Author: Jameyanne F

The Bane Chronicles Review

Cover for The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Maureen JohnsonLast week, I finished The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, and maureen Johnson. This is a collection of short stories about events in the life of Magnus Bane, one of the major characters in Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments, Infernal Devices, and Dark Artifices series (possibly others but these are all I’ve read). I did my best in this post to talk about this book without spoilers, but it was difficult given how closely tied to Clare’s other work this is.

I really liked this book. It’s a lot of fun, but at the same time, it’s not entirely fluffy adventures. There is definitely some dark stuff in these books. What I particularly like is the ability to see several big events in history (centuries apart) from the same point of view character. Over the course of these stories, we see Magnus’s adventures in Peru (which may or may not have led him to be banned from Peru), his attempt to save Marie Antoinette and the royal family during the French Revolution, his stint running a speakeasy in the late 1920s, his discovery of a ring of vampires getting high on humans addicted to drugs in the 1980s, and more. I liked how cohesive this book was, and I had fun putting together what I learned about Magnus in each story.

There was, as I’ve mentioned, some overlap with the existing books in Clare’s shadowhunter universe. In one story, we meet Will Herondale’s father, Edmund, and in another story Magnus encounters James Herondale, Will and Tessa’s son. Later on, we see Magnus’s first interaction with Valentine’s Circle, the story of how he first meets Jocelyn and Clary from Magnus’s point of view, his first date with Alec, and another story about Magnus trying to figure out what to get Alec for his birthday. The final story is all the messages on Magnus’s voicemail after what happened at the end of City of Fallen Angels. While all these stories were interesting, I thought they were on the whole weaker than the stories that were just about Magnus and his adventures, with the exception of the first date with Alec because that is a great story. These stories were burdened by the fact that they were connected so heavily to the plot of the other books. For them to be complete short stories, there had to be a fair amount of exposition that wasn’t necessary in the other stories. At the same time, as I worked my way through these stories, I was definitely looking forward to seeing Magnus’s perspective on the crucial events in the main books of the series. I think I would have been disappointed if there was no overlap at all. And I definitely did enjoy these stories. So while these stories weren’t as strong on their own in my opinion, connected to the broader universe they are great.

If you haven’t read any of Cassandra Clare’s books before, I’m not sure I would recommend this as a starting point. I don’t think it would make a lot of sense. But if you’ve read any of her books, this collection is great fun and I definitely recommend.

Jameyanne Rereads Harry Potter, 2019 edition: Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets

Every year I reread the Harry Potter books. I’m a nerd like that. And every year, I discover something new.

Recently, a friend suggested that I write down my thoughts during my yearly reread and do a blog post about them. She may have been joking, but I’m running with it.

This year, I reread the Harry Potter books starting just after finals in December 2018 and through April 2019 (I’m actually not finished with my reread yet but I’m planning to finish this month). I took my time with this reread, savoring the books instead of hurtling through them at my usual breakneck reading speed. This was a particularly fun reread, because at the same time I was reading the first two books, I was also reading The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, which really made me focus on the food in the series. Also, in my middle grade space adventure novel, my main characters are listening to the audiobooks when they’re having downtime in the plot—the Jim Dale version, of course. This may be cut from the final draft, but right now I’m having a lot of fun interpreting the Harry Potter books from a time when interplanetary space travel is common and the books are considered classics, akin to Shakespeare.

I’m breaking up my thoughts on the Harry Potter books into three posts. This week, I’m talking about Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. Next week, I’ll talk about Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix. And the week after that, assuming I’ve finished reading them, I will talk about Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. These posts are not reviews like my other posts. I will write spoiler-free reviews at some point in the future (probably for next year’s reread). These posts will be my thoughts and notes as I read the entire book, so there will be spoilers. All the spoilers. If you have not read the Harry Potter books and plan to in the future and don’t want to be spoiled in what will probably be a very confusing way, these are not the posts for you. If you have no interest in the inner workings of my brain while I’m reading these books, these are also not the posts for you. You have been warned.

Also, I ask a lot of questions in these thoughts. I’m sure there are answers out there on the web, especially on Pottermore, but I’m generally confining these posts to what’s contained in the books themselves. Also last I checked (admittedly a few years ago, thanks law school), Pottermore wasn’t all that accessible with a screenreader.

So without further ado, here is what struck me as I reread Harry potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of secrets this year.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Since I was living in the query trenches for my own novel when I started rereading this book, I was struck by the first chapter of the first book. I never thought much about the first chapter, which I always viewed as more of a prologue. But this time as I was reading it I was really dissecting what the point was. And I’m not sure there is a point other than to be mysterious. Everything that is introduced in the first chapter is introduced again in the subsequent chapters in a much more dynamic and developed way, and the second chapter is a more intriguing place to start the book. We all know that J. K. Rowling was rejected a lot before she got a book deal—this is like the thing that nonwriters quote at me whenever I said I was trying to get an agent—but this is the first time I really considered why that might be the case. When you submit a book, you usually submit a query letter and the first few pages, maybe the first chapter. And I can definitely see, because I’ve done it myself now, why the first Harry Potter book would get rejected so much. Don’t get me wrong, I love the first book to pieces, but the opening could have been a lot stronger.

So Dumbledore has a scar above his knee that’s an exact map of the london underground. Which makes me wonder: Does he reference that?

I really admire how so much of what happens in Diagon Alley isn’t just important for world building but is also setup for later in this book and later in the series. I really admire when a writer puts things together so well, and that’s one of the things I love about this series is just how well everything comes together.

I just love little innocent eleven-year-old Harry.

I don’t think we ever learn what the point of studying astronomy is. I’m all for studying astronomy, but every other class connects in some way to magic and this one doesn’t. Astrology comes up later in divination but that’s always treated as a joke. So what is the point of astronomy?

Why couldn’t Snape just heal his leg with magic after Fluffy bites it? Or go to Madam Pomphrey? Or get Dumbledore to do it if he doesn’t want anyone else to know?

When they’re looking for Nicholas Flammel, my first thought is that muggle-borns nowadays, used to google and smartphones, would be in for a nasty shock when they go to Hogwarts and there isn’t even electricity. I’m not even sure there’s a card catalogue for the Hogwarts library—at least it’s never mentioned. I would totally read the story about a muggle-born going to Hogwarts in 2019 and having to abandon their iPhone.

When I was a kid, it always really impressed me how Ron knew what the winged key would look like by looking for one that matches the handle. It must be a visual thing that keys match locks, which of course I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid, but even then as a twelve-year-old under pressure I don’t think I would have made the connection like that.

I love the potions logic problem. It reminds me of an LSAT logic problem, and I honest to goodness loved those. I try to diagram it every time I read it, but I’ve never managed to get it myself. I always got stuck with how to figure out which one of the end bottles lets you go forward and which one lets you go back. And I know, as someone who was just talking about the wonders of Google, maybe I should have looked it up. But I was determined that one of these days I would figure it out. And this year, I finally got it. In case anybody else has been as mystified as me, here’s how to do it.

First, here’s the riddle:

Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind,

Two of us would help you, whichever you would find,

One among us seven will let you move ahead,

Another will transport the drinker back instead,

Two among our number hold only nettle wine,

Three of us are killers, waiting hidden in line.

