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August Reading Roundup

So here we are at the end of September. I’ve been working at the FCC for eleven days now, and I’d like to say I get a little less confused every day, but that might be an optimistic assessment. I’ve been told not to worry, because the government is alphabet soup and the satellite division has even more jargon and I’ll catch on. So I’m taking the small victories, like the fact that I haven’t gotten turned around between the front door and my cubicle for a few days now.

Work-life balance is still pretty tricky. I’m having a hard time getting my sleep schedule in order, so I’m really tired, and I feel like there are so many things to do besides work—eat, sleep, exercise, write, hang out with friends, blog—and no time to do any of it. Welcome to adulthood?

I have learned a few important lessons. Lay my clothes out before I go to bed, move my alarm clock across the room, and set a second alarm just in case. You guessed it, I have already managed to sleep through my alarm and wake up an hour late with no idea what to wear to work. On the plus side, I now know exactly how fast I can move and still get to work on time, and I never want to do that again.

It’s the end of September, so I’m taking the time while my chicken and fennel are roasting to talk about the books I read in August.

Collage of the covers of the four books I read in August: To Kill a Mockingbird, Bridge to Terabithia, The Martian, and BeartownI read three books in August. Okay, technically I read four, but the fourth book was Beartown, which is not only a reread but a book that I read six months ago, so I’m not counting it toward my 2019 reading goal. I included it in the picture again because it was so much easier to make a collage of four books than three and I didn’t want to fight the app. Of the three books, one was a classic, one was middle grade fiction, and one was sci fi. Two of the three were rereads.

First, I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was actually almost finished with this book at the end of July but a week of taking the bar stalled me, so I finished it in August. I first read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. Who didn’t? To Kill a Mockingbird follows a young girl, Scout; her brother, Jem; and their friend Dill for a few years of their childhood as they grow up in Depression-era Alabama. Scout’s father is a defense attorney charged with defending an African-American man accused of raping a white girl, and we see his trial and its aftermath through Scout’s eyes. I remember thinking that it was just okay. I enjoyed it, but I found it pretty slow for most of the book. I absolutely loved it this time around. I’m older and a much more mature person and reader than I was in high school, so I appreciated the issues and how they’re woven throughout the book much more than I did then. I also just loved the level of detail in this book. Scout’s voice is so rich and vivid, and the world felt so authentic. I also loved all the lawyer jokes and legal references that went right over my head before I was a law student. I’ve heard people complain that this book shouldn’t be held up as the best example of fiction confronting racism in America, and I one hundred percent agree with that, because there are many more modern books, written by people of color, that tackle the issue. However that doesn’t make To Kill a Mockingbird a bad book. If you haven’t read it, it’s definitely worth a read. If you have read it but it’s been a while, it’s worth picking up again.

Next, I read Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. Somehow, I never read this growing up. One of my roommates mentioned it while we were studying for the bar, and when she found out I’d never read it, she insisted that I had to. So I got it out of the library. Bridge to Terabithia follows two fifth graders who become unlikely friends in a poor town in Virginia. Together they create the kingdom of Terabithia, where they are kings and queens and have great adventures. It’s such a short book, so I’m not going to say more than that. I enjoyed this book. It made me cry. I particularly liked how Paterson wove the real, everyday troubles of her two protagonists together with the fantastic adventures they had in Terabithia. This book is not a fantasy, but it felt like it could be. It so beautifully captured that time when I was a kid when I invented magical kingdoms in the forest with my friends. Who am I kidding? I still invent magical kingdoms, just in my head now because I live in a city and there is no forest to speak of. And then there was the last third of the book, which was incredibly powerful, and which made me ball my eyes out, but also felt like it came from nowhere, and in retrospect I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Third, I reread The Martian by Andy Weir. When the third manned mission to Mars is aborted because of a dangerous sandstorm, Mark Watney is stranded on Mars. And he has to survive. By himself. On Mars. I first read The Martian the spring before I started law school. I really enjoyed it, but I thought it got too into the weeds with the science, and I found the writing style to be too cinematic for my taste. We were almost never inside a character’s head. Even Mark’s journal entries were more tell than show. While the writing-style still wasn’t my favorite thing in the world on this reread, I definitely liked this book a lot more. Part of that is that I have embraced my geeky science side and in addition to actually working in space law, I now read a lot more science fiction. My science fiction tastes tend toward (1) space, (2) fun, and (3) realistic science. All of which The Martian has. This was yet another book that I enjoyed the first time through and pretty much loved on reread. So if you haven’t read The Martian, I highly recommend you give it a chance.

Finally, I reread Beartown by Fredrik Backman. This wasn’t my original plan, but I gave a copy to my mom for her birthday, and she really loved it and was talking about it to my dad, and he proposed listening to it on the drive down to Virginia when I was moving. I loved Beartown the first time I read it. I loved it even more the second time, because knowing what was coming, I was able to  really dive in and appreciate every moment. Also, it took a second reading for me to realize that this book is set in Sweden. This book was so powerful, and it remained powerful on reread. It’s definitely one of my favorites of 2019. If you haven’t read Beartown, you need to go read it now. If you have read it, it’s honestly worth a second read. And if I haven’t convinced you, I have a full review of the book right over here.

