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Mopsy the Magnificent Crosses the Rainbow Bridge

Ten and a half years ago, I stood on a graduation stage and spoke to my high school class. I told them about cliff diving in the Grand Canyon, about the terror and joy of leaping into thin air with no idea of how you will land. And immediately after  the graduation ceremony, I took my own leap. That very afternoon, I got on a plane to the Seeing Eye. Two days later, on June 21, 2010, my trainer brought me into the lounge and introduced me to my first Seeing Eye dog.

“This is Mopsy,” she said, as a little black lab sniffed me all over.

“Mopsy?” It sounded like a frumpy old British woman. “Can you spell that?” I asked, not sure I’d heard her right.

Mopsy's official Seeing Eye portrait: Mopsy sits in her harness, her head turned toward the cameraNo, I did not like the name Mopsy. I actually considered changing it, but nothing I came up with seemed right. And the name grew on me. It fit this spunky girl perfectly, and soon she was not just Mopsy but also Mopsy Girl, Mopsicle, Flopsy Mopsy, and the Mops.

Mops and I became a team over our four weeks of training and then beyond, from our first misadventure on the beach, where we both got dehydrated and the sand was too hot for our feet and we had to be rescued so that she wouldn’t drink the ocean, to our first days at Kenyon College, when we made a bunch of new friends and Mops discovered that chocolate chip cookies are not food for doggies.Jameyanne sits on the beach with her back to the camera but her head turned slightly toward the camera. Mopsy stands in front of her, also looking toward the camera. Mopsy attended every class and sat through every exam. She was very well-behaved and quiet, though she did untie my shoes under the table once, and she was known to grumble happily every time someone mentioned a dog or whenever the silence after a professor asked a question became too long. She learned Italian right along with me, and we spent a summer abroad in Torino in 2012. She put up with dressing up for Halloween but made her displeasure known by shredding the antennae off her costume during English class. Mopsy is dresed up as a bumble bee, with a stripped yellow and black costume with wings and sparkly gold antennae on her head. She is standing facing away from the camera but is looking back over her shoulder at us.  She stood by me when my childhood pet, Kokopelli, passed away, and then when I lost my eye in 2013. In 2014, Mopsy and I graduated from Kenyon, me with my bachelors in English and creative writing, and Mopsy with her bark-elors degree as dogophonus maximus, because she loved to sing along with my clarinet and the wind ensemble. On her diploma, in Latin, it says, “With me you will go safely.” Mopsy's diploma from Kenyon College

And then we were off to Italy. We spent a year in Assisi, with trips to Rome, Florence, Bari, Matera, Narni, Ancona, Venice, Spoletto, Spello, Foligno, and Montefalco. Italy was a huge challenge, but Mopsy rose to meet it, and soon we were dodging radical Italian drivers with, if not ease, at least more skill. I’m not exaggerating when I say Mopsy saved my life at least three times a week that year. But while Mopsy rose to the challenge magnificently, Italy took its toll. Over the next two years, while I worked at the New Hampshire Disability Rights Center, took the LSAT, applied to law school, and then attended my first year at Harvard Law, Mopsy slowed down considerably and became defensive aggressive with other dogs. It became abundantly clear at the end of my 1L year that it was time for Mopsy to retire.

Jameyanne and Mopsy cuddling on the floorMopsy was with me through some of the most important years of my life. When I left home for college, took my first steps as an adult, realized my independence, went off to law school, she was there. When I was happy, she shared in the joy, and when I was lonely, she was there to be a friend.

Mopsy moved in with my parents, and I went back to Seeing Eye and was matched with the Neutron Star. I finished law school, passed the bar, and moved to D.C. to start work at the FCC as a space lawyer. And Mopsy enjoyed three and a half years of walks in the woods with my father, soccer in the yard with my brother, naps in the sun at my mother’s feet while she worked on the computer, and cuddles with her doggy friends in front of the fire. Mopsy lies on the floor wrapped in a tie-dye blanket. Only her head is visible above the blanket.

Mopsy had a lot of doggy friends over the years. First, of course, was our yellow lab Kokopelli.

Kokopelli, a yellow lab, is curled up in a ball on a dog bed, and Mopsy, a black lab, is lying with her body curved around his and her head next to his.
Kokopelli, a yellow lab, is curled up in a ball on a dog bed, and Mopsy, a black lab, is lying with her body curved around his and her head next to his.