Choose, unless you wish to stay here forevermore,

To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:

First, however slyly the poison tries to hide,

You will always find some on nettle wine’s left side;

Second, different are those who stand at either end,

But if you would move onward, neither is your friend;

Third, as you see clearly, both are different size,

Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides;

Fourth, the second left and the second on the right,

Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight.

And here’s how I solved it:

We have seven bottles, lined up on a table from smallest to largest. Three are nettle wine, two are poison, one lets you go forward through the black fire, and one lets you go back through the purple fire. Number the bottles 1 to 7 from left to right (because I’m treating this like at LSAT logic game). We know that neither bottle 1 nor bottle 7 is poison. We know that bottle 2 and bottle 6 are the same. So bottle 2 and bottle 6 could be wine, because there are 2 bottles of wine, but we also know that you will always find poison to the left of the nettle wine. Repeat, always. So if bottles 2 and 6 are wine, that means that bottle 1 is poison, and we know from the third clue that bottle 1 isn’t poison (we’re assuming of course that the poison is deadly, but it doesn’t work if you don’t assume that). So if 2 and 6 can’t be the wine, and they’re identical, they have to each be poison. That means that bottle number 3 has to be wine. What about bottle 7?  The second clue seems to indicate that bottles 1 and 7 won’t be your friend if you want to move forward, but forward is danger, as it says in the intro. So let’s come back to that. If 7 is wine, that would allow 6 to be poison, and leaves us with bottles 1, 4, and 5 to contend with. We know that 1 can’t be wine, because no poison to the left of it, and the clues say it isn’t poison. So bottle 1 will either let you go forward or backward. So 1 will let you go forward or back, 2 is poison, 3 is wine, 4 will either let you go forward or back or it’s poison, 5 will either let you go forward or back or it’s poison, 6 is poison, and 7 is wine. But that’s not completely solved, and I’m not seeing another clue to get you the last step.

But there’s another way to do it: 1 will either take you forward or back, 2 is poison, 3 is wine, 4 is poison, 5 is wine, 6 is poison, 7 will take you forward or back. There are three poisons and 2 wines and 7 spots, so one poison automatically won’t be directly to the left of nettle wine. Also, the pairing of the dwarf and giant twice in the second and third clues, particularly the third clue, hints that they have similar qualities—specifically fireproofing qualities. Finally, this is a much neater arrangement that fits with all the clues, and the clues are supposed to lead you to an answer.

So how do you know whether 1 or 7 will take you onward and which one will take you back? The third clue says “if you would move onward, neither is your friend.” Taken figuratively, it means one bottle will take you back, so it’s not your friend, and one bottle will take you into more danger, so it’s not your friend either. And that’s always how I read it. But you can also read it literally: if you want to go on, your friend isn’t coming with you. And so bottle number 1, the smallest bottle that will only hold enough potion for one person, will let you go forward, and bottle 7 will send you back.

Voilá. I solved it. That being said, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable enough with that solution to drink a potion and walk through fire. Given that it took me years to figure it out, I am very, very impressed with Hermione. Of course I always have been. Nobody else I know memorizes all their textbooks.

I love the twist in this book. It does such a great job of setting up Snape as the bad guy, and yet it makes perfect sense that it’s Quirrel. Voldemort sticking out of the back of Quirrel’s head is totally terrifying (like I can’t believe I first read this when I was eight). And how Harry manages to hold him off is great.

And then Neville wins them the house cup! I will always love Dumbledore for that!

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

When I first read this book when I was a kid, I didn’t like it that much. I honestly don’t remember why. I mean okay it’s not my favorite in the series, but now when I read it, it’s so intense, and it gives me so many feelings.

The Dursleys are the worst. I wondered when I read the last book, and I feel like especially here it bears repeating, where is child services? Like when Harry and Dudley went to the same school, Harry’s teachers must have been able to tell that Harry was being neglected. He didn’t even have clothes that fit and his glasses were held together by tape. Come on people.

I know that the sixth book comes back to what happened in the second book because of Tom Riddle’s diary, but there’s also a lot of other stuff in this book that becomes important in the sixth book. Basically everything in the scene at Borgan and Burkes—the hand of glory, the opal necklace, even Harry hiding in the vanishing cabinet—are key to the sixth book. Later on, when Harry and Ron are disguised as Crabbe and Goyle, Malfoy reveals his family’s secret chamber under their drawing room floor, which will become important in the seventh book too.

Speaking of Harry hiding in the vanishing cabinet, I have fun imagining the conversation between Harry and McGonigall when he winds up traveling through the cabinets into Hogwarts and showed up at school a month before classes started. I know it’s not how it goes but it would have been a funny scene.

I feel like Harry complains a lot about not having money in the Muggle world. Why doesn’t he change some of his wizard gold for muggle money at any point during the series?

So Harry and Ron definitely cross a line for me when they steal the car to fly to Hogwarts. Like a certain amount of rule-breaking to solve the mystery like in the first book and this book and later on in the series is fine by me. But rule-breaking because the characters are being stupid and don’t think of the obvious solutions, like sending a letter to Hogwarts or waiting for Ron’s parents, kind of annoys me. Yes the car being at Hogwarts is important later, but I’m just kind of meh about how it gets there. (I like it when my characters are fundamentally smart and good.)

I love Colin Creevey. He is so cute, and he is also so brave. Annoying, yes, but it takes guts to approach a stranger and ask them for a photo. Not to mention the guts it takes to stick up for Harry against Malfoy.

Why doesn’t Hogwarts have a stash of spare wands? Or a contact with Olivander? It’s a wizard school. Accidents happen, right? Ron basically goes the whole year without doing magic, and his broken wand is frankly dangerous.

Speaking of Ron going the whole year with a broken wand, he isn’t the only one who misses large chunks of their education this year. Colin, Justin, Penelope Clearwater, Hermione, and even Ginny to some extent miss months of classes. I assume that in the first and second year it probably isn’t hugely important, but Percy’s girlfriend is a sixth year. How does she make that up? And when they cancel all exams at the end of the book, does that cover OWLS and NEWTS? These are just some questions I have.

Spiders continue to be scary, Lockhart continues to be a complete douchebag, and the ending of this book is just great. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

And that’s it for my thoughts on the first two books. I’ll be back next week to chat about the third, fourth, and fifth books.

Ableds Are Not Weird

In the last few weeks, this #AbledsAreWeird hashtag has been going around on Twitter. The hashtag was started by Imani Barbarin to express frustration at all the indignities people with disabilities have to deal with on a regular basis, and it’s gotten so big that it’s made the news. I’m probably inviting some kind of Twitter war with this post, but as you can guess from my title, I disagree.

Let me be totally clear. The experiences people are talking about on this hashtag are at best upsetting to the people who have to experience them, and many of them are worse than horrifying. I have experienced a lot of these things myself. I have been prayed over on the subway because I’m blind. I have been physically prevented from entering buildings or going upstairs. Strangers have grabbed me, my cane, or my guide dog and attempted to pull me where they think I want to go. People have taken my things and asked me personal questions, and I’ve probably been discriminated against while job hunting. And I’m talking about people in the U.S. here. So when I say I disagree with what’s happening on the #AbledsAreWeird hashtag, I’m not saying that because I’m unsympathetic. What people are talking about on this hashtag really happens. It happens on a daily basis, and it’s awful, and it hurts, and we should talk about it.

