book recommendations and reviews – Page 2

May Reading Roundup

I hit a bit of a reading slump in May. I only read seven books this month. Part of it was that I struggled with a few of the books I was reading. The rest of it was being busy with the perpetual novel edits, going to a friend’s wedding, and then life becoming very, very stressful.

In mid-May, I had an experience while Neutron was guiding me that clarified some odd behavior I’ve been seeing from him in the last few months. This set off a flurry of vet visits and then ophthalmology visits and then calls with the Seeing Eye and finally a visit from the Seeing Eye. I actually wound up going up to New Hampshire to see the veterinary ophthalmologist we’ve seen in the past, because the new ophthalmologist my vet in D.C. recommended couldn’t see me until late June and this felt more urgent. The long and short of all this is that Neutron has iris atrophy, which means his pupils can’t constrict in bright light. Right now it’s minor, and after working with the Seeing Eye, the consensus is Neutron’s guide work is still perfectly safe, but it’s definitely something I’m going to keep an eye on. Pun intended. I’m so glad this is how it all resolved, because I was well-aware that the alternative was probably retirement sooner rather than later and I was not ready for that. So though it turned out well, it made for a very stressful few weeks.

But you can see why I didn’t read as much this month and why it took me so long to get this post up. I’m just glad I did it before the end of June.

Collage of the seven books I read in May: Talking to Dragons, Red White and Royal Blue, Lost Moon, His Majesty's Dragon, Sweet Sixteen Princess, Valentine Princess, and Princess on the Brink Like I said, I read seven books in May. Four were continuations of series I’ve been reading. One was the start of a new series. One was a stand-alone. And one was a science/history nonfiction. Looking at the picture, it was a very pink month. Let’s dive in.

I started May with the last book in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. This book takes place sixteen years after the cliffhanger ending of the third book. Daystar’s mother, Cimorene, has sent him out into the Enchanted Forest with no explanation and only the instruction to not come back until he knows why she sent them out there. Daystar winds up on a quest to reach the castle, accompanied by a magic sword he doesn’t understand, a fire witch whose kagic is ruled by her emotions, and a host of other characters, battling the usual wizards and swamp monsters and so on. This book was fine. The big problem I had is that because we’ve read the first three books, we know exactly why Daystar’s mother sent him out into the forest and what the secret Daystar doesn’t know, so a lot of the tension was lost for me. I understand Patricia C. Wrede wrote this book first in the series, and that makes more sense, but coming as the fourth book it just didn’t work for me. There were other things that also didn’t work, like how there just weren’t enough feelings for my taste during the resolution, and how much I kind of hated Cimorene in this book. On the whole, I would probably recommend the first book in the series, Dealing with Dragons, and maybe the second, but I’m not sure I would recommend the rest of the books in the series.

Next, I read Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. This is set in an alternate 2020—no pandemic, a fictional democratic president—and is the story of the president’s son falling in love with the prince of England. This book was so much fun. There was a bit too much description of the sex for my taste, and I’ve confirmed that romance novels really aren’t my favorite thing because I was more interested in the subplots than the romantic relationships, but on the whole this book was really quite delightful.

After that, I read Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. This is the book Apollo 13 that the movie is based on. I found the science and the history really interesting, and obviously the drama of the story of Apollo 13 is gripping and powerful. I read this book in high school and wrote a history paper on it, so it wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me. What I was surprised by was also how dry the writing was. Like this is a high stakes story. The spaceship is broken and we’re not sure if they’re going to make it home. But honestly the number of times I fell asleep while listening to the audiobook, woke up and turned it off an hour later, and then felt that I could have gone on without rewinding and wouldn’t have missed much, was unfortunately high. I described this book to my parents as simultaneously one of the most interesting and most boring things I’ve read. If you’re interested in delving deeper into the science of what was happening inn the Apollo 13 mission, then I’d definitely recommend giving this a read (and that was what I was interested in, so I’m glad I read it on the whole). But otherwise, I’d say you’re probably better off just watching the movie. It’s good.

Then I read the first Temeraire book, His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, and oh my goodness I loved it. William Lawrence is a captain in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. When his ship captures a French ship and they discover a dragon egg on board, and then the egg hatches, Lawrence becomes bonded with the baby dragon, and they set off to join the British Aerial Corps to train and then fight in the war from dragonback. I loved Temeraire, the dragon. I also loved all the other characters we got to meet. The book was well-paced and exciting. And maybe because of what I was going through with Neutron at the time I was reading this, I actually noticed some interesting paralells with working with a service dog. For example dragons live a really long time, so they will have a series of handlers, and that can be really hard for them. It reminded me of how a guide dog user will have many guide dogs and how a lot of us say that is the hardest part of having a guide dog. That really spoke to me, as did the bond between dragon and handler. The only part of this book that I was not a big fan of is how Levitas’s subplot was handled. I don’t want to give spoilers, but Levitas deserved so much better, and I am prepared to shout that from the rooftops. I read the second Temeraire book in June, so I’ll be talking about that soon, and I’m on the waiting list to get the third one from the library.

Finally, I read three Princess Diaries books in may, the novellas Sweet Sixteen Princess and Valentine Princess, and the next full-length installment in the series, Princess on the Brink, all by Meg Cabot. The two novellas were fun, but they also felt very similar in that they’re all about Mia being worried about her relationship with Michael because she either wants or doesn’t want something and Michael seems to want the opposite, only to find that if they’d just communicated better it would have been fine, and in the end, everybody goes home happy. Princess on the Brink was quite a book, , and I’m not exactly sure in what way I mean that. Michael is going off to Japan, both to prove to Mia’s family that he’s worthy of her and also to get some space from Mia because he’s distressed by the fact that she won’t sleep with him. Mia is devistated. Mia decides to sleep with Michael in an attempt to get him to stay with her in New York. This goes terribly, because to be clear, this is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea. I just felt like Mia was so so stupid in this book, like so stupid, and we’re now eight books into the series, and I would have thought she would have learned something—anything—from the last seven books and three novellas. Suffice it to say I was frustrated by this book but interested to see where we’re going next.

And that’s it for May. Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? I’ll be back soon with my June books and some exciting writing news.

March and April Reading Roundup

March was a really busy month for me. So was April. And since we’re already in late May, I decided I better combine these two months into one post if I ever wanted to get it out there.

In March, I finished my revisions on my middle grade sci fi project; put in a lot of time at work to finish the first complete draft of a major project that I’ve been working on for almost a year; got my first covid vaccine; and basically slept for a week. Somewhere in there I also met my pedometer app’s monthly challenge of walking 105 miles in March, because the weather was generally pretty nice, and I read fifteen books. Eighteen if you count that yes I caved and reread the three Nevermoor books again. I’m not going to talk about the Nevermoor books again in this post, except to say, again, that if you haven’t read them, you really, really should.

Collage of the 29 books I read in March and April In April, I got more edits on my middle grade sci fi project and did a lot of work on those revisions; put in a lot more time at work to finish that major project and release it into the world; had my parents visit for Easter; met my pedometer app’s April challenge to reach my step goal 17 times; got my second covid vaccine (yay!) and accompanying side effects; and ventured into a supermarket for the first time in a year. Oh, and I read fourteen books in April.

So let’s dive right in.

I started off March with Crownchasers by Rebecca Coffindaffer, a fun, fast space adventure with a lot of political intrigue. When the emperor dies, he kicks off a crown chase, a giant galaxy-wide scavenger hunt for the imperial seal, and he nominates his daughter to represent his family. But Alyssa doesn’t want anything to do with ruling a giant space empire. She just wants to fly her ship and discover cool stuff for the explorer’s guild. So she teams up with a friend who is also competing to help the friend win. Then someone starts killing the other competitors. This is not supposed to happen. And things get dicier from there. Like I said, this book was really fast and fun. It was perfect for the rainy Sunday I spent reading it at the very beginning of March. It did get a heck of a lot darker than I expected at the end, and it’s a good thing the sequel is coming out in October because it ends on a cliffhanger. This is one where I think how the sequel goes will determine how I feel about the first book and whether I recommend the whole series. So stay tuned.

