Category: book recommendations and reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That plan starts with Cress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After reading Cinder and Scarlet last month, I paused in my reading of the Lunar Chronicles to read The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman. This book has been recommended to me by a few people over the years. I don’t exactly make it a secret that I love World War II books. I got the audiobook out of the library as one of the books advertised for the anniversary of D-Day, and I had to read it before it expired.

The Zookeeper’s Wife tells the true story of a woman in Poland who saved hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust by hiding them in the abandoned animal cages of the zoo. The book follows the woman and her family through the whole of the war, dealing with the invasion and occupation of Poland by the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Polish resistance, and then the arrival of the Russians. Honestly, while I found the story this book told to be incredible, I thought the execution of the book hindered my enjoyment of it.

The subject of this book reminded me a lot of The Assisi Underground, which is about priests in Assisi who hid Jews by disguising them as priests and nuns in the many churches in Assisi. The Zookeeper’s Wife reminded me of the Assisi Underground because of the unlikely and ingenious strategy of hiding people, as well as the leadership of this one woman who took it upon herself to protect all these people and see them on to safety. Most of my World War II knowledge is focused in Italy, France, England, Germany, and America. I don’t know too much about Poland, and I think I’ve only read one other book about World War II in Poland, so I was particularly fascinated by this account.

On the other hand, I found the writing to be scattered and a little tone deaf. The book leapt crazily from descriptions of the cuteness of the critters the zookeeper’s family was saving to the horrors of the war. It was pretty jarring. It also leapt around in time a lot. At one point, I got so confused I thought the main character had been pregnant for two years. There quite a few moments like this where I wasn’t quite sure where I was in space and time in the book, and it felt like the confusion could have been cleared up with clearer writing. I also found the writing to be rather dry, and I was both fascinated and bored at the same time as I read.

Let me be perfectly clear. This was a great story. It was an interesting story, and an important story. It deserved to be told, and deserves to be read. And I’m glad I read it. Unfortunately, I just didn’t enjoy the book that much. I can’t help comparing it to the fabulous nonfiction books I’ve read on World War II in the past, particularly The Assisi Underground, and the World War II books I’ve read since I finished The Zookeeper’s Wife, Code Girls and A Woman of No Importance, which I loved and I’ll talk about here soon.

I have heard good things about the movie for The Zookeeper’s Wife, and maybe when all this bar studying is over I’ll check that out.

Have you read The Zookeeper’s Wife? Seen the movie? What did you think?

Last week, I reviewed Cinder, the first book in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. Today I’m going to talk about the second book, Scarlet. As with my other reviews of sequels, there will probably be spoilers for Cinder, so if you haven’t read Cinder go check out my spoiler-free review for Cinder right over here. Otherwise read on at your own peril.

The Lunar Chronicles has a really interesting format as a series. As I said last week, each book is a retelling of a different fairy tale. The first book is Cinderella, and the second book is Little Red Riding Hood. This means that the main character of the second book is Scarlet, not Cinder. We don’t just abandon Cinder though. She’s still part of the story, and she’s arguably still the main character of the series, but the focus of this book is Scarlet. I loved Cinder so much I was uncertain about this format the first time I read it, but it works really well, and it’s really impressive. Also, I love Scarlet.

Scarlet lives on a farm in southern France with her grandmother. At the same time that Cinder is making her dramatic debut at the Commonwealth’s ball, Scarlet’s grandmother goes missing. The police find no sign that she was kidnapped, but Scarlet is convinced that something has happened to her. Her grandmother wouldn’t just leave. And when Scarlet’s estranged father turns up with claims of being forced to torture himself in Scarlet’s grandmother’s presence to get her to give up some sort of information, Scarlet sets out to find her grandmother herself. She teams up with a strange newcomer in town, a street fighter named Wolf. Wolf has the same tattoo as the people who tortured Scarlet’s father. He says he was part of a gang in Paris but he left, and he agrees to help Scarlet find her grandmother.