But I don’t think this is the way to talk about it.

My problem with the hashtag is pretty simple. As far as I’ve seen, and admittedly there’s a lot to scroll through so I may be missing something, the hashtag has turned into a space where people with disabilities are shouting about things people without disabilities have done to them, and then calling people without disabilities weird. Barbarin says she hopes the hashtag will make able-bodied people feel accountable for their actions, but I honestly don’t understand how. This does nothing to solve the problem. It doesn’t even really tell able-bodied people what the problem is. It just accuses them of something that they probably think of as being helpful or honest curiosity. And by accusing them in this form, I feel like it’s just pushing them away.

Ableds aren’t weird. They just don’t know that what they’re doing is insensitive or offensive. Instead of pushing them away with accusations without explanations, we should be reaching out to them with positive messages of what they can do to be helpful and what kind of questions it is appropriate to ask.

But, Jameyanne, why should it be on us to educate people about what we need all the time?

I get it. It’s frustrating to constantly have to educate the public. I’m pretty patient about it, but I definitely have days when someone tells me I can’t bring my dog into their restaurant, and I feel like exploding. But exploding doesn’t help.

When I feel like exploding, I think of a story my younger brother told me. He was with some friends when he saw a woman who was blind walking back and forth along the block across the street, obviously trying to find a specific doorway. He crossed the street, approached the woman, and offered assistance. He grew up with me, so he knows how to do this appropriately. He didn’t grab her. He just asked if he could help her find what she was looking for and offered to give her directions or sighted guide to her destination. (Sighted guide is when a blind person holds a sighted companion’s elbow and walks a half-step behind them, using their movements as a guide rather than a cane or guide dog.) My brother was polite, he used the right terminology, and the woman still exploded at him. And he came away feeling like he would never offer to help another blind person, because he didn’t want to have his head torn off for it. And I’ve heard similar stories from all sorts of other people.

So when I feel like exploding, I think of the damage I would do by exploding, and I don’t. At least not at that person. I maybe explode when I get home and I’m in private or talking to close friends.

The #AbledsAreWeird hashtag is kind of like everybody exploding at once. At best, it’s confusing for the ableds of the world. Saying “random person grabbed me and tried to drag me across the street today” doesn’t mean anything to someone who thinks that’s a helpful response to seeing a blind person on the corner. They don’t know that what they did is the opposite of helpful. They don’t even really think about what they’re doing, because if they thought about it, they’d probably realize that it is never appropriate to grab another human being and drag them across the street. So complaining about what happened on twitter doesn’t solve the problem. If anything, it makes it worse because it pushes the ableds away. And we don’t want to do that. For one thing, think how it would be to find yourself in a situation where, for whatever reason, you really need help, and you can’t find it because people are unwilling to help for fear of doing something wrong. For another, it just makes people with disabilities seem more other to able-bodied people.

It’s probably true that the hashtag has allowed people with disabilities to feel less alone over these experiences. This is certainly a valuable thing, but there are countless facebook groups, email lists, etc for disabled people to get together and gripe about an inaccessible and insensitive world. But Twitter is a public place. The people being griped at can see the griping. In my opinion, if you’re going to have a public conversation about this problem, it shouldn’t start with calling the people on one side of the argument weird. Granted, with only 280 characters to make your point, Twitter isn’t always the best forum for a productive conversation, but words matter, and personally, I think #AbledsAreWeird was a poor choice to label this hashtag.

When someone without a disability does or says something that I find inappropriate or offensive, I stop them and I educate them. When a random stranger on the street corner says “It’s time to cross,” grabs my arm (or my dog’s harness), and attempts to drag me forward, I pull free, step back, and say, “Please don’t grab me or any other blind person without permission. I appreciate that you’re trying to be helpful, but it pulls me off balance, distracts me and my dog, and endangers my safety. Also, I don’t want to go that way.”

Is this easy? No.

Can it be frustrating? Yes.

But is it necessary? Absolutely.

We have to educate people. No one else will do it for us, because they can’t. They don’t know what we need as individuals, stereotypes abound, and unfortunately most people have never interacted with someone with a disability (check out this horrifying study from Perkins School for the Blind if you don’t believe me). We, people with disabilities, know best what we need. We need to be the ones to tell people what we need and don’t need, and we need to do it in a positive way, or we will get nowhere.

Yes, it’s high time that we started publicly talking about the many microaggressions and macroaggressions we face every day as people with disabilities. But there needs to be a next step. If we’re going to say “this is not okay,” we need to say what is okay. In my opinion, this needs to be a conversation, not a one-sided shouting match.

So to start that conversation, here is your periodic reminder that you can ask me questions about what it’s like to be blind and how I do things when I can’t see. I will happily answer. I will answer based on my own experiences, so bear in mind that I am not every blind person, but I will answer. The only reason I won’t is if it’s a totally inappropriate and personal question, in which case I will tell you so. But I will not laugh at you. I will not shout at you. I will not call you weird.

So fire away.

The Final Empire Review

As I mentioned a couple days ago in my March Reading Roundup post, I’m trying out writing individual posts for each book I read and review, rather than one giant post at the end of each month. So here goes.

Cover of The Final Empire by Brandon SandersonLast month, I read The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. This is the first book in the Mistborn series, and since I’m definitely continuing on with the series and planning to write reviews for the next books, I wanted to write a full review of this book. As with all my reviews, this will be as spoiler-free as I can make it.

The Final Empire is epic fantasy. It was originally published as adult fantasy but I think since has been remarketed as young adult. I could see it going either way myself. This was my first Brandon Sanderson book, and I am just so glad I picked it up because it is awesome!

The Final Empire is set in a dystopian world that’s a rough analog to the early 1800s in terms of technology (or so Wikipedia tells me). Ash falls from the sky during the days, and at night supernatural mists terrorize the peasant population. A thousand years ago, the prophecied Hero of Ages fought off something called the Deepness and ascended to become the tyrant and god-king of the empire. He calls himself the Lord Ruler, and he keeps the empire on a tight leash. Only the nobility are allowed to possess magic, and the inquisitors, the police force of literal monsters are vicious in enforcing that, since magic is a genetic trait. And the peasants, or Skaa, are brutally enslaved. This is a world where the bad guy has won.

Not only has he won, but he has been in power for a thousand years. So when a street urchin named Vin is approached by Kelsier, told she can do magic, and asked to join in a plot to overthrow the Lord Ruler, she’s pretty sure he’s crazy. Vin is sixteen, and she has lived in truly desperate circumstances for her whole life. The only person who ever looked out for her, her older brother, also abused her and later abandoned her. She goes with Kelsier because she wants to learn to use her magical powers and because the inquisitors are looking for her and she needs protection, but it takes her a long time before she trusts him and his thieving crew.

Let me take a minute to talk about the magic system in this world. The main kind of magic is called Allomancy. Allomancers can consume pure metals and then burn them within their bodies to gain powers. Each metal does something different, and the metals work in pairs. For example, steel and iron allow a certain amount of telekinesis with metal—one lets you pull metal to you, one lets you push metal away, which you can use to pretty much fly. Tin heightens your senses, and pewter heightens your strength. Bronze helps you sense and strengthen others’ emotions, and copper shields your emotions—and the fact that you’re doing Allomancy at all—from others. You get the idea. There are ten metals total. Most Allomancers can only use one. A rare few Allomancers, which includes Kelsier and Vin, can use all the metals. They are called Mistborn.

