This actually happened last week, but it was a crazy week, so I’m only telling people now. The anthology Twilight Worlds: Best of New Myths Volume II, which includes my poem “A World in Seven Flames,” has been published. You can get it on Amazon here, and it should be available from other retailers and in other eBook forms soon. “A World in Seven Flames” is my first speculative poem, and also the first poem I’ve written in a long time. It is also set in the same world as my short story “Dissonance,” which was published by Abyss and Apex in 2016. I hope you enjoy. And once you’ve read the poem, head over here to read about the story behind “A World in Seven Flames.”
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November Reading Roundup
Hello all, and welcome to the final days of 2020. I hope everyone had a happy socially-distanced Thanksgiving. It’s hard to believe, but we have almost made it through 2020, and there’s some hope that life may return to normal in the coming months, but November was still a pretty rough month for me. In addition to the general stress of the election and the ongoing pandemic, Mopsy got an infection in her paw and has been pretty sick, and I’ve been forced to admit that at twelve and a half, she’s getting up there. After some unsuccesfull antibiotics and the infection spreading to all of her feet, we’ve gotten her on some medication that seems to be helping with her pain. She’s up and around a bit more, and she’s more alert. She has a mass on her spleen that the vet thinks is cancer, particularly because some stomach cancers in dogs can manifest as foot infections (who knew?). I’m working from home in New Hampshire right now and will be through the holidays, and I’m really glad I have this time to spend with her. I’m also glad the medication is helping with her pain and she’s alert and happy again, but there’s no denying she’s sick, so we’re taking things one step at a time to make sure we’re doing what’s best for her.
In better news, November was also National Novel Writing Month. My writing group did a set-your-own-goal of November, and I edited 53,000 words of my middle grade space adventure novel. Since then, I have actually finished up this draft, at the expense of sleep a lot of nights and getting this post finished sooner, and I’m happy with how it’s turned out. On another fun note, I have been writing every day now for almost a year and two months, which is super cool.
I don’t feel like I read that much in November, partly because I spent so much time writing, partly because I ended the month with three library books that expired while I was in the middle of them. But let’s be fair to myself, on top of editing about two thirds of a novel in November, I read seven books, ish, and I met my 2020 reading goal of 100 books. Yay!
Most of the books I read were pretty short this month. I read three middle grade books, one contemporary and two fantasy. I also read two YA fantasy books, a satire, and something that I would call a fantasy short story but Goodreads calls a book (this is the ish in my seven ish books). One of the books I read this month was in Braille, bringing my total Braille books for the year so far to eleven. One to go to meet that goal.
So let’s dive in and talk about these books.
First, I read Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko. This was an absolutely fabulous book. It’s definitely up there as one of my absolute favorite books of the year. It’s really hard to describe, but I’ll give it a try. Tarisai is half-genie. Her mother imprisoned and raped a genie to create her. Now she is sending Tarisai to the palace to undergo the trials to become one of the crown prince’s chosen eleven, who will join him in ruling the empire as a counsel. But in order to be anointed as one of the prince’s chosen, Tarisai will have to love the prince, and her mother is using the wish in her blood, her third wish from the genie, to force Tarisai to kill the prince once she is anointed. The first part of the book is Tarisai trying to fight her mother’s wish while becoming friends with and then falling in love with the prince. And then things change. And change again, and change again. What I love about this book is how much it packs into one novel. This book arguably could have been a trilogy, because there’s so much going on, but it’s really condensed and moves really fast and I love it. I also love Tarisai and all her friendships. Also, I want to give Jordan Ifueko so much credit for pulling off amnesia really well halfway through the book without making it feel like a loss of character development. The only thing that jarred me sometimes was that this book covered a lot of time, and there were some time skips that felt kind of sudden. But on the whole this was a fantastic book and I one hundred percent recommend.
Next, I read Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why by Alexandra Petri. This is a book of satirical essays about the past five years or so. I read this the afternoon after the election was called, and it was helarious. I’m not sure how funny it would be at any other time, honestly. Obviously some essays were better than others, but on the whole this was a good book.
After that, I read the fourth Artemis Fowl book, The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer. Remember Opal, the villain from book two? ell she’s back, and she’s out for revenge, forcing Artemis and Butler to team up with Holly and the other fairies. I went into this book a little warily. The last book ended in a way that could have negated all of Artemis’s character development over the course of the series. But Eoin Colfer handled that issue really well, and I was satisfied with how this book went and how it ended. A lot of friends have told me that this is the place to stop with the series, and I probably will, because this was a great conclusion. On the other hand I do like to draw my own conclusions on books, so I might give the next books a try at some point in the future.
Then I read the short story on tor.com, The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections by Tina Connolly. Since this is a short story, I’m not going to try and summarize it, but it involves food that causes you to experience memories from your past and an evil king, and it is so so good, so you should go read it. It won’t take you too long.
Next was Weather or Not by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle, the fifth book in the Upside-Down Magic series. This was, as usual, a really fun book. But I also enjoyed this book less than I’ve enjoyed earlier books in the series. This book focuses on Nory, as usual, along with Willa, who struggles to handle her emotions and causes rain indoors when she’s upset. Nory and Willa are forced to work together for a group project, and they don’t like each other, and their feud draws in the rest of the upside-down magic class. I didn’t like how mean Nory was in this book, and I also didn’t like how Miss Star, the teacher, definitely knew these girls were having trouble and didn’t step in before things got out of hand. But this continues to be a fun series and I’m looking forward to reading the next book whenever I get it out of the library.
Then I reread Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. I first read this book in sixth grade, and it made a huge impression on me then, because it was the first book I remember reading where a major character dies. I found it just as powerful now, but I was also uncomfortable with how disability was treated in this book. It feels very dated, and because of that I’m not sure it’s a book I would recommend now.
And I finished off November with the third Mortal Instruments book, City of Glass by Cassandra Clare. I continue to love this book. It works really well as a conclusion to the first half of the series, and there are just so many feelings.