Writing this post has taken me through dinner and my toasted banana, and now it’s time for dishes and bed. I hope to have full reviews up for the other three books I read in August soon, and I’m planning to get back on track with reviews for my September books this week, so stay tuned. And as always, if you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to know what you think.

July Reading Roundup

Hello from northern Virginia. Yes, I have successfully moved and I am writing to you from amid the many piles of boxes filling my new apartment. I am having a lot of fun organizing everything to my satisfaction. I have strong opinions on trash can designs, apparently, and I maybe alphabetized my spices. Shopping for pillows to match my couch and general color scheme is slightly less fun, because I am really bad at telling if something matches or clashes and kept liking things that turned out to be just slightly off. But it’s all coming together, and I’m really excited about it. I’ve also been doing a lot of orientation and mobility, learning my way around my neighborhood, the metro system, and the walk from my metro stop to work. And of course I’m chugging away on revisions to my book. I’m in the home stretch, and I’m happy with what I’ve done. Which probably means it’s terrible.

All in all, life is pretty crazy right now, and honestly, the idea of writing full reviews for all the books I read in July and August and then what I’m reading in September and trying to catch up was starting to stress me out. It got to the point last week when I was considering completely dropping the individual book reviews altogether and going back to just the monthly reading roundup posts. I don’t want to do that, because I’ve been enjoying the individual reviews, so unless you tell me I should do otherwise, I’m planning to continue them. But for the sake of my sanity, I’m going to switch things up a bit.

Today, I’m going to give you a reading roundup for July, and sometime soon I’ll do a reading roundup for August. Then, in the future, between book reviews for the books I’m reading currently, I’ll play some catch-up and write full posts for each of these books. This will allow me to get the full reviews done but also not to stress about catching up. And as soon as I get some of this moving craziness sorted, I plan to figure out a regular schedule for blog posts that I will mostly stick to, so look forward to that.

July was a big month for me. I took the bar. And I moved out of my apartment in Cambridge. Oh wait, that was only one week of July. It feels like that was the whole month because the whole month was building toward that week. But I also went to a friend’s wedding in Rhode Island, finally ditched the walking cane and ankle brace, and read eight books. Almost got to nine but the bar was exhausting so I didn’t read much the last week of July.

Collage of the 8 books I read in July: Presumed Innocent, Stars Above, A Woman of No Importance, The Shifter, Ash Princess, Blue Fire, The English Patient, and Darkfall.So I read eight books in July. One was nonfiction, and definitely a favorite. One was a legal thriller, which is a genre I don’t typically go for and which I actually liked despite being constantly immersed in the law otherwise. One was a short story collection. I reread five books this month—it was, as you recall, the great bar prep rereadathon—but I read three new books, including two books that were the first books in two new series. I also read one book in Braille, which I haven’t done in a long time and which I plan to do more of in the future because I miss it.

My first book of July was Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow. This was the legal thriller. A prosecutor is accused of murdering his coworker, but he’s innocent, and he goes to trial. My friend who recommended this book to me specifically recommended it to me for after the bar, because it gets pretty technical on the legal side of things. I got on the library waiting list, and it came up sooner than I expected, so I jumped on it and read it. And I’m actually glad I read it while studying for the bar. For one thing, I’m not sure I would have wanted to read it after the bar—I was so done with the law by then! For another, this book actually helped me understand criminal procedure and evidence so much better. It tallied with my bar prep course, and gave me some concrete examples to work with in my studying. I will say that I found this book to be oddly paced. Knowing that the premise is that an innocent man is accused of murder, it felt like it took a while to get there. It might not have felt so long had I not known that this was the premise, but it was right on the back cover so there wasn’t much I could do about that. I also felt like the ending of the book was a bit slow. But the middle section was great, and I was on the edge of my seat through all the courtroom stuff.  One other note: This book is pretty sexually graphic, so if you don’t like that, you won’t like this book. On the whole, I enjoyed this book. I’m not sure I would recommend it to someone, and though it is the start of a series, I don’t think I’m going to read the other books, but that’s more because the library doesn’t have the audiobooks and I didn’t enjoy the first one enough to buy the rest. That being said, if you enjoy legal thrillers this might be a great book for you.

Next, I read Stars Above by Marissa Meyer. Stars Above is the short story collection that accompanies the Lunar Chroneacles series. You could probably read this  on its own, but it’s also probably more enjoyable once you’ve read the series. We get stories from Cinder’s, Scarlet’s, Cress’s, Winter’s, Thorne’s, Kai’s, and Wolf’s, as well as some totally original characters in the universe. This book was a lot of fun. I loved getting more of the characters’ back stories, and I loved the last story in the book which takes place after the end of Winter. This was a reread for me, but my opinion hasn’t changed much since I first read it (I may have only read this book once, I’m not sure). I really liked this book, but I will say that since these stories were so heavily tied into the main series, they didn’t feel like complete stories that could stand on their own to me, but I honestly didn’t mind that in this case. That being said, my favorite story in the book is “The Little Android,” a retelling of “The Little Mermaid,” in which Cinder appears briefly in the role of Ursula (don’t freak out, Iko is not the little mermaid). All in all, this is a good book and a fun way to wrap up the Lunar Chronicles series.