Throughout the novel, we follow Vin and Kelsier. Kelsier trains Vin, and also the reader, in how Allomancy works and how to use the magic, and they put their plans against the Lord Ruler into action. Apart from studying her Allomancy, Vin becomes the crew’s spy. She infiltrates the nobility, disguised as the niece of a cooperative nobleman, and plants seeds that the crew hope will grow into a house war to destabilize the highest levels of society. Kelsier helps out with this with a few assassinations, while other members of the crew recruit and train soldiers for a Skaa army. The eventual goal is to topple the government by basically stealing the whole treasury, including all the stores of Allomantic metals. Of course, it isn’t going to be that easy. Anything and everything is going to go wrong, but throughout it all, Vin learns how to trust the new crew that has taken her in, and even how to become friends with them.

When I was in college,I worked as a submissions reader for the Kenyon Review. During one of our annual training sessions on how to read submissions, one editor said that he knew when a story was right for the magazine when reading it caused him physical pain, because the story is so good that it hurts that you didn’t write it. I related this description to my writing group, and writer’s pain became the highest compliment we could give each other’s work.

So when I say that The Final Empire gave me writer’s pain, I want you to understand exactly what I mean. This was so good. It was beyond good. It blew me away. It may be the best book I’ve read in a while. I could go on and on showering it with praise, but instead let’s talk about why.

The plot: The plot in this book is so tight and so compelling. It grabbed me up from page one and did not let go until the end. Arguably, it still hasn’t let go. We’re talking about a book that starts with the idea of a revolution and carries that idea through to its conclusion, and doesn’t even take that long to do it. The book is only 500-ish pages. (Has my feeling on what makes a long book been skewed slightly because of The Way of Kings? Maybe. Probably.) Whether you think 500 pages is long, medium, or short, there’s very little downtime in this book. That’s not to say that it’s all action all the time, though the action scenes are great. There is dancing and socializing and a romantic subplot and so many feelings. Remember I said that Vin is learning how to trust people and make friends and all that? That does not happen while they’re fighting off inquisitors all the time. Which brings me to…

The characters: I just loved them all!Especially Vin. They are so rich and strong and beautiful and flawed and it is wonderful. I love the group chemistry of the thieving crew. I love how they each have their own role but they plan together as a team. I love how they all have these moments when they break. One of my favorite moments in the book is when Vin just snaps at all of them because even though they’re Skaa too, they’ve never known what it’s like to live on the street the way she has, and then when Kelsier goes after her and calms her down and she’s now all embarrassed for flipping out, Kelsier is like “we all say stupid things sometimes, it’s cool, also you’re right.” It’s just a great moment, and the book is so full of great moments like these, largely because of these characters. And the characters’ arcs are perfection. (But in case you didn’t know, I’m a sucker for mistreated orphan finds family and learns to love stories.)

The world building and the magic system: I thought the world was really cool and mysterious, and there’s so much left to explore in the rest of the series. I really appreciated how detailed Sanderson was when describing exactly how the magic worked and what its limitations were. It was refreshing to have everything laid out so clearly.

The ending: Everything came together so well, and it was painful and messy and glorious. And while most everything was wrapped up, and I’m pretty sure you could stop reading after this book if you wanted to, enough was left dangling to entice me into the sequel. Plus i just love the world and these characters so much and I’m not ready to leave them.

No book can be absolutely perfect, and there were a couple things that bothered me. The biggest one is the romantic subplot. Vin falls in love with one of the nobles she’s supposed to be luring into a house war. This complicates the plot and it complicates Vin’s feelings for everyone involved. It wasn’t a bad plot move by any means. I actually quite like it as a natural outgrowth of Vin learning how good feelings work. My problem is with the love interest in particular. In a book populated with so many rich and vivid characters, he was just kind of meh to me. I think this is at least partly because I, like some of the other members of the crew, saw him as distracting Vin from what she was supposed to be doing. But I just didn’t like him too much. He was kind of a well-intentioned and well-read idiot. I’m trying to remain open-minded about him though, because I’m guessing he will be more important in the plot of the second book.

Other than that and a few other small things, this was such a good book. I was crying at the end. A lot. And I am dying to dive in to the rest of the series.

If you haven’t read any Brandon Sanderson before, I think this might be a good place to start. As I said, it was my first Sanderson book, and I know a number of other people who read this as their first Sanderson book as well. It’s significantly shorter than some of his other work, so it’s not as much of a time investment as another book might be.*Coughs The Way of Kings.* I’ve heard The Final Empire compared to V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series. There are certainly similarities. In both, an older magician takes in a street urchin and trains her in magic and brings her into his plans and adventures. And in one book the magician is named Kell and in the other it’s Kelsier. The audiobook narrator for The Final Empire is even the same as the audiobook narrator for the second and third Shades of Magic books. The similarities pretty much end there, in my opinion, but I think it is true that if you liked A Darker Shade of Magic you will probably like The Final Empire. Oh, and they’re both fabulous! In case I hadn’t mentioned that already.

If you haven’t read The Final Empire, I hope this review helps you decide to pick it up. It is so worth it! And if you have read the book, do you agree with my opinions? Do you disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments.

March Reading Roundup

It’s still hard to believe, but it’s April now. It’s been a pretty crazy month, what with my regular homework and not-so-regular class projects, starting to apply for the bar, going down to D.C. for spring break, and then flying to Florida this week for an interview. I redesigned my website too, and I upgraded things so there shouldn’t be ads anymore. I’ve also been going home a lot, because I have five day weekends now and home is so close. It’s great, but it’s been a lot. It’s also hard to believe that I only have four weeks of classes left before finals, and then I’m done with my 3L year.

Before we dive into the books I read in March, I have a couple quick announcements. This is not an April Fools Day joke, either. Since I’m trying to post more regularly on this blog, I’m going to start doing individual reviews of books, instead of a big post every month with all the books I’ve read that month. Since I’m in the middle of a few series, I will take some time in April and May to write full reviews for books in the series I have already started this year. All the reviews will still be spoiler free, and I think I’ll still do a monthly recap post to sum up the month, but it will be shorter than these have been. This is an experiment for all of us, so feedback will definitely be appreciated.

I’ve also updated my book recs page. Books are now organized by category and then alphabetically by author’s last name. As I start writing individual reviews, I’ll link to them from that page as well.

Finally, please feel free to recommend books to me in the comments of any of my book-related posts or else use my contact form here. You should have a good sense of what I like and don’t like at this point, but I’m always happy to try new things. I will put all books recommended to me on this blog into a jar and pick at least one to read each month.

Now, let’s take a look at what I read this month.

A collage of the covers of the nine books I read in March: The Final Empire, The Burning Maze, Wren Journeymage, Beartown, The Way of Kings, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle, Found, and Home.
Covers from Goodreads

I read nine more books in March, bringing my grand total for 2019 up to 28. I would have read more, but one of these books was massive and took me two weeks to read. Also like I said it was a crazy month. Eight of the books I read were fantasy, and one was a contemporary. On the whole, this was a great reading month. I absolutely loved so many of the books I read, and everything I read was fun and thought provoking. Let’s dive in.