Next, I read Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. I actually started it a while ago but my library copy expired. I need to stop getting all the books out of the library at once. Anyway, Legendborn is about a girl who goes to a precollege program the fall after her mother dies in a car crash and discovers a secret society of magic. Not only that, one of the members of the secret society was at the hospital the night her mother died and tampered with her memory. So she infiltrates the secret society to try and bigure out what’s going on, facing trials and a whole lot of racism, because the book is set in the south and she’s a young woman of color trying to get into a mostly white male organization. Also the secret society is basically the descendants of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. This is just such an amazing book. It has magic and mysteries and competitions and secrets, which is all great, but it also feels really important for representation and equality. I definitely recommend this book, however the sequel turns out, but also I can’t wait for the sequel.

After that, I read Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis. I want to make it clear that in general I like a lot of Lindsay Ellis’s YouTube videos, but I don’t follow her religiously. I also read Axiom’s End before all the Twitter drama about her happened, and I don’t want to get into that here. So, Axiom’s End. It’s about a young woman who gets entangled in a first contact scenario when she becomes the interpreter for an alien. There were certainly some things I enjoyed about this book, but on the whole, it was just okay. I found the writing overwrought and the characters kind of flat. At this point, almost two months after I read the book, I can’t remember the specifics of my feelings or the specifics of the book, which says a lot. It wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t a great book, and I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

I read a whole bunch of the Princess Diaries books in March: Princess in Waiting, Project Princess, Princess in Pink, and Princess in Training by Meg Cabot. In April, I read The Princess Present and Party Princess. These books continue to be a ton of fun, but I admit they’ve become a bit silly, and Mia’s worries and reactions seem a bit ridiculous. But we returned to the good old fashioned crazy drama with Princess in Training and that was really great. I think that was my favorite of the ones I read in the past couple months. I’m still definitely enjoying the series and can’t wait to read more.

Somewhere around the time I got my first vaccine shot and slept for a week (I suspect the sleeping was more caused by being super busy and pushing myself too hard than the vaccine), I gave in and reread all the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. I tried to keep myself out of the Twilight loop I got stuck in last summer by reading Midnight Sun right after Twilight, then going on to New Moon, then Eclipse, then Breaking Dawn. It only kinda sorta worked. Twilight has this way of drawing me in and trapping me like a venus fly trap or something. Go ahead and judge me. I judge myself a little. Anyway I talked about these books at length last summer in this post about the original series and this post about Midnight Sun, so I’m not going to rehash it all here, but suffice it to say as problematic as these books are, and oh boy are they problematic, they are my guilty pleasure reads and I’m just going to accept that.

Next, I read the third Enchanted Forest Chronicles book, Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. The wizards are at it again, and Morwin the witch and all of her glorious cats are trying to help Mendenbar and Cimorene, king and queen of the Enchanted Forest, stop them. This was a fun book, as usual, and oh what a cliffhanger, but it wasn’t as engaging as the other books, and some of the characters, like the giant talking rabit, were frankly annoying.

Then I read Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale. This is a retelling of a fairytale about a noble maiden and her servant locked in a tower by the maiden’s father after she refuses to marry the man he has chosen for her. Shannon Hale tells this story from the point of view of the servant, a girl named Dashti, as Dashti tries to take care of her mistress, Saren, and help them escape the tower. I normally really like Shannon Hale books, and I was excited to get my hands on this one, but honestly I was disappointed. This book had a great premise, but I found myself kind of bored as I read this book. It’s possible that’s because it was written as a diary, so it felt very distant, and I just didn’t get the feelings I wanted to feel from this book.

Last year, I was slowly working my way through The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. I got through the first six books, but the library didn’t have the seventh one on audio, I wasn’t in love with the series enough to buy the next one, and I didn’t want to put in the effort to read it in Braille. But the library finally got the seventh book, Persepolis Rising, on audio, so I gave it a read this month. Thirty years after the end of the sixth book, James Holden and his crew are embroiled in the attempt of the Martian deserters who escaped to another system at the end of the last book to take over the solar system, and all the other systems, and create a galaxy-wide empire. This book was… I don’t know. It was a fine book. I enjoyed it at least as much as all the others. But I was really thrown by the thirty year time jump. I felt like I couldn’t quite grasp who the characters were anymore and what their relationships were like, and this left me constantly scrambling and floundering to keep up with what was going on and why I should care. If I can get my hands on the next book, I’ll probably keep going with the series, but I suspect the sixth book is probably the best place to stop if you’re reading this series.

Since I was diving back into revisions on my middle grade sci fi project in April, I decided to help myself out by revisiting some of the series that really inspired this project and also some other sci fi books I’ve really loved. So April became a bit of a fun sci fi rereads month. First, I reread the first three Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few. Then I read the fourth book in the series, which came out at the end of April, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within. I loved revisiting the first three books in the series, which I read last year. I adored these books even more the second time around. The fourth book was really great too. I had fun meeting characters from other species we haven’t had a ton of experience with in this series, and I continue to love how generally all these characters are just so nice. I will say parts of this book felt a bit slow and repetitive, and I was a little disappointed to learn that this was the last book in the series, because I wished for something that pulled it all together. At the same time, these really are four separate but related stories, rather than a series, so I think I’m okay with how it ended, and I might enjoy the fourth book more on a reread. This continues to be a series I just love and will recommend to everyone.

You can’t have a fun sci fi rereads month without revisiting The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, so of course I also reread Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter. I’ve talked about each of these books at length in the past, so I’m not going to get deep into it here. You can read my full review of Cinder here, Scarlet here, Cress here, and Winter here. I did not reread Fairest this month because as I discussed here, while it certainly informs Levana’s character a lot, it isn’t a fun place to spend my time.

Last year, I read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. I enjoyed it, but at the time felt like there was too much buildup and not enough payoff, but I was willing to see where the sequel went. The sequel recently came out, so I reread A Memory Called Empire in April, then read the sequel A Desolation Called Peace. I enjoyed Memory a lot more on reread, and Desolation was also very good, but it left me with the same feeling that Memory did, and I was able to put my finger on it a bit more. I have a friend who is a big history buff, and he really appreciated how the book felt like true history in how messy the resolution felt. This was a really interesting point, and I know the author is deep in the history as well, but at the same time, from a narrative, storytelling perspective, it wasn’t satisfying. The internet tells me there will be one more book, and I’m still holding out hope that the ultimate ending will be satisfying, because there’s so much in these books that I love. We’ll see.

Next I read MiNRS 2 by Kevin Sylvester. I really enjoyed the first book, which I read back in January. Christopher and his friends have defeated the Landers who attacked their colony, but more are coming. In this book, the kids are in a race against some pretty evil bad guys and unraveling some pretty big secrets about what’s happening on Earth. Despite all this, I felt like this second book was kind of slow, and the villain was a little too evil for me to take seriously. The kids also had this moral quandery of whether they should fight back or try to just hide and survive, and while I’m not objecting to kids grappling with big issues, it ‘just seemed to drag on a bit long when it seemed pretty clear which way they were going to go. I’m still interested in the third book, and I’ll let you know what I think.

Finally, the sixth Murderbot book, Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells, came out the day before my birthday. So as an early birthday present to myself, I lay on my couch all evening and read it. This short novella is a stand-alone murder mystery. It takes place before the full-length novel and doesn’t do much to move the series along. I didn’t know this when I started reading, and I spent a long time being confused about how this followed the end of the full-length novel (answer, it didn’t, it happened before the novel). Basically there’s a dead body on Preservation Station, and Murderbot is assigned to work with station security, who are afraid of it, to help solve the murder. All I really have to say about this book is oh I just love Murderbot so much! Go read Murderbot!