After that, I read A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell. I’ve mentioned this already in a few earlier posts, but I absolutely loved this book. It tells the story of Virginia Hall, a female spy with a prosthetic leg who worked for both the British and the Americans, spent almost the whole war in Nazi-occupied France, and practically single-handedly organized the French resistance. This was a fascinating read, and it was also an enjoyable read. The writing is so strong and vivid, I felt like I was in France with Virginia the whole way through the book. This is definitely one of my absolute favorites of 2019 so far, and it’s one I’ve been recommending to everyone I know. If you like World War II books, you need to read this. If you like spies, you need to read this. If you like feminist or disability issues, you need to read this. Whatever you like, you need to read this. So go read it. Go read it now.

My next reread was the Healing Wars series by Janice Hardy. In July I read the whole series—The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall—in quick succession. This is one  of my all-time favorite middle grade fantasy series, and it remained so after this reread. Nya lives in the war-torn and occupied city of Geveg. Her parents are dead, and her younger sister is a taker, which means she can heal injuries by taking pain and transferring it to a special metal called pynvium. Nya can take pain too, but she can’t transfer her pain to pynvium like a normal healer. She can only transfer pain to other people, which no other taker can do. If anyone finds out she can shift pain, she’ll be arrested and sent to the occupying duke either to be experimented on or to be turned into an assassin. But when the takers of Geveg start disappearing, Nya’s sister among them, Nya has to decide how much keeping that secret is really worth. There is so much I love about these books. They’re fun and fast-paced, even as they deal with really heavy subjects—they actually get pretty dark for middle grade, but they always have this light, hopeful tone that I really like. I love that Nya’s sister is actually a strong character in the books, and not just an innocent little sister on a pedestal in need of rescuing—cough Prim from The Hunger Games cough. I have a lot more to say about these books, but I will wait until I write my full reviews. Suffice it to say that this was a great series to reread right before the bar.

I also read Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian. This is the first book in a trilogy, and I am dying to get my hands on the second one. Ten years ago, Theodosia’s kingdom was invaded, and her mother was killed before her eyes. She was six years old, and the invaders spared her and raised as  a prisoner. Whenever one of her people committed a crime, Theodosia was publicly punished as an example. She’s sixteen now, and pretty much broken. And then the king—I forget what his actual title is in this world—forces her to execute a particular rebel, and Theodosia finds a spark of rebellion of her own. I think I read this book in maybe two days. It was so fast, but it was also complicated and there was some great political intrigue, and there were so many feelings. There is actually a love triangle that I can get behind in this one. And without any spoilers, the ending is just what I wanted it to be, and more that I didn’t know I wanted but that is great. I’m really looking forward to reading the next one and to telling you more about it in my full review soon.

Finally, I reread The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient is about four people sheltering in an old villa in Italy at the end of World War II: a thief, a sapper, a nurse, and a patient. It switches back and forth among all their points of view, and time is pretty fluid, as the novel moves back and forth between the characters’ pasts and the present. I first read this back in 2013, as part of my senior honors reading list at Kenyon. I recall really enjoying it when I read it then, but I admit I struggled with it this time around.  I think part of the reason is that this is a slow meandering book, and maybe reading it while I was frantically cramming in some last few days of bar studying and also packing and cleaning up  my apartment just wasn’t a good move. I really wasn’t in the mindset to read a slow, meandering, complicated book. The first time I read it, I also read it in Braille, and this time I listened to the audiobook, and I wonder if that influenced my opinion too. The audiobook was fine, but I think this is a book that is better read slowly and thoughtfully than listened to while running around an apartment wielding a swiffer. Even so, by the end of the book, I was really enjoying it, and I’m really happy with the ending and the book on the whole. I hope to one day go back and reread the book in Braille, because I think I would enjoy that.

And that’s it for what I read in July. I promise I’ll be back as soon as I and start working on full reviews for these books. In the meantime, I’ve made a lot of progress unpacking in the time between I started writing this post and the time that I’m posting it, and I just have one box left to empty. Yay!

June Reading Roundup

Yes, I know it’s mid-August and I’m more than a month behind on these posts. The bar happened, but I’m working on it.

June was a crazy month. It was also kind of an awful month. I was neck deep in bar studying, nine to ten hours a week, seven days a week, and by mid-June I’d been doing that for six weeks and still had six weeks to go. I was exhausted and terrified, and I  didn’t think my brain could possibly hold any more information but there was so much more information that my brain had to hold. And then I was so focused on the law that I lost all of my coordination, fell down the stairs, and sprained my ankle so badly that I actually went to urgent care and was walking with a cane for a month. Two months later my ankle is still kind of swollen and twingy. So yeah, it was a bad month.