I’m still in the middle of two of the library books that expired before I could finish them in November (I did get one out of the library and finished it earlier in December). Hopefully I’ll get the others out of the library again soon. Otherwise, that’s it for November. If you’ve read any of these books, let’s chat in the comments. I’ll be back soon with my usual wrap-up of 2020, if I can face it, and my favorite books of the year. Have a happy and safe holiday, and please, please, please wear a mask.
Another Short Story Publication
I am so excited to announce my short story “Noa and the Dragon” is going to be published in the anthology The Artificial Divide.
The Artificial Divide is an #OwnVoices anthology of stories by blind and visually impaired authors and about blind and visually impaired characters.
This isn’t the first story I’ve had published that’s about a blind person—my story “Polaris in the Dark” is also about a blind character—but “Noa and the Dragon” was the first story I ever wrote with a blind protagonist, and I can’t wait to share it with you.
I’ll share more details about the anthology as I learn them. In the meantime, if you’re a blind or visually impaired author, the call for submissions will be open until January 31.
October Reading Roundup
Well, we have finally reached November. On the up-side, we only have two more months and then we can bid this awful year farewell. On the down-side, we are rapidly approaching the singularity beyond which I can make no plans of any kind. If you haven’t voted yet, please make sure to vote tomorrow. I really don’t like talking politics here, but this is an extremely important election, and your vote matters. Please vote.
But before we dive into the election hole, let’s talk about books.
I only read four books in October. This is about half my usual monthly reading amount, and three of these books were really short. I’m actually in the middle of three more books but managed to finish none of them before the end of the month. This was partly because things got a lot busier at work in the last few weeks, so I was more tired at night. I was also focusing pretty heavily on writing this month: I finished revising my novel at the beginning of October; wrote, rewrote, and revised a whole short story; discussed more revisions to my novel with my agent; and planned out my NaNoWriMo project. And I do feel like I hit a bit of a reading slump about halfway through October. I started this book a lot of my friends really liked, but I was really struggling with it, and I didn’t finish it before my library copy expired, so I’m waiting to get off the waitlist again. My friends have good taste in books so I’m sure it gets better. But in the meantime, I struggled to get into other books for the rest of the month. But then I spent the last weekend of October in New Jersey with my writing group for a Halloween writing retreat (we all quarantined for two weeks and got negative covid tests before we went, so I felt very safe), and it was wonderful, but I didn’t get much reading done. So October was a good month for me personally, but not a lot of reading, and that’s okay.
I didn’t read any Braille books this month, but I got ahead last month so I’m okay with that. Of the four books I read, two were middle grade fantasy, one was a contemporary middle grade, and the other was nonfiction. Let’s dive right in.
First, I read Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly. This is a memoir of Scott Kelly’s year in space aboard the International Space Station, with flashbacks to his life and the path that got him there. This was a fascinating read. I absolutely loved learning about what it’s really like to live aboard the ISS, because I’m a nerd like that. I admit I got a little mixed up in the beginning because Scott Kelly is the twin of Mark Kelly, Gabby Gifford’s husband and hopefully a soon-to-be U.S. senator, and I got the Scott and Mark mixed up a bunch. But my confusion was more because of how the book was described to me than any problem with the book itself. I was a huge fan of this book and would absolutely recommend it.
After that, I read the fourth Upside-Down Magic book, Dragon Overnight by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. The Upside-Down Magic class is going for an overnight at the dragon sanctuary. They thought they were going to be the only school group there, but it turns out that Nory’s father is there too with a group from his school. Nory navigates making new friends who don’t like her father as a headmaster along with her own complicated feelings about her father, all while learning about dragons. Meanwhile, Andres is discovering that his upside-down magic, which so far has mostly been a pain, could actually be a real and useful talent. This book follows the last book so well, and it’s another fun installment in Nory and her friends’ adventures. Only one thing disappointed me with this book: after all her growth in the last book, Pepper can’t come to the dragon sanctuary because her magic is still out of control, so she’s basically not in the book at all. I like the idea that even after she’s overcome the biggest obstacles in controlling her upside-down magic, she still has things to work on, but these books are so short that there isn’t room to explore that, and it ended up feeling like Pepper’s growth in the third book was invalidated by her inability to participate in the adventures of the fourth book. But I still definitely enjoyed this installment and I’m looking forward to what comes next.
Next, I read the third Artemis Fowl book, The Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer. Artemis has built a super-computer using the fairy technology he stole from the LEP in the first book, and he’s planning to show it to an evil American businessman. Nothing can possibly go wrong, can it? Yes, if you say that out loud, everything will go wrong. There was a lot that I liked about this book, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the first two books, partly because I just couldn’t get behind the premise. Artemis is a genius, and I just didn’t buy that he would do something so stupid. I’m dubious about the ending as well, but I’m holding out judgment until I read the fourth book later this month.
And finally I read 96 Miles by J. L. Esplin. This is a contemporary middle grade novel, which I don’t tend to enjoy as much as middle grade fantasy, but I enjoyed this one immensely. John and Stewart Lockwood have been trained all their lives by their father to survive anything. Their dad is a hardcore survivalist, and he’s stockpiled their isolated Nevada ranch with enough food and water and medical supplies to last for months. But then there’s a massive blackout while their dad is out of town on a business trip, and when the boys are robbed at gunpoint, they have to travel 96 miles to get help. I really enjoyed this book. It was really tense, and very well-written, and I was super invested in these characters. There’s one thing that I’m not a fan of in this book. Something major is revealed close to the end of the book, and it casts everything we’ve read so far in a different light and makes the need to get the rest of the way to safety even more important. The problem is, the thing that’s revealed is something that there isn’t a reason why we the readers wouldn’t know it already except that the author wanted to hide it from us, especially because the book is in first person. So it feels unnatural that we only learn this information when we do as opposed to earlier in the story. I have a lot to say about this, and I’m actually thinking of doing another book review and writing topic post about this later on. This was a good book, but I’m on the fence about whether I would recommend it because of this problem.
And that’s it for October. If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to talk about them in the comments. And in the meantime, vote. Please, please, please vote!