My first March book was The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. This is the first book in the Mistborn series, and the first book I’ve ever read by Brandon Sanderson. I’m going to talk about this one in much more detail this week, so I’ll keep these thoughts brief, but oh my god, I was completely blown away by this book! I totally understand the hype, it is definitely well deserved, and I’ve already purchased the next two books in the series.

Next, I read the third Trials of Apollo book, The Burning Maze by Rick Riordan. I’m also going to talk about this in more detail later on. This was definitely a fun read. Apollo is trying to free the third trapped oracle and stop a certain Roman emperor from taking over California. We learn a lot more about Meg’s backstory in this book, and of course we have Rick Riordan’s classic fun adventure feel. This was a great ride.

After that, I read the final book in the Wren series, Wren Journeymage by Sherwood Smith. Wren and her friends have finally brought peace to the kingdom, or so Wren thinks, when her old enemy, Hawk, rides into town with intentions of courting Tess. Worse, Tess knew he was coming, and she didn’t tell Wren. Angry with her friend for not trusting her advice, Wren leaves Tyron to try to persuade her to see sense and sets off to find Connor and some more adventure. There are smugglers, pirates, sea battles, cool magic, spies, and even more old enemies. This book was so much fun, and it really pulled the whole series together. While the second and third books felt a bit scattered to me, this felt a lot more unified, and it was a nice conckusion to the series. I did end up having to buy the audiobook because it wasn’t available in Braille, but no, I did not hate the narrator.

Next, I read Beartown by Fredrik Backman. Fredrik Backman also wrote And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, which I read last December and adored, and I found I loved this book just as much. And it’s about hockey. I never thought I would love a book that’s centered on a sport so much, but I did. There’s a sequel, which I’m waiting to get from the library, so like the other books I’m going to talk about this in a lot more detail later this month. I’ll give you a quick synopsis though. The book is told from the point of view of a failing town whose last hope of survival is that their junior hockey team wins the national championship. They’re so, so close, and this is the only thing that matters to anyone in town. And then a fifteen-year-old girl accuses the star hockey player of raping her, and everything explodes. This book is so powerful and utterly incredible. I was literally up all night reading it, and I have a ton more to say, so stay tuned.

And now for the book that took me two weeks to read, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. This is another start to a series, so I’ll be doing a full review next week. Good thing too, because there is no way I can describe this in one paragraph. It is epic fantasy at its most epic, roughly a thousand pages of epic. I found it to be very daunting to even pick up, but after The Final Empire I had total faith in Sanderson’s ability to make every one of those thousand pages count, and for the most part he did. My very brief thoughts are that I’m not entirely convinced it had to be as long as it was, but the plotting and the world building were superb, and the way it all came together in the end was fabulous! More soon on this one.

In the last few days of March, I powered through the last two books of the Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, and then the last two books in the Magic Thief series by Sarah Prineas, Found and Home. I really liked The Silver Chair. Eustace is brought back into Narnia along with his classmate Jill, and Aslan sends them on a mission to find Caspian’s son, who was kidnapped by The White Witch (the witch of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe). Accompanied by the marshwiggle Puddleglum, they journey north, facing man-eating giants, solving puzzles, and descending below the Earth to confront the witch in her underground layer guarded by enchanted gnomes. Overall, it was a good read. On the other hand, I found The Last Battle to be disappointing. The religious overtones were too much, and there was so much racism and sexism, and also just the plot didn’t make any sense. Like the monkey convinces the donkey to dress up as Aslan for a joke, and then somehow the monkey allies himself with the Calormen, and this ends the world? Okay that’s an oversimplification but you get the idea. On the whole, it was a disappointing end to the series.

But the last two books in the Magic Thief series were fabulous. As you might recall, I read the first two books toward the end of last year, and while I liked them, there was something missing, and I struggled to really be drawn in. The third and fourth book had that something, and I was sucked right in. These two books made the whole series awesome for me. In Found, the dark magic is threatening the city, but Conn needs to find a new locus stone so he can fight against it. So he goes on a journey and finds… dragons. And the adventure goes from there. The fourth book, Home, finds Conn dealing with new conflicts and old enemies and trying to figure out just who he is and what he’s meant to do in the world. This was another one that did a great job tying the whole series together. I liked it lots.

And that’s it for March. Have you read any of these books? Do you agree with my opinions?

2019 Check In the First

We’re just about a quarter of the way through 2019. Feel free to stop reading at this point for some existential screaming if you need to. I’m right there with you. How is it almost April? I’m still accidentally writing 2018!

However it happened, it is in fact almost April. I set some pretty ambitious goals for myself for 2019, so I thought now might be a good time to check in on my progress and course correct if I need to. So let’s go.

  1. Don’t freak out:

I have a lot of things going on this year. Last semester of law school, graduation, studying for the bar, taking the bar, moving somewhere, starting a new job, actually becoming an adult. My goal is to not panic as all this happens. I’m doing okay with that, all things considered. I’m not 100% calm by any means. Lately I’ve been having some days where I am very much a ball of stress, but I’m getting everything done that I need to get done, and I’m moving forward.

1a. Get a job:

This still hasn’t happened yet, but I have some good leads I’m working on. So here, too, continuing to move forward is good progress.

  1. Get in shape:

This has not happened. A wonky schedule during J-term, then a variety of illnesses in February meant I’ve just this month started going to the gym, and that’s been interrupted by spring break and traveling for job interviews. But I am going to the gym as often as I can. As long as I keep doing that, I’m making progress.

  1. Read 100 books:

I’ve read 25 books so far this year. If I read 8 books a month, I’ll hit 100 for the year easily, so even though I haven’t read as many books in March as I did in January and February, I’m right on target for this goal.

  1. Finish the next draft for three projects: the middle grade sci fi novel, the memory-wiping academy novel, and the WWII Italy novel.

I am nearly done with a first draft of the middle grade sci fi novel. I will almost certainly have finished a draft before I graduate. The rest of this goal is going to have to change slightly, because guys I got an agent! And we’re going to be working on revisions to my middle grade fantasy project. I don’t know how long that will take and how many drafts that will require, so I want to allow myself some leeway here. I still want to finish three drafts this year, but what they are can be flexible. And with that flexibility, I’m well on my way to meeting that goal.

4a. Get an agent:

Yes! I did this! And I am still screaming about it!

4B. Set achievable weekly writing goals:

In January, some friends and I did a mini NaNoWriMo, because November is the worst month for writing a lot if you’re a student. I set a goal of writing one chapter a week. If I finished the chapter early in the week, I had a stretch goal of writing an additional chapter, and if I did that, I got to reward myself in some way. I only ended up meeting the stretch goal once. My reward was renting The Hate U Give movie when it came out, and wow! While I only made the stretch goal once, I did write almost five chapters that month (the flu stopped me from finishing the bifth chapter), and this is a big reason I’m so close to finishing the middle grade sci fi project.