So we’re not going to talk any more about what I was up to in June, because those are some deeply unpleasant memories. Except for the books.

Collage of the ten books I read in June: Words of Radiance, The Book Thief, Cinder, Scarlet, The Zookeeper's Wife, Cress, Edgedancer, Fairest, Code Girls, and WinterBut hey! The books!

I read ten books in June, and I really liked most of them. I also really hope I passed the bar otherwise I’m going to feel really bad about those ten books.

Six of the books in June were rereads for me, and four were totally new. Two were nonfiction (both World War II), and two were more novellas than novels. I read one entire series, and I continued on with another series, but three of the books I read were stand-alones. All of these books were audiobooks. I’m working on getting back to reading in Braille I swear.

So let’s dive in.

First, I read Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. This was the second book in his Stormlight Archives series. It was just as massive as the first book, but also just as worth it. I loved how the stories came together, and while the beginning of the book was kind of slow, I pretty much flew through this book in a week. Remember what I said about really hoping I passed the bar? That particularly applies to this book, which took up forty-five plus hours of my life in one week when I should have been studying civ pro or con law or something. My full review for Words of Radiance is right over here. I also read Edgedancer, the novella that comes in between Words of Radiance and the next book, Oathbringer. I absolutely loved Edgedancer, because I absolutely love the main character, Lift, who we meet in Words of Radiance. It may be possible to read Edgedancer without having read the other books in the series too, so if you’re daunted by the size of the other Stormlight books—and I don’t blame you, I was very daunted—Edgedancer is a fun and fast introduction to the world. My full review for Edgedancer is over here.

Next, I reread The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The Book Thief has been one of my all-time favorites since I first read it in 2012. This month I reread it not just because I was in the middle of my great bar prep rereadathon but also because I was leading the discussion for the book club I’m in. I’ve read so much since I first read The Book Thief that I was a bit more picky about it than I have been in the past, but I still love it a lot and still definitely recommend it. This is one of those books that everyone should read. My full review is over here.

I reread the entire Lunar Chronicles series in June. It was so much fun to go adventuring with Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, Winter and the rest of the gang, and it was a wonderful distraction from the bar exam hole I was living in. I also reread Fairest, the prequel novella about the evil Queen Levana, which I liked but also kind of regretted rereading because it’s not a pleasant book to read and right then I needed pleasant books. For a lot more elaboration and a good bit of squealing, go check out my full reviews for Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, Fairest, and Winter.

Next, I read The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman. This is a nonfiction book about a woman in Poland who hid Jews in her family’s abandoned zoo while her husband worked in the Polish resistance. My full review is right over here, but the long and short of it is that I was really interested in the story but the book could have been better.

Finally, the other WWII nonfiction book I read in June was Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy. This book was just fascinating. I had no idea that women worked as code breakers in World War II, and I loved reading about their contributions and accomplishments. I felt like the book was juggling the stories of too many women, to be honest, but as a chronicle of the role of women code breakers during the war as a whole, it was great. This is definitely one for the favorites list, and if you’re interested in World War II and spies, I definitely recommend. You can check out my full review over here for more details too.

And that’s it for June. We’ll dive into the books I read in July next, and hopefully I can get reasonably caught up on these reviews soon. In the meantime, have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

Winter Review

Hello all, and apologies for not posting in a while. It has been a crazy week. I finally figured out how to write this chapter I’ve been stuck on, and I’ve been making great progress with that. Which is to say yes, the entire chapter is still an infodump but at least I now have something on the page that I can work with to make less infodumpy, and that’s progress. I also took the Massachusetts Law Component of the bar and passed on my first attempt, so yay! Oh, and I’m moving in less than two weeks and I officially hate Ikea, particularly their online ordering system on tax free weekend (spoiler alert, it doesn’t work).

Cover of Winter by Marissa MeyerSo here I am at past 11:00 PM, and it’s almost too late for me to be articulate, but I’m going to chat with you all about Winter, the fourth book of the Lunar Chronicles series, which was the last book I read in June.

I actually fully expected not to finish this book in June (studying for the bar and everything), but I was feeling pretty sick on the last weekend of June, so I gave up on studying and just spent the day in bed listening to Winter. And when you listen to all audiobooks at 1.5 speed as I do, you can make a lot of progress in one day. So I finished Winter in June.

As usual, this review will be spoiler free for Winter, but there will be spoilers for Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress. If you haven’t read any of those books, go check out my spoiler-free reviews: Cinder is here, Scarlet is here, and Cress is here.