The Kiss of Deception and Surprise
I spent a lot of time last year posting individual reviews of books. A little while after I started work at the FCC, I stopped doing full reviews of every book I read, because it just got to be too much. My plan was to write reviews of books that made me think about writing in some way. And then life got busy, and then Covid started, and I’m pretty sure the only one of these I actually wrote was about Midnight Sun, and that was only marginally about the writing topic. I actually wrote this post about a year ago, but never posted it.
So let’s try all this again. My goal is to keep doing these posts going forward. Think of them as a combination of book review and writing discussion. I will try to keep these posts spoiler-free, but depending on the writing topic I’m focusing on, that might not be possible. I will flag any spoilers before I say them, though, so if you think you might want to read this book and don’t want to be spoiled, you can skip over them. I did manage to stay spoiler-free on this post, so no worries here.
So without further ado, let’s talk about a runaway princess.
Last year, I read The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, and since I just reread it, I decided the time was ripe to talk about it. This is the first book in The Remnant Chronicles trilogy. I’m planning to discuss all three books over the next few weeks, because I have so much to say.
I talked about The Kiss of Deception a little bit in my October reading roundup last year, so apologies if this post is a little redundant with that, but I want to go into a lot more detail here.
Lia is the only princess of the kingdom of Morraghan. This means she’s the first daughter and should be blessed with the Gift, a supernatural awareness of events taking place in the present and near future. But Lia doesn’t have this magic, so she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham on another kingdom when they arrange her marriage to the prince based on the fact that she has the gift. Unwilling to be a pawn in the sham, and definitely unwilling to marry a stranger she is pretty sure is at least twice her age, Lia runs away. She and her attendant and friend, Pauline, settle in a distant village and get jobs at an inn. Then two strange young men come to stay at the inn, and Lia finds herself falling for both of them, unaware that one is the prince she left at the altar and the other is an assassin sent from the barbarian kingdom of Venda to kill her. And both the prince and the assassin are falling for her too.
Before you roll your eyes—and if I could have rolled my eyes I would have when I first started reading—this book is so much more than a runaway princess and a silly love triangle. I’m so glad I stuck with it, because by the end of the book I was hooked into this world and these characters. Yes, the first half of this book is a bit rough, mostly because Lia is pretty insufferable, and there’s not much plot beyond the kind of cringy love triangle, but face it, Lia is a runaway princess, and when everything goes sideways about halfway through the book, she gets so much better. I also really loved the world building in this book. The magic system feels fully fleshed out, even if we only see a little of it in this book. What we see of the political situation is also really well-done and intricate. Since I’ve now I read the book twice and finished the series once, I can say that it feels like Mary Pearson knew where she was going from the beginning.
Another thing that I really liked is that Mary Pearson pulled off multiple points of view—Lia’s, the prince’s, and the assassin’s—without frustrating me. So many times, when we have the villain’s point of view in a book, I get frustrated because knowing what the bad guy is up to takes out some of the tension. My prime example of this is Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series, especially the second book (I love it but it bugs me). Especially in cases where the main character is trying to figure out what the bad guy is up to, if we have the bad guy’s point of view and know what they’re up to, it takes the urgency out of the protagonist’s journey, or worse, makes the protagonist look stupid.
But it actually works to have the assassin’s point of view in this book. Part of the reason it works is that poor naive Lia is in no way suspicious of these two guys, so there’s still a lot of tension because we the readers know that she’s walking straight into a lot of trouble. But Pearson also keeps the mystery going for the reader too. We know the two guys are named Kaden and Rafe. We get chapters that are from their points of view, with chapter headings that tell us their names. But we don’t really get much of their motivations in these chapters. And Pearson is careful to phrase their thoughts so that they’re specific enough to not be frustrating but vague enough still that they could apply to either the assassin, or the prince. We also get chapters from the point of view of The Prince and The Assassin, where we get their motivations but no indication of who is who. So for the first half of the book, we know that Lia is walking straight into trouble probably, but we honestly don’t know whether she prefers the prince or the assassin, and we don’t know who is the prince and who is the assassin.
It was a ton of fun trying to fit all the pieces together and figure out who was who. And then about halfway through the book, the assassin reveals himself and kidnaps Lia, and the prince goes after her, and everything turns upside down.
I don’t want to say more because I’m doing my best to keep this spoiler-free, but the description of this book as a runaway princess gets involved in a love triangle with the prince she was supposed to marry and the assassin who is sent to kill her just doesn’t do this book justice. That’s the first half of the book, yes, but the second half, when Lia is a prisoner trying to escape, discovering her own power and magic and learning more about her world and how she came to be in this situation, is just so great, and in my opinion what this book is really about.
But my favorite part of the book is that it took me by surprise. The first time I read this book, I was positive I knew who was the prince and who was the assassin. And I was wrong.
In case you haven’t noticed, I read a lot. This was my ninety-first book of 2020. I also read a lot of YA fantasy. I’m really familiar with the tropes, and lately I’ve found myself able to predict a lot of what’s going to happen in books. Maybe not specifically, but very few things actually surprise me in books these days. But Mary Pearson totally surprised me, and I love it.
I’m not saying that the reveal of who was the assassin and who was the prince was unfounded. It wasn’t. When I looked back the first time I read this book, and as I was reading it for the second time, it makes total sense. So I really admire Pearson’s ability to both set up the true reveal so that it feels consistent with what’s happened so far and to steer her readers so effectively in the wrong direction. She weaves the details into the story so well it’s really incredible.
I want to note that I listened to the audiobook both times I read this, and it has different narrators for each of the point of view characters. The second time through this, I felt kind of stupid because the narrators for the prince and the assassin are the same for the corresponding named character, and that’s normally something I would pick up on. But I was so focused on picking apart the details that I got mixed up on the narrators and was actually convinced they swapped. I’m curious if there’s different fonts or something for each point of view in the print book, but I would also note that there are no different fonts in Braille, so if I had been reading in Braille I still would have been led down the wrong path.