Generally, I really enjoyed the books I read in March and April, and I’d love to keep talking about them in the comments. Let me know if you’ve read any of these and what you thought of them. I’ll be back soon to talk about the books I’ve read in May (so far it isn’t that many, so it should be a shorter post).

February Reading Roundup

I wrote this in the very beginning of March, and I felt on top of things for once. And then I completely forgot to post it, so I’m obviously just hopeless.

For a short month, I feel like a lot happened in February. I returned to my apartment in Virginia, which involved a lot of packing and then unpacking and reorganizing and such. Work continued apace, and I spent a lot of time on revisions to my middle grade space adventure novel. I finished writing another short story and got to take a lot of walks, especially as the weather got nicer. At the end of February, my story “Harmonies for Cadence” was accepted for publication by the Voyage YA Journal, and they published it right away. I also signed the contract for my story “Noa and the Dragon,” which is going to appear in the anthology Artificial Divide, a blind #OwnVoices anthology I’m really excited about.

Collage of the 12 books I read in February: Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, Hide and Seek, Princess in the Spotlight, Princess in Love, Children of Blood and Bone, Wizard and Glass, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow, Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow, and The House in the Cerulean Sea I also read twelve books in February. Two were contemporaries, one was nonfiction, and the rest were fantasy. Two were rereads, but the rest were new to me. I didn’t finish any Braille books this month. There were a couple I wasn’t super excited about, but on the whole it was a good reading month.

I started February with the first two books in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. These are more books that I never read as a kid and a friend recommended I check them out. Princess Cimorene is not very princess-like, so when her parents arrange her marriage, she runs away and gets herself “kidnapped” by a dragon. And she has a lot of adventures fending off evil wizards and princes coming to rescue her, and it’s just great. The second book follows the same characters but is from the point of view of the king of the Enchanted Forest. This series is a really great example of changing point of view from one book to the next but doing so in a way that isn’t annoying. The end of the second book kind of made me sad, and honestly I think it could have been fine if it had been set up better, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes next in the series.

In the beginning of February, I returned to Virginia, and along the way, my mom and I listened to A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Eutopian Plot to Liberate an American Town and Some Bears by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. You probably saw the article last year about this book. I know I was asked about it many times because I’m from New Hampshire. A Libertarian Walks into a Bear is about an experiment to make Grafton, New Hampshire a free town

, with no taxes and no government. The result? Bears run wild. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, and I don’t expect to laugh when I read nonfiction. But this book was hilarious as well as fascinating, and just because of that, I 100% recommend it.

I also continued the Upside-Down Magic series with the seventh book, Hide and Seek by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. In this book, Nory’s father asks her to reapply to Sage Academy, and she gets in, but she doesn’t want to leave her new school and her new friends in the UDM class. When a pipe bursts or something similar happens at Nory’s school, kids are split up and sent to other schools in the area for a week, and Nory’s class goes to Sage, where Nory learns just how much she doesn’t belong at Sage. This book wasn’t as memorable as the others in this series for me, but it also ended on a cliffhanger, and the next book hasn’t come out yet. I can’t wait!

I also read the second and third Princess Diaries books in February, Princess in the Spotlight and Princess in Love by Meg Cabot. I really, really liked Princess in the Spotlight. Mia’s mom is pregnant and is planning to marry her algebra teacher, and Mia’s grandmother insists on throwing them a royal wedding they don’t want. Mia is receiving anonymous notes from someone who likes her, and she really, really hope’s it’s from Michael, her best friend’s older brother. And she’s also preparing for her first public interview as a princess. I just loved all the drama of this book. I didn’t enjoy Princess in Love quite as much, because it’s all about Mia trying to figure out how to break up with a boyfriend she sort of started dating almost accidentally at the end of the second book. There was plenty of drama, but it wasn’t quite as fun as the first two books. But I’m still really looking forward to the next book in the series.

After that, I read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. In a world where the king has killed anyone who can do magic and basically destroyed magic, Zélie, her brother, and a runaway princess go on a journey to bring magic back. This book has some great adventures in search of relics and arcs of learning to use power, but at the same time, the pacing is a bit all over the place—moving along at a good clip in some places, dragging in others—and I absolutely hated the romantic subplot. I know a lot of people really liked this book, but it just didn’t work for me the way I wanted it to. I probably won’t go on to read the sequel, and it probably isn’t a book I would recommend.

Next I read the fourth book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Wizard and Glass. This book picks up where the last one left off, with our heros traveling aboard the suicidal talking pink monorail. They’ve made a deal with it to save their lives if they can stump it with riddles. But most of the book is taken up with Roland’s backstory. And then there’s a weird climax/ending tacked on. It was interesting, but it was too long and dragged a lot. It also reinforced an issue I’ve noticed in the previous books, that it feels like female characters in the book only exist to be sexually abused, to be sexual abusers, or to have sex with the male characters, and I don’t like it. I’m probably going to press on just to see how the series ends—last time I tried these books I stopped after Wizard and Glass—but I’m going to take a break for a while and read something happier.

At the end of 2019, I read the first two Nevermoor books by Jessica Townsend and fell in love. The third book came out last fall, and in February, I finally reread the first two books, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow and Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow, and then the third book, Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow. I continue to absolutely adore the first two books, and the third was just what I wanted it to be. Fair warning, it is a plague book, and it did give me some flashbacks to this time last year, but if you’re going to read a plague book, this is the one to read. It’s so heartfelt and warm and has so many excellent feelings. It’s the sort of book that once I reached the end, I just wanted to go back to the beginning of the series and start again. And I did that in March because I’m hopeless. These books are so special to me that I’ve ordered them in hardcopy Braille so I can hold them in my hand and study them and luxuriate in every perfect word. Honestly, I aspire to write a story that is this captivating, this enchanting, this intense, and this heartwarming, and these books are rapidly coming to take the place Harry Potter holds in my heart, and I don’t say that lightly even after J. K. Rowling revealed herself as a bigot. I really need more people to scream about these books with me, so if you have read them, let’s chat, and if you haven’t go read them now please please please!

And I finished off February with The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune. This book was just pure delight. A caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth is sent from his dreary life in the city to a beautiful little island to investigate the orphanage on that island. Once there, he meets the charming master of the orphanage and the children he cares for: a gnome, a wivern, a sprite, a green blob, a boy who can turn into a dog, and the six-year-old antichrist. It’s all about falling in love and found family and it is just so warm and fuzzy. This is another book that is fundamentally happy and still has a strong sense of plot. I definitely recommend this one.

And that’s it for February. Let me know if you’ve read any of these or if you have any recommendations for books I might like. I was going to say happy March, but honestly, we’re almost at April, so happy April.

January Reading Roundup

Happy February everybody! I am always a big fan of the month of February in general, because it’s short, and it just doesn’t seem to drag as much as January, and before you know it we’re in March and springtime is in sight. This year in particular, when winter has been long and cold and so so difficult, I am very glad to find myself more than halfway through February. Almost to the end of February at this point because as usual I am a slow poke.

And as usual, I meant to post this sooner, but I am embroiled in novel edits, and I also returned to my apartment in Virginia and that was complicated.

Collage of the fifteen books I read in January: Save the Cat! Writes a Novel; Because of Winn-Dixie; Everything, Everything; The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue; The Thief; MiNRS; Cemetery Boys; The Big Shrink; The Princess Diaries; The Princess Bride; and all five Murderbot books. I read fifteen books in January. Many of them were quite short, which is how I got through so many. I was also almost definitely avoiding stress with books, which isn’t the worst thing in the world but which I’ve realized I need to be aware of. But I also just loved so many of these books.

Two of the books I read were in Braille (yay!), and the rest were audio. It was a pretty even split between fantasy and science fiction, with a couple contemporary books and one writing advice book as well. And none of these books were rereads.

First, I read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab. I actually started this book last November but didn’t finish it before my copy from the library expired, and I didn’t get it out of the library again until the very end of December. When Addie LaRue runs away from a wedding she doesn’t want in 1714 France, she makes a deal with a demon: she will have immortality, time to live her life, but no one will remember her. Then, three hundred years later, she meets someone who does remember her. This is the best I can describe this book. It spans 300 years of Addie’s life, crossing continents and wars, and it has such a beautiful, flowing, lyrical style. And I just love it and will definitely recommend it.