Like the first three books of the series, Winter is a retold fairy tale. Winter is Snow White. Princess Winter is Lunar Queen Levana’s stepdaughter, incredibly pretty, and pretty crazy too. She refuses to use her Gift, so she has lunar sickness. Her only friends in the world are the guard Jacen (who teamed up with Cinder and co in Cress and then betrayed them to get back to Luna and Winter), and now maybe Scarlet (though Scarlet is more of a prisoner than a friend). And while Scarlet is stuck in a cage in the royal menagerie, and Winter is playing Levana’s political games and trying to protect Jacen and herself from Levana’s wrath, Cinder, Iko, Thorne, Wolf, Cress, and Kai are plotting a revolution. I don’t want to say much more than that, but as we’ve gotten to know what makes Levana tick and Winter’s story is based on Snow White, you can probably guess where things are headed (hint: Jacen is the huntsman and Cinder and co may be the dwarves.

This book is a ton of fun. It’s fast-paced and action packed from start to finish, and it does a really good job of wrapping up the series. All the characters have such epic moments. I really love watching Scarlet and Winter’s friendship grow over this book, and I love the contrast between how Scarlet treats Winter and how Jacen treats Winter. I also love Winter’s arc and how she goes from crazy but timid to crazy but powerful. And of course Cinder, Cress, Thorne, Kai, Wolf, and Iko are all wonderful as well.

I will say that this book suffers a bit from being the last book in the series and needing to tie everything off. There’s a lot to pack in, and it’s great, but we also have ten point of view characters now, and they’re spread all over the moon at times. It means that Winter’s story is overshadowed by the rest of the plot in a way that Cinder’s Scarlet’s and Cress’s stories were not in the previous books. Winter’s story is great, don’t get me wrong. It just doesn’t have the ability to shine the way the others’ stories did, because there’s so much going on.

Also I just have to say it: I was sad that Thorne gets his sight back. This isn’t a complaint about a disability being magically or scientifically cured as if it didn’t exist or anything. In terms of disability representation and the plot of the book, I have no problems with Thorne getting his sight back. His awesome character development is still there, and yay science and everything, but he was such a great blind character and I was sorry to lose that in this book.

I’ve read a lot of criticisms about the ending of this book, which is also the ending of the series. Without any spoilers, they boil down to a complaint that it’s unrealistic, but honestly I don’t mind it. It’s the ending I wanted, and honestly the ending I would have written if this were my book. Reminder, it’s a retold fairy tale. Actually, four retold fairy tales. A little unrealistic is okay. I also don’t mind the decision Cinder makes in the end, because I think it fits with her character, and it’s not like she’s going to do it all at once or even right away.

I’m not saying this book is perfect, because Cress is perfect and Winter certainly has some flaws. But this is also one of those series that I get really frustrated when people nitpick it because I love it so much and why can’t people just like things anymore?

Anyway, I don’t want to say more about the ending because this is a spoiler-free review. I’m happy to talk more about the ending in the comments if you want, just please remember to tag any spoilers to protect anyone who hasn’t read Winter yet.

The last time I reread this series (during the fall of my first year of law school, I think), I said that this is one of those series where each book is better than the last. I think it still says that on my goodreads reviews for these books. I think I’d amend that opinion now though. The series certainly gets better and better as you read on. I love all the characters, and I love getting new characters with each book. It’s a format I was uncertain about when I started Scarlet, but Marissa Meyer pulls it off really well. I also love how all the books connect, and we see different characters in different roles throughout the series (like how Cress is kind of the fairy godmother in Cinder’s story and Cinder is one of the dwarfs in Winter’s story). I love the world building, particularly the disability representation I talked mostly about in my review of Cress, and in general these books make me so happy.

But I wouldn’t say that each book is better than the last. I think Scarlet suffers from sticking a little too closely to the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, which takes a lot of suspense away for the reader. And I think Winter suffers from being the last book in the series and trying to cram so much into one book. Cress is probably my favorite, followed by Cinder, then Winter, then Scarlet.

But they are all fantastic books, and I love them all. The Lunar Chronicles is one of those series that I reach the end of and just want to turn around and start again at the beginning. It was a really great series to reread while studying for the bar, because it really did take me to a whole new world.

I’m really curious what you think of Winter and the series as a whole, so let’s chat in the comments.

And that’s it for the books I read in June. Woot! I’ll be back tomorrow with a quick reading roundup post, and then it’s on to July.

Code Girls Review

So far I’m keeping up with all the things I need to do in August. I’m moving right along on the packing, the writing, the setting up of moving day and utilities for my new apartment, and the furniture shopping. There’s still a lot to do: I’m pretty much ignoring the Massachusetts section of the bar which I’m supposed to take on my own some time this month (surprise! Another test!), and I have a bunch of people I’d like to see before I move. But in the meantime, we are speeding through the books I read in June. Soon we’ll be into July, which seems a more acceptable level of behind—as long as it’s still August.

Cover of Code Girls by Liza MundyThe second-to-last book I read in June was Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy.

Side note: Has anyone else noticed a pattern of subtitles for nonfiction starting with “the untold story of?” I’ve now read three books with subtitles like that this year, and it’s starting to feel redundant.

