I wrote this in the very beginning of March, and I felt on top of things for once. And then I completely forgot to post it, so I’m obviously just hopeless.
For a short month, I feel like a lot happened in February. I returned to my apartment in Virginia, which involved a lot of packing and then unpacking and reorganizing and such. Work continued apace, and I spent a lot of time on revisions to my middle grade space adventure novel. I finished writing another short story and got to take a lot of walks, especially as the weather got nicer. At the end of February, my story “Harmonies for Cadence” was accepted for publication by the Voyage YA Journal, and they published it right away. I also signed the contract for my story “Noa and the Dragon,” which is going to appear in the anthology Artificial Divide, a blind #OwnVoices anthology I’m really excited about.
I also read twelve books in February. Two were contemporaries, one was nonfiction, and the rest were fantasy. Two were rereads, but the rest were new to me. I didn’t finish any Braille books this month. There were a couple I wasn’t super excited about, but on the whole it was a good reading month.
I started February with the first two books in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. These are more books that I never read as a kid and a friend recommended I check them out. Princess Cimorene is not very princess-like, so when her parents arrange her marriage, she runs away and gets herself “kidnapped” by a dragon. And she has a lot of adventures fending off evil wizards and princes coming to rescue her, and it’s just great. The second book follows the same characters but is from the point of view of the king of the Enchanted Forest. This series is a really great example of changing point of view from one book to the next but doing so in a way that isn’t annoying. The end of the second book kind of made me sad, and honestly I think it could have been fine if it had been set up better, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes next in the series.
In the beginning of February, I returned to Virginia, and along the way, my mom and I listened to A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Eutopian Plot to Liberate an American Town and Some Bears by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. You probably saw the article last year about this book. I know I was asked about it many times because I’m from New Hampshire. A Libertarian Walks into a Bear is about an experiment to make Grafton, New Hampshire a free town
, with no taxes and no government. The result? Bears run wild. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, and I don’t expect to laugh when I read nonfiction. But this book was hilarious as well as fascinating, and just because of that, I 100% recommend it.
I also continued the Upside-Down Magic series with the seventh book, Hide and Seek by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. In this book, Nory’s father asks her to reapply to Sage Academy, and she gets in, but she doesn’t want to leave her new school and her new friends in the UDM class. When a pipe bursts or something similar happens at Nory’s school, kids are split up and sent to other schools in the area for a week, and Nory’s class goes to Sage, where Nory learns just how much she doesn’t belong at Sage. This book wasn’t as memorable as the others in this series for me, but it also ended on a cliffhanger, and the next book hasn’t come out yet. I can’t wait!
I also read the second and third Princess Diaries books in February, Princess in the Spotlight and Princess in Love by Meg Cabot. I really, really liked Princess in the Spotlight. Mia’s mom is pregnant and is planning to marry her algebra teacher, and Mia’s grandmother insists on throwing them a royal wedding they don’t want. Mia is receiving anonymous notes from someone who likes her, and she really, really hope’s it’s from Michael, her best friend’s older brother. And she’s also preparing for her first public interview as a princess. I just loved all the drama of this book. I didn’t enjoy Princess in Love quite as much, because it’s all about Mia trying to figure out how to break up with a boyfriend she sort of started dating almost accidentally at the end of the second book. There was plenty of drama, but it wasn’t quite as fun as the first two books. But I’m still really looking forward to the next book in the series.
After that, I read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. In a world where the king has killed anyone who can do magic and basically destroyed magic, Zélie, her brother, and a runaway princess go on a journey to bring magic back. This book has some great adventures in search of relics and arcs of learning to use power, but at the same time, the pacing is a bit all over the place—moving along at a good clip in some places, dragging in others—and I absolutely hated the romantic subplot. I know a lot of people really liked this book, but it just didn’t work for me the way I wanted it to. I probably won’t go on to read the sequel, and it probably isn’t a book I would recommend.
Next I read the fourth book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Wizard and Glass. This book picks up where the last one left off, with our heros traveling aboard the suicidal talking pink monorail. They’ve made a deal with it to save their lives if they can stump it with riddles. But most of the book is taken up with Roland’s backstory. And then there’s a weird climax/ending tacked on. It was interesting, but it was too long and dragged a lot. It also reinforced an issue I’ve noticed in the previous books, that it feels like female characters in the book only exist to be sexually abused, to be sexual abusers, or to have sex with the male characters, and I don’t like it. I’m probably going to press on just to see how the series ends—last time I tried these books I stopped after Wizard and Glass—but I’m going to take a break for a while and read something happier.
At the end of 2019, I read the first two Nevermoor books by Jessica Townsend and fell in love. The third book came out last fall, and in February, I finally reread the first two books, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow and Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow, and then the third book, Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow. I continue to absolutely adore the first two books, and the third was just what I wanted it to be. Fair warning, it is a plague book, and it did give me some flashbacks to this time last year, but if you’re going to read a plague book, this is the one to read. It’s so heartfelt and warm and has so many excellent feelings. It’s the sort of book that once I reached the end, I just wanted to go back to the beginning of the series and start again. And I did that in March because I’m hopeless. These books are so special to me that I’ve ordered them in hardcopy Braille so I can hold them in my hand and study them and luxuriate in every perfect word. Honestly, I aspire to write a story that is this captivating, this enchanting, this intense, and this heartwarming, and these books are rapidly coming to take the place Harry Potter holds in my heart, and I don’t say that lightly even after J. K. Rowling revealed herself as a bigot. I really need more people to scream about these books with me, so if you have read them, let’s chat, and if you haven’t go read them now please please please!
And I finished off February with The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune. This book was just pure delight. A caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth is sent from his dreary life in the city to a beautiful little island to investigate the orphanage on that island. Once there, he meets the charming master of the orphanage and the children he cares for: a gnome, a wivern, a sprite, a green blob, a boy who can turn into a dog, and the six-year-old antichrist. It’s all about falling in love and found family and it is just so warm and fuzzy. This is another book that is fundamentally happy and still has a strong sense of plot. I definitely recommend this one.
And that’s it for February. Let me know if you’ve read any of these or if you have any recommendations for books I might like. I was going to say happy March, but honestly, we’re almost at April, so happy April.