Next, I read The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, the first of her Queen’s Thief series. This is another one that I started earlier in 2020, didn’t finish before the library copy expired, and then didn’t get it out of the library to finish it for a long, long time. The Thief follows Gen, a convicted thief who is hired by the king to steal a mystical gem from a hidden temple. Honestly, I struggled with this book. I didn’t really like any of the characters, and most of it was kind of boring. I was very intrigued by the ending, however. Without spoiling anything, this book is one that pulls off an effective twist that didn’t make me mad, even though the twist concerns our first person narrator and it’s something our first person narrator knew all along. I may go on to read the sequel, because it promises to have some fun political intrigue.

In January I also powered through all of the Murderbot Diaries books by Martha Wells, All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, and Network Effect. The first four are more like novellas than novels, and the fifth one is a full length novel. These books follow a security unit who hacked its control systems so that it can slack on its job and watch television, but it gets embroiled in a lot of dangerous situation with its clients and is generally trying to figure out what to do with itself now that it is free. I absolutely adored these books. Murderbot is just plain amazing! I love the characters; I love the voice; the plot is technical but not so technical I couldn’t follow it; the world is appropriately awful; and there is just so much wonderful snark. The sixth book comes out and day before my birthday and I am just so excited!

I also read MiNRS by Kevin Sylvester, the first book in his MiNRS series. Twelve-year-old Christopher lives on a mining colony on the asteroid Perses, and his biggest worries are whether his parents will agree to let him hold a party celebrating the upcoming communications blackout with Earth and why his best friend, Elena, keeps looking at him like that. But then on the eve of the blackout terrorists after the ore mined on Perses attack, killing almost all the adults, and Christopher becomes the leader of a small band of kids determined to survive in the mining tunnels. This book didn’t make a ton of sense, as in it didn’t feel as logically sound as I wanted it to, but it was definitely fun. I’ve started the sequel, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.

Next, I read Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. My agent recommend I read this to help with some structure problems with my space adventure project, and I found it super helpful. The book is based on the popular screenwriting book Save the Cat!, and it goes through all the beats you should hit when writing a novel, with a lot of explanations and examples. I particularly enjoyed all the examples of popular books included. This is one of those things where I don’t know how many times I’ve had three act structure explained to me but it never really clicked. Then I read this book, and something about the way everything was explained and the examples, it clicked. If you’re a writer, I definitely recommend this book. I have in fact been throwing it at everyone in my writing group.

Then I read Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas. This was another book that I started in 2020 and didn’t finish because of the library. I got too many books out of the library at the end of 2020, okay? Cemetery Boys is about a trans boy, Yadriel, who belongs to a family who can see and communicate with spirits and help them pass on. In this family, the men are the ones who help spirits pass on, while the women have healing magic. Yadriel has been trying to convince his family, without success, to let him take his place among the men of his family. So he undergoes the ritual to gain his powers by himself, with his cousin’s help. Then, when he accidentally summons the ghost of a dead classmate, Julian, he’s pulled into the mystery of what happened to Julian so that be can help Julian pass on, only to find that he doesn’t want to let Julian go. I admit that I had a hard time getting into this world, but once I did, I was just along for the ride with this book. I loved the characters, and the world was so rich and intricate. Most of all, I loved the way the characters’ relationships grow and change over the course of the book, romantic relationships, friendships, and familial relationships. This book is also a great mix of fun adventures and grappling with serious, heartfelt feelings and issues. I loved it.

Next, on a way lighter note, I read Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. I picked this up because it was one of the examples discussed in Save the Cat! and I hadn’t ever read it. Opal and her father have just moved to a new town, and Opal doesn’t have any friends and is starting to really feel the absence of her mother, who left when she was little. When she adopts a stray dog, Winn-Dixie, she begins to make friends and become closer to her father. This book was just plain adorable. The characters are so vivid, and Winn-Dixie stole my heart. Minor spoiler alert, I was a little worried as we neared the end that Winn-Dixie was going to die, it I was hesitating to keep reading, because I’m still just such a mess about losing Mopsy and I don’t think I could stand to read a book where the dog dies. But Winn-Dixie is fine. So if you haven’t read Because of Winn-Dixie, it’s a really cute book, and you should check it out.

I also picked up Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon, another book discussed in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Maddie has an autoimmune disease that basically means she can’t go outside because she’s allergic to everything. Then new neighbors move in, and she befriends Olly, a boy her age, first by talking through written signs and miming messages through the window, then online. They fall in love, and Maddie has to decide how far she’s willing to push the boundaries set up to protect her in order to be with Olly. There were definitely some things I enjoyed about this book. The way the characters get to know each other was really fun, and Maddie has some great character growth. It reminded me a bit of The parts I loved in Fault in Our Stars. And then we hit the ending, and I don’t want to give spoilers, but I could do an awful lot of ranting about disability representation and just how much I hate this twist. Ultimately the twist ruined the book for me, and I can’t recommend this one.

Then I got the sixth Upside-Down Magic book, The Big Shrink by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. In this book, the kids in the UDM class start a craze at their school for these amazing dragon toys that are kind of like living pets, and suddenly the other kids want to hang out with them, which is new and exciting, and then the teachers get mad because the kids are always playing with the dragons and ban them from the school. The kids plan a revolution. This was a very fun book for me. It reminded me of my own days in fifth grade, when I was circulating petitions to get a longer lunch time (I still think fifteen minutes was too short) and getting the entire class to play squish the lemon until we broke the slide and starting a bottle cap collection craze that spawned quite a few disagreements. I saw a few Goodreads reviews that didn’t really like it as much as the other books, but for me, it felt very realistic and was quite fun.

I also read The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot. This is another one that I never read as a kid. I guess at this point I’m just on a kick of reading middle grade books I missed as a kid. I think I’ve talked before about how I missed a lot of books as a kid because easy access to digital Braille didn’t really come along until I was in high school, and hardcopy Braille and audiobooks were expensive and pretty big-deal gifts. So sidenote, I’m always taking recommendations for your favorite books from middle school. Back to The Princess Diaries. I do know I’ve seen the movie for this one, but didn’t really remember much of it. Mia is a normal fourteen-year-old in New York City. All she wants is to grow breasts, get a boyfriend, and generally not be a freak. But then her father comes to visit and guess what? Mia is a princess. This book was really, really fun. Mia’s voice is just superb, and while some of the jokes and references might be a bit dated (the Trumps keep coming up and I cringe every time), it was just a great read. I’ve since read the second book and watched the first movie, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the rest.

After that, I read The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I absolutely love the movie, and I’ve always heard the book is better. I totally believed this, because the book is always better, but honestly I didn’t feel like the book added to my understanding of the movie. In fact, I found the book to feel kind of flat, as opposed to the lush, intense world of the movie. On the other hand, I did like the framing device in the book quite a lot. On the whole, this is a rare case where I prefer the movie to the book.

And that’s it for January. I’ll be back, hopefully sooner rather than later, to talk about the books I’ve read in February, which I’m just as excited about. In the meantime, have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? And definitely pass along your favorite books from middle school so I can read them too.

Favorite Books of 2020

January was a month full of emotional whiplash, both for me personally and in the broader world. I basically wound up accomplishing what I could and hanging on for the ride. But here I am, finally, to give you my favorite books of 2020.

Whatever else 2020 was, and it was a lot, it was a good reading year for me. I set out to read 100 books, and I read 107. And after realizing I’d all but stopped reading books in Braille in 2019, what with finishing law school and taking the bar and moving to D.C., I made a concerted effort to read more books in Braille in 2020. I read eleven books in Braille this year.

39 of the books I read in 2020 were wonderful enough that they have now been added to my book recs page. And here they are, in no particular order.