When I was in college, I worked for the Kenyon Review as a first reader for submissions. One of the things the editors told us to look for when evaluating submissions was “surprise and delight.” I haven’t thought about that phrase in a long time, partly because I found that what surprised and delighted me typically wasn’t what surprised and delighted the KR editors—obviously surprise and delight is a pretty subjective metric. But as a reader, surprise and delight is still a really important factor in how I feel about books. If I find the book is predictable, then I just don’t like it as much. If I’m surprised by a book, and if that surprise is done well, that adds a lot to my enjoyment of the book. I was surprised and delighted by The Kiss of Deception, both because it managed to trick me and because it subverted a lot of typical tropes when it did so.
So while surprise and delight is definitely subjectile reader to reader, it also seems like something that us writers should shoot for. I’ve been thinking about ways to do this effectively since I first read The Kiss of Deception. It’s done so well in this book, and it’s also something that I was working on in my MG fantasy project around the same time I first read it.
So how can you surprise a reader?
This will depend on the kind of surprise you’re writing. If the surprise is crucial to the plot or part of the climax of the book, how you set that up will be more important than a surprise in a subplot, or even a surprise early on or midway through the book that changes the character’s direction. Obviously, when I say less important, that isn’t to say it isn’t important at all, and if you’re writing a surprise or a twist, you should definitely work to set it up well.
When it comes to a good surprise or twist, that the setup is key. You want to lay enough groundwork so that when the twist comes, the reader can feel like the twist makes sense and is earned in the story. At the same time, you want to slip those clues in among other details or events, because you want the reader to be, well, surprised. But the other things you use to distract from the important clues should also be important to the story, because red herrings that go nowhere feel like pointless distractors, and that’s no fun for anyone.
In the context of The Kiss of Deception, I think the way Mary Pearson set it up, with the chapters from Kaden and Rafe and The Prince and The Assassin, and separating the characters from their motivations the way she does, works really well for this book. We get the separate motivations of the prince and the assassin, but when we know we hearing from Kaden or Rafe, we are only given details of their motivations and opinions of Lia that could apply to both the assassin or the prince. At the same time, Kaden and Rafe are distinctive, well-fleshed out characters, so the intentional vagueness isn’t as frustrating as it might otherwise be.
Another point of interest in this setup is that it is very obvious it is a setup. By using chapter headings both with the characters’ names and with their titles, so to speak, Mary Pearson is all but inviting us to try to figure out who is who before it’s revealed. It would be a very different book if we had no idea that Kaden and Rafe were either prince or assassin. If we saw them from Lia’s point of view, as a trader and a farmhand come to stay at the inn where she’s working, the reveal that one is an assassin and one is a prince would come out of nowhere and feel unearned.
I would also like to point out that while this surprise is really important for this first book in the trilogy and is the surprise that got me thinking about surprises in the first place, it isn’t the only surprise in the book, and it isn’t actually that important to the series at large. Lia’s discoveries about her gift and what part she might have to play in the future of Venda are much more important to the series as a whole, yet the groundwork is laid just as thoroughly, from snippets of Lia’s facility with languages and the book she stole from the scholar, to the quotes at the end of some chapters, and so on. The clues are all there, but they are disguised as pieces of information to help build Lia’s character or to describe the world, and these little bits of information are overshadowed by the mystery of Rafe and Kaden for the reader, until hey, remember all this stuff we’ve been talking about all along, because it’s really important, have another twist. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t give more details than that.
There are a lot of ways you could pull off a compelling, convincing, and delightful surprise. The Kiss of Deception demonstrates at least two approaches. Like so many other things in writing, how you do it depends on the story you’re telling. The most concrete advice I can give here is to read a lot. Look at how authors you admire pull off twists. And just as important, look at books that don’t pull off twists effectively.
This probably should go without saying, but if you have a twist in your book, don’t just throw your story out into the world without getting some objective feedback from your trustee beta readers. Chances are, you’re way too close to your work to be able to tell if you’ve set up your twist effectively, and you have no way of knowing if it’s obvious to the readers or not. In my own work, I swung wildly back and forth between readers seeing the twist the first time certain character is introduced to readers not seeing it coming, not understanding it, and feeling it came out of nowhere before I found a balance that seems to work.
This is a topic I’m really interested in, and I’m pretty sure I’ve only scratched the surface here. If you have thoughts on how to successfully write twists and surprises into your work, I’d love to talk about them in the comments. I’d also love to know if you’ve read The Kiss of Deception and its sequels, because so far I haven’t found anyone else who’s read these books, and I am dying to talk to someone about them. Honestly, they may be the latest series that I go around yelling at people to read. I’ll be back soon with my whole reading roundup for October and then to talk about the next two books, along with talking about cliffhangers and strong female characters. But in the meantime, seriously, these books are great. You should read them. Go read them now!
September Reading Roundup
Hello. It’s mid-October, fall is upon us and covid cases are on the rise again, but I’m here to tell you about all the books I read in September. I keep trying to jrite this post earlier in the month, but this time I don’t feel that bad, because I spent the first half of this month writing and editing a short story. I haven’t finished a short story in a couple years, because of law school and the bar and working on novels, but also because writing short stories is hard guys. So this feels like a big accomplishment and I don’t mind that other things took a back seat this month.
But here I am now to talk about books again. I read eight books in September. Two of them were in Braille, bringing my total number of Braille books I’ve read this year up to ten, which means I’m ahead of the game for once. Three of the books I read this month, including the two Braille books, were rereads. I started a few new series and continued others I’ve been working on. No stand-alones this month.
Honestly, I was less happy with the books I read this month than I’ve been in the past few months. There were a few books that I really liked, of course, but there were also a few that were fine but ultimately just kind of so-so for me. Almost everything I read this month was some kind of fantasy. So let’s just dive right in.