My various sicknesses in February, as well as the start of the semester and my renewed job hunting efforts, meant I didn’t get as much done in February. I had a hard time maintaining the weekly goal system without the structure of the group. But I have been moving forward. I liked the weekly goal strategy, but I also think that I have so much going on right now—finishing the semester, applying for jobs, applying for the bar, studying for the bar, revising my book with my agent—that if I try to add specific weekly writing goals on top of all that the sheer amount of things might paralyze me into not writing again. So my goal right now is to write as much as I can. When things settle down, I can be more ambitious on a weekly basis. See? Achievable writing goals.

  1. Blog more:

Okay, so, so far this hasn’t happened. We can all agree on that. But as you’ve probably noticed, I’m working on redesigning my website, and I have plans to most more regularly. I’ve already finished and scheduled a number of posts for April. So while I haven’t made much progress on this front so far, I’m turning that around now.

So that’s where I’m at. It’s a quarter of the way through 2019, and I’m making good progress. Better progress than I expected in some areas, actually. I’d like to focus on getting in shape, doing more with this blog, and of course continuing with the not panicking, the reading, and the writing in the same way I have been. And I’ll check in on these goals again in three months.

In the meantime, happy April!

February Reading Roundup

Happy March! It is still not spring. In fact it’s more winter than ever. The groundhog lied to me. How dare he?!

Though it may not be spring yet, spring break is approaching. In a couple weeks, I’m heading down to D.C. to do some preliminary exploring and orientation and mobility in case a hypothetical job I’ve applied for comes through. I’m probably jinxing it just by planning to go down there, but it’s also probably warmer there than it is here. I’m finally over my various start-of-the-semester illnesses, and I’m starting to get all the emails about ordering regalia and making sure my name is right on my diploma and doing exit counseling for my financial aid. I’ve finished my Intro to Finance Concepts course, so I have five-day weekends for the rest of the semester. Yes, that means I finally updated my book recs page to include my 2018 favorites. And yes, that means you should be getting more posts from me, and not just about the books I’m reading either.

Collage of the covers of the nine books I read in February
Covers came from Goodreads

But speaking of the books I’m reading, I read nine in February. My grand total for 2019 is 19, which is kind of cool, right?

This was an interesting reading month for me. I definitely went way out of my reading comfort zone with some of these books. I really liked a bunch of them, and some of them were a bit disappointing. These books were mostly fantasy, with a couple historical fiction, one that I can’t categorize, and one contemporary chick lit/women’s fiction (if the categorization on Goodreads is to be believed). As always, these thoughts are as spoiler-free as I can feasibly make them. Let’s dive in.

First, I finished Cassandra Clare’s Dark Artifices series. I read the first two books, Lady Midnight and Lord of Shadows, last year, but the third book, Queen of Air and Darkness, just came out last November and I just now got it out of the library. And oh! The feelings! It’s really hard to talk about this without spoiling things from the second book, because so much of what happens in the third book hinges on the ending of the second book (which definitely broke me, btw, what an ending!). Basically, in this book the characters split up and are each trying to deal with the consequences of what happened in different ways. We still have the racist Shadowhunters trying to take over the Clave, and the faeries are still stirring up trouble. There were so many things that I loved about this book, and so many things that drove me up the wall. I think it was too long, the pacing was wacky, and there were too many point of view characters. At this point, I was also kind of over Julian and Emma’s forbidden romance thing. On the other hand, the alternate world they stumble into in the middle of the book is really awesome. And I loved, loved, loved Ty and Kit’s arc, and I am so glad there’s going to be a trilogy about them because I am all over that! On the whole, this book, and this whole trilogy, were not as good as I wanted them to be after The Mortal Instruments, but I still loved the world and the characters, and I’m looking forward to more in the future.

Next, I read the third Wren book, Wren’s War by Sherwood Smith. I read the first two books in this series last year. This is another one where it’s hard to explain the plot without spoilers, because a really big thing happens at the beginning of this book and it’s important but knowing it’s coming will wreck the impact for you. And already I might have said too much. Basically though, the evil king who’s been menacing Wren, Tess, Connor, and Tyron (and the whole kingdom) is back, and he has an army. And the foursome have to raise an army of their own and defeat him. And also deal with some messy domestic politics and family squabbles while they’re at it. So much cool stuff happens in this book, and I love these four friends to pieces, especially Wren. My one complaint is that since the four are scattered around doing different things, the book kept jumping around and it was hard to give any of them the time I thought they deserved. But this is a minor complaint, and I still really liked this book. I was ready to dive right into book four after I finished this one, but I’ve been reading these books in Braille, and the fourth book isn’t available. There is an audiobook, but I hate changing formats mid-series. What if I don’t like the narrator? This definitely threw a wrench in my momentum, but I have an Audible credit, so I’m definitely going to pick up the fourth book soon.

Meanwhile, I was also reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. This was the first time I read this book, and I’m kind of surprised by that, given all the World War II books I’ve read and all the research I did on WWII Italy in particular a few years ago. I really loved this book. I think it’s the first book I’ve read in 2019 that’s going on my book recs page. This book tells the story of a group of U.S. Airforce officers headquartered on a fictional Italian island. It reminded me a lot of Slaughterhouse Five, which I read in college and again last year, because it definitely was a darkly humorous take on the war. But while Slaughterhouse Five is humorous in a somewhat subtle way, Catch-22 was almost a slapstick comedy. It was a wild ride, and it definitely took me a bit to get into the style of this book. At times it was bizarre and ridiculous, but it gets dark, and the craziness only serves to make the dark more profound and horrific. In short, this was a great book, and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend.

Next up was The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. I’m going to be honest, I almost put this book down. I did put it down for a bit. And then I picked it back up again because I have guilt and can’t not finish a book. This is another WWII book, this one about a group of POWs working for the Japanese on the Burmese railroad. The book bounces around in time and place, so it also shows the lives of the prisoners after they’ve been released and are trying to live their lives. Basically everything not in the POW camp didn’t work for me. It was just written in this very pretentious style that made me grind my teeth and want to roll my eyes. The parts of the book set in the POW camp, however, were amazing. The writing was stronger. The details were crisp and vivid. I felt like I was there. There’s this one scene where the main character, who’s a doctor, is performing a tricky surgery and it was such a gruesome scene but it was also handled so incredibly. The author’s grandfather was a POW working on the Burmese railroad in World War II, and it’s obvious that the author really wanted to tell that story. It’s an important story, and it’s one that I definitely think needs to be told. I just wish Richard Flanagan had stuck to that and left the other stuff out. This book evoked a lot of strong emotions in me, in case you can’t tell. My feelings were not lukewarm on any of it, but on the other hand, it definitely stuck with me and unsettled me. I think whether you’ll enjoy this book depends a lot on your taste in what you like to read.

Next, I read The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. This was a quick book, which I liked because it was a bit of a breather after some of the longer and heavier books I read earlier in the month (not that this book was particularly light). This is also an older book—a lot of you might have read it before—but it was totally new to me. The Outsiders tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his brothers, who live in a poor part of town and are part of a gang of what’s called greasers. The greasers are constantly going head to head with the socs, who are like the rich kids. Ponyboy is proud to be a greaser, to be part of the gang, and to get into fights with the socs. But one night, his friend kills a soc to save Ponyboy’s life, and Ponyboy and his friend have to go on the run. I think the age of this book and the age of the author—she was a teenager when she wrote it—definitely show today. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just is a thing. I also wish I had more of a sense of the setting in this book. There were parts of the book where I had a great feel for where and when we were, and there were parts that could have been any time. But this is still a really good book, and I enjoyed it a lot. The pacing was really strong, so even though it was short, it didn’t feel like it was moving too quickly or like there wasn’t enough plot. I was gripped from start to finish, and I thought the voice was particularly strong. If you haven’t read this yet, it’s definitely one to try.

