I was all set to post this on Friday, and then the news of RBG’s death broke, and I reached levels of despair about the state of the world I haven’t felt since March. It’s hard to believe that 2020 could get any worse, but on top of the plague, huge parts of the country are literally on fire right now, I don’t even know what hurricane is hitting where at this point, and I don’t even have words to express what RBG’s death and the upcoming battle for the Supreme Court means to me, so yes, 2020 did get worse. A lot worse. To my friends affected by the fires and the floods and the plague, my thoughts are with you. Please stay safe. And for anyone feeling hopeless, there are steps we can take beyond just wringing our hands and panicking. I never wanted this blog to be about politics, but I can’t ignore the fact that our very democracy is at stake. This is the time to call your senators, donate to campaigns, volunteer, and vote, vote, vote.
But this post isn’t really about politics. It’s about books. So let’s talk about books.
Nothing major happened for me in August. I continued to stay home and work from home and take Neutron for as many walks as I can. This past week marked my one-year anniversary working at the FCC, which is really cool. I definitely feel more confident in my work than I did on day 1, but it also doesn’t feel like it’s been a whole year, probably because half of that time I’ve been at home.
I read eleven books this August. This felt like a minor miracle to me when I counted them all up, because in case you didn’t read my whole post on Midnight Sun, I got kind of hung up on Twilight again. Two of the books I read were in Braille, which gets me up to eight Braille books a month, which means I’m back on track to reach my goal of reading twelve books in Braille this year. There wasn’t quite as much variety in what I read last month as I’ve noticed in the past few months, but I still really enjoyed most of what I read. Three of the books I read were rereads, but the rest were new to me. I read one YA contemmporary; four middle grade fantasies, one of them a mystery, and two YA fantasies; three YA paranormals; and one fantasy that I’m honestly not sure what age category it belongs to. I also got two books on the day they came out in August and just blasted through them. I haven’t done that in a long time and it was really fun. For one of those books I also got to attend a virtual launch party, and I’ll talk about that experience in a bit.
My first book of August was A Constellation of Roses by Miranda Asebedo. Tricks has been on her own and on the run from the foster care system ever since her mom abandoned her. And she’s good at being on her own, because she can steal anything she wants, and she’s never caught. When the police finally do catch up with her, she’s given a choice, prison or going to live with her father’s family in the middle of nowhere. Tricks never met her father, never knew she had other family, but they welcome her with open arms. And it turns out she’s not the only one who do magic with her hands. All the women in her new family have special, powerful talents. As you must know by now, I’m a sucker for found family stories. Throw in a pie shop and a little magic, and I’m hooked. I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend.
After that, I squeezed in the second Upside-Down Magic book, Sticks and Stones, by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. Strange things are happening at Nory’s new school, and everyone is blaming the Upside-down Magic kids. They’re even starting a petition to end the UDM program and kick the UDM kids out of school. Nory and her friends have to figure out who is trying to frame them, and working in a little kittenball wouldn’t go amiss either. This book was just as fun and delightful and full of heart as the last one. By this point I’ve read the third one too, and I can say this series is definitely going on the favorites list unless it goes, well, upside-down.
Then Midnight Sun came out and I was lost. As I’ve discussed at length over here, I loved Midnight Sun despite the many reasons I probably shouldn’t. And then, because Midnight Sun got me stuck back in the Twilight world again, I read The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and Twilight Reimagined: Life and Death, both also by Stephenie Meyer. I think I read Bree Tanner my first year of college, though I didn’t remember it until I reread it. And you know what, it was actually a lot better than I was expecting. Life and Death, though, was another matter. I was torn between hysterical laughter and utter horror as I read it. Far from demonstrating that the story would have worked if Bella was a boy, I actually feel like Life and Death made the mysogyny in the Twilight books that much worse. The two scenes in the original series that involve sexual violence against female characters are simply changed to muggings gone wrong, which is an excellent example of the idea that if the crime can be changed that easily, then it’s only a sexual crime because the victim is a woman and that’s not great. Never mind that Edythe (AKA female Edward, also I can’t get over the spelling of that name) frequently has less agency than Edward, and her inability to stay away from Beau comes across more as because she’s a girl, and I’m just going to stop here because this book made me really angry and I don’t even want to rant about it. Life and Death was an interesting experiment, I guess, but it didn’t work for me. But on the upside, it did the trick of getting me out of Twilight world for the moment.