Anyway, Code Girls tells the story of the hundreds of women recruited during World War II to break codes for the army and navy. They were recruited from all over the country, from colleges and universities, and from jobs as teachers, secretaries, and housewives. The book follows several groups of these women through their training as code breakers and work on the Japanese codes and of course the German Enigma.

This was a great book. I really enjoyed delving deep into the code breaking machine of World War II and the lives of all these women. It was really impressive, particularly because these women never spoke of their experiences, and their stories are just coming out now.

my one complaint about the book is that it followed too many women. While I enjoyed seeing the broader picture and the variety of jobs women had in the code breaking machine for the army and the navy, I couldn’t keep them all straight in my head. this made it hard to become really invested in these women. On the other hand, if you treat the book as more of a history of the code breaking operations of the U.S. during WWII than the stories of these women’s lives and work during the war, it’s less disappointing. Though based on the subtitle, that isn’t what the author intended this book to be.

On the whole, though, I found this book fascinating, and I would definitely recommend for anyone interested in spies or World War II.

Fairest Review

Cover of Fairest by Marissa MeyerI continued my reread of The Lunar Chronicles in June with the prequel novella, Fairest by Marissa Meyer. This will be a quick post, because I have only a few things to say about Fairest.

You could probably read Fairest on your own without reading the rest of the series, but I’m not sure how much meaning it would have for you. Nevertheless, I’ll make this review as spoiler-free for the rest of the series as I can, and if you’re curious, you can go check out my review of Cinder, the first book in the series, over here.

Fairest gives us the backstory of Queen Levana of Luna, the villain of the main Lunar Chronicles series. The novella starts with the death of Levana’s parents and her older sister Channery’s ascension to the throne. Channery mistreats Levana—actually mistreats is an understatement—and Channery is a terrible queen. Levana is sure she could rule the country better, but everyone sees her only as the queen’s sad, ugly little sister, and no one listens to her or takes her seriously. Complicating matters, Levana also thinks she’s in love with one of her guards, who inconveniently is married and about to have a daughter.

This book was well-written, and for the first bit, I was even sympathetic to Levana. (Excuse me while I cringe.) It certainly eluminates Levana’s character a lot.

Unfortunately, Fairest is also a really upsetting book to read. There is a massive, massive trigger warning for rape and abuse. Honestly I read this novella the first time I read the series, and I was glad I read it then, but I decided not to reread it again when I reread the series. A decision I forgot when I reread the series this time.

It’s not that this is a bad book, or that it isn’t worth reading. It is a well-done book. But because you’re reading about things like rape and abuse from the point of view of the perpetrator who feels totally justified in her actions, it is just a deeply unpleasant book to read.

I would recommend that you read Fairest once, when you’re reading the series for the first time. But you don’t need to read it more than once, certainly. Levana’s actions in Cress and Winter will make  a lot more sense if you read it. It just isn’t a fun book to read, and I didn’t find any joy in rereading it while I was studying for the bar this summer.

Edgedancer Review

Cover of Edgedancer by Brandon SandersonIt’s been an emotional roller coaster of a week, but now I get to talk about this delightful little book. After I read Cress in June, I read Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson. This is a short novella set in Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. It takes place between the end of Words of Radiance, which I read in May, and the beginning of Oathbringer, which I haven’t started yet.

While Edgedancer takes place between the second and third book of the Stormlight Archives, I think you could potentially read it inn its own, without reading any of the much longer Stormlight books. That being said, you might be confused because the world building is a lot less detailed than it is in the Stormlight books, and I’m not sure how much sense it would make if you didn’t already have the context of the other books. Nevertheless, I’m going to write this review without any spoilers for the main series. If you haven’t read any of the Stormlight books and you’re curious, you can check out my review for the first book, The Way of Kings, right over here. The short version: The Way of Kings is long but so worth it.

So Edgedancer stars Lift, the young street urchin who we meet briefly in Words of Radiance. Since I was really intrigued by Lift’s interlude in Words of Radiance, I was delighted to discover this novella from her point of view.

The novella opens with the interlude from Words of Radiance, where Lift and some friends break into the palace, Lift meets the executioner in black who is searching out potential knights radiant, and Lift saves her friend’s life with her own powers. Her friend becomes the new premier of the country,, stops the executioner from killing Lift, and Lift gets everything she could have wanted out of life. But she’s unsatisfied, and when she hears the executioner in black is heading somewhere else, she follows him and decides to try to stop him from killing another potential knight radiant.

This book was a  breeze. It was fast-paced and fun, and I really loved Lift’s voice and her very particular turns of phrase. I also loved watching her journey and her character development as she grows into using and accepting her powers.

Another thing I really liked is how we get to see the immediate impact of the events of the climax of Words of Radiance on other parts of the world. It was really fun to see other countries and go into details about them and also how the main series is impacting the world.