First, I reread the first two Mortal Instruments books, City of Bones and City of Glass by Cassandra Clare. Just before she turns sixteen, Clary Fray discovers she is far from the ordinary teenager she thought she was when her mother is kidnapped by demons. Clary is a Shadowhunter, a demon slayer, and together with her new Shadowhunter friends and her barely discovered powers, she sets off to find and save her mother. I haven’t reread these books since before law school, and it was really great to pick them up again. No, they aren’t the most fabulous books in the world, but they are fast and fun and full of feelings, and right now that’s about all I need.
After that I got the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s second Mistborn trilogy, The Bands of Mourning. Wax and his team of trusty investigators are sent off to find the Lord Ruler’s metalminds, before the bad guys do, of course. I felt pretty much the same way about this book that I’ve felt about the first two books in the series. It was really slow for a long time and then it picked up and became really interesting, but unfortunately, I also just don’t feel as connected to these characters as I want to.
Then I read the third Upside-Down Magic book, Showing Off by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. In this book, Nory and her friends in the Upside-Down Magic class are faced with a whole new challenge: a school talent show ⋅ coneaen ieass has to compete. And Nory’s father is coming, so whatever they do, it can’t feature their Upside-Down Magic. Meanwhile, Pepper is finally getting a grip on her magic so she doesn’t always scare animals witless, and she and the other UDM kids want to show off their magic at the talent show. I continue to love the Upside-Down Magic Adventures. I especially love how much the characters grow in this book and learn about friendship and their own special power. And Nory’s father is the worst. I can’t wait to read more in this series.
I mentioned a few months ago that I was trying to read more books by authors of color, and this month I finally got A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow out of the library. Tavia is a black girl living in Portland, Oregon, where there aren’t that many other people of color and even fewer with magical powers. Tavia is also a siren, in a world where sirens are feared and persecuted. And her best friend, Effie, is, well, no one is sure but she’s definitely something. Everything is going just fine for them until a well-publicized trial of a man accused of killing his girlfriend begins, and the man claims his girlfriend was a siren as a defense. Then Tavia is pulled over by the police and accidentally uses her siren-call to get them to leave her alone, and Effie is blacking out and shedding skin and maybe turning people to stone. And suddenly staying silent is too much for Tavia. I really loved so much about this book. A lot happens, and there’s a lot of feelings, and it speaks to the current moment in our lives so well. I particularly loved Tavia’s and Effie’s friendship. On the other hand, I really struggled with the pacing in this book. Even while dealing with all this stuff, it still managed to be really slow for most of the book, and It switched from slow to fast and fast to slow so abruptly that it often threw me out of the story. So while I really did enjoy this book, it’s not one I would leap to first to recommend. On the other hand there’s a sequel or companion novel or something on the way, and I will most certainly read that.
Then I finally finished Rules for Thieves by Alexandra Ott. I’ve been trying to read this for almost six months. I read the first half of this book in Braille, but gave up because the copy I had on my BrailleNote had too many issues, so I switched to having it read to me by this app on my phone. When twelve-year-old Alli runs away from her orphanage, she gets blasted by a curse that will spread and eventually kill her. The cure, however, is super expensive. Her new friend Beck proposes she comes back to the thieves guild with him and joins, because the salary will cover the cost of the cure. This was a fun book about belonging and right and wrong, and on the whole I enjoyed it. I did feel like I had a hard time getting into it, probably because of the problems I was having in Braille and then listening to it being read to me by a robot voice. I also found I had a hard time connecting with A’li as a character. I felt like I never understood why she wanted to run away from the orphanage so badly, especially because she was going to be released in a few months anyway. And this made it hard for me to grasp the rest of the world and the stakes and everything. And while she clearly thought of herself as sassy, she came across as more annoying and whiny to me. There is a sequel to this book, but I’m not sure I’m going to read it.
Next, I read The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer, the second Artemis Fowl book. In this book, Artemis is trying to find his father, and Holly and the fairy police are trying to deal with a goblin rebellion. Holly and Artemis make a deal to exchange hlp and team up, and it’s really great. I just love the adventures and the teamwork and the character development we get in this book. An excellent second book to this series.
And I finished off September with The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, the first book in The Remnant Chronicles. I read this series last year, and I believe I told you I had a full post on this book on the way. Well a year later I finally finished writing that post and will post it by the end of this week, so I’m not going to say much more than I continue to love this book and this series.
And that’s it for September. As usual, let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy, and if you haven’t already, be sure to vote by November 3.
Book Recs Redux
I started this blog just over seven years ago, in 2013, before I started my senior year of college. (Excuse me for a moment while I go hide in a corner and feel old.) In early 2015, while I was working in Italy, I set up my book recs page, and I’ve been adding to it with my favorites of the books I read each year. Recently, I looked through the list and realized that not only is it getting to be a bit unwieldy, but there are also several books I wouldn’t recommend anymore, and the list doesn’t accurately reflect my tastes as a reader and books I would want to share with friends and family. So this week, I removed a bunch of books from the list, and you can go see the new and improved list right over here.
This pruning of my book recs page also made me think a lot about myself as a reader. I have read a lot over the past five years. And I mean a lot. Since I started tracking my reading goals on Goodreads in 2016, I have read 514 books: 62 in 2016, 77 in 2017, 176 in 2018, 109 in 2019, and 90-one so far in 2020. Yikes! But reading so much so fast has changed me as a reader, and I’m certainly not the same person I was at the start of 2016. So I thought this was also a good time to take a step back and think about how my reading tastes have changed and how I evaluate what books I like and what books I love so much I would recommend them to others.
I’ve read a lot of new genres and authors over the last few years. Recently, my reading habits have definitely skewed toward fantasy and science fiction. I’ve especially been enjoying getting into new science fiction stories, because I never used to read sci fi, though I definitely prefer my sci fi to be more space-related than not. I’ve also become pickier about the literary, contemporary, and historical fiction I read. I’ve struggled a lot more to get into those books, and I actually put a historical fiction book down recently, which is really rare for me. In terms of middle grade and young adult, I’ve found that while I adore middle grade fantasy, I’m usually not as captivated by contemporary middle grade stories, though there are some that I do love dearly and are still on the list. I want to read more middle grade science fiction, because what I have read I really like, and also I’m working on a middle grade sci fi project right now. I’ve also found I’m pickier with YA of all genres. I tend to like the fantasy and sci fi books more, but there are some contemporaries I still absolutely love as well.
