book recommendations and reviews – Page 2

Reading, Writing, and Swimming in July

In my last blog post, I mentioned that I wanted to try something new, more of a general life update than just a roundup of all the books I read that month. The monthly reading roundup posts were starting to feel tedious to me, and I was struggling to have energy to post other things. My hope is these posts will be more fun for me, and you, going forward and that they will give me more energy to write other things for this blog. So let’s give it a shot!

July was a pretty good month. Yes it was a million degrees in D.C. all the time, but I was able to wait to take walks with Neutron at least until the sun went down. It wasn’t much cooler then, but at least we weren’t being baked alive. I did a lot of outdoor barre classes, which was fun, and at the end of the month, the studio opened up for indoor classes, mask optional if you’re vaccinated (and they check, which makes me very happy). I also finished rewatching all of the Tangled series in Italian, and I’ve so far really been enjoying the adaptation for The Mysterious Benedict Society.

In mid-July, my friends and I went up to New Jersey for a long weekend. It was meant to be a writing retreat, and some of us got writing done, but mostly it was hours of playing a travesty of volleyball, with a beach ball, in the pool. We christened our game “sport,” because we writerly types are so creative. It was a great weekend all around. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in a really long time, and I went back to D.C. feeling much less stressed about the state of the world.

In other good news, one of my friends at this retreat had a cold (she tested negative for Covid, otherwise she wouldn’t have come), and I did not get sick. This was the first time I can definitively say I was exposed to germs since I found out I had lime disease at the start of the pandemic. Staying at home for a year and a half and wearing a mask whenever I go out has meant I haven’t been sick in all that time, which has been wonderful and such a welcome change from the constant illness I was dealing with all through my last year of law school, studying for the bar, and my first few months in D.C., but I had no idea if my lime had become chronic or if the antibiotics had worked. So this weekend I was away with my friends, I knew for sure I had been exposed to a cold, and I did not get sick. I am absolutely delighted, because I’m pretty sure this means the antibiotics worked and I don’t have chronic lime. I feel really lucky and so relieved.

I read fourteen books in July, bringing my total for the year up to 84 books. I finished the Princess Diaries series and for the most part really enjoyed the ending (though I wish we got to actually see the royal wedding). I also finished the Greystone Secrets trilogy by Margaret Peterson Haddix. I read the first two books last year and loved them, and I reread them this month before reading the third book. The third book, The Messengers, was a lot of fun, but honestly things got weird and it didn’t feel like it pulled the mysteries together for me. This month, I also discovered the Extraordinaries series by T. J. Klune and Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. The Extraordinaries was a lot of fun, I absolutely adore the voice and the characters, and I can’t wait to find out what happens in the third book. But a major caveat for me is I’m really not sure how the subplot with Nick’s father, who is a cop, and the issue of police brutality, is handled in these books. It felt forced and shallow to me, and this made me uncomfortable. I’m hoping it comes to something in the third book. Illuminae was cool because it started out as a typical YA romance type thing, except in space, and then about a third of the way through you realize that is not what this book is at all, and it was great. But then at about the two thirds mark, the book did something that made me think there were only two possible endings, and I didn’t like either of them, so I stopped caring. The ending is something totally different and it’s really cool and I can’t wait for the sequel, but that last bit where I didn’t care really put a damper on how I feel about the book.

My favorite book of July was Amari and the Night Brothers by B. B. Alston. This book was absolutely amazing! It’s a middle grade book about a young black girl, Amari, who joins the bureau of supernatural affairs to try to find her missing older brother. She confronts bullies, entrance trials, and evil magicians and she is awesome! She also has an illegal talent making her life a whole lot harder. This book is heartwarming and beautiful and so so powerful, and I cannot wait for the sequel! In the meantime, you should all go read it right now!

Unfortunately, I had a least favorite book of July as well, Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I read this because it was on the Hugo ballot, and I did not like it at all. I normally try to find something good in every book I read, even if it turns out that it wasn’t the right story for me, but I just couldn’t here. Not only were there so many problems with the writing and the story, but I found the ablest tropes it employed to be incredibly harmful and just all around gross. I have so much more to say on this book, and it has inspired me to work on another post on how to write blind characters without perpetuating harmful stereotypes, which I will hopefully have ready for you all next week, so stay tuned.

In happier news, I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s 2020 writing lectures at BYU on YouTube and binged them all in a week. A lot of the lessons were things I already knew because I’ve been writing a long time myself, but I definitely picked up some useful nuggets and new ways of looking at things that I think will improve my writing. I have since been listening to all of the archives of the Writing Excuses podcast too and really enjoying it. I’m very late to the party on this podcast, obviously, but in case you’re like me and haven’t listened to Writing Excuses before, I recommend it. Each episode is only fifteen minutes long, so it’s very digestible and I’ve learned a lot.

I’ve also been super productive with my writing this month. I finished a draft of my fantasy mystery project, the memory wiping Academy novel I’ve mentioned on here before. My writing group has been reading the final chapter this week and they’re giving me feedback tomorrow. The book needs a lot of work still, but I think this draft is definitely the closest I’ve been to the story I’m trying to tell.

I’ve also been hard at work on some final revisions to the middle grade space adventure novel. I’ve been trying to add more emotion and voice for each of my point of view characters. At first it was kind of a counterintuitive revision for me, because I tend to take “show don’t tell” to an extreme when it comes to character reactions and feelings, but this isn’t the best approach for middle grade, and once I got into it and adjusted my mindset, it’s actually been a really fun revision.

Finally, four years ago when I was at Seeing Eye, I had a free course on writing flash fiction, and I got about halfway through it before training with Neutron became too consuming for me to consider. I had the beginnings of seven connected flash fiction pieces set in my Phoenix Song universe, and I had middles for most of them, but I never finished, and whenever I’ve sat down to work on the project over the years something hasn’t felt right about it. This month, I had the idea to put the flash pieces together into one short story, and it worked beautifully, though my ending may still need some work. It made me really happy to finish this story and have another Phoenix story completed. Hopefully I’ll be able to share it with you soon.

When I write it all out like that, July was quite a month! I hope you’ve all been keeping safe and having fun. What have you all been up to this summer?

June Reading Roundup

Happy July everyone. Summer has really hit, and we’re steaming away here in D.C. I was still really worried about what was going on with Neutron for the first half of the month, but then Seeing Eye came to work with me and we decided that at least right now we’re totally safe, which was a huge relief. Otherwise, it was a pretty chill month, except for the temperature of course. My writing group had a few in person gatherings, but we’re still doing our regular meetings remotely for the time being because the metro has some summer construction we’re trying to avoid.

In addition to reading, I finally finished watching the Tangled TV show on Disney Plus, and I just want to give it a shout-out because it’s adorable. Tangled is probably my favorite Disney movie, and the show was a great sequel. Also the music is very catchy. I also discovered in June that I can watch so many things on Disney Plus in Italian, and since I’ve been feeling like my Italian is rusty, I started rewatching the Tangled show in Italian. It was hard at first but ultimately really fun. Half my thoughts are in Italian now, which is just the way I like it.

Collage of the seven books I read in June: A Little Princess, The Bone Shard Daughter, The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Princess Mia, Throne of Jade, and The City We Became I read seven books in June, the same I read in May. It was almost all sci fi and fantasy books and then one classic. The classic was a standalone, I continued two series I’m in the middle of, started two other series, and one of the books I’m not sure if it’s meant to stand alone or be the start of the series. My writing group is going to Worldcon this year, since it’s in D.C., so I also started working my way through the books that have been nominated for Hugo Awards. I’ve already read some of them—Raybearer, Legendborn, and the Murderbot series at least. Harrow the Ninth is nominated for a Hugo, and since I haven’t read the first book in the series, Gideon the Ninth, I decided I should read that first. Honestly, I couldn’t get through it. I got about a third of the way through and still had no idea what was going on, and I ended up putting it down. As you know, I don’t put books down lightly. I think I can name all the books I’ve put down ever. There might only be three. A lot of my writing group is really insisting that I give Gideon another try, and maybe I will, but we’ll see.

I also want to throw it out there that I reread all the Nevermoor books again (this might be the fourth time this year), but this time I read them in Braille. It was a really interesting experience to see things like punctuation and spelling sentence structure that I didn’t necessarily notice when listening to the audiobooks. I am also super excited that we now appear to have a title and a synopsis for the fourth book, even though it won’t be coming out until the end of 2022. I realize I have gotten myself stuck in a loop of Nevermoor, but there are far worse loops to get stuck in, and it makes me happy, so I don’t care.

But now let’s chat about the new books that I finished in June.

First, I read A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This is set in England in the early 1900s, I think. Sarah is sent to boarding school, and when her beloved father dies leaving her nothing, the headmistress of the boarding school makes her become a servant and live in the attic and everything is awful. Frances Hodgson Burnett also wrote The Secret Garden, which I didn’t realize until after I finished this book, but there were several times throughout this book when I kept thinking “this reminds me of The Secret Garden.” In general, I enjoyed this book, hisoough it had that slower, very descriptive quality of older books that I’m not overly fond of. It also had an omniscient narration that told us some things that undercut the tension of the ending. But this was a nice little book, and if you haven’t read it, you might enjoy it.

Next, I read The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart. This is the first book in the Drowning Empire series, and I think the next book is coming out later this year. The Bone Shard Daughter follows a whole bunch of characters living on this empire of floating islands. We have the emperor’s daughter who has lost most of her memories due to an illness and is trying to learn her father’s magic. There is the thief who is searching for his wife who was kidnapped years ago and is now getting roped into saving children from the yearly festivals that give magic to the emperor. There’s the daughter of the governor of one island whose girlfriend is involved in the rebellion. And there are people trapped in a mental fog working on a mysterious island. There is also a very creepy magic system that we discover over the course of the book. My one and only complaint, and it’s a very minor complaint, is that I felt like the emperor’s daughter was supposed to be the main character, especially because of the title, and she was actually the only character I had a hard time being engaged with for a while. But her story did hook me, and once it did, and everything started coming together, it was so great. I particularly loved how all these pieces and layers came together and this book just built and built and built to this great climax and finale. I can’t wait for the sequel.

Next, I read the first two books in Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society series: The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey. The first book is about a group of unusual and talented children who are recruited to infiltrate a boarding school and foil the headmaster’s evil plan. And the second book sees the kids off on new and exciting adventures. These books were a ton of fun. I really enjoyed them, and I’m looking forward to getting the next one out of the library. I’m also currently watching the show that’s coming out on Disney and that’s been a lot of fun.

After that, I read the ninth Princess Diaries book, Princess Mia by Meg Cabot. I believe last month I complained that Mia hadn’t grown as a character much throughout the series so far, and that she was an absolute idiot in the last book. But this book saw Mia really having to deal with the consequences of her actions grow as a character and make some complicated decisions and I love it. It was certainly darker and more serious than the earlier books in the series, but at this point that’s what I needed.

Next, I read Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik, the second book in the Temeraire series. The Chinese want Temeraire back, because they believe only the emperial line can have celestial dragons. Temeraire refuses to be parted from Lawrence, so together they travel to China and political games begin to try and keep Temeraire with Lawrence (the British side) and to keep him in China (the Chinese side). It’s more complicated than that but there you go. I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the first book. The pacing just felt very weird to me. Most of it was very slow, and then the last third or so was a roller coaster of action and political moves and countermoves and it really finished with a bang. That being said, I did enjoy it a lot, particularly the development of the bond between Lawrence and Temeraire, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the third book.

As I mentioned above, I’ve started working my way through the books nominated for Hugo awards this year. In June, I read The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. This was actually my first ever Jemisin book, and I will definitely be checking out more of her work. Recommendations welcome. The City We Became is about how at a certain point cities become actually alive, are born into sentient, human being-type avatars of themselves, but the birth of New York goes wrong, and a bunch of very different people become the avatars for each of the burrows of New York and have to find each other and fight off the evil force that is trying to prevent the birth of New York. If the birth of New York fails, well pretty much New York is gone and a whole lot of stuff around it. What I really liked about this book was how it took a really weird concept and made it really accessible. I also loved the variety of characters we were dealing with. I was not totally thrilled about the ending. This is the book that I’m unclear if it’s meant to have a sequel or not. It’s one of those endings that if there’s more to come, I am totally fine with it. If this is it, it just wasn’t completely satisfying to me.

And that’s it for June. I’ve realized over the past few weeks that unfortunately I’m not enjoying writing these posts as much as I used to. I love talking about books, but these monthly posts about everything I’ve read are starting to feel kind of tedious for me. So starting next month, I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of talking about everything I’ve read each month, I’m going to give you more of a general update on what I’ve been up to with life and writing and then talk briefly about my absolute favorite books of the month. I’m hoping this will make the posts more exciting for me to write and give me some more energy and time to maybe put some other posts up here more frequently. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I hope you’re enjoying your summers and staying safe.

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.

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Jameyanne’s Favorite Books of 2020:

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