dangerously deadly before things are over.
While this book started very slow for me, I think it is a good book for girls looking to find empowerment in their mind and academics, especially math and science. I had trouble connecting with the characters at the beginning and unfortunately that stuck with me through a lot of the story. I did enjoy the fact that we see a strong female leading not letting the men and their idea of what a woman should be limited to keep her from following her passion and helping others. Rhen, the main character, is strong and determined but also a little scared with what could happen if she isn’t able to accomplish what she sets out for. The story reminded me in a way of The Hunger Games but set in a much different time and location with characters that were big into girl power and advancing their status in a much different way. Once part way into the story, the plot picked up and the characters came to life in a way that kept the story going till the last page. I think if readers can make it past the first few chapters that were a struggle for me they will find an enjoyable read. I recommend this to young readers that are patient and willing to keep turning the page for a story they will enjoy.
I received a complimentary copy of this title from the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within are my own.