After I read Midnight Sun, but before I read Bree Tanner and Life and Death, I spent a lot of time trying to find books that interested me enough that I wanted to read them instead of reading Twilight again. I ended up reading Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Did I pick it up because a friend described it as like Twilight for her? Yes, yes I did. But I didn’t find it to be very like Twilight for me. Every ten years, the lord of the valley, the immortal wizard called the Dragon, chooses a seventeen-year-old girl to be his servant for the next ten years. This is the price for the Dragon’s protection against the corrupted wood encroaching on the valley. Agniescka is seventeen this year, but she, like everyone else, is convinced the Dragon is going to choose her best friend, Kasia. Except, of course, he picks Agniescka. Because Agniescka has something the other village girls do not. She has the power to become a witch herself. The strongest aspects of this book for me was Agniescka discovering and grappling with the consequences of her new power and Agniescka and Kasia’s friendship. I didn’t really find all the political intrigue, epic war, and romance parts of the book all that interesting, and on the whole I felt like I was dragging myself through the book, which was unfortunate. It’s entirely possible I was still in recovery from Midnight Sun, but on the whole I’m sorry to say this isn’t a book I would recommend.
Next, I read Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. I’ve never read these books before, and after a lot of friends telling me they were good, and a desire to be able to join in on the discourse around the new movie, I got the first one out of the library and gave it a shot. Artemis Fowl is an evil genius. Also a millionaire. And a criminal mastermind. And did I mention genius. His father has disappeared and his mother is slowly going insane from the grief of losing his father. And Artemis has concocted a plan to get his hands on some fairy gold. Only he might have bitten off a bit more than he could chew when he kidnaps the fairy lieutenant Holly Short and soon finds his house under siege. This book started out slow for me, but it picked up really quickly and on the whole was fun and engaging. I have the second book out of the library now and I can’t wait to read it.
After that, I sped through Midnight At the Barclay Hotel by Fleur T. Bradley. This was a middle grade mystery/ghost story that reminded me a lot of And Then There Were None, the one and only Agatha Christie book I’ve ever read. A whole bunch of people are invited to the Barclay Hotel in the mountains of Colorado for a weekend getaway. Twelve-year-old ghost hunting JJ tags along with his mother, and bookish Penny comes with her grandfather. JJ and Penny befriend Emma, who’s lived at the hotel her whole life. They’re all set to have a fun weekend full of cupcakes and bowling and swimming pools and of course trying to find the ghosts rumored to haunt the Barclay Hotel. But then the butler announces that the owner of the hotel, Mr. Barclay, has been murdered, and all of the adults are suspects, so the kids set out to figure out who the killer is and to prove JJ’s mom didn’t do it. This was such a fun, fast mystery with all kinds of twists and turns. I loved the characters, and the twists were exactly right for the story. This was the second book of August that I snatched up the day it came out and just sped through. (Yes, the first was Midnight Sun.) I also went to the virtual launch party Fleur Bradley held, and it was so cool to hear her talk about how to write a mystery and where the ideas for the Barclay Hotel came from. On the whole, this was a great book and I would definitely recommend.
Then I got The Mystwick School of Musicraft by Jessica Khoury from Audible. It was free with their new Audible+ thing, and I’ve had it on my wishlist for a while, so I grabbed it, and oh I loved it so so much! Amelia Jones wants only to go to Mystwick and become a maestro, basically a super high-powered magical musician, and learn about her mother, who attended Mystwick herself and whom Amelia knows very little about. But then she fails her audition in a horrible way—like she gave the maestro a very, very impressive mustache kind of way. She thinks all hope is lost, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. But then a mix-up leads to her getting a second chance. If, after two months at Mystwick, the maestros think she’s Mystwick material, she can stay. But not only is the work harder than anything she’s ever done in her life, someone is out to get her, and something dark and sinister is closing in on Mystwick. I feel like my description of this book doesn’t do it justice, but it is absolutely fabulous. Magical music stories are right up there with found family stories and space adventures for me, so I was probably bound to love this no matter what. But I adore all the characters, and I was hooked from start to finish. It was fast and fun and full of so many feelings. And the audiobook had actual musicians playing the songs the kids were playing in the background, which made it super epic. I don’t know if there are going to be any sequels to this but I would be so so happy if Mystwick was a series.
Finally, I finished the Harry Potter series with Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. My thoughts on the books themselves haven’t changed, but finishing the series this time felt especially bittersweet to me (mostly, bitter actually). I don’t know when I’ll pick them up again. I do plan to reread them in Italian before I go back to Italy, because I need to practice and I already own them in Italian and never finished them. But I don’t know when I’m going back to Italy. The plan was this October but with Covid of course that’s not happening, and it’s not happening any time soon. Also, as she-who-must-not-be-named continues to demonstrate her despicable transphobia, I just don’t feel right rereading the books again when there are so many other books out there that are just as good and whose authors aren’t horrible people. On the other hand, Harry Potter is such a huge part of who I am—it shaped me as a reader, a writer, and a person—and I’m not ready to just let the books go. So I don’t know, and adding all those mixed feelings to the Battle of Hogwarts was a lot.
And that’s it for August. Let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. And of course I will always happily take more recommendations for found family, magical music, and space adventure stories.