My big takeaway from looking at all this is that I have become a lot pickier and a lot less forgiving as a reader. I really only find myself recommending books I absolutely love, and if I feel like I need to recommend a book or series with a caveat, I tend not to recommend it. So the books I list on my book recs page now are books that I not only loved when I read them but books that I still love, books that have stayed with me in some way or another and are still meaningful to me.
I’m not going to list here which books I removed from the page. To be clear, these were good books and series, and I really enjoyed them when I read them, so I certainly don’t want to put them down by calling them out. That being said, if you remember something was on the old list and want to talk about why I cut it, I’m happy to chat about that in the comments.
Generally speaking, there were a few reasons I removed the books I did. at this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you what some of the books were about, so while I enjoyed them at the time, they obviously haven’t stuck with me, and I don’t feel like I can honestly recommend them now.
Some of the books and series that I recommended in the past were books and series that I enjoyed even though I recognized they had serious flaws. Sometimes I recommended them because I was interested in the flaws, or because the flaws inspired me as a writer. I have removed these books for a few reasons. Firstly, because as I’ve said above, I’m a lot less forgiving of major flaws than I once was. And secondly, because a book recs page that is just a list of books I would recommend with no explanation of whyI recommend them doesn’t seem like the place for these books. In the future, I might write posts about what intrigued me or inspired me about these books, but they aren’t books I would recommend.
Finally, I removed books that I felt I could not recommend for social justice reasons. Over the past several years, I have become much more aware of diversity, inclusion, and representation in what I’m reading, and I have become much better at critically engaging with the text. This is not to say that all the books on my book recs page are paragons of diversity and representation. Several certainly have problems, and one day I will write a whole post on how you can love something and recommend something while still recognizing and engaging with its flaws (thank you to the folks over at the Tortall Recall podcast for teaching me this important lesson). But there were a few books on my list that I have come to realize have serious enough problems that I am just no longer comfortable recommending them.
Which brings me to the one and only series that I removed from the list and am going to call out by name: Harry Potter. This is also the series which I regret most removing from my book recs page, because it has meant so much to me over the years. I’ve bestruggling with how J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments all summer affect how I feel about the books. Rowling has always been a writer I admire, and the Harry Potter books have remained incredibly important to me. It broke my heart that someone who wrote such powerful books about accepting difference and love being the strongest kind of magic could believe and say such awful, hateful things. This letter on Tor.com does such a good job expressing my feelings. I am not trans, but I have friends who are, and I have been bullied because I’m different too. I can’t stand by silently mourning how she has forever-tainted the book series that has served as a beloved touchstone for my whole generation, and worse, the harm she is doing to trans people all over the world, because to remain silent is to condone her comments. And her comments have become more and more hateful in the last few months.
I have come to the conclusion that whatever she says, the Harry Potter books are ours now, not hers. I love them. I can’t turn that off. They have still affected how I read and write even today. They are flawed books, certainly, but they still send a strong and lasting message about the power of love and friendship and acceptance. But there’s a difference between me continuing to love the books and me actively recommending the books. Because as Lindsay Ellis said in this video about death of the author, recommending the books gives J.K. Rowling more power and more influence. I do not in any way agree with J.K. Rowling’s views, and I do not want my continued appreciation of the original Harry Potter books to be construed to mean that I do agree with her.
If I were to recommend the Harry Potter books, it would come with a major caveat: borrow them from the library or from a friend, or by them from a used bookstore, because by purchasing these books new, you are supporting an author who has turned out to be a hateful bigot. But part of repising my book recs page, as I said above, has included removing books that I would recommend with caveats. And so it is with a heavy heart that I have taken Harry Potter off the list.
That turned into a bit more of a rant than I originally intended, but as much as I didn’t want to remove Harry Potter from the list, I would also be really uncomfortable doing it silently, without explaining why. As with the other books I took off the list, I still think the original Harry Potter series is really good and worth reading, but it doesn’t belong on my list anymore.
And that’s it. You can go check out my leaner book recs page over here, and if you’re curious why a book you remember being there is gone, I’m happy to chat about it in the comments. I’d also like to know if you’ve read any of the books on the list and what you think of them, and of course I will always take more book recommendations.
August Reading Roundup
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.
Midnight Sun Madness
Well, friends, I promised it was coming, and here it is: all my thoughts on Midnight Sun, the good, the bad, and the confused. I have a lot of criticism for this book, but on the whole I really enjoyed it, and my primary reaction to this is that I want more Edwardian Twilight please give me more Edwardian Twilight!
Before we go on, I just want to flag that the real Quileute tribe is currently seeking donations to move to higher ground. I’ve learned since posting my last Twilight post that a lot of people didn’t think the Quileute tribe featured in the Twilight books is in fact a real tribe. They are a real Native American tribe, living right on the water’s edge in Washington, and they are attempting to move their at risk communities to higher ground to secure the survival of their tribe. If you’re a fan of the Twilight books, or have recently purchased Midnight Sun, please consider a donation.
For those who don’t know, Midnight Sun is Twilight told from Edward Cullen’s point of view. Stephenie Meyer started the project more than twelve years ago, while she was working on the original Twilight series. But in 2008, someone leaked her unedited, unfinished draft on the internet, and she set the project aside, much to everyone’s disappointment, because what we did see was so great. I found out recently (I didn’t know it at the time) that there were rumors she had picked up the project again and it was going to be published in 2015 with the tenth anniversary edition of Twilight, except then the Fifty Shades book from the guy’s point of view came out. I never got into those books and so know literally nothing about them except they exist and started as Twilight fanfiction, and I’m going to keep it that way because I’ve gone far enough down this rabbit hole. Anyway, when that came out apparently Stephenie Meyer set Midnight Sun aside, again, and we ended up with the gender-bent Twilight book, Life and Death, which I also just recently discovered and don’t really want to talk about (but I probably will, more on that later). Which brings us to 2020. It feels like everything in the world that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong, and everything is awful, but finally, finally, Midnight Sun has been published!