Koko never really liked other dogs, but he did like the Mops. Later on, the tables turned when we got a new puppy, Rocket. Mopsy sitting on a blue couch with tiny baby Rocket, a black lab puppy, cuddled up against her side. Rocket was objectively annoying. One time, he tried to chew on Mopsy’s ear, and she very gently put her paw on his back and put his entire head in her mouth to prove that she was in charge. But she let little Rocket snuggle with her too. Mopsy and Neutron had a special bond from the beginning.

I came home to New Hampshire during the pandemic so I could spend the holidays with my family, so I’ve been here with her for the last few months. I am so glad I did, because I was able to spend this time with her. Mopsy became more vocal in the last few years, grumbling and growling and sometimes howling when we were  playing or when she wanted attention, but in November she became very quiet. One Saturday night, we filled her bowl, and she didn’t come, in itself surprising. We called her, and she didn’t come. We went to find her, and she was struggling to get up off her bed. She had developed a sudden, severe limp, and she was in so much pain she didn’t eat that night, though she did eat the next morning. After examining her paws and her legs for cuts or other injuries, we were pretty sure she had an infection in her front left paw. I checked her ears, and sure enough, her left ear was infected too. Mopsy has had ear infections in the past, even ear infections that had spread to her foot, but nothing this sudden, and coupled with her sudden quiet, loss of appetite, and the excessive drooling she was doing, we were pretty concerned. We took her to the vet. They treated her ear and paw and also took x-rays. They discovered a mass on her spleen that they suspected was cancer.

After a lot of family discussion, we decided not to try to intervene with the cancer. Mopsy was almost twelve and a half, and we were worried, and the vet agreed, that any attempt to remove or further diagnose the mass might do more harm than good. So we gave Mopsy the antibiotic for her foot and ear and did our best to make her as comfortable as possible. But the infection in her front left paw did not get better. Instead it spread to her other feet. So we returned to the vet in early December asking specifically if there was anything we could do about her feet. The vet was now sure the mass on her spleen was cancerous, because apparently abdominal cancers in dogs can present in feet infections like Mopsy had. They gave us a different antibiotic and steroid, but warned us if these didn’t help, there wasn’t much else we could do.

But the medication worked. Mopsy’s feet healed. For a couple weeks, she was getting up and walking around, scrounging for crums when we were cooking, and even barking and grumbling again. I was overjoyed. I’d been facing down losing my Mops for the last few weeks, and now she was getting better. It felt like nothing short of a miracle, and we all thought that now she was acting more like her old self, she would be fine. My mom actually said that the cancer could be something she died with, as opposed to something she died from.

But on Christmas Day, Mopsy started going downhill again. She struggled to get up and started having accidents in the house. Over the next few days, her back legs completely gave out on her; she stopped eating, then stopped drinking; her stomach ballooned out while she lost almost all her weight everywhere else, as if the cancer was eating her from the inside. By Tuesday, she couldn’t lift her head anymore, though she was still licking up the ice cubes I brought her. Neutron and I stayed by her day and night. Neutron snuggling up against her to help keep her warm and even worming his way under the blanket with her.

And I slept on a mattress beside her for the last three nights, always with one hand on her side so she would know I was there.

Yesterday morning, on December 30, 2020, around 10:00 AM, Mopsy passed away peacefully in my arms, surrounded by my mom, younger brother, and Neutron. Today we laid her to rest at our home on Cape Cod, beside Kokopelli. The woods on the Cape was always her favorite place to walk. We planted wildflowers over her grave, and we’re planning to get a granite marker for her. It will be lovely in the springtime.

There are so many more things I want to say, but I can’t express the loss I am feeling right now. I still can’t believe my Mopsy girl, who would put your whole arm in her mouth and nibble on your ears when she was happy, who literally jump for joy and yip with glee when you came home and she wanted to tell you she’d missed you, who could be incredibly stubborn and definitely knew how to manipulate gravity so you couldn’t get her up when she was lying down, who’s breath was always horrendous no matter how often we brushed her teeth, who loved butt scratches and carrying around her blanket and baby carrots and lying at my feet with her head on my shoes and her paw around my ankle, my bestest girl forever, is gone. Mopsy had a long, full life. She was an extremely well-educated, well-traveled dog, and she was surrounded by so much love and had so much love to give. It was her time to leap from this world to the next, but she’s still gone, and I just don’t have words for it.