The February selection for my law school book club was Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, so I picked that up next. This could not have been more different than last month’s book, Girl Made of Stars. This may in fact be the most graphic thing I have read ever, and I mean graphic in every sense of the word. Wow! This is a collection of short stories, many with a speculative or horror twist. There were a few stories that I loved: the first story, which is a retelling of that green ribbon story we all heard as kids; the story about the woman in the writing residency, which may have my favorite line in the whole book; the story about the virus with all the lists; and the story about the women fading. Sorry I can’t remember any titles. A couple of the stories I just did not get at all, like the one with the baby and the SVU one, but the author is just such a good writer that I was willing to go with it. While the subject of a lot of these stories and the graphic quality did not make this book my ideal cup of tea, the writing was just fabulous, and I did in fact enjoy it. And what, you ask, is my favorite line of the book? “Do you ever worry … that you’re the madwoman in the attic?” (I guess I was an English major after all.)

After that, I reread Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling. I promise my posts on this year’s HP reread are coming. I’m waiting to finish the series so there isn’t a long gap between posts.

Next, I read Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. I picked this book up because I formed/joined a second book club, this one with the Cambridge chapter of the National Federation of the Blind, and this was the book that was chosen for our inaugural meeting. I wanted so much to love this book, because I just love Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. But this was not The Nightingale. Firefly Lane follows Tully and Kate through thirty years of friendship, from the time when they’re fourteen. This book started out really strong. I got pulled right in, and I loved the girls and their different home situations and their friendship. But I found the pacing to be weird, and the plot points to be predictable. In almost every instance, I knew what was going to happen before it did. I also felt like we were supposed to be able to sympathize with both of the main characters, and I’m sorry,I didn’t. One of them was clearly wrong all the time. Kristin Hannah is a great writer, and that’s definitely present in this book. And despite everything, I was definitely balling my eyes out at the end, so it packed an emotional punch. I just wanted it to be as good as The Nightingale, and I don’t think it was. Also I really, really want to talk to people about this, and I don’t know if I can make it to the book club meeting where we’re discussing this, so if you’ve read it, hit me up. I have feelings. Also there’s a sequel. Should I read it?

And finally, I read The Ocean At the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. This is the first book I’ve read by Neil Gaiman by himself (I read Good Omens back in the summer of 2012 but he co-wrote that). In this book, a man returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers an incident in his childhood when an opal miner staying with his family committed suicide and brought monsters into the neighborhood, and the boy and his really awesome magical neighbors have to fight off the monsters. That’s the best way I can describe it, and I am in no way doing it justice. This book was yet another one that was definitely outside my reading comfort zone, because it was dark fantasy, bordering on horror, and I don’t normally like that sort of stuff. I’m more into happy adventure time, if you haven’t gathered that yet. This was a deeply odd and deeply creepy book, and it may give me nightmares, but I also loved it. The writing was stellar. The creepiness was just the right level of creepy. It didn’t make sense and it did make sense and the feelings were so vivid and I just loved it. It’s also a pretty short book, so it was easy to take the leap and try something new. I realize I’m not making a ton of sense with my thoughts on this one, but it’s just really hard to describe. But it’s great and you should give it a read. Promise.

And that’s it for February. I’ll have more coming your way soon, so stay tuned, and in the meantime, let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them.

Exciting News!

Friends, it has finally happened.

After years of writing, rewriting, revising, rewriting, revising again, and finally querying my middle grade fantasy adventure book, yesterday I signed with a literary agent, Laurel Symonds of The Bent Agency.

Yay!!!

I’ve known this was happening for the past couple weeks, and I still can’t believe it’s real, and I am still ridiculously excited! We’re going to revise my book and then start submitting it to publishers.

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks from when I received the call to now, and I’m looking forward to telling you about the process up to this point and what happens next. But first I have to unstick myself from the ceiling and finish my homework for Monday, because law school doesn’t stop.

January Reading Roundup

January always feels like the month that never ends. It’s long and dark and cold. Particularly cold in the last couple weeks. But here we are, finally, in February. Today it’s warm and birds are singing and I’m daring to hope that the groundhog might be right and we might actually get an early spring. And don’t you even think of telling me the groundhog is never right and there’s still a lot of winter ahead of us. Punxsutawney Phil is right 39% of the time. I looked it up. And I’m going to cling to my hope of an early spring until February dumps another bucket of snow on us, and even then, I’ll hope.

Speaking of warm weather, I rang in the New Year in Florida. Literally there was a bell. We had a great vacation before returning to the cold northeast. Harvard law has a mandatory J-term, and this year I took a three-week course on patent law. It was really interesting but also really intense. Then spring semester started, and I once again came down with a really nasty cold that felt like the flu. I started off fall semester sick too, so I’m noticing an unfortunate pattern here. There is some good news though. First, I’m on the mend now. Second, this is my last semester of law school, so the pattern can’t build up a head of steam and continue much longer. Knock on wood.

I was also writing a lot in January. A group of friends and I decided to do our own National Novel Writing Month in January—since November is the worst month if you’re a student. I set out to write one chapter a week (five chapters total) on my middle grade space adventure project. I wrote four chapters and a bit of the fifth. I blame my cold/flu for not quite finishing, but this is a ton more progress than I’ve made in a while. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this project. At this point, I’m pretty much pantsing it, which means it’s just as much of an adventure for me as it is for my characters. I’ll talk more about this later.

So now that January is over, it’s time to recap the books I read this month. Because so much was going on, I only read ten books, and it was a bit of a mixed bag—some were really great; some not so much. Let’s dive right in.

I started the year with An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. This was our first book club selection of the year. Celestial and Roy have been happily married for a year (at least Roy says they’re happy—I have my doubts), when Roy is arrested and convicted of rape. He didn’t do it, but he’s off to prison, leaving Celestial behind to fall in love with her childhood friend. So this is not the sort of book I would have picked up on my own, and I wasn’t a fan. I recognize that it was a good book. It did cool things with form, and it tackled hard issues like race in the deep south and false imprisonment and family. I just didn’t like it.

After that, I started the next Rick Riordan Greek myths series, The Trials of Apollo. I read the first two books, The Hidden Oracle and The Dark Prophecy. I admit I was dubious about continuing on with these series after the ending of The Blood of Olympus, which was on the whole disappointing. But the premise of this series was irresistable: Zeus punishes Apollo for his role in the events of the last series by casting him down to Earth to live as a mortal. And it is priceless. The quest plots are starting to feel very similar, because I’ve now read ten of these books, but I just love Apollo and his new friend Meg. They carry this series.