The only part of the book that didn’t quite work for me was that the start of the book was the same as the interlude in Words of Radiance. This definitely bothered me because I had just read Words of Radiance so it was fresh in my mind. But if it wasn’t fresh in my mind, this wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a good place to start the story, because it grounds us in who Lift is and how she gets to where she’s going. If you haven’t read Words of Radiance recently, or if you’re reading the book on its own, I think it is a good place to start and not a problem at all. For me, because I had just read Words of Radiance, it was just redundant.

But on the whole, this was a fun, fast novella, and a great next installment in the Stormlight Archives series. Now that the bar is over, I’m really looking forward to diving back into this world with Oathbringer.

If Only a Word for All Things is Published

I’m a tad late on this, because I didn’t know this was happening until it happened, but I am so excited to announce that my short story “If Only A Word for All Things” has been published by Cast of Wonders. It’s been a long time coming (I got the acceptance more than a year ago), but now it’s here! You can go listen to or read the story here.

Cast of Wonders is a young adult speculative fiction podcast. You may recall they published my story “The Collector” back in 2014. I was so excited when I got the acceptance letter a year ago, because I love what they did with “The Collector” and I knew they would do a great job with this story.

“If Only a Word for All Things” is the only story I’ve written (so far) that was directly inspired by my year in Italy. It means a lot to me, and I’m so glad you can all read it now. It is a fantasy story, but the fantasy element is very subtle. It’s much more of a literary or magical realism type story. I really hope you enjoy it.

And once you’ve read the story, you can check out what went on behind the scenes and find out the story behind “If Only a Word for All Things.”

Happy reading!

Cress Review

So way back in June, when I was still struggling through criminal law and criminal procedure and constitutional law, I was also rereading The Lunar Chronicles. I talked about the first two books, Cinder and Scarlet, already. So today, I’m going to talk about the third book, Cress.

Apologies again for taking so long to get to writing this post, but Cress is probably my favorite book in the series, so I want to do it justice.

Since this is the third book in The Lunar Chronicles series, there will almost certainly be spoilers for Cinder and Scarlet. If you haven’t read the first two books in the series, you should go check out my review for Cinder here. Otherwise, proceed at your own risk.

Cover of Cress by Marissa MeyerCress picks up where Scarlet left off. Cinder, Thorne, Scarlet, and Wolf are on the run aboard Thorne’s stolen rampion space ship. Emperor Kai has agreed to marry Queen Levana, so the attacks have stopped. Cinder has finally accepted her identity as Princess Selene, and she and her team are making a plan to fight back.

That plan starts with Cress.

Cress is a lunar shell—she has no lunar gift. Though Queen Levana has told her people that all shells are taken away and killed at birth, she really gives them to her head thaumaterge, Sybil, who has kept them in the lava tubes beneath the moon’s surface and regularly draws their blood for mysterious reasons. But even among shells, Cress is special. She is exceptionally gifted with computers, and so she has become the queen’s secret hacker. Sybil trapped Cress on a satellite orbiting Earth and forced her to spy on the Earthen leaders. It was Cress who warned Cinder about Levana’s plans for Kai before the Commonwealth ball.

At the start of the book, Cinder contacts Cress to get evidence about Levana’s plans for Kai and earth, hoping to reveal the plans and stop the wedding. When she learns that Cress has been trapped on the satellite by herself for nine years and that to give Cinder the evidence she needs would surely mean her death, Cinder and the others decide to come get her. But the rescue mission goes very, very wrong. I mean all the wrong it could possibly go.

I don’t want to say more than that, because I don’t want to spoil anything about this awesome book, but suffice it to say that the team is split up and they’re all fighting for their lives.

Each of these books is a retelling of a different fairytale. Cinder was Cinderella, Scarlet was Little Red Riding Hood, and Cress is Rapunzel. Rapunzel is one of my favorite fairy tales (thank you Tangled), and this is such a great retelling. Again, I loved how Marissa Meyer is so creative about interweaving the elements of the original Rapunzel story into her retelling. And then there’s just everything else I loved.

Let’s start with Cress, because she is the star of this book. She definitely isn’t as strong as Cinder and Scarlet at the start of this book. She’s really scared and anxious, but she’s also really smart and resourceful and curious. She’s also super bad at interacting with other people and it’s horrifying but kind of adorable. But as she and Thorne try to get back to the rest of the crew and then as the crew carries out their plans, she becomes so much stronger and braver, and it’s great to watch that journey.

I also love Thorne so much in this book. He’s kind of annoying in Scarlet, but when he ends up in a position of having to help and protect Cress, he just becomes really great. It helps that in the botched rescue attempt, Thorne hits his head and loses his vision. So he’s navigating all this, being the one in charge, while blind. And also figuring out how to be blind. And it is great. There is just so much awesome character development.

Scarlet continues to be totally amazing, and I continue to love her and Wolf’s relationship.

And as I said before, Cinder is finally growing into her identity and her powers and making plans to fight back instead of running. Sure some of her initial plans aren’t that great but we’re finally seeing the fruits of all her character development.

As with all the other books in this series, Cress is really fun and exciting and fast paced. I sped through it way too fast, given that I was supposed to be studying con law. I felt guilty about it at the time. I don’t feel guilty about it now.