Jameyanne’s Favorite Books of 2020:

Savvy series by Ingrid Law
The Thickety series by J. A. White (I read the first one at the end of 2019 and the rest of the books at the start of 2020, and they were all wonderful)
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Forever, or a Long Long time by Caela Carter
Greystone Secrets series by Margaret Peterson Haddix (the third book comes out this year, but I loved the first two enough I don’t want to wait for the third to recommend the series)
Ash Princess trilogy by Laura Sebastian (I read the first one while studying for the bar in 2019, then reread it in 2020 and finished the series, and wow!)
Renegades trilogy by Marissa Meyer
The Light Between Worlds by Laura E. Weymouth
Speak by Laurie Hals Anderson
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu
Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt
You Should See Me in a Crown byLeah Johnson
The Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers (the fourth one comes out in 2021, I think soon, and I can’t wait! But this is more a bunch of interconnected stand-alone novels than a series, and they are all so wonderful)
Midnight at the Barclay Hotel by Fleur T. Bradley
The Mystwick School of Musicraft by Jessica Khoury
Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly
Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko (I forget when the sequel is coming out but I am so excited!)
Artemis Fowl books 1-4 by Eoin Colfer (I haven’t read the rest of the series, but everyone I’ve talked to says this is the place to stop. I may read the other books just because I like to make my own opinions, but the fourth book is a good ending to Artemis’s story)
Upside-Down Magic books 1-5 by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle (I’m still working on finishing the series but so far it’s been great fun)
We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly

I highly recommend all of these books. Check out my monthly reading roundup posts over here for more details on all these books, and happy reading in 2021!

The Heart of Betrayal and Cliffhangers

Cover of The Heart of Betrayal by Mary E. Pearson At the end of 2019, I read the Remnant Chronicles by Mary E. Pearson and absolutely loved them. In November and December of 2020, I reread the series, and I’m finally doing what I started to do in 2019 and never finished: raving to you all about them. A couple months ago, I wrote about the first book, The Kiss of Deception, and about how Mary E. Pearson pulls off a twist midway through the book that manages to be surprising without coming out of left field. You can read that post here. Now I’m back with another book review and writing topic post, and this time I’m talking about the second book in the series, The Heart of Betrayal, and what makes a good cliffhanger. Obviously, since I’m talking about the second book in a series, spoilers for The Kiss of Deception are unavoidable. If you think you might want to read the series, this probably isn’t the post for you. Also, since the writing topic I want to talk about is cliffhangers, there will also probably be some spoilers for the second book. I will make sure to flag them in the text, but as usual I will do a general spoiler-free review first before diving more deeply into my discussion of cliffhangers.

The Heart of Betrayal picks up right where The Kiss of Deception left off. Rafe has caught up with Kaden and Lia, and he’s lied to Kaden to accompany Lia into Venda. Rafe’s men are going to try and sneak into the city to help Rafe and Lia get out. But while Lia has nothing but revulsion and fear for the rulers of Venda, she cannot help but befriend the common people, and soon they are looking to her as more than just a prisoner princess. They believe, as Lia believes, that she is the one promised in the long ago prophecy Venda, founder of her namesake country, made before her husband pushed her off a wall. Lia is also growing closer to Kaden, much as she doesn’t want to. I feel like I’m doing an utterly terrible job of describing this book, but it’s really good. It’s full of political intrigue and secrets and the characters all have so much heart and resolve.

The Heart of Betrayal is certainly slower than the first book in the series. It’s more of a slow build with a lot of tension than the first book, which was pretty action-packed. We spend a lot of time getting to know Venda, and the characters all spend a lot of time getting to know each other, especially now that they all know each other’s true identities. But even though it is slower, Mary E. Pearson crafts such strong tension you can practically taste it, and it’s actually really important that we get to know Venda and the other characters so well, because that makes it real to the readers as well as Lia, and we can then fully understand her conflict as the book continues. And then of course we learn there are traitors in the court of Morrigan, Lia’s kingdom, and Venda is building an army to conquer Morrigan. And then the plans are laid, they go to escape, and all heck breaks loose.

The Heart of Betrayal works really well as both a sequel to the first book in The Remnant Chronicles and as a lead-in to the third book, which I will talk about soon. It is complex and intricate, but it is also easy to follow and full of wonderful feelings. And the ending is just fabulous

Which brings us to cliffhangers.

I think cliffhangers are something that are incredibly fun for a writer, because we live to torture our readers, but they can also be incredibly frustrating for a reader, especially if they have to wait a long time for the next book. There are a few ways to do a cliffhanger.

You could leave absolutely nothing resolved. Cassandra Clare does this at the end of the second Dark Artifices book. The book ends right as something absolutely terrible and tragic happens. Another good example of this is the ending of the third season of Castle, which ends right after someone is shot.

Another way to construct a cliffhanger is to leave the main character at a point where they have failed in their journey. This is similar to the first way, but often the author will also give the reader something else, a new element that gives the character the impetus to act, which they will do at the start of the next book. The Kiss of Deception actually does something similar to this. Lia has failed to escape, she has watched her brother die, she is surrounded by hostile soldiers and it is likely she will be killed anyway once they arrive in Venda. But then Rafe arrives, and even though he can’t overpower 500 soldiers to rescue Lia, they are now facing this together and there’s hope for an escape in the second book. The ending of Cinder by Marissa Meyer also does this quite well. Spoiler alert: Cinder is in prison, having failed to convince Kai not to marry Queen Levana and also having exposed herself as a Lunar. Queen Levana is going to take her back to the moon to execute her, but it’s this or war with Earth. Then Dr. Errland shows up with a new prosthetic hand and foot for Cinder and the news that she is the long-lost lunar princess and rightful heir to the throne, and we’re left with Cinder’s decision to break out of prison, which she does at the start of the next book. End spoilers.

The third kind of cliffhanger, and the kind I want to talk about today, is the kind of ending where almost everything is resolved except for one, maybe two things, and then there’s one final punch. The second Hunger Games book, Catching Fire, is a good example of this. Spoiler alert: Katniss has blown out the forcefield. She and several others have escaped the arena. But Peeta has been captured. And District 12 has been destroyed. End spoilers.

This might be my favorite kind of cliffhanger,. I tend to find the first kind, where we’re left in medias res, to be kind of jarring. And I’m generally frustrated by the second, though I did like the ending of Cinder. I just feel like the first and second options generally feel like the writer just hasn’t taken us all the way through the story. The third type, on the other hand, feels like we’ve reached the end of the story but the door is open for more and then we’re literally punched through that door. We the readers have taken a breath, we may even be relieved, and then something changes and it’s clear it’s not over.

I’m going to break this down in The Heart of Betrayal. Spoiler alert: The plan to escape goes awry. There’s a huge battle on the terrace. The Comizar has murdered the child Lia befriended, Aster. Lia has stabbed the Comizar. A huge battle ensues, and in the midst of it, Lia is proclaimed to the people to be the new comizar of Venda. Lia, Rafe, and Rafe’s men make a run for it. They jump onto their raft to get down the river (the only way to get across to freedom). They’re going to make it. They’re going to make it. And then bad guys show up and start shooting at them, and both Lia and Rafe fall off the raft into the river. Lia is shot, she can’t get her heavy dress off, and then she goes under. And then we switch to Rafe’s pov when he finds her on the riverbank. They are safely out of Venda, but as Rafe carries Lia on foot, we are left with him being unsure if she is going to survive. Spoilers over.

The ending of The Heart of Betrayal is wonderfully brutal. Just when we think they’re going to make it, things go wrong and we’re left unsure and dying for more. It’s everything that I personally love in a good cliffhanger.

If you’ve read The Heart of Betrayal, I’d love to know your thoughts on the whole book, particularly the ending. I would also love to know what kind of cliffhangers are your favorite and why. And of course if there’s a kind of cliffhanger I didn’t think of or if you would categorize them differently, I’d love to discuss. In the meantime, you should really give The Remnant Chronicles a read.