Next, I read What to Say Next by Julie Buxbalm. After Kit’s father dies in a car accident, she forms an unlikely friendship with David—who is at the very bottom of the high school popularity hierarchy and is somewhere on the autism spectrum. Together, Kit and David set out to figure out exactly how and why Kit’s father died in that car accident. I was so torn about this book. On the one hand, I loved the characters. David in particular was depicted really well. I found the bullying—and the lack of school action about the bullying—to be very realistic. And it gave me lots of feelings. At the same time, I felt the overall message of the book was that in order for David to have any friends—including Kit—he had to be less autistic. He couldn’t be himself. This left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Next, I read the second Expanse book, Caliban’s War by James S. A. Corey. In this book, the crew gets dragged back into the war between Earth and Mars when they go to Ganymede to search for a missing child. There’s also a Martian marine working for a high-up UN official, and they are both awesome. While I wasn’t one hundred percent thrilled with the first book, this book really sold me on the series. The worldbuilding continued to be really awesome, and I felt like the character development finally started to catch up with it. I’m really looking forward to what comes next in this series.

After Caliban’s War, I continued my reread of the Harry Potter series with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter in the Goblet of Fire. I’m working on a more detailed post about my Harry Potter reread, so I won’t go into details now, but these two are my favorites of the series and they definitely brightened up my January.

This month it was my turn to pick a book for book club, and I chose Girl Made of Stars by Ashley Herring Blake. When Mara’s best friend Hannah accuses Mara’s twin brother Owen of rape, Mara is forced to choose between her family and her friend and face trauma in her own past. I chose this book because another writer on twitter said this was the best YA book of 2018, and the plot sounded interesting. I really liked a lot about this book. The high level concept was really gripping, and the book gave me all kinds of feelings. But it felt like the author was trying to cram as many hot-button issues as she could into the book, so there were a lot of things that felt like they were glossed over. And I also found the absentee parenting unrealistic given the characters’ socioeconomic class and other descriptions in the book. As a friend in book club who was a teacher before law school said, there are definitely situations where this kind of parenting would be realistic, but based on everything we know about this family, these parents should have noticed what’s going on with their kids, and that’s not only unrealistic but also harmful to kids who really are in that situation. So as much as I appreciated what this book was trying to do, and as powerful as this book was in places, it ultimately doesn’t work for me.

Then I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. This is an epistulary novel about the Nazi occupation of the island of Guernsey in the British channel, which I knew nothing about. It was really cool, until two thirds of the way through when it turned into a Jane Austin-esque romance and kind of fell apart for me. Like what just happened there?

Finally, I finished off January with The Postmistress by Sarah Blake. This was another World War II book about three women—a young wife on Cape Cod waiting for her husband who’s gone off to work as a doctor in London during the blitz, the postmistress of the same town on Cape Cod, and a reporter in London who travels through Europe to try to find out what is happening to the Jewish refugees. The back cover of this book describes it as three remarkable women coming together around the fact that the postmistress doesn’t deliver a letter, and okay, if you can call any of these characters remarkable and you can say they actually come together. The postmistress not delivering the letter, by the time it actually happens, is so inconsequential. And honestly the only one of these charactersI care about is the reporter in the London blitz who goes off to Europe and rides the trains recording the stories of the Jewish refugees. There were also some factual things that just drove me nuts. First, the author took liberties with the dates to allow the reporter to carry a portable recording device (I forget what it’s called) on the trains through Europe a year before the device was invented. It’s a small thing, and it’s a choice the writer is free to make, but it annoys me because it’s unrealistic and just allows the writer to bend the world to suit her story. Second, the postmistress makes a big deal of correcting the reporter, when they meet, that in the U.S. her title is postmaster, but the reporter and the book continue to call her the postmistress, which I just found kind of disrespectful to the character. On the whole, this wasn’t a bad book. It just didn’t work for me, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

And that’s it for January. Have you read any of these books? Do you agree with my opinions?

Favorite Books of 2018

I read 176 books in 2018, a number that still floors me. Here are my favorites. Since I’ve already talked about why I liked these books in my reading roundup posts each month, I’m just giving you a list here, sometimes with a quick note. This list does not include books I reread that are already on my book recs page.

My book recs page will be updated soon to include my 2018 favorites.

Favorite books of 2018, in no particular order:

  • The Children of the Red King books 6-8 by Jenny Nimmo (I read the first 5 in 2017, and while the series could have ended there, these rounded things off nicely)
  • The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
  • The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel
  • Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel
  • Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy by Lisa See (Shanghai Girls is better , but you need to read them together)
  • Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
  • See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng
  • The True Meaning of Smekday and Smek for President by Adam Rex
  • War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars by Richard N. Haass
  • Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery (this is the last book in the Anne of Green Gables series, and in my opinion the only one worth bothering with after the third one. Just skip the ones in the middle.)
  • The Sisters Grimm books 2-9 by Michael Buckley (I read the first book in 2017, and this whole series is just such fun)
  • Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver
  • Delirium series by Lauren Oliver
  • Slaughterhouse Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut
  • A Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L’Engle
  • The Giver series by Lois Lowry (The Giver is the best but the others are good too)
  • Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
  • Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan
  • Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan (if you like audiobooks, this is one to listen to, because it includes the music in the story and is really well-done)
  • The Breadwinner series by Deborah Ellis
  • Lily’s Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff
  • Gingersnap by Patricia Reilly Giff
  • Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff
  • Life After Life and A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
  • The Underland Chronicles series by Suzanne Collins
  • Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali
  • Turtles All the Way Down by John Green (the plot is weird and just shouldn’t be there but I loved being in Aza’s head so much that it made my favorites)
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan
  • The Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan (not as good as the first series but still a fun read)
  • Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (don’t bother with the rest of the trilogy they aren’t as good)
  • The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox
  • Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon
  • Matilda by Roald Dahl
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (I’d skip the sequel. It’s weird.)
  • Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
  • Maximum Ride books 1-3 by James Patterson (stop after book 3. I really mean it.)
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  • The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater
  • Rose series by Holly Webb (the last book isn’t what I wanted it to be but it’s still a delightful series)
  • And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman
  • Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George (the sequels are fine but nowhere near as good as the first book)
  • Wren series books 1 and 2 by Sherwood Smith (I haven’t finished this series but loved the first two so much I had to include them here anyway)
  • The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis (these certainly have problems but nostalgia won the day.)
  • Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (Another one where I haven’t finished the series but really liked the first one so here it is.)
  • Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
  • Smoke in the Sun by Renee Ahdieh (not as good as the first one, the pacing is weird, but it completes the series nicely)
  • The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century by Amanda Hesser (lots of fun food history in here, and the recipes I’ve tried so far have been really good)
  • The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook: From Cauldron Cakes to Nickerbocker Glory—More Than 150 Magical Recipes for Muggles and Wizards by Dinah Busholz (I can’t vouch for any of the recipes yet but it’s great for an HP nerd).
  • Tempests and Slaughter by Tamora Pierce

And here are a few books that I read and enjoyed but that I’m waiting to finish the series before I decide whether they’re favorites:

  • Lady Midnight and Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare (The Dark Artifices series)
  • The Magic Thief and Lost by Sarah Prineas (the Magic Thief series)
  • Caraval by Stephanie Garber (the Caraval series)
  • Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse series)

Stay tuned for how I feel about these books once I finish the series and/or once the rest of the books come out.

All in all, it was a pretty good reading year. I read so many books that I really, really loved. I’ve set a goal to read 100 books in 2019, and I hope I discover another abundance of good books. What are you planning to read in 2019?