Meanwhile, Cinder teams up with another prisoner, Carswell Thorne, and together they break out of New Beijing prison. Cinder does most of the work, actually. Thorne just tags along, but he does have a stolen space ship hidden away, and they go on the run together. Dr. Errland told Cinder to meet him in Africa, but she isn’t ready to accept her role as lost princess. She feels like she doesn’t know who she is and who she’s supposed to be. So she starts practicing her lunar gift, and she uses the information she learned from Kai’s android Nainsi and goes in search of Michelle Benoit, a woman in southern France who Nainsi thinks hid Cinder for years. Cinder thinks Michelle Benoit might have some answers for her. And Michelle Benoit is, you guessed it, Scarlet’s grandmother.

And finally, we follow Emperor Kai as he faces down Queen Levana over Cinder’s escape. Levana gives Kai three days to find Cinder, or she will. And she won’t be nice about it.

And of course everything comes together in a crazy awesome climax.

The first time I read this, I admit that I was kind of bored with Scarlet’s story in the beginning. I wanted to keep following Cinder. On this reread, I was kind of bored with the start of Cinder’s story. Especially once they get out of prison, it feels like a lot of nothing drama. Okay, I like Thorne a lot, especially since I know where his story is going next in Cress, and Iko as the space ship is just great. Cinder’s story is by no means bad—it’s actually really good—but it isn’t her best moment, certainly.

Scarlet, on the other hand, has a great story in this book. Scarlet is a fierce character, and she will do anything to find her grandmother. Also Scarlet and Wolf’s romance is just so adorable! Scarlet’s story follows Little Red Riding Hood a lot more closely than Cinder followed Cinderella, though, so that makes things pretty obvious to everyone but Scarlet, which is a bit unfortunate. She probably has the weakest arc of any of the four main characters who have a book, but I also love her character so much that I don’t care. Like yes Scarlet might be the weakest of the series, but it’s still a really good book.

The other thing I love about this book is how much the international and interplanetary politics ramp up in this book. We see a lot of that from Kai’s point of view, and it’s great to watch him try to navigate this world that he’s really just been thrown into. It’s also great to watch his conflicting emotions about wanting Cinder to get caught so Levana doesn’t declare war but also wanting her to escape because she doesn’t want her to be executed.

I don’t want to say much more than what I’ve already said, because I don’t want to give anything major away. You really just have to go with these characters on this great journey. This is a really great second book in this series. This is one of those series where each book is just as good, if not better, than the last, and the series just builds and builds. It’s so intense but also so fun and adorable. I actually started screaming when I finished this book, because the ending is so crazy.

As I’ve said before, The Lunar Chronicles is one of my favorite series of all time. If you’ve read Cinder and you’re hesitating about going on to read Scarlet, you need to do it. Read it now. If you haven’t read Cinder, I don’t know why you’ve read this far in this review honestly, but you should go do that and then read Scarlet. It is great.

I’ve continued my bar prep rereadathon by diving back into The Lunar Cronicles series by Marissa Meyer. I’ve raved about these books before, and I was so glad that I loved rereading them just as much now as I did when I first picked them up in 2015 (I think that was when I first read them). Today, I’m going to talk about the first book, Cinder, and I’ll go on to the other books in the next few days.

The Lunar Chronicles is a series of retold fairy tales in a sci fi universe. For those who don’t know, I love retold fairy tales to pieces. The Lunar Chronicles was also some of the first sci fi I ever read. I never really gravitated toward it as a genre before, but once I got into it I was just in love. Each book in the series focuses on a different fairy tale. Cinder, the first book, is Cinderella. Except Cinderella is a cyborg, there’s a deadly plague sweeping the globe, a threatened war with Luna (the moon), and so much more. Yes, there’s a ball and sort of a fairy godmother. We even get a pumpkin colored car to take Cinder to the ball, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Cinder takes place in a future where the countries of the world have united into about seven countries (roughly by continent but Britain is still its own thing). People are also living on the moon, and they have developed from an Earthen colony into something not quite human. They can basically do mind control to mess with people’s emotions and perceptions and even force them to act without their volition. And like I said, there’s a deadly plague sweeping the globe.