And Cress also has some of the best blind person representation I’ve seen in a while in a sci fi or fantasy book. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but in case I haven’t, you hardly ever see people with disabilities in sci fi or fantasy, and if you do, there’s usually some super cool technology or else magic that basically negates the disability. When it comes to disability representation, I love two things about the world of The Lunar Chronicles, and Cress in particular. First, while cyborg technology does take away the physical drawbacks of a disability, the stigma and the classism surrounding it remain. It’s taken on a new form, perhaps, but people with physical disabilities are othered just as much in Marissa Meyer’s books as they can be in our world, and as a reader with a disability, that means a lot to me. It doesn’t feel like she’s just totally eliminating disabilities in her world. And even with cyborg technology, you get situations, like what happens to Thorne, where people become disabled and can’t get medical help right away. So even with the advanced technology, disabilities aren’t eliminated. Second, Thorne is great blind! His struggle to figure it out on his own, his crisis of confidence, even the way he searched for things on the ground or walked with Cress felt really authentic. It felt like Marissa Meyer did her research and put a lot of thought into how Thorne would act. Thorne cracks some great blind jokes, and he one hundred percent remains a valuable member of the team. Just wait until the climax.

I know in most of my book reviews, I usually have one or two things about a book that didn’t work for me. But I can’t think of anything critical to say about this book. It’s right up there with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on my list of books I reach for when I’m looking for a perfect example of how to handle something in my own writing. It was also definitely a big inspiration for my story “Polaris in the Dark” in this anthology and the middle grade space adventure novel I’m writing now. I’m sure Cress isn’t a perfect book, but I feel like I would have to dig far to find something wrong with it, and honestly I don’t want to do that.

If you’ve read The Lunar Chronicles, what did you think of Cress? Do you agree with my assessments? Did I miss something important I should have talked about?

I’m looking forward to chatting about this book with you all, and I’ll be back soon to talk about more books.

I Survived the Bar Exam… Now What?

Hello all. I’m back. And as you can surmise from the title, I survived the bar!

I apologize for the quiet in my little corner of the internet for the last few weeks. The studying and the panic got really intense in July. At the same time, I was packing up and moving out of my apartment. My lease ended at the end of the same week I was taking the bar.

I’ll give you some numbers to put it all into perspective. Studying for the bar was a nine-to-ten hour a day, seven days a week affair. Because I had a Braille test, the bar exam itself was four days, six hours a day. Now I’m a super organized person. I knew this was going to be a crazy time, so I’ve been planning since December, studying since May, and packing since June, but you still inevitably reach a point in packing and studying where your planning descends into chaos and you just start throwing things into the car at random and screaming that states should be abolished.

But all that’s over now, and huge, huge thanks to my mom for coming to stay with me this last week and helping me pull it all together so I could take the bar, get out of my apartment in Cambridge, and of course eat without completely losing my head. (No I don’t consider shouting about how states’ rights are ridiculous to be losing my head, but I’m not getting into politics here.)

So what comes next?

I’ll find out if I passed the bar at some point in October. I am not thinking about it until then. But there are plenty of other things for me to think about.

The crazy does not end now that’s August. But it’s crazy in a good way.

First, I need to turn the chaos of the last week into an organized plan of attack for moving down to D.C. at the end of August. As organized as I am, there’s still a lot I need to do. For one thing, I’ve blocked the front door with my pile of boxes and that can’t continue to be the case for long.

Also, while I’ve been writing as much as I can while studying for the bar, it’s time for me to buckle down and finish revisions on my middle grade fantasy project. I’m really excited about what’s it done and can’t wait to dive in headfirst with no law school or bar exam to worry about.

Oh wait, there is more bar exam to worry about. Well, not to worry about, per se. I have to take the state component of the bar, but that’s a fifty question, open book, untimed test, and they give me the books. I can also take it as many times as I need to. So I’m not terribly concerned. I just have to do it.

Otherwise, I’m looking forward to getting back in touch with friends I haven’t seen or spoken to in a while (thanks a lot bar exam), and finally doing some more cooking, because I’ve been living on chicken pesto meatballs and frozen vegetables for the last three months (thank you again bar exam), and believe me, that got old fast.

As for this blog, I’m going to catch up on posting book reviews for the rest of the books I read in June and July. Then I’m going to try to get myself to post on a regular schedule. I don’t know what the regular schedule will be, but once I figure it out I will let you know. I plan to continue doing book reviews, but I also want to give you more life updates. I also have ideas for posts about writing, and I want to do more posts from Neutron’s point of view. Finally, I want to start a new series about how I do things when I’m blind, inspired by this post I wrote a while back about educating able-bodied people about disabilities in a positive way. I have some ideas to get started, but if you want to know how I do specific things, let me know.

And that’s it. I’m going to stop making plans before I exhaust myself just thinking about it and go take a nap instead. Happy August everybody. And to my law school friends who took the bar last week too, we did it!