December Reading Roundup

December was a hard month. The world continued to be on fire, but most of my energy was consumed with taking care of Mopsy and trying to keep her as comfortable as possible in her final days. I was an emotional mess all month (I’m still an emotional mess), and for the first time, reading didn’t help the way it normally does. So all in all, I didn’t end up reading too much in December. I only read four books, so this will be a short post. Three of the books I read were fantasy, one middle grade and two YA, and one was a contemporary-ish middle grade (it’s set in the 1980s but it doesn’t feel historical so I don’t really know where it falls).

First, I read The Tower of Nero by Rick Riordan. This was the final book in the Trials of Apollo series, which follows the two Percy Jackson series I read in 2018 (I think). This was a fun popcorn book, but that was about it. As I’ve said when discussing the other books in this series, I felt like Apollo went on the same journey of discovering there was more to humans and basically learning not to be a terrible person several times, and while the plot was exciting and there was a lot of action, there wasn’t much left for this book to do, character-wise, so it felt very familiar. Still, if you enjoy the Percy Jackson books, the series might be up your alley.

Next, I read We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly. We all know I have a major soft spot for middle grade books about kids who love space, and this was no exception. It’s about three seventh-grade siblings learning about space in the month leading up to the launch of the Challenger. It’s largely about their struggles with their home life, because their parents aren’t great, and their relationships with each other and other kids at school. I flew through this book in maybe a day and a half, and it gave me so many feelings. I was a little thrown by the pacing, because the way I read the description on Goodreads, I thought the Challenger launch was going to happen much sooner in the book and we would spend more time with the kids during the fallout of that, particularly dealing with the girl’s dream of becoming an astronaut. But the launch occurred much later in the book than I expected. I think the problem is more with the expectations set up by the description than the book itself. It was, as you might expect, a bit of a downer, and I did wish for more positive resolution for these kids, but that also might have been my mood this month rather than a problem with the book itself. I really did like the book. I particularly loved how it included all the astronauts on the Challenger, most of whom I’ve never heard of before. And like I said, I love middle grade books about kids obsessed with space. This one is definitely worth a read.

And I finished off 2020 by completing my reread of The Remnant Chronicles with The Heart of Betrayal and The Beauty of Darkness by Mary E. Pearson. I’m planning to talk about these two books in much more depth later this week, so I won’t get into them here, but suffice it to say I loved them just as much as I did the first time through.

And that’s it for December. Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? I’m planning to talk more about the Remnant Chronicles, as I said, and I’d like to dive a little deeper into some books I read in 2020 that have stuck with me but won’t be making it onto my 2020 favorites list, but then I’ll be back with my 2020 favorites list.

November Reading Roundup

Collage of the seven books I read in November Hello all, and welcome to the final days of 2020. I hope everyone had a happy socially-distanced Thanksgiving. It’s hard to believe, but we have almost made it through 2020, and there’s some hope that life may return to normal in the coming months, but November was still a pretty rough month for me. In addition to the general stress of the election and the ongoing pandemic, Mopsy got an infection in her paw and has been pretty sick, and I’ve been forced to admit that at twelve and a half, she’s getting up there. After some unsuccesfull antibiotics and the infection spreading to all of her feet, we’ve gotten her on some medication that seems to be helping with her pain. She’s up and around a bit more, and she’s more alert. She has a mass on her spleen that the vet thinks is cancer, particularly because some stomach cancers in dogs can manifest as foot infections (who knew?). I’m working from home in New Hampshire right now and will be through the holidays, and I’m really glad I have this time to spend with her. I’m also glad the medication is helping with her pain and she’s alert and happy again, but there’s no denying she’s sick, so we’re taking things one step at a time to make sure we’re doing what’s best for her.

In better news, November was also National Novel Writing Month. My writing group did a set-your-own-goal of November, and I edited 53,000 words of my middle grade space adventure novel. Since then, I have actually finished up this draft, at the expense of sleep a lot of nights and getting this post finished sooner, and I’m happy with how it’s turned out. On another fun note, I have been writing every day now for almost a year and two months, which is super cool.

I don’t feel like I read that much in November, partly because I spent so much time writing, partly because I ended the month with three library books that expired while I was in the middle of them. But let’s be fair to myself, on top of editing about two thirds of a novel in November, I read seven books, ish, and I met my 2020 reading goal of 100 books. Yay!

Most of the books I read were pretty short this month. I read three middle grade books, one contemporary and two fantasy. I also read two YA fantasy books, a satire, and something that I would call a fantasy short story but Goodreads calls a book (this is the ish in my seven ish books). One of the books I read this month was in Braille, bringing my total Braille books for the year so far to eleven. One to go to meet that goal.

So let’s dive in and talk about these books.

First, I read Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko. This was an absolutely fabulous book. It’s definitely up there as one of my absolute favorite books of the year. It’s really hard to describe, but I’ll give it a try. Tarisai is half-genie. Her mother imprisoned and raped a genie to create her. Now she is sending Tarisai to the palace to undergo the trials to become one of the crown prince’s chosen eleven, who will join him in ruling the empire as a counsel. But in order to be anointed as one of the prince’s chosen, Tarisai will have to love the prince, and her mother is using the wish in her blood, her third wish from the genie, to force Tarisai to kill the prince once she is anointed. The first part of the book is Tarisai trying to fight her mother’s wish while becoming friends with and then falling in love with the prince. And then things change. And change again, and change again. What I love about this book is how much it packs into one novel. This book arguably could have been a trilogy, because there’s so much going on, but it’s really condensed and moves really fast and I love it. I also love Tarisai and all her friendships. Also, I want to give Jordan Ifueko so much credit for pulling off amnesia really well halfway through the book without making it feel like a loss of character development. The only thing that jarred me sometimes was that this book covered a lot of time, and there were some time skips that felt kind of sudden. But on the whole this was a fantastic book and I one hundred percent recommend.

Next, I read Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why by Alexandra Petri. This is a book of satirical essays about the past five years or so. I read this the afternoon after the election was called, and it was helarious. I’m not sure how funny it would be at any other time, honestly. Obviously some essays were better than others, but on the whole this was a good book.

After that, I read the fourth Artemis Fowl book, The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer. Remember Opal, the villain from book two? ell she’s back, and she’s out for revenge, forcing Artemis and Butler to team up with Holly and the other fairies. I went into this book a little warily. The last book ended in a way that could have negated all of Artemis’s character development over the course of the series. But Eoin Colfer handled that issue really well, and I was satisfied with how this book went and how it ended. A lot of friends have told me that this is the place to stop with the series, and I probably will, because this was a great conclusion. On the other hand I do like to draw my own conclusions on books, so I might give the next books a try at some point in the future.

Then I read the short story on tor.com, The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections by Tina Connolly. Since this is a short story, I’m not going to try and summarize it, but it involves food that causes you to experience memories from your past and an evil king, and it is so so good, so you should go read it. It won’t take you too long.

Next was Weather or Not by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle, the fifth book in the Upside-Down Magic series. This was, as usual, a really fun book. But I also enjoyed this book less than I’ve enjoyed earlier books in the series. This book focuses on Nory, as usual, along with Willa, who struggles to handle her emotions and causes rain indoors when she’s upset. Nory and Willa are forced to work together for a group project, and they don’t like each other, and their feud draws in the rest of the upside-down magic class. I didn’t like how mean Nory was in this book, and I also didn’t like how Miss Star, the teacher, definitely knew these girls were having trouble and didn’t step in before things got out of hand. But this continues to be a fun series and I’m looking forward to reading the next book whenever I get it out of the library.

Then I reread Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. I first read this book in sixth grade, and it made a huge impression on me then, because it was the first book I remember reading where a major character dies. I found it just as powerful now, but I was also uncomfortable with how disability was treated in this book. It feels very dated, and because of that I’m not sure it’s a book I would recommend now.

And I finished off November with the third Mortal Instruments book, City of Glass by Cassandra Clare. I continue to love this book. It works really well as a conclusion to the first half of the series, and there are just so many feelings.