Sixteen-year-old Cinder is the best mechanic in New Beijing, but she’s also a cyborg. Cyborgs are generally looked down on by most citizens and actually discriminated against by the government. Cinder is legally the property of her stepmother (her parents were killed in the same accident which prompted Cinder’s cyborg operation when she was eleven). Cyborgs are also drafted every day to be test subjects for plague research, which basically means they’re killed because they’re injected with the plague and then given antidotes to test. In general, people don’t think cyborgs are fully human. So Cinder tries to keep the fact that she’s a cyborg a secret as much as possible. When Prince Kai comes to her booth in the market to have a royal android repaired, she’s not about to tell him. Then things really heat up when Cinder’s younger stepsister, the one she likes, catches the plague and is sent off to the city quarantines and Cinder’s stepmother volunteers Cinder for plague research. Where she finds out that she is lunar and so immune to the plague, Prince Kai wants her to come to the annual peace festival ball with him, and oh yeah, the evil brainwashing lunar queen, Levana, is coming to earth to form an alliance which may or may not involve a marriage with the prince. And Queen Levana does not take kindly to illegal emigration from Luna.

Even after multiple rereads of this series, I still love this book to pieces. It’s fast paced and easy to read. Cinder is smart and resourceful, but also vulnerable in all the right places, and so she’s really likeable. We have both the personal stakes—Cinder wants to save her sister and run away from her stepmother, Cinder has a crush on the prince, and Cinder wants to not be caught by Queen Levana. And we also have these big intergalactic stakes with the plague ravaging the world and the possible alliance with Luna and all that promises and threatens. I feel really immersed in this futuristic world where people travel everywhere by maglev cars and androids and cyborgs and space travel are common. I also love all the little details that connect back to the Cinderella story.

I’ve heard and read criticism that for a book being set in a city called New Beijing, there isn’t enough Asian culture present and none of the characters really look Asian. I’m not going to comment on whether the characters look Asian or not. I have no idea what that even means, and I generally don’t mind if character description in a book is minimal. But as to the Asian culture, I’m torn. I think it’s a valid point, but I also think we’re hundreds of years into the future, countries have collapsed and reformed, and on the whole the world has become smaller. This doesn’t mean that different cultures will have been eliminated, but I feel like it’s fair that cultures we know today would change. So for me, I treated the culture of the Eastern Commonwealth in this book as having roots in today’s Asian culture but having changed into something new and we’re discovering that in the book. But again, I recognize that this could come off as tokenism. Representation in literature is a big deal, especially for books for kids and young adults. And it’s a big deal for a good reason. Having a culture that is nominally Asian and then it’s not really Asian can feel like false representation. I don’t know a lot about Asian culture beyond what I’ve read in books and seen in movies, so I’m not going to speak directly to what’s there and what’s missing in Cinder. I guess just know that this is a potential problem with the book.

Speaking of representation, I love the disability representation in this book. This will come up a lot more when we get to Cress, so stay tuned for my rant about one of the best blind characters I’ve ever read, but to give you a preview of my feelings: I really love how Marissa Meyer has created a world in which physical disability essentially doesn’t exist anymore, but the stigma still exists. It just feels real to me.

On the whole, I still love this book so much. I love Cinder’s journey and character development as she finds out who she is and what she’ll do to protect her friends. Yes, the revelation in the end is a bit obvious once you get there, but it’s really more about Cinder’s journey. And like I said I really liked the twists on the fairy tale. It presented Cinderella in a really new and fresh way.

I could keep ranting about how much I love this book, but I also have to get back to studying because that never ends, so I’ll leave you with this. Rereading Cinder, this might be the third or fourth time, was a wonderful experience. It’s a great start to one of my all time favorite series. If you haven’t read it, I hope I’ve convinced you of how awesome this book is. If you have read it, I’d love to talk about it with you. And I’ll be back soon to talk about the second book in the series, Scarlet, which is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

This month, I’m leading the discussion for the book club I’m in with the Cambridge chapter of the NFB. We’re reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which is a reread for me, and which I still absolutely love.

I first read this book back in 2012, when I was studying abroad in Torino. I probably read it three or four more times between 2012 and 2014, especially as I was working on my World War II Italy novella for my senior honors project. I’ve said on countless occasions that The Book Thief is one of my favorite books ever, but I haven’t revisited it since I graduated from college, so rereading it this month was a treat.