So instead I drew a picture. They say when our animal friends pass, they cross a rainbow bridge to paradise where they can play together. I found a picture of Mopsy walking in the snow, looking back over her shoulder in her characteristic Mopsy style, and I used that picture to draw Mopsy walking along a rainbow bridge. I hope she’s found her Kokopelli friend, and that she can lie in the sun and sniff every blade of grass and throw bones to her heart’s content in doggy heaven.

Shortly after I got Mopsy, Seeing Eye was doing renovations to its campus, including what they called a path to independence. We donated a brick, engraved for me and Mopsy, and I found it when I returned to Seeing Eye to train with Neutron. It says “Jameyanne and Mopsy, walking with my best friend.” And even though she’s crossed the rainbow bridge, she will still be walking by my side, in my heart, forever.

2020 wrap up

2020 is finally coming to a close. It has been a rough year for everyone on this planet, and I definitely feel ambivalent about writing what in any other year would be a celebratory post about all I accomplished this year and my plans for 2021. Obviously, I don’t feel celebratory. I was only just starting to settle into D.C. with a great job and lovely coworkers and a wonderful new friend group when the pandemic knocked everything flying. And I’ve been lucky. I still have my job, and I am healthy and reasonably sane. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.

I’m also struggling with this post because as I write this, I’m sitting on the floor holding my Mopsy girl, who is very sick and will likely pass in the next couple days, and I’m struggling to think of anything but that. Mopsy deserves an entire post and so so much more, and she will get it, I promise. But this is just a horrendous end to a horrendous year.

I set a number of goals for myself in 2020. I don’t remember what they were, and I don’t think it would be productive to look back at my 2020 New Year’s post to see if I met them. But I continue to find that I deal with stress by being creative, and amid everything, I have accomplished quite a bit.

First, on the writing front, I had two publications this year. My story “A Valentine’s Fear” was published in February by Every Day Fiction and my poem “A World in Seven Flames” was published in the anthology Twilight Worlds: Best of New Myths Volume II. I also have another short story lined up to be published in 2021, so yay!

My writing group is flourishing, virtually of course. It’s become not just a writing group but a great group of friends. Without these guys I don’t know how I would have coped with everything going on this year. In October, we all took Covid tests and quarantined for two weeks before gathering in New Jersey for a Halloween writing retreat, which was a ton of fun, and in the new year we’re going to expand our activities beyond critiquing each other’s stories to also start holding mini workshops where we teach each other what we’re good at.

This year, I managed at least one new draft of three major projects, and more than one draft for two of those projects. I also wrote two new short stories and another poem, which was great because I’ve been so focused on novels for a while. I really enjoyed working in these these different forms, which present unique challenges all their own. Once again, I cope with stress by writing.

I actually wrote almost every day this year. I say almost because I didn’t write yesterday or today, but while writing every day has become a habit that works really well for me, I also have to admit that sometimes, like now, I need to focus on other things, and that’s okay too.

I also read 106 books in 2020. I’m almost done with two more books and I’m hoping to finish them before the end of the year, but it’s very likely life will intervene so we’ll see. Eleven of the books I read were in Braille. I really enjoyed so many of the books I read, and I can’t wait to share my favorite 2020 books with you after the new year.

My exercise plans were derailed by the pandemic, but I have continued the barre virtually, even though it’s not the same. I also didn’t blog as much as I intended, but this is a perennial concern for me. I did learn to make ice cream, and I’ve had a lot of fun practicing my cooking skills.

It’s been quite a year. I hope everyone is able to find some joy and peace as we bid 2020 goodbye and set off into 2021. I’m not planning to set any goals for myself in 2021. I’m just going to keep on doing my best and see where I land. So happy New Year! Here’s to 2021 being not 2020.

A World in Seven Flames Published in Twilight Worlds Anthology

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.”

November Reading Roundup

Collage of the seven books I read in NovemberHello 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.

Collage of the four books I read in October: Endurance, Dragon Overnight, The Eternity Code, and 96 MilesI 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.

Collage of the books I read in September: City of Bones, City of Ashes, The Bands of Mourning, Showing Off, A Song Below Water, Rules for Thieves, The Arctic Incident, and The Kiss of DeceptionBut 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.

Collage of the covers of the books I read in August: Midnight Sun, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Life and Death, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, A Constellation of Roses, Uprooted, Sticks and Stones, Artemis Fowl, Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, and The Mystwick School of Musicraft.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.