I’m still in the middle of two of the library books that expired before I could finish them in November (I did get one out of the library and finished it earlier in December). Hopefully I’ll get the others out of the library again soon. Otherwise, that’s it for November. If you’ve read any of these books, let’s chat in the comments. I’ll be back soon with my usual wrap-up of 2020, if I can face it, and my favorite books of the year. Have a happy and safe holiday, and please, please, please wear a mask.

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 Miles I only read four books in October. This is about half my usual monthly reading amount, and three of these books were really short. I’m actually in the middle of three more books but managed to finish none of them before the end of the month. This was partly because things got a lot busier at work in the last few weeks, so I was more tired at night. I was also focusing pretty heavily on writing this month: I finished revising my novel at the beginning of October; wrote, rewrote, and revised a whole short story; discussed more revisions to my novel with my agent; and planned out my NaNoWriMo project. And I do feel like I hit a bit of a reading slump about halfway through October. I started this book a lot of my friends really liked, but I was really struggling with it, and I didn’t finish it before my library copy expired, so I’m waiting to get off the waitlist again. My friends have good taste in books so I’m sure it gets better. But in the meantime, I struggled to get into other books for the rest of the month. But then I spent the last weekend of October in New Jersey with my writing group for a Halloween writing retreat (we all quarantined for two weeks and got negative covid tests before we went, so I felt very safe), and it was wonderful, but I didn’t get much reading done. So October was a good month for me personally, but not a lot of reading, and that’s okay.

I didn’t read any Braille books this month, but I got ahead last month so I’m okay with that. Of the four books I read, two were middle grade fantasy, one was a contemporary middle grade, and the other was nonfiction. Let’s dive right in.

First, I read Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly. This is a memoir of Scott Kelly’s year in space aboard the International Space Station, with flashbacks to his life and the path that got him there. This was a fascinating read. I absolutely loved learning about what it’s really like to live aboard the ISS, because I’m a nerd like that. I admit I got a little mixed up in the beginning because Scott Kelly is the twin of Mark Kelly, Gabby Gifford’s husband and hopefully a soon-to-be U.S. senator, and I got the Scott and Mark mixed up a bunch. But my confusion was more because of how the book was described to me than any problem with the book itself. I was a huge fan of this book and would absolutely recommend it.

After that, I read the fourth Upside-Down Magic book, Dragon Overnight by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. The Upside-Down Magic class is going for an overnight at the dragon sanctuary. They thought they were going to be the only school group there, but it turns out that Nory’s father is there too with a group from his school. Nory navigates making new friends who don’t like her father as a headmaster along with her own complicated feelings about her father, all while learning about dragons. Meanwhile, Andres is discovering that his upside-down magic, which so far has mostly been a pain, could actually be a real and useful talent. This book follows the last book so well, and it’s another fun installment in Nory and her friends’ adventures. Only one thing disappointed me with this book: after all her growth in the last book, Pepper can’t come to the dragon sanctuary because her magic is still out of control, so she’s basically not in the book at all. I like the idea that even after she’s overcome the biggest obstacles in controlling her upside-down magic, she still has things to work on, but these books are so short that there isn’t room to explore that, and it ended up feeling like Pepper’s growth in the third book was invalidated by her inability to participate in the adventures of the fourth book. But I still definitely enjoyed this installment and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

Next, I read the third Artemis Fowl book, The Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer. Artemis has built a super-computer using the fairy technology he stole from the LEP in the first book, and he’s planning to show it to an evil American businessman. Nothing can possibly go wrong, can it? Yes, if you say that out loud, everything will go wrong. There was a lot that I liked about this book, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the first two books, partly because I just couldn’t get behind the premise. Artemis is a genius, and I just didn’t buy that he would do something so stupid. I’m dubious about the ending as well, but I’m holding out judgment until I read the fourth book later this month.

And finally I read 96 Miles by J. L. Esplin. This is a contemporary middle grade novel, which I don’t tend to enjoy as much as middle grade fantasy, but I enjoyed this one immensely. John and Stewart Lockwood have been trained all their lives by their father to survive anything. Their dad is a hardcore survivalist, and he’s stockpiled their isolated Nevada ranch with enough food and water and medical supplies to last for months. But then there’s a massive blackout while their dad is out of town on a business trip, and when the boys are robbed at gunpoint, they have to travel 96 miles to get help. I really enjoyed this book. It was really tense, and very well-written, and I was super invested in these characters. There’s one thing that I’m not a fan of in this book. Something major is revealed close to the end of the book, and it casts everything we’ve read so far in a different light and makes the need to get the rest of the way to safety even more important. The problem is, the thing that’s revealed is something that there isn’t a reason why we the readers wouldn’t know it already except that the author wanted to hide it from us, especially because the book is in first person. So it feels unnatural that we only learn this information when we do as opposed to earlier in the story. I have a lot to say about this, and I’m actually thinking of doing another book review and writing topic post about this later on. This was a good book, but I’m on the fence about whether I would recommend it because of this problem.

And that’s it for October. If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to talk about them in the comments. And in the meantime, vote. Please, please, please vote!

The Kiss of Deception and Surprise

I spent a lot of time last year posting individual reviews of books. A little while after I started work at the FCC, I stopped doing full reviews of every book I read, because it just got to be too much. My plan was to write reviews of books that made me think about writing in some way. And then life got busy, and then Covid started, and I’m pretty sure the only one of these I actually wrote was about Midnight Sun, and that was only marginally about the writing topic. I actually wrote this post about a year ago, but never posted it.

So let’s try all this again. My goal is to keep doing these posts going forward. Think of them as a combination of book review and writing discussion. I will try to keep these posts spoiler-free, but depending on the writing topic I’m focusing on, that might not be possible. I will flag any spoilers before I say them, though, so if you think you might want to read this book and don’t want to be spoiled, you can skip over them. I did manage to stay spoiler-free on this post, so no worries here.

So without further ado, let’s talk about a runaway princess.

Last year, I read The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, and since I just reread it, I decided the time was ripe to talk about it. This is the first book in The Remnant Chronicles trilogy. I’m planning to discuss all three books over the next few weeks, because I have so much to say.

I talked about The Kiss of Deception a little bit in my October reading roundup last year, so apologies if this post is a little redundant with that, but I want to go into a lot more detail here.

Lia is the only princess of the kingdom of Morraghan. This means she’s the first daughter and should be blessed with the Gift, a supernatural awareness of events taking place in the present and near future. But Lia doesn’t have this magic, so she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham on another kingdom when they arrange her marriage to the prince based on the fact that she has the gift. Unwilling to be a pawn in the sham, and definitely unwilling to marry a stranger she is pretty sure is at least twice her age, Lia runs away. She and her attendant and friend, Pauline, settle in a distant village and get jobs at an inn. Then two strange young men come to stay at the inn, and Lia finds herself falling for both of them, unaware that one is the prince she left at the altar and the other is an assassin sent from the barbarian kingdom of Venda to kill her. And both the prince and the assassin are falling for her too.

Before you roll your eyes—and if I could have rolled my eyes I would have when I first started reading—this book is so much more than a runaway princess and a silly love triangle. I’m so glad I stuck with it, because by the end of the book I was hooked into this world and these characters. Yes, the first half of this book is a bit rough, mostly because Lia is pretty insufferable, and there’s not much plot beyond the kind of cringy love triangle, but face it, Lia is a runaway princess, and when everything goes sideways about halfway through the book, she gets so much better. I also really loved the world building in this book. The magic system feels fully fleshed out, even if we only see a little of it in this book. What we see of the political situation is also really well-done and intricate. Since I’ve now I read the book twice and finished the series once, I can say that it feels like Mary Pearson knew where she was going from the beginning.

