Category: book recommendations and reviews

January Reading Roundup

January felt like a very, very long month this year. This is the first year that I’m working full time and didn’t have a long break from mid-December through mid-January, which was definitely part of the feeling that January lasted forever. But a lot happened in January too. I started writing every morning before work, a friend from college came to visit for the weekend, I made a ton of progress on my revisions, and then I got the flu and a post-flu ear/sinus issue that I’m still dealing with. It was a lot.

Collage of the 14 books I read in January: Savvy, Scumble, Switch, The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages, The Whispering Trees, Well of Witches, First Test, Page, Squire, Lady Knight, Girl in the Blue Coat, and A Pocket Full of MurderI also read 14 books in January, which gets me well on my way toward my 100 book goal for 2020. I read three complete series this month, continued with a series that I was in the middle of, started a new series, and read one stand-alone. I only read half a book in Braille and switched to audio when I got the flu. And all of the books I read but one were fantasy, mostly middle grade fantasy but one adult fantasy series. The non-fantasy book I read this month was historical fiction. I really liked almost all the books I read too, so on the whole this was a really good reading month.

First, I blazed through the Savvy trilogy by Ingrid Law. I read the first two books, Savvy and Scumble, on New Years Day, and the third book, Switch, the day after. These books take place in contemporary midwest and west America and follow a sprawling family with magical powers. The first book follows Mibs, who gets her magical powers—called a Savvy—on her thirteenth birthday like the rest of her siblings, and sets off with two of her brothers and some new friends to try to get to the hospital where her father is in a coma after a car accident. It’s a crazy adventure and a ton of fun. The second book follows Mibs’s cousin as he tries to get his savvy of dismantling anything metal under control. And the third book follows Mibs’s younger sister after everyone in the family’s powers suddenly switch and they’re stuck with new powers just as they’re trying to help their very unmagical grandmother move to come live with them. These three books are more like related companion novels than a series with a single arc, but they are just all so much fun and basically everything I want out of a middle grade fantasy adventure book. I definitely recommend all three.

Next, I read the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. I read the first book in this series, The Final Empire, last year, and I loved it to pieces. I loved it so much that I was afraid to pick up the second book, because I didn’t know where the story was going from here and didn’t want to be disappointed. After reading Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series last year though, I decided I had enough faith in his plotting ability to brave the rest of the series. And… I don’t know. The Final Empire is about a girl who discovers she is a mistborn, someone with the ability to unlock the powers of various metals. She’s taken on by a thieving crew working to overthrow the evil dictator known as the Lord Ruler. I have a full review of The Final Empire over here, so you can read all about how much I adored this book. The thing is, this plot is very wrapped up by the end of the first book, and so the second book is a very different kind of story. So is the third book. And while the plots of the second and third books definitely follow the first book logically, and both The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages are definitely good books, they don’t feel like a unified story to me. Also, a lot of what I loved about The Final Empire wasn’t present in the sequels. Finally, I know I was sick when I finished The Hero of Ages, but I feel like the ending should have had me balling my eyes out, and I just felt nothing. I know a lot of people really love The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages, and I don’t think they’re bad books by any means. They just weren’t what I wanted them to be, and I ended up kind of disappointed. So while I still absolutely love The Final Empire and will continue to recommend it, I’m not sure I would recommend the rest of the series. On the other hand yes I am definitely planning to go on and read the second Mistborn trilogy which takes place a few hundred years after the events of The Hero of Ages.

While I was reading Mistborn, I also read the second and third Thickety books, The Whispering Trees and Well of Witches by J. A. White. I read the first Thickety book, A Path Begins, in December and loved it. The Whispering Trees picks up where A Path Begins left off, with Kara and Taff running for their lives through the Thickety. In this book, they come face-to-face with the forest demon himself, and things get really scary. I won’t say much about the third book because it would spoil the second, but Kara and Taff go on yet another dark and twisty journey through the well of witches, where the witches go after using the last spell, to try to save their father. I absolutely love how dark and twisted this series is but also how much fun and hope there is. So far this is a really excellent middle grade series. I started the fourth book this evening, and I am already hooked.

Next, I continued my reread of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books with her Protector of the Small series. I read First Test, Page, Squire, and Lady Knight in January. Of the Tamora Pierce I’ve read so far on this reread, these are definitely my favorite. The king decreed that girls could try for their knighthood, and Kel is the first girl to openly train for her shield in Tortall since Alanna the Lioness. The series follows Kel through her training as a page and squire and her first year as a knight as she faces down bullies, immortals, and a system that generally doesn’t want her there. Kel is so different from Alanna, and she faces different struggles because she is openly training to be a knight as a girl. She is very much a heroine it’s easy to get behind and support, and on the whole these books are really well put together and hold up well on reread.

This month I also read Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse. This is a World War II historical fiction book set in Amsterdam. I admit I don’t know much about the war in the Netherlands, so I was very interested in this book. Hanneke works as an undertaker’s secretary and black market delivery girl to support her family. She’s expert at avoiding the Nazis and finding the impossible, but since her boyfriend’s death fighting the Nazis, she has put a premium on her own self-preservation. When one of her black market customers asks her to help find a Jewish girl who ran away from her hiding spot in her house, Hanneke gets pulled into the resistance movement in the city and discovers the true horrors of the war. This was a pretty good book. I liked that it stuck to a narrow focus on these characters and events and didn’t try to include the entire war. I also felt like Hanneke had a really relatable journey, and her emotions and desires were so well-done. I will say that the pacing felt a bit off—the climax came too soon and there was too much denouement—but on the whole I enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

Finally, I finished off January with the first Uncommon Magic book, A Pocket Full of Murder by R. J. Anderson. This is the book that I started reading in Braille and switched to audio when I got the flu. This is a middle grade fantasy set in a kind of steampunk-style world where turn-of-the-century technology is powered by magic. Only the wealthy can afford magic, and the city is teetering on the brink of a workers’ revolution. Twelve-year-old Isaveth’s family is very poor. Her mother has recently died, and her father is out of work, forcing Isaveth’s older sister to drop out of school and get a job at a sewing factory. When Isaveth’s father is arrested for murder of the governor of the university committed using magic only a builder could get their hands on, Isaveth joins forces with a street boy named Quiz to prove her father’s innocence and find the true murderer. But Quiz may not be who he says he is, and Isaveth’s father is keeping secrets too. This was a really good book. I loved how rich the world was and how complicated the problems that Isaveth and Quiz face. I picked this up because I thought it would be a good comp title for my own middle grade fantasy project, and I wasn’t disappointed. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the sequel this month.

And that’s it for January. If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to know what you think of them.

Favorite Books of 2019

Collage of the covers of my favorite books of 2019I set out to read 100 books in 2019. I read 109. And the time has come once again for me to tell you about my absolute favorite books of this year.

I feel like my favorites list is shorter than usual. This is partly because I did a lot of rereading this year, over the summer in particular because of the bar exam. This is also because I read a few books that were just absolute standouts of amazingness this year, and everything else was compared to them. Though I don’t usually single out my top favorites from the books I’ve read each year, for 2019 I actually have clear favorites: Beartown by Fredrik Backman, which I actually read twice in 2019; the five Brandon Sanderson books I read this year; and the Nevermoor series by Jessica Townsend. This isn’t to say that I didn’t really like the other books on this list. They wouldn’t be on this list if I didn’t. But this year I discovered Fredrik Backman and Brandon Sanderson and Nevermoor and they are just amazing! I’ll stop now or I’ll be raving all night.

The other interesting thing to me is the diversity of genre on this list. There are three nonfiction books on this list, quite a few series but also a bunch of standalones, some fantasy and contemporary, even a horror book, and the books cover all age categories, from Charlotte’s Web up through middle grade, young adult, and adult. I’m kind of proud of myself for reading so many different books in 2019.

I’m not including books that I reread and still loved in 2019 on this list, because they’re already on my book recs page. I’m also not including series that I’m in the middle of and still kind of ambivalent on, which is to say I’m still not including the Expanse on this list. The Expanse is actually leaning toward book recs page material, but of the five books I’ve read I really liked three, was sort of meh about one, and really disliked one, so I’m having a hard time recommending the whole series at this moment. But that might change next year. Finally, since I’ve talked about most of these books in detail in other places, I’m just going to list them here, occasionally with some explanatory notes. If you’re curious for more details, you can check out all my posts in my book recommendations and reviews category.

Speaking of my book recs page, it’s now all up-to-date with my 2019 favorites included. Go check it out.

Now that I’ve explained everything, let’s get down to it.

Jameyanne’s Favorite books of 2019, in no particular order

  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
  • The Ocean At the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
  • Wren’s War and Wren Journeymage by Sherwood Smith (I read the first two books in the series in 2018)
  • Beartown by Fredrik Backman (the sequel is also good, but not as good as Beartown, and I recommend you just read the first book at this point)
  • The Magic Thief series by Sarah Prineas (I read the first two books in 2018 but wanted to finish the series before deciding if it would be a favorite or not)
  • The Street by Ann Petry
  • The Grown-up by Gillian Flynn
  • Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterley
  • Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
  • James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
  • Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy
  • A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell
  • Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian (I’ve only read the first one so far but it was great, and I’m looking forward to diving into the second book, which I own, and the third, which comes out in February)
  • The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  • The Stormlight Archives series by Brandon Sanderson (the series is not complete yet, but I’ve read everything that’s been published so far: the first three books and the novella Edgedancer)
  • The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (this is the first in the Mistborn books and I loved it so much I was afraid to pick up the second book so I can’t speak to the rest of the series yet; I’ll let you know at the end of January how that turns out.)
  • The Winner’s Trilogy by Marie Rutkoski
  • Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
  • Night by Elie Wiesel (not a pleasant book to read, but very powerful, should be required reading)
  • The Remnant Chronicles by Mary E. Pearson
  • Cassidy Blake series by Victoria Schwab
  • Willow Run by Patricia Reilly Giff
  • The Furthermore duology by Taherea Mafi
  • Nevermoor series by Jessica Townsend (the third book comes out in August and I’m just dying to get my hands on it because I just love these books so much!)
  • A Path Begins by J. A. White (I only read the first book in this series by the end of 2019, but really enjoyed it and I’m working on the rest of the series now)
  • Greetings from Witness Protection by Jake Burt
  • Baker’s Magic by Diane Zahler

And that’s it for 2019. Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? And what are your favorite reads of 2019?

December Reading Roundup

Collage of the 19 books I read in DecemberDecember was a great reading month. I read a whopping 19 books. And I really loved so many of them.

I started several new series, continued with some series I’ve been reading all year, and finished a few series. I also read several stand-alone books. I hit a bunch of genres and age categories too this month: fantasy, sci fi, historical fiction, contemporary fiction, and nonfiction, as well as middle grade, young adult, and adult books.

So let’s dive right into it.

First, I read the Furthermore duology by Taherea Mafi, Furthermore and Whichwood. I am once again on the hunt for comp titles for my middle grade fantasy book, which is to say books that are similar enough to mine that I can reference to publishers. So I read a lot of middle grade books this month, including these too. While they are definitely not good comp titles for mine, I really enjoyed them. Alice lives in a world where magic thrives, and the more colorful you are, the more magic you have. But Alice has no color at all, and so everyone thinks she has no magic. Worse, Alice’s father has vanished, and life at home has become unbearable to Alice. Then a boy named Oliver invites Alice on an adventure to find her father in another world called Furthermore. Furthermore, turns out to be incredibly tricky and dangerous at every turn, and Oliver also isn’t being totally honest with Alice. These books reminded me a little of Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland books, with these vivid and unique worlds and a narrator with a personality. They were really fun, but also pretty dark at points. And I definitely recommend these books.

I started 2019 reading the first three books of Rick Riordan’s Trials of Apollo series, which follows his Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus series. The fourth book, The Tyrant’s Tomb, came out this fall, and I finally got my hands on a copy and read it in December. After the tumultuous end to the last book, Apollo and Meg journey to Camp Jupiter, only to discover that the emperors are planning to attack. Adventures ensue to save Camp Jupiter. Things that I liked about this book: is Apollo finally getting some character development? Frank and Hazel. So much Frank and Hazel. The climactic battle, which I obviously can’t tell you about because spoilers. Things I didn’t like about this book so much: honestly these books are all starting to feel the same. I know I read a lot of books in December, but I actually had to look up a plot summary for this one because I was getting it mixed up with the first three. These books are like fun popcorn, but that’s about it, which is unfortunately not how I felt about Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus series.

Throughout December, I continued my reread of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books with her Immortals series. I read all four Immortals books this month, Wild Magic, Wolf Speaker, Emperor Mage, and The Realms of the Gods. These books held up a lot better on this reread than the Lioness books did. There’s a relationship in the fourth book that I seriously disapprove of, but I have always disapproved of it so that isn’t a heart shattering discovery. But on the whole I love journeying with Daine as she discovers her magic and makes friends and finds a new home and has such great adventures. Also these books have such awesome human and animal friendships and I love them.

Next, I read One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. This was another book I picked up in my search for comp titles—it wasn’t a good comp title either—and I ended up with such mixed feelings about this book. After her stepfather beats her and her mother up, Carly ends up in foster care. With her new foster family, the Murphys, Carly learns what it’s like to have a real family in a normal home. She makes friends, deals with bullies, and generally is happier than she’s ever been. Then her mother starts recovering in the hospital and wants to reconnect. This book made me cry. A lot. And okay it doesn’t take much to make that happen. But once I got over my feelings, I spotted the problems, and once I spotted the problems, I couldn’t unspot them. I love how Carly’s feelings are depicted in this book. It feels really authentic, and it’s really well-done. But even though my knowledge of the foster care system is limited, I’m pretty sure there are significant problems with how it’s portrayed. Carly would probably have a therapist to help her through all this, and she would also have an attorney to represent her interests in any court proceedings. At thirteen, Carly would be old enough that her views and desires would be taken into consideration in any proceedings too. And once we find out more about the situation that sent Carly to foster care, no way would her mother be able to reconnect with her so easily. And the ending. Ugh the ending. That’s just not how that would go. It’s possible that the author was trying to keep the book a little simpler for middle grade readers, but if the foster care system had been depicted more accurately, it actually would have given Carly more agency and made it a stronger book, in my opinion. All in all, I did enjoy this book. It gave me serious feelings, and that was the strongest part of the book. But the problems with how the foster care system worked in the book really dragged it down for me.

After that, I read A Path Begins by J. A. White. This is the first book in White’s Thickety series, and I’m in the middle of the second book now. When Kara was five years old, her mother was accused of witchcraft and executed by her village just hours after giving birth to Kara’s younger brother, Taff. Now Kara is twelve, and with her father still struggling with grief for her mother, she has virtually become her sickly brother’s guardian and the sole caretaker of her farm. She is shunned by the rest of her island village because of her mother. Then she discovers an old spellbook and begins to practice her mother’s forbidden magic and to learn about her mother and what really happened that night. The island is also dominated by this super freaky forest full of dangerous magical plants. The forest, called the Thickety, is constantly trying to encroach on  the village, and Kara also discovers there’s an evil forest demon who’s after her in particular. This was an incredibly dark and creepy middle grade book, and I loved it. I particularly enjoyed watching Kara grapple with her new power and whether it means her mother was evil and now she’s evil too because her religion forbids witchcraft. I loved how all the characters in this book learned and grew and changed. I love how complex the plot is. And the climax and ending of this book were just so amazing. This was a great book and a great start to a series. I’m currently stuck   in middle of the second book because my library copy expired and I’m waiting to be able to borrow it again, but I can’t wait to get back to it.

This month I discovered the Nevermoor series by Jessica Townsend. I blazed through the first two books, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow and Wondersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow. I won’t be able to do this series justice with my description, but I’m going to try. Morrigan Crow is a cursed child. She was born on the last day of the last age, and so she is destined to die on the eve of the next age. On top of that, she is blamed for every little thing that goes wrong in her town. But just hours before she is expected to die, a stranger named Jupiter North appears and whisks Morrigan away from her neglectful family, snatching her from the jaws of the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow which has come to kill her. Jupiter brings Morrigan to the wondrous world of Nevermoor and enters her as a candidate in the trials to join the Wondrous Society. Morrigan is soon falling in love with her new world and her new friends, but the only way she can stay in Nevermoor is to pass the trials and be admitted to the Wondrous Society. In order to do that, she needs a knack, and Morrigan is positive that she doesn’t have one. And if she’s sent home, the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow will get her. I won’t go into what happens in the second book because it is super spoilery, but everything about these books is spectacular. The world is just so vivid and unique, and the characters are fabulous. I just fell in love with  this series and now I’m raving about it to anyone who will listen. I’m also deeply disappointed because for some reason I thought the third book was coming out this week and then realized that it isn’t coming out until August and that’s just too long to wait guys! On the plus side it means if you haven’t read  the NEVERMOOR books, you have time to get caught up. So go  read them. Go read them now.

Next, I read The Institute by Stephen King. I’ve never been a huge Stephen King fan, but I picked this up because the summary sounded eerily similar to a project I’m working on. Luke is a child genius. One night, strangers break into his house, kill his parents, and kidnap Luke. Luke wakes up in a strange place called the Institute, where he learns that he has telekinetic powers, and the people running the Institute are experimenting on him and kids like him for some nefarious purpose. This book definitely kept me reading from start to finish, but on the whole it just wasn’t really my thing, and I can’t quite explain why. The portrayal of the kids was really weird, and I didn’t like the point of view shifts so much. And there were just some needlessly brutal details. I don’t know. If you’re a King fan, you’d probably really like this book. There were definitely parts that I loved. But on the whole it just wasn’t my kind of book.

Next, I read The Fog Diver by Joel Ross. This was another book that I picked up in search of a comp title, only to realize it’s sci fi so not the right genre for my purposes. That was a very misleading description when it came to genre. Anyway, I blew through this book in just a few days. Hazel, Swedish, Chess, & Bea are a crew of orphans operating an airship and salvaging things hidden in the fog on earth below. Chess, our protagonist, is the one who dives into the fog, which is poisonous to almost everyone else. The kids are trying to earn enough money to get the woman who took them in out of the slums and over to another city where her fog sickness can be cured. But of course everything goes wrong and they end up on a rollicking adventure through the air, chased by an evil lord and a bunch of pirates. This is a fun exciting book. I really liked how today’s culture is depicted as totally scrambled ‘up in the future, and I love the kids’ teamwork and friendship. On the other hand, the writing in this book was pretty simplistic, and that really got under my skin. There was a lot I liked in this book, but it just didn’t stand out to me the way so many other books have this year. I’m not sure I would recommend this book to friends, and I’m not sure I’m going to go on to read the sequel.

After that, I picked up Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This book is about a girl who is abandoned by her family and shunned by her whole town. She basically grows up on her own, with practically everybody in the town hating her. Then in the present we’re following a police investigation into the murder of a very well-liked young man, and the marsh girl is the main suspect. Sorry, I can’t remember anyone’s names and I’m too lazy to look this book up again. The writing in this book was beautiful. Delia Owens does a great job with vivid descriptions, and I felt like I was in the North Carolina marshes. I loved the parts about the girl growing up on her own. I didn’t like the murder investigation storyline as much. Like a lot of present-day storylines in books like this, it felt forced, like the author was trying to shoehorn in some more plot, and it just didn’t grip me the way the rest of the book did. I know a lot of people absolutely love this book, but I came down pretty neutral. On the whole, I didn’t love it, but I didn’t dislike it either.

I’ve been working my through The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey this year. I’ve been getting the books out of the library, and there have been really long wait times, but this month I was able to read the fifth book, Nemesis Games. After the fourth book, the ship needs some pretty major repairs, so while that’s going on, the crew splits up to do some personal stuff, and then terrorist attacks start happening and everything goes crazy and our four crewmembers have to fight their way back together again. I really loved the character work that went on in this book. We really dive into Naomi’s backstory, which is great. We also get a lot from Amos and Alex too. But the pacing of this book was weird. It just kept building and building and building and then it ended. Like I didn’t realize the climax had happened until the book ended. It was confusing, to say the least. This definitely wasn’t one of the strongest books in the series, but it also wasn’t as bad as the third book, so I’d say this is a medium book. It felt like a bridge between the fourth book and whatever comes next. And this series is definitely growing on me, so I’m still looking forward to getting the next book out of the library.

After that, I sped through Greetings from Witness Protection by Jake Burt. Finally, something that could maybe be a comp title for my middle grade fantasy book. If only it was fantasy. Nikki has bounced from one foster home to another ever since her father was arrested and her grandmother died. Then U.S. marshalls arrive with a proposal for her: that she join a family going into witness protection as part of their disguise and also as an extra layer of protection. This book was full of so many great things. It was tense, because the family is trying to hide and stay out of public notice, but it’s also full of feelings because Nikki is discovering family and friends and a normal life. And of course it all comes together in a fabulous climax, and it’s just so great, and if you’re interested in a tense and heartfelt contemporary middle grade book, this is for you.

Next, I read Baker’s Magic by Diane Zahler. Bee is an orphan in a crumbling kingdom, but when she steals from a baker and he catches her, he allows her to work for him to pay for what she stole. Soon, she’s his apprentice, and she’s discovering that she might just have a little bit of baking magic herself. Bee learns about her powers and makes new friends, including the kingdom’s lonely princess. And when the regent magician attempts to marry the princess off and seize the kingdom for himself and the princess asks for Bee’s help, Bee, her new friends, and her little bit of magic embark on an epic adventure. This book has it all: evil magicians, baking, baking magic, strong friendships, found family, and even some noble pirates. ‘I do feel that it kind of simplified and glossed over some of the darker, more complex issues that came up, but it was still a fast, fun read, and I definitely recommend.

And then I finished off my middle grade reading spree of the month with Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty. Serafina has lived hidden in the basement of the Biltmore estate all her life, and she has been told by her father to never go into the woods. Yet when a mysterious man in a black cloak starts wandering the estates grounds and children start disappearing, the woods might be exactly where Serafina needs to go to stop him. This was a fairly good book. I found the pacing to be kind of off. There were times when the book was really slow, and times when it was very tense and fast-paced. I also found the writing kind of telly in places. It was a fine book, but it didn’t stand out to me, and I’m not sure I would recommend it or go on to read the rest of the series.

Last month, a coworker took me to a book talk sponsored by the D.C. Bar Association. The book talk was the first part of the D.C. Bar’s celebration of the 100-year anniversary of ratification of the 19th Amendment—women’s right to vote. At the talk, Elaine Weiss was speaking about her book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. It was an excellent talk, and I got a copy of the book and started reading it right away. Unfortunately the book was not as good as the talk, in my opinion, and it took me two months to finish it. I found the subject-matter very interesting, but for something that was described as a nail-biting thriller, I was kind of bored. The book kept jumping around in time, and there were moments when the same event was discussed multiple times, and then other moments when something was referred to as if we knew what it was when the book had never talked about it before. At the same time, I think the book did a good job grappling with important issues like the problematic nature of the mainstream suffrage movement’s treatment of minorities and minority suffrage—basically they were willing to let that go in order to get white women the right to vote. But on the whole I was kind of disappointed that this was the last book I read in 2019. Definitely not finishing the year with a bang. On the other hand, I have heard that this book is being made into a TV series, and I’d definitely be interested in watching that.

And that’s it for December. While some of the books were a letdown, there were also so many books I read this month that I love unconditionally. Several of them are making it onto my 2019 favorites list, which I plan to post later this week. Have you read any of these? What did you think of them?

November Reading Roundup

I was intending to post my rambles about The Heart of Betrayal and the Beauty of Darkness before I posted this, but then I saw the date and wanted to get this post out there before it became even more ridiculous. Don’t worry, I going to talk about the rest of the Remnant Chronicles soon—but probably not until next week. But first I’m going to tell you all about the books I read in November.

November was a pretty good month. My parents came to visit and spent a week with me in D.C., I got my new writing group off the ground and after a few meetings we’re still going strong, I got sworn in as a real lawyer, and of course Thanksgiving. I managed to write every day in November too, so I’m feeling pretty proud of myself. I’ve been flipping back and forth between my middle grade space adventure project, which is what I’m showing to my new writing group, and my middle grade fantasy book, which I got more edits on from my agent. So a lot’s going on, but it’s all really good.

I can’t believe it’s already the end of December, and I’ve been living in D.C. and working at the FCC for almost four months now. I love December so much more than November, because the holiday season kicks off and everything is so much brighter and happier than November, which after daylight savings time is pretty much just dark and cold. December has Christmas lights and holiday parties and cookie swaps and carollers singing to you as you come out of the metro. See what I mean?

Collage of the covers of the 10 books I read in November 2019: The Heart of Betrayal, The Beauty of Darkness, Tunnel of Bones, Half a World Away, Willow Run, Alanna: The First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, Cibola Burn, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant.December also means it’s time to look back at the books I read in November. I read ten books in November. Four of them were rereads. A lot of them were pretty short books that I just blew through in a single day. It was sort of a weird month in terms of how fast I read, because when my parents were visiting and when I was home for  Thanksgiving, I didn’t get much reading done because I wanted to actually interact with people instead of just hang out in my room reading. But in the couple weeks in between my parents’ visit and Thanksgiving, I just churned through a ton of books. On the whole, I was really happy with what I read this month.

First, I finished The Remnant Chronicles series by Mary E. Pearson. In October, I read the first book, The Kiss of Deception, which I talked more about here. This month I read The Heart of Betrayal and the Beauty of Darkness. Since I just talked about the first book and I’m aiming to talk about the other two soon, I’m not going to go too deep into the plot summaries in this post. The second book follows Lia, Rafe, and Kaden as they navigate life in Venda. Lia is trying to escape with Rafe, but she’s also becoming more entangled with the people of Venda. Rafe is trying to help her escape, and Kaden, of course, is trying to both keep her alive and keep her in Venda. I won’t give you a plot summary of the third book at all because basically anything I say about the third book will spoil the second book. I absolutely loved this series. The first half of the first book was a bit cringy, but it grew on me so fast, and now it’s definitely a favorite. I just love Lia and how she goes from a runaway spoiled princess to a young woman who makes these really difficult choices. She becomes such a strong character, and I love it.

Last spring, I read City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab. The sequel, Tunnel of Bones, came out recently, and I read that next. After their adventure in Scotland, Cassidy and her family are off to Paris, where Cassidy manages to attract the attentions of a poltergheist and get a glimpse of what her ghost friend Jacob could become if he gets too strong. This book was delightfully scary, but also full of such great moments. I love Cass and Jacob’s friendship so much and I love how it develops over the course of this book. I can’t wait for the third book!

After that I read Willow Run by Patricia Reilly Giff. This is a companion novel to Lily’s Crossing, which I read last year. Twelve-year-old Meggie moves with her family to Michigan to work at the Wi’low Run airplane factory during World War II. We deal with prejudices against German Americans, a son and brother who is missing in action, and the fears of war. For being from the point of view of a twelve-year-old, it gets into some deep issues and it feels very real. Which just proves the point I make every chance I get that middle grade and young adult books can deal with really serious issues often in ways that are more poignant and powerful than adult books. This book made me cry quite a few times. Actually since it’s such a short book, I just cried the whole way. Not that it’s a downer of a book. I just have a lot of feelings sometimes.

Next, I read Half a World Away by Cynthia Kadohata. This is another book that I read in an evening. Twelve-year-old Jaden is adopted, and he considers himself an epic fail. Which is obviously why his parents are going to adopt another son. but when they arrive at the orphanage in Kazakhstan they learn that the baby they were going to adopt has been given to another family. They have to choose another baby on the spot. Jaden’s parents pick a baby, but at the same time  Jaden latches onto a different toddler. This book was another one with a lot of feelings attached to it, and I really really liked it. The ending felt a little rushed and convenient, and I felt like Jaden’s feelings that his parents were replacing him weren’t really resolved to my satisfaction, but I really did enjoy this book.

I was talking about Tamora Pierce’s books with a friend in the beginning of November, and we were being generally gleeful about the fact that her Tortall books are going to be made into a TV show. My friend asked if I’d discovered the Tortall Recall podcast, which is basically a forroup of friends who read the Tamora Pierce books as children rereading them now as adults and yelling about them. I decided to give it a try, and then decided to reread the books along with listening to the podcast. So I reread the entire Song of the Lioness series this month. As always, I really enjoyed revisiting these books about a girl who decides she wants to become a knight and disguises herself as a boy to do just that. Tamora Pierce’s books had a huge influence on me as a young writer, and even now I am banned from rereading her Circle of Magic series until I get my revisions done. But I admit that a lot of what keeps me loving the Song of the Lioness books is nostalgia. Now that I’m older, more widely read, and honestly more woke than I was even a few years ago, these books don’t stand up as well, and that makes me kind of sad. They’re still good books, I still enjoy them, and I’d still recommend them to anyone who hasn’t read them, definitely, but I now have other feelings that I need to unpack. I’m actually planning a whole post on this so stay tuned.

And finally, I read the fourth Expanse book, Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey. After I finished the third book back in September, I said I would give this series one more book before I gave up on it, and I’m so glad I gave it one more book. Because this book was great! Now that they’ve figured out the rings, humanity has access to all these new earth-like planets, and there’s basically a land rush going on. But then there’s a group of refugees who fled Ganymede after the incident in book two and a corporation who start fighting over one of the planets, and the U.N. and the OPA send James Holden to mediate. And then of course the alien artifacts on the planet get cranky and everything goes off the rails. This was a fast easy read. I loved seeing the characters I loved from book two coming back in so many different ways, and I loved the different roles Holden and his crew were forced into in this book. It was good, and I’m pretty much sucked in for the series now, though I’m still not sure if it’s one for the favorites list.

And that’s it for November. I’ve already read a bunch of books in December, and I’ve already passed my goal of reading 100 books in 2019.  I’ll be back in a few days with a wrap up of all the crazy and great things that happened to me this year, my December reading roundup, and my favorite books of 2019. I’m also hoping to talk about the rest of the Remnant Chronicles, cliffhangers, and strong female characters soon too. In the meantime, let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you think of them.

October Reading Roundup

Hey there. It’s November. The weather is finally turning, the pumpkin spice madness still somehow continues, and it’s NaNoWriMo. I’m not actually doing NaNoWriMo this year, because I’m living in revision land on a bunch of projects, so word counts are hard, but I am trying to write every day, and so far I’m succeeding.

But before we really get into November, a lot happened in October. I finished revisions on my book and sent them off to my agent, which is very exciting. I also got to meet my agent in person, which was also great. I started a writing group, and after a lot of gathering people and deciding how we were going to operate and finding where to meet, we finally had our first meeting last weekend and it was everything I wanted it to be. I kept on working, and while I still feel like I’m pretty clueless, I’m feeling like I’m slightly less clueless. I understand a lot of the words that are being used now, at least. I also really ramped up my exercise at the barre, because I won a free month and so I just went all the time, and now I’m addicted. While I’m still really tired and can’t quite get my sleep schedule the way I want it, I feel like I’m at least starting to find a balance between work and fun, and I’m really happy.

Collage of the 12 books I read in October: Oathbringer, Animal Farm, Peter Pan, The Winner's Curse, Long Road to Mercy, The Winner's Crime, The Kiss of Deception, The Winner's Kiss, Cutting for Stone, Night, Our Dried Voices, and White is for WitchingI also read twelve books in October. Wow! This brigns me to a total of 80 books in 2019, and so I’m back on track to meet my goal of reading one hundred books this year, but also I’m straining my collage app to the limit.

The books I read were all over the map. Some were really long, and some were really short. I read one book in Braille and the rest were audio. I continued with one series I’ve been reading, read a whole new trilogy, and started another one. I was also all over the map with genre. There was plenty of fantasy, but I read a couple classics, one World War II book, three books that were set in a secondary world but otherwise didn’t have other traditional fantasy elements, one literary fiction, one sci fi, and one modern gothic horror thing. I really liked a lot of these books. A couple of these books I ended up with lukewarm feelings. I really didn’t like only one book. And all of these books were new for me—no rereads this month.

So here are the twelve books I read this month and what I thought of them. I’ll keep this spoiler-free and link to full reviews if I have them, but as I said here, part of me finding a work-life balance means I’m stopping full reviews for all books.

First, I finished Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, the third book in the Stormlight Archive series. I have a full review for this book here. Oathbringer picks up right after the end of Words of Radiance. Kaladin is off to find his family. Dalinar is trying to pull the rulers of the world together into a coalition against the parshendi-turned-voidbringers. Shallan is having a really hard time. This book was pretty slow at first, and the ending was a little chaotic, but the plot was amazing, and I really adored the character development we got. I especially loved getting more about Dalinar’s past and watching him really struggle with it in real-time. Like wow I just love everything about this series and I am dying for the next book to come out. I know they’re massive, but they’re easy reads, and I can’t recommend this book and the whole series strongly enough.

Next, I read Animal Farm by George Orwell. Animal Farm follows a group of animals on a farm who overthrow their human owners, build their own society based on equality and sharing and all the good intentions behind communism, and take up running of the farm themselves. But as they realize what’s really involved in running the farm, their idyllic society tumbles toward more of a totalitarian dictatorship. I have a full review of the book over here, and it’s pretty ranty. I wasn’t a fan of this book. It had some good qualities, certainly, but on the whole, it felt like Orwell was spoonfeeding his morality to me, and I hate being spoonfed anything books. ,I especially hate being spoonfed morality. I know this book is a classic, but it just wasn’t for me.

After that, I went to the complete opposite end of the classics spectrum and read Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. This book was a delight. I’m sure that you know the basic story. Peter Pan appears and whisks Wendy, John, and Michael Darling off to Neverland for fantastical adventures, where they face down Captain Hook and ticking crocodiles and so on. But the book has so much more than the Disney movie. The book spends a lot of time with the Darling parents, who notice their children have gone missing, and we spend time with their grief and their loss. The book isn’t about the kids’ adventures so much as family and childhood and adulthood, and it’s beautiful. I have a full review right here, but the short version is that I really enjoyed this book and definitely recommend it.

This month, I read the entire Winner’s Trilogy by Marie Rutkoski, The Winner’s Curse, The Winner’s Crime, and The Winner’s Kiss. You can see my full review of the first book, The Winner’s Curse, over here, but I didn’t get to do full reviews of the second and third books, and unfortunately I don’t think I will get to unless someone can find me a Time Turner so I can have more hours in the day. I really enjoyed this series. In a world where teens have to choose between marriage or enlistment in the army, Kestrel wants to be a musician. Then she buys a mysterious slave, Arin, and they fall in love, all while Arin is working as a spy in her house for the slave rebellion intent on reclaiming his country. Things get complicated. The first book had some problematic bits when it came to talking about slavery, definitely, but the second book did a lot to make that better. The second book was full of so much amazing political intrigue. I will admit some disappointment with the third book, because in the beginning-ish Kestrel loses all her memories and we spend a good chunk of the book as she tries to get them back and figure out who she is. It was frustrating because it felt like we lost all her character development from the first two books. But the ending of the series was really great, and on the whole I would recommend checking it out.

The October book for the National Federation of the Blind book club was Long Road To Mercy by David Baldacci. Atlee Pine’s twin sister, Mercy, was abducted when they were six years old. Now, almost thirty years later, Atlee is an FBI agent working in the Grand Canyon. When a mule is found stabbed to death on the Canyon floor, Atlee is sent to investigate, and soon she’s uncovering an international conspiracy. I admit that this wasn’t my kind of book. I’m not big into spy thrillers, and this felt like it had all the cliché’s of a lone detective story. It was certainly a page-turner, and it was easy to read, and there were some great characters. But given the title, Long Road to Mercy; the sister’s name, Mercy; and the emphasis on the sister’s abduction in the beginning of the book, I expected the sister to play a larger role in the book. Minor spoiler, the sister has almost nothing to do with the plot. Her sister’s abduction is    important to Atlee’s character, of course, but that was the part of the book that felt most overdone to me. I don’t feel strongly enough about this book to devote a whole post to it, but this would be a great place to talk about the importance of correctly setting up reader expectations. I expected the sister to matter to the plot. She didn’t. I was disappointed. This disappointment affected my entire impression of the book. And this could have been solved with something as simple as ‘a different title. Sorry to harp on this but it really bugged me, and some of the people in the book club discussion just didn’t get why I even expected this to be part of the plot. Anyway, while I won’t say I disliked the book, I didn’t really enjoy it that much either, but it’s also just not my kind of book. If you really like spy thrillers or suspense books, this might be the perfect book for you, and you should take my thoughts with a handful of salt.

I also started The Remnant Chronicles this month. I read the first book, The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson. I will definitely have full reviews for this book and its sequels, which I’m reading now, because I have so many interesting writing thoughts on this. So keep an eye out for that. The main premise of The Kiss of Deception is that we have a princess, engaged to marry a prince, but she doesn’t want to, so she runs away and settles in a little seaside town and is very happy. Then we have the jilted prince, who sees her as a challenge and goes after her. And we have an assassin from another country also looking for her. They both find her in the little seaside town, and because it’s a YA fantasy, a love triangle ensues. Yes the assassin is one of the corners of this triangle. I admit I was one hundred percent skeptical when I started this book, and if I could roll my eyes there would have been so much of that. But I really enjoyed it. The world building is really rich, and while Lia, the princess, is pretty insufferable for the first half of the book, she has so much great character growth. But my favorite thing about this book is that it surprised me over and over and over again. I went in thinking this was just another love triangle YA fantasy novel, and I made predictions accordingly, and I was so wrong. For example, I was one hundred percent convinced I knew which of the guys pursuing Lia was the assassin and which was the prince, and I was wrong. But looking back, it totally made sense. And this gave me so much respect for this book and for Mary E. Pearson as a writer. As ridiculous as the premise of this book sounds, I highly recommend you give it a try. I’ve already finished the second book, and I’ll say now that it’s even better than the first.

Next, I read Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. This is the book we’ll be talking about in December for my NFB book club. I’m planning a full book review for this one too, because I’m really interested in how Verghese plays with time in this novel and I want to talk about that from a writing perspective. When a nun working as a nurse in a mission hospital in Ethiopia suddenly goes into labor, has twins, and dies in childbirth, the hospital rallies around the infants and raises them as their own. The book tells the story of the twins’ lives, starting seven years before the twins are born and ending when they’re fifty years old. It’s hard to describe this book beyond that, but it is really phenomenal. Just a small warning, if you’re squeamish about hospitals, surgery, and blood and guts, that’s a big part of this book, so it might not be for you.  But I loved it, and I highly recommend.

I’ve never read Night by Elie Wiesel. I’ve read so many World War II and holocaust books, and I thought it was high time I read this book. This was such a raw and visceral account of the holocaust. I can’t say that I loved it, because it was an incredibly difficult book to read. But I also think it’s an important book to read, and I’m glad I read it. If you haven’t read it, you should, though it is not a book to read right before you go to bed. Unless you don’t want to sleep.

Next, I read Our Dried Voices by Greg Hickey. Full disclosure, Greg gave me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This book actually isn’t available in any of the places I normally get digital Braille or audio books, so I’m really glad Greg contacted me, because I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to read this book otherwise. There is so much to talk about here. The book is set in a distant future where humans have cured all diseases, colonized another planet, and basically built a society where all of humanity’s basic needs are taken care of by automation. But now the machines are breaking, and no one knows how to fix them. This sounded like a really cool premise, but I had a hard time with this book. I particularly struggled to suspend my disbelief on what felt like the main premise of the book. The fact that humanity would build automated systems to take care of all their basic needs and not include some trouble-shooting mechanisms or backup systems is beyond me. Like aren’t computer problems ubiquitous? In all fairness, this one is explained by the end of the book, but it still made it hard for me to get into the book. More importantly, I really just don’t buy the premise that if you don’t have to work, you will lose your identity. The humans in this colony just romp mindlessly through the meadow, they eat when the bells ring, sleep when the bells ring, they have no independent thoughts of their own, they barely even speak. I admit the book and the writing do a really good job describing this and setting the scene, but I just couldn’t get behind it as a premise. If people have no need to work because all their basic needs are provided for, why wouldn’t they spend that time cultivating creative or intellectual pursuits? Just because all disease has been cured doesn’t mean there’s no need to continue studying science. That sort of thing. Personally, I found the idea that the need to work for our survival is key to our identity to be problematic. More so because when we actually confront this idea toward the end of the book—the people of the colony are actually compared to animals at one point—we sort of come at the confrontation sideways and never really resolve it. The ending feels like the book is just avoiding the issue it set up to talk about. Basically I wanted our main character, Samuel, to take a stand, whatever that stand might be. But he chose the option that was not taking a stand. This isn’t to say that there weren’t things about this book that I liked. I really enjoyed discovering how the world worked along with Samuel. I really liked Samuel’s adventure beyond the colony and character growth as he learns the truth. I liked that the theories I had were wrong. There were also so many moments where the writing in this book was crystalline and beautiful. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that I would have liked this book a lot better had I not had the timeline with the history of humanity from 2000 onward in the front of the book, and if I didn’t have the description saying that humans had cured all of the world’s ills and colonized another planet.  If I had gone into this book with no idea that this was supposed to be advanced humanity, for example, and it was more of a mystery figuring out what was going on, I think I would have enjoyed it more. We could have built up to the realization that this was what automation did to humanity. That would have been really cool, though I’m still not sure I agree with either the premise or the ending. So while this was a pretty neat book, short and fast and easy to read, and I enjoyed many parts of it, on the whole it just didn’t work for me the way I wanted it to.

Finally, my law school book club friends who also moved to D.C. have decided to keep up our book club. This month, in honor of Halloween, we read White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. Lily Silver has died, leaving behind her husband and teenaged twins. They’re all grieving, but her daughter Miranda is taking it particularly hard. She already has a rare eating disorder where she only likes eating chalk, and now her mother is dead and she basically has a haunted house to contend with. I had a hard time following what was going on in this book, but I still really enjoyed it. The writing was so good, and it was so creepy. It really took me back to the American horror class I took my first year of college. I saw all the same themes and everything. I loved how gothic this book felt, very much like The House of the Seven Gables or The Haunting of Hill House, but also how very modern it was. And the writing in this book is just so vivid and beautiful. If you like bizarre and creepy haunted house stories, this is for you.

Wow! I read a lot in October, and a lot of different books. It was a pretty good reading month, too, because I really liked most of the books I read. I have some great plans for the books I want to read in November—The Starless Sea, Tunnel of Bones, the rest of the Mistborn books, the rest of the Remnant Chronicles, this book called Daughters of Nri which just  came out and which I am so excited about. And as I said, I’m planning some full book reviews for a few of these October books, along with some writing discussions I hope you’ll find interesting. In the meantime, have you read any of these books? What do you think? And can you recommend a photo collage app that will handle more than nine photos?

Changing Things Up Again

A few weeks ago, I said that I was going to set a regular schedule for blog posts. I tried it for a few weeks, and I have come to the conclusion that this isn’t working for me.

Yes, last week was a crazy week. I was really sick, and then I was really stressed about imminent bar exam results, and then I passed the bar, which was great, but after all that I just crashed. But even though last week was exceptional, I was thinking that this isn’t working for me before that. Last week just served to underscore the fact that I’m exhausted.

In the last two months, I’ve discovered that working full-time is a lot. I don’t have a lot of time in the evenings and on the weekends, and so I have to set some priorities. Those priorities have to be writing and exercising. As much as I love blogging, the five, six, sometimes seven posts I’ve been doing a week has become too much. It’s turning blogging here into a chore, and that’s the last thing I want.

So I’m going to cut back a little. I’ve decided to stop doing individual, dedicated book reviews for all books I read. For one thing, I can’t keep up with myself. For another, my reviews are all starting to feel the same to me. I will continue to do my monthly reading roundup posts, where I talk about all the books I read this month. I will also do individual book reviews for books that make me think about writing, and I will tie my review of that book in with a post about the specific writing topic.

I will continue to review books on Goodreads, and I’m going to continue my posts about blindness and add regular posts about writing and revising, along with the book review/writing discussion posts. This is going to start with any book I finish after this post. I’m not going to backtrack to talk about books I just finished or didn’t do full reviews of over the summer. I understand this means I won’t get to go into detail for some books I really loved—Ash Princess, A Woman of No Importance, To Kill a Mockingbird The Martian—but the whole point of this is to set boundaries. I’m sorry if this turn of events is disappointing to you, and I hope to one day have the time to come but ack to doing full book reviews of every book I read on this blog, but it’s just not feaseable right now, and I think this solution will help me write more dynamic posts that I’m excited about sharing with you.

Presumed Innocent Review

Cover of Presumed Innocent by Scott TurowBack in July, I read Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow. This is a legal thriller, and a few friends questioned why I was reading a legal thriller while also studying for the bar. I didn’t intend it to happen like that, certainly, but a friend recommended this book, I put it on hold at the library, and that was when it came up. So I read it.

Honestly I think Presumed Innocent really helped me understand what the heck was going on with evidence in my bar prep course. I didn’t take evidence in law school, so studying for the bar was the first time I was learning it, and it was a lot. This book gave me examples I could connect with more (because I connect better with fiction than casebooks).So whatever else I think of the book, and I have thoughts, Presumed Innocent for the win.

Also, I just found out this morning that I passed the bar, so pro tip: If you’re studying for the bar, maybe read some legal thrillers?

My brain immediately started trying to concoct a secured transactions legal thriller and now I’m horrified with myself. Let’s talk about this actual book.

Presumed Innocent is about a prosecutor who is arrested and tried for the rape and murder of his coworker. The coworker he was having an affair with. That’s about all I’ll say.

I liked this book. It took a while to get going, but once we got to the trial I was hooked. It got pretty technical with the legal stuff, but I liked that because it seemed more real to me. Bonus points because it tallied with what my professors in my bar prep course were saying about criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence. I only took criminal law my first year of law school and didn’t take the other two classes at all so basically learned all the subjects for the bar. I wonder how it would be to read this book with just a layperson’s understanding of the law. If I didn’t know what was going on, I’d feel like the book got bogged down in specifics I found confusing, but my friend who recommended this book to me is not a lawyer, and she said she followed what was going on reasonably well and enjoyed all the specificity. I also really liked the way the book ended. It’s been months, but it’s definitely stuck with me.

This book wasn’t perfect for me, however. It was honestly a little too graphic for my taste in some places. Also, the pacing was weird. I already said it took a while to get going. Given that we know from the back cover that the main character is going to be accused of murder, the first third of the book until that actually happened dragged. Also, there’s a good quarter of the book after the trial ends, and it was basically way, way too much denouement. And I’ve written too much denouement before. I know.

This book is actually the start of a series that follow various characters from this book through other cases. The library didn’t have the second audiobook, and honestly I wasn’t invested enough to go find it somewhere else. It’s been a few months, and while I still think about this book from time to time, I honestly don’t think I’m going to continue with the series.

I did enjoy this book, however, and if you like legal thrillers this is definitely one for you. If you read it, I’d love to know what you think, and if you’ve already read it, do you agree with my opinion?

The Winner’s Curse Review

I’ve been powering through books this month. Like seriously I need to slow down–I can’t keep up with myself. After Peter Pan, I started The Winner’s Trilogy by Marie Rutkoski. The first book is The Winner’s Curse.

Cover of The Winner's Curse by Marie RutkoskiSeventeen-year-old Kestrel is the general’s daughter in a vast empire that is constantly waging war on other countries and enslaving the conquered people. Like all teenagers in the empire, Kestrel must soon choose between marriage or enlisting in the military herself, but Kestrel isn’t really interested in either. She just wants to play the piano, but only slaves are allowed to be musicians. Then Kestrel buys a young slave named Arin, and everything turns upside down. As Kestrel and Arin become friends, we switch between Kestrel’s and Arin’s points of view. Kestrel is navigating the world of high society, and doing so very well. She’s very clever, good at strategizing, and politically savvy. But she’s also falling in love with Arin, and maybe Arin is falling in love with her, even though Kestrel’s obvious preference for him is stirring vicious rumors, and Arin is working as a spy for the slave rebellion planning to overthrow the empire and reclaim their conquered home.

I really loved this book. The plot was intricate, and the characters were so well-done. I loved watching Kestrel and Arin become close and all the complications that created. I also loved how Arin forced Kestrel to see the truth of the empire but how Kestrel forced Arin to see that people like her were in fact people and not all monsters.

The thing I didn’t like about this book is that it really seemed to gloss over the horrors of slavery. Beatings are mentioned, and it’s implied that Arin’s sister was raped by the conquering army ten years ago, but these things are just mentioned or implied. We don’t see the horrors of slavery. Just as bad, there’s a history in our world of masters sexually exploiting slaves, and this book comes close to that, because Kestrel and Arin are falling in love, without really going into how problematic that is, not even within this world where Kestrel will have to either enlist in the army or marry someone else and a real relationship between her and Arin can never be a thing. That the master in this scenario is the woman and the slave is the man doesn’t make it less problematic. I will say that the second book deals with the slavery issue a lot more and sort of makes the first book better on this front, but it’s important to acknowledge that this is a problem with this book.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this book. I particularly loved the last third-ish. And the ending is perfect both to round off this story but also to set up for the sequel.

Peter Pan Review

Cover of Peter Pan by J. M. BarrieI was looking for something more cheerful to read after Animal Farm, but I was still looking for short books, so I picked up Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. This is the book that the Disney movie is based on, but the Disney movie changed a lot, as you might expect.

Peter Pan follows the three Darling children, Wendy, John, and Michael, who go off to Neverland with Peter Pan, a boy who never grows up. They meet the lost boys and have adventures and face down the dread pirate Captain Hook. But the book also follows the Darling parents, and deals with their grief and loss and guilt when their children vanish one night and don’t return.

This was a fun little book. I loved all the fantastical adventures the kids have. I really love how it dives into the children’s desire for a mother and the parents’ loss of their children. I was also intrigued by the way even the adventures in Neverland felt like the children were pretending. There’s definitely a reading that all of Neverland is make believe, and I love that the book neither confirms nor denies that. Basically this book gave me feelings.

There were a couple things that bothered me about this book. There’s a group of people on the island of Neverland who are always referred to as the redskins, and they are very stereotypical native Americans. Also Wendy, as the only girl among Peter Pan and all his lost boys, is relegated to the role of mother, so she only does all the cooking and cleaning and everything while the boys have the adventures. She seems perfectly happy with that, and that’s fine, but it bothers me that she gets this role purely because she’s a girl. This book was published in the early 1900s, so obviously these problems are products of the book’s time, but I still think it’s important to recognize that by today’s standards, it’s problematic.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book a lot. I honestly don’t remember the Disney movie that much, but it was fun to see where it came from and what else the book did. I love the themes of childhood and adulthood and belonging to someone else, and as I said, the fantastical fairy tale elements are great.

Have you read Peter Pan? What did you think?

The Trials of Apollo Review

Way back at the beginning of this year, before I started writing individual book reviews, I read the first three Trials of Apollo books by Rick Riordan. I’ve been meaning to write full reviews for these books for a while, since the fourth book just came out and I’m on the waiting list to get it from the library. But the bar got in the way. I feel like I say that about a lot of things, but it’s true. The bar got in the way of everything.

Anyway, here I am now. For the sake of space and time, I’m going to review the first three books all in one post. I will do my best to keep this spoiler-free for all three books, but I can’t promise, so if you haven’t read any of these books and you think you might want to, I’d stop after the review of the first one.

The Trials of Apollo series takes place after the Heroes of Olympus series (the second Percy Jackson series). It stars the sun god Apollo, who has been cast down to earth by Zeus to live as a mortal. I won’t say why because that’s a spoiler from the fifth Heroes of Olympus book. This new series features many of our favorite characters from the two Percy Jackson series, but they’re more side characters than main characters, which is nice because it feels like something new rather than just a continuation of what we’ve already done.

Okay, enough background. Let’s dive in.

The Hidden Oracle

Cover of The Hidden Oracle by Rick RiordanSo Apollo, now a mortal, lands in New York City as a normal teenager. No magical powers to speak of. Not even demigod powers. But it gets worse. Because he’s a god, he has a lot of enemies, monsters and such, and he has to figure out how to survive as a mortal so he can reclaim his godliness. He teams up with another demigod, Meg, and together they head to Camp Halfblood. Meg technically claims Apollo as her slave and gains the power to order him around and he has to do what she says. I forget how that works but it’s a thing. Adventures ensue, but pretty soon Apollo learns that his oracles have gone quiet, and he and Meg set out to find what’s keeping the oracles quiet. And Meg might have some unfortunate secrets of her own.

This book was classic Rick Riordan fun. It reminded me a lot of the very first Percy Jackson book, with the going to Camp Halfblood and having fun camp games and camp adventures and such, and I liked that. I will say, as the eleventh book I’ve read in this world, all with the same kind of structure, it’s starting to feel a bit familiar, but it was still a lot of fun. I really enjoyed Apollo’s character development. He starts as a really arrogant, pretty insufferable guy, and it’s a bit painful to be in his head. But at the same time, it’s understandable, because he is a god. And there’s nowhere to go but up from there. And up he goes. Also, the ending of this book and the reveal of who the bad guys are is just awesome.

The Dark Prophecy

There will be spoilers for The Hidden Oracle here. Sorry, I can’t avoid them. So if you haven’t read the Hidden Oracle and you think you want to, stop here. These are major spoilers. You have been warned.

Cover of The Dark Prophecy by Rick RiordanAfter the end of The Hidden Oracle, Apollo sets off to Indianapolis with Leo and Calipso. Yay Leo! And of course they’re traveling by dragon. They’re going in search of the next oracle, but Apollo is also hoping to find Meg and to pry her away from her evil stepfather, Nero. And again, adventures ensue.

I admit I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the first one. I loved getting to see Leo again, because yay Leo! But Apollo was a bit insufferable in this book. I felt like a lot of the character development he had in the first book went out the window. At least his self-centered narration made it seem like that. But even so this book was a ton of fun and I just breezed through it. Basically these books are candy to me.

The Burning Maze

Same warning as above. Spoilers. Lots of spoilers.

Cover of The Burning Maze by Rick RiordanThe prophecy we get at the end of The Dark Prophecy points to the big bad guys going to attack Camp Jupiter. So Leo heads off to warn them, and Meg and Apollo head to the American southwest to journey through the labyrinth, which has rebuilt itself, to find the third oracle. They are led by Grover, and they eventually team up with Piper and Jason. Yay Grover! Less yay about Piper and Jason—I was never a huge fan of them, they’re kind of boring.

Again, this book is a lot of fun. It gets decidedly darker toward the end, which I like, but it’s still a lot of fun. I also really enjoyed the puzzles in this book, and the stakes have definitely gone up. Meg has a lot of great character development here. But I have to say that by this point, reading them in quick succession as I did, they all started to feel the same, and it was annoying that Apollo didn’t seem to be learning anything as a character. Like I know he’s a god, but three books is still a long time.

On the whole, these books were a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the fourth book and then finishing the series when the fifth one comes out. But they are starting to feel very similar to one another, and I’m honestly not enjoying them as much as I enjoyed the Percy Jackson books.

If you’ve read The Trials of Apollo books, what did you think?