Tag: book recs

October Reading Roundup

Well, we have finally reached November. On the up-side, we only have two more months and then we can bid this awful year farewell. On the down-side, we are rapidly approaching the singularity beyond which I can make no plans of any kind. If you haven’t voted yet, please make sure to vote tomorrow. I really don’t like talking politics here, but this is an extremely important election, and your vote matters. Please vote.

But before we dive into the election hole, let’s talk about books.

Collage of the four books I read in October: Endurance, Dragon Overnight, The Eternity Code, and 96 MilesI only read four books in October. This is about half my usual monthly reading amount, and three of these books were really short. I’m actually in the middle of three more books but managed to finish none of them before the end of the month. This was partly because things got a lot busier at work in the last few weeks, so I was more tired at night. I was also focusing pretty heavily on writing this month: I finished revising my novel at the beginning of October; wrote, rewrote, and revised a whole short story; discussed more revisions to my novel with my agent; and planned out my NaNoWriMo project. And I do feel like I hit a bit of a reading slump about halfway through October. I started this book a lot of my friends really liked, but I was really struggling with it, and I didn’t finish it before my library copy expired, so I’m waiting to get off the waitlist again. My friends have good taste in books so I’m sure it gets better. But in the meantime, I struggled to get into other books for the rest of the month. But then I spent the last weekend of October in New Jersey with my writing group for a Halloween writing retreat (we all quarantined for two weeks and got negative covid tests before we went, so I felt very safe), and it was wonderful, but I didn’t get much reading done. So October was a good month for me personally, but not a lot of reading, and that’s okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kiss of Deception and Surprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how can you surprise a reader?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Recs Redux

I started this blog just over seven years ago, in 2013, before I started my senior year of college. (Excuse me for a moment