Another thing that I really liked is that Mary Pearson pulled off multiple points of view—Lia’s, the prince’s, and the assassin’s—without frustrating me. So many times, when we have the villain’s point of view in a book, I get frustrated because knowing what the bad guy is up to takes out some of the tension. My prime example of this is Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series, especially the second book (I love it but it bugs me). Especially in cases where the main character is trying to figure out what the bad guy is up to, if we have the bad guy’s point of view and know what they’re up to, it takes the urgency out of the protagonist’s journey, or worse, makes the protagonist look stupid.

But it actually works to have the assassin’s point of view in this book. Part of the reason it works is that poor naive Lia is in no way suspicious of these two guys, so there’s still a lot of tension because we the readers know that she’s walking straight into a lot of trouble. But Pearson also keeps the mystery going for the reader too. We know the two guys are named Kaden and Rafe. We get chapters that are from their points of view, with chapter headings that tell us their names. But we don’t really get much of their motivations in these chapters. And Pearson is careful to phrase their thoughts so that they’re specific enough to not be frustrating but vague enough still that they could apply to either the assassin, or the prince. We also get chapters from the point of view of The Prince and The Assassin, where we get their motivations but no indication of who is who. So for the first half of the book, we know that Lia is walking straight into trouble probably, but we honestly don’t know whether she prefers the prince or the assassin, and we don’t know who is the prince and who is the assassin.

It was a ton of fun trying to fit all the pieces together and figure out who was who. And then about halfway through the book, the assassin reveals himself and kidnaps Lia, and the prince goes after her, and everything turns upside down.

I don’t want to say more because I’m doing my best to keep this spoiler-free, but the description of this book as a runaway princess gets involved in a love triangle with the prince she was supposed to marry and the assassin who is sent to kill her just doesn’t do this book justice. That’s the first half of the book, yes, but the second half, when Lia is a prisoner trying to escape, discovering her own power and magic and learning more about her world and how she came to be in this situation, is just so great, and in my opinion what this book is really about.

But my favorite part of the book is that it took me by surprise. The first time I read this book, I was positive I knew who was the prince and who was the assassin. And I was wrong.

In case you haven’t noticed, I read a lot. This was my ninety-first book of 2020. I also read a lot of YA fantasy. I’m really familiar with the tropes, and lately I’ve found myself able to predict a lot of what’s going to happen in books. Maybe not specifically, but very few things actually surprise me in books these days. But Mary Pearson totally surprised me, and I love it.

I’m not saying that the reveal of who was the assassin and who was the prince was unfounded. It wasn’t. When I looked back the first time I read this book, and as I was reading it for the second time, it makes total sense. So I really admire Pearson’s ability to both set up the true reveal so that it feels consistent with what’s happened so far and to steer her readers so effectively in the wrong direction. She weaves the details into the story so well it’s really incredible.

I want to note that I listened to the audiobook both times I read this, and it has different narrators for each of the point of view characters. The second time through this, I felt kind of stupid because the narrators for the prince and the assassin are the same for the corresponding named character, and that’s normally something I would pick up on. But I was so focused on picking apart the details that I got mixed up on the narrators and was actually convinced they swapped. I’m curious if there’s different fonts or something for each point of view in the print book, but I would also note that there are no different fonts in Braille, so if I had been reading in Braille I still would have been led down the wrong path.

When I was in college, I worked for the Kenyon Review as a first reader for submissions. One of the things the editors told us to look for when evaluating submissions was “surprise and delight.” I haven’t thought about that phrase in a long time, partly because I found that what surprised and delighted me typically wasn’t what surprised and delighted the KR editors—obviously surprise and delight is a pretty subjective metric. But as a reader, surprise and delight is still a really important factor in how I feel about books. If I find the book is predictable, then I just don’t like it as much. If I’m surprised by a book, and if that surprise is done well, that adds a lot to my enjoyment of the book. I was surprised and delighted by The Kiss of Deception, both because it managed to trick me and because it subverted a lot of typical tropes when it did so.

So while surprise and delight is definitely subjectile reader to reader, it also seems like something that us writers should shoot for. I’ve been thinking about ways to do this effectively since I first read The Kiss of Deception. It’s done so well in this book, and it’s also something that I was working on in my MG fantasy project around the same time I first read it.

So how can you surprise a reader?

This will depend on the kind of surprise you’re writing. If the surprise is crucial to the plot or part of the climax of the book, how you set that up will be more important than a surprise in a subplot, or even a surprise early on or midway through the book that changes the character’s direction. Obviously, when I say less important, that isn’t to say it isn’t important at all, and if you’re writing a surprise or a twist, you should definitely work to set it up well.

When it comes to a good surprise or twist, that the setup is key. You want to lay enough groundwork so that when the twist comes, the reader can feel like the twist makes sense and is earned in the story. At the same time, you want to slip those clues in among other details or events, because you want the reader to be, well, surprised. But the other things you use to distract from the important clues should also be important to the story, because red herrings that go nowhere feel like pointless distractors, and that’s no fun for anyone.

In the context of The Kiss of Deception, I think the way Mary Pearson set it up, with the chapters from Kaden and Rafe and The Prince and The Assassin, and separating the characters from their motivations the way she does, works really well for this book. We get the separate motivations of the prince and the assassin, but when we know we hearing from Kaden or Rafe, we are only given details of their motivations and opinions of Lia that could apply to both the assassin or the prince. At the same time, Kaden and Rafe are distinctive, well-fleshed out characters, so the intentional vagueness isn’t as frustrating as it might otherwise be.

Another point of interest in this setup is that it is very obvious it is a setup. By using chapter headings both with the characters’ names and with their titles, so to speak, Mary Pearson is all but inviting us to try to figure out who is who before it’s revealed. It would be a very different book if we had no idea that Kaden and Rafe were either prince or assassin. If we saw them from Lia’s point of view, as a trader and a farmhand come to stay at the inn where she’s working, the reveal that one is an assassin and one is a prince would come out of nowhere and feel unearned.

I would also like to point out that while this surprise is really important for this first book in the trilogy and is the surprise that got me thinking about surprises in the first place, it isn’t the only surprise in the book, and it isn’t actually that important to the series at large. Lia’s discoveries about her gift and what part she might have to play in the future of Venda are much more important to the series as a whole, yet the groundwork is laid just as thoroughly, from snippets of Lia’s facility with languages and the book she stole from the scholar, to the quotes at the end of some chapters, and so on. The clues are all there, but they are disguised as pieces of information to help build Lia’s character or to describe the world, and these little bits of information are overshadowed by the mystery of Rafe and Kaden for the reader, until hey, remember all this stuff we’ve been talking about all along, because it’s really important, have another twist. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t give more details than that.

There are a lot of ways you could pull off a compelling, convincing, and delightful surprise. The Kiss of Deception demonstrates at least two approaches. Like so many other things in writing, how you do it depends on the story you’re telling. The most concrete advice I can give here is to read a lot. Look at how authors you admire pull off twists. And just as important, look at books that don’t pull off twists effectively.

This probably should go without saying, but if you have a twist in your book, don’t just throw your story out into the world without getting some objective feedback from your trustee beta readers. Chances are, you’re way too close to your work to be able to tell if you’ve set up your twist effectively, and you have no way of knowing if it’s obvious to the readers or not. In my own work, I swung wildly back and forth between readers seeing the twist the first time certain character is introduced to readers not seeing it coming, not understanding it, and feeling it came out of nowhere before I found a balance that seems to work.

This is a topic I’m really interested in, and I’m pretty sure I’ve only scratched the surface here. If you have thoughts on how to successfully write twists and surprises into your work, I’d love to talk about them in the comments. I’d also love to know if you’ve read The Kiss of Deception and its sequels, because so far I haven’t found anyone else who’s read these books, and I am dying to talk to someone about them. Honestly, they may be the latest series that I go around yelling at people to read. I’ll be back soon with my whole reading roundup for October and then to talk about the next two books, along with talking about cliffhangers and strong female characters. But in the meantime, seriously, these books are great. You should read them. Go read them now!

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Jameyanne’s Favorite Books of 2020:

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