When I heard Midnight Sun was finally going to be published, I reread all the Twilight books in preparation. You can find my post about my feelings about the Twilight books over here.
There will be spoilers in this post. I’m assuming you’re familiar with the first Twilight book, at the very least. If not, read on at your own risk.
As I said, I really enjoyed Midnight Sun, against a lot of my better judgment. Because as we’ve already established, when it comes to Edward Cullen I’m apparently still sixteen and I don’t care how awful he is I love him so much.
Lots of people have gone through all the problems with this book. I don’t really want to tear it apart, because others have done a really good job doing that, but there are some things I just have to point out, in no particular order.
This book is still about the start of a toxic, abusive teenage relationship. There’s just no getting around that. Also, the way Edward thinks about female characters is pretty gross. Rosalie and Jessica come to mind in particular, but they are by no means the only ones in this book. Also, I don’t care what justification Edward has, it is still really bad that he is sneaking into Bella’s room to watch her sleep. He says he’s there to protect her and there’s nothing creepy about it, but he’s a vampire with super senses, and he can protect her from the front lawn or the roof or something, I don’t care. He’s in Bella’s room, while she’s sleeping, without her knowledge or consent, and that is creepy and wrong and not romantic at all. Also it’s made weirder by the fact that his whole family knows what he’s doing and is okay with it. Yikes! And finally, while it might have been okay to include Orson Scott Card on your list of favorite authors in 2005, when Twilight is set, that isn’t really an okay thing to say now in 2020, when the problematic issues of Card’s books and the fact that he is really homophobic have been common knowledge for a long long time. Disclaimer, I haven’t read Ender’s Game or any of his other fiction, and at this point I probably won’t, so I don’t feel qualified to say more than that. But the fact is that Stephenie Meyer’s readers are living in 2020, and I never really got a strong sense of time in Twilight anyway. Like if someone hadn’t told me it was set in 2005 I wouldn’t have guessed that year, and it could just as easily have been set in 2020 without too many changes (like maybe there’s better internet in Forks in 2020, but there’s still a massive digital divide in this country so also maybe not). Anyway, my point is that including Orson Scott Card on Bella’s list of favorite authors felt too deliberate not to be a point Stephenie Meyer was making, and it made me uncomfortable.
Like I said, there are certainly many other problems with this book, but I’m really not here to rant about how problematic it is. Others have done that much more eloquently than I could. These are the problems that really jumped out at me, and I wouldn’t feel right not pointing them out up front. But Midnight Sun also did a lot of really cool things and brought a whole new perspective to Twilight for me, and what I really want to do in this post is talk about why.
One of the coolest things, as a writer, was being able to see how Stephenie Meyer has actually grown as a writer from the first Twilight to Midnight Sun. The writing isn’t bad in Twilight, in my opinion, but it certainly isn’t fabulous. Because Midnight Sun is essentially the same story, it’s really easy to see how Meyer’s writing has improved. I’m sure some would disagree with me, but I would actually say that Midnight Sun is quite well-written. Okay Edward says Bella has translucent skin a few too many times, and since a friend started referring to the monstrous part of Edward that wants to eat Bella as the eldritch horror living inside him, I can’t help cracking up every time Edward refers to the monster. But Meyer uses metaphors and symbolism and deliberate repetition in this book, along with other techniques she didn’t use in the first Twilight book, and she uses them well. She also captures Edward’s angsty teenage boy/hundred-year-old vampire voice really well.
Also, I have to give Meyer points for pulling off what had to be a really difficult point of view to write. She’s writing in first person, but it’s also kind of an omniscient style because Edward can hear everyone’s thoughts, with one notable exception, of course. Which makes Midnight Sun not only Twilight from Edward’s point of view, but almost Twilight from everyone’s point of view.
The new scenes that were added were pretty cool too, like the family conference after the car accident when Jasper and Rosalie are arguing for killing Bella because she saw too much, or how Jasper is actually using his powers at the baseball game to hide Bella. And the bit in the end where Alice is going through how she’s going to fake Bella’s accident, seeing how each decision will play out and making new decisions to make it go just right, is super awesome.
There were also some points in Midnight Sun where I felt like Meyer was actually taking this opportunity to respond to some of the criticism Twilight has faced without actually changing what happens in Twilight. This was a really intriguing idea to me. Obviously this might not be the case, but it’s how I interpreted it. The big ones that stood out to me in this regard were Edward’s justification for watching Bella sleep and Bella’s character. As I said earlier, Edward’s justification for watching Bella sleep still doesn’t make it okay in my opinion, but I accept that Meyer couldn’t just rewrite that part out of the book or significantly change it so that Edward asks Bella permission and she says yes. Still not okay though. As for Bella’s character, in Midnight Sun we get to hear Bella’s side of the Q&A chapter, which is glossed over in Twilight. Bella has things she likes and dislikes. She has plans for college and dreams of becoming an editor or a creative writing teacher. It makes sense that we don’t see this exact scene in Twilight, because we’re from Bella’s point of view and it would have been boring and very telly, but I do wish we had gotten these details from Bella’s point of view in other ways, because we have literally no inkling of any of this in Twilight, which of course is one of the criticisms of Twilight. So I’m glad we get the details in Midnight Sun, but it does feel kind of like Meyer is trying to say “look, Bella is a fully developed character,” while trying to retcon in all her hopes and dreams. As I said, I could be totally wrong on this, but it kind of does feel like Meyer is trying to respond to some of the critiques of Twilight, and even if it didn’t work as well as she may have hoped, I think it’s really brave of her to accept that she could have done better in the first Twilight and to try to show how she would have done it if she was writing it now. Again, just my interpretation.
Finally, I want to talk about the end of Midnight Sun and why I want more from Edward’s point of view. The ending was definitely the right ending for this book, but it wasn’t a good ending for Edward’s story. Spoilers ahead. Basically the book ends with Edward deciding, while Bella is in the hospital, that he is going to leave her. Not now, but some point soon. And as we know from New Moon, he does indeed leave. End of spoilers. So I know that everything works out, but I want to see the rest of the story from Edward’s point of view. At the very least, I want to see New Moon and Eclipse from Edward’s point of view. I really don’t care about seeing Breaking Dawn from Edward’s point of view honestly but I would read it if it were to be a thing.
I am aware that Stephenie Meyer has said she isn’t planning to write more of the Twilight books from Edward’s point of view. I’ve read various interviews where she’s said that writing Edward has made her anxious (and New Moon would be even worse) and that she didn’t enjoy not having the freedom she would have writing a completely new book. I appreciate both of these sentiments, but just in case Stephenie Meyer or anyone who has the power to change her mind is reading this, I just want to say that I kind of feel like I’ve been left hanging by the end of Midnight Sun, even though I have the rest of the Twilight books and I know it works out. And I would love, love, love more Edwardian Twilight. I know New Moon would be super depressing, but since Edward is apart from Bella, it would also basically be a completely new book. And I feel like Edward has the most character growth of the series in New Moon and Eclipse and I want to read that so much! So I will continue to hope.
I would also take any of the Twilight books from Alice’s point of view. Just saying.
In the meantime, since I’ve already reread all the Twilight books, the end of Midnight Sun left me listening to the last chunk of New Moon (from the point when Alice returns to the end) on a loop for days and days. I only managed to get out of the loop and start reading other books again by reading The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and Life and Death, which I’ll talk about in my August reading roundup post soon. I also made a deal with myself that if I reach my goal of reading 100 books by December, I’m allowed to reread all the Twilight books again, reading Midnight Sun between Twilight and New Moon so things feel more resolved.
I could go on and on about Midnight Sun, but these are my main thoughts. As I said, on the whole I really enjoyed the book, despite its flaws, and I’m really really hoping for more from Edward’s point of view someday. If you’ve read Midnight Sun, I’d love to know what you thought of it.
What I’ve Learned in Three More Months of Quarantine
Back in May, I posted a list of what I learned in the first two months of quarantine-life: things I learned to do, fun factoids I didn’t know before, things I learned about myself, and more. This was and remains the best way I’ve found to journal about the pandemic, and some of it was pretty funny, at least to me. So I kept it going.
I meant to post this last month, so that it would be what I’ve learned in two more months of quarantine, but time is weird now, and here we are.
So here is what I’ve learned in three more months of quarantine. Enjoy.
- What moldy garlic feels like (it’s weirdly powdery).
- Contrary to a lot of recommendations on the internet, you can’t just use aquafaba as an egg replacement to make a non-vegan cake vegan. You need to have a vegan cake recipe. This lesson came with a cake pan full of batter that refused to solidify and yet was also somehow burning on top.
- That you should not read a plague book in the middle of a plague. I made this mistake twice (and will probably willfully make it again whenever the third Nevermoor book comes out because I don’t care).
- That I’ve learned Unified English Braille so well that I now have trouble reading old Braille.
- That risotto requires a lot of stirring. And I mean a lot of stirring.
- That I might just not like prequels to books.
- That the book I’ve been writing is actually two books. So now I have almost complete drafts of a middle grade space adventure and a sequel. Yikes!
- That I can type in Braille right onto the screen of my iPhone. I actually learned this in March when I got my new iPhone, but I’ve since perfected it, and it is super cool.
- How to actually make a vegan cake. Also flax eggs are nifty.
- I don’t understand how they work, but food processors are magical.
- That I do better when things are scheduled for me. I reactivated my barre membership so I could take the virtual classes with the actual instructors from my studio, and actually signing up for specific time slots means I actually take the class, which was not happening when I was just trying to use videos whenever I felt like it.
- That I have in fact, finally, fallen into a new routine. Is it a routine I like? No, not at all. But it’s a routine and that’s progress.
- That even though the metro is opening up, I am terrified to get on it.
- That social distancing when you’re blind means a lot of trusting other people to do the right thing, and that generally I do not trust other people to do the right thing. Sorry.
- That I don’t do well with the unknown, and reminding myself that the people who are making the decisions don’t know what’s going on either doesn’t help. I already knew this about myself but as the unknown stretches on longer and longer it seemed important to say.
- That I miss the headphones I left on my desk at work on March 13.
- That I didn’t actually leave my headphones on my desk at work on March 13.
- That I don’t know where my favorite headphones are.
- That a certain author who wrote the Harry Potter books and shall not be named is a horrible, horrible person.
- But on the other hand, Twilight is not as bad as I give it credit for. No it’s not great, but it’s not as bad as I’ve been making it out to be.
- Also when it comes to Edward Cullen I am apparently still a sixteen-year-old girl. Deal with it.
- That the Twilight movies aren’t that bad either, though definitely sometimes unintentionally hilarious.
- How to spell misogyny. The first y gets me every time.
- That a subscription for the New York Times cooking app is 100% worth it. Seriously I have loved everything I’ve tried so far!
- That I use my oven way more than I thought I did.
- How to make homemade potato gnocchi without a potato ricer and without a ton of flour.
- That I will be continuing to telework for a long, long time, possibly until next June, and that I’ve gotten so used to telework that I no longer viscerally hate it. I don’t like it, but I don’t hate it.
- That melatonin makes my covid dreams a whole lot weirder.
- That friendships change, and when you find yourself saying, “That’s fine, and I understand that, but…” to everything going on, it might be time to think about whether it really is fine.
- That scented toilet paper exists.
- That I do not like scented toilet paper.
- That there is nothing quite like buying a book the second it comes out and dropping everything to read it. It’s been a while since I did this, but I did it twice in August and I should do it more often because it is wonderful.
And that’s it. I’ll keep noting down things I’m learning in pandemic life, and whenever I have a good-sized list again, I’ll post that too. I hope you all are keeping healthy, safe, and sane, and maybe it’s too much to ask of 2020, but I hope things start to look up from here.