The Book Thief is set in a small town in Germany from 1939 to 1943. When Liesel Meminger is ten years old, she’s put into foster care and goes to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann, who at first seem like complete opposites but are both loving foster parents. But on the way to her new home, Liesel’s younger brother dies, and at his funeral, Liesel steals her first book, even though she doesn’t know how to read. But she learns how to read, makes friends with a host of great characters, and as World War Ii begins, she starts stealing books in earnest. And then her foster parents take a Jew into their home to hide him from the Nazis. Oh, and the story is told by Death.

I still absolutely love this book. It was great to dive in and rediscover this world and all these great characters again, and it’s been so long that it really was like rediscovering them. I  really enjoyed the writing style too. I love how Zusak personifies things like the sky, and people’s expressions, and the words that they’re saying. And this book just gave me so many feelings!

I will say it this pointhat The Book Thief might not be my favorite book ever, but that’s more because I’ve read so many other amazing books since I last read this than because of any fault on the part of The Book Thief. If I had to nitpick, I’d say there were times when the writing style was a little excessive for me, and the discussions of things like the extermination camps felt like token references because they weren’t really part of Liesel’s story. But I felt like I had to dig to find anything negative to say about this book, so I really don’t have strong feelings about either of these criticisms.

On the whole, The Book Thief is an amazing read, and if you haven’t read it, you absolutely need to. I can’t wait to talk about this with my book club this evening, but in the meantime, if you’ve read it, I’d love to know what you think.

Hello from my couch where I’m busy elevating and icing my foot and studying for the bar. I meant to post this review yesterday, and then I fell down the stairs and landed myself in urgent care with a sprained ankle, so here we are. Other than the perpetual bar studying and the inability to walk anywhere, life is pretty good.

I started June with the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, Words of Radiance. Words of Radiance isn’t quite as huge as The Way of Kings, but it was still a significant time investment. Honestly probably a time investment I didn’t have time to make, but I blew through it in about a week. I couldn’t put it down.

As usual, this review will be spoiler-free for Words of Radiance, but because it’s the second book in the series, there may be some spoilers for The Way of Kings. I’ll do my best, but if you haven’t read The Way of Kings, you should go check out my spoiler-free review over here to decide if this series is for you.

Words of Radiance picks up right after the end of The Way of Kings. Kaladin and the rest of Bridge Four are now working in High Prince Dalinar’s war camp as Dalinar and Adolin’s personal guards, and soon they’re guarding the king too. There’s a lot of political machinations, because Dalinar and Sadeas are both angling for power, and someone is still definitely trying to assassinate the king. Kaladin is being stretched between loyalty to his men and his new duties to Dalinar and the king. He’s also not very good at staying in line in political meetings. And then of course the guy who killed Kaladin’s old squad and enslaved Kaladin shows up as Dalinar’s ally. And as Kaladin’s loyalty is tested, he has to make choices, and the wrong choice might cost him his surgebinding powers.

Meanwhile, Shallan and Jasnah are on their way to the Shattered Plains, and Shallan is starting to learn about her powers, when they are attacked by assassins, and Shallan has to make her way onward on her own, carrying valuable information to the war camps.

Also, the parshendi are up to some really bad stuff in an attempt to destroy the whole Alethi army. Like remember how Shallan and Jasnah figured out the Parshmen were voidbringers? That kind of bad stuff.

Again, this is a huge book, so I’m barely scratching the surface with this description. I’m also probably muddling everything up.

Words of Radiance was slow at first, but once it picked up, it started flying. I just loved learning so much more about these characters and this world. I particularly enjoyed finally getting Shallan’s whole backstory, though honestly I saw some of that coming (but not in a bad way). I also loved that all the characters and storylines came together, and the way everything built toward this fantastic climax.

The only thing I didn’t particularly like about this book was the instalove between Shallan and Adolin, and then what I believe is the beginnings of a love triangle between Shallan, Adelin, and Kaladin, and these dislikes are more because I feel like it wasn’t really necessary to the plot, especially because the book is pretty long. These plots could develop into something I really love in the next book, but right now I’m kind of meh about the idea. I’m also kind of meh about love triangles in general, because they’re so often just ways to insert extra drama into a relationship.

But on the whole, I loved this book. It just blew me away. Pun intended.

And the ending! Oh, the ending!

This morning, I finished the novella that takes place between Words of Radiance and the third book in the series, and I have the third book ready to start after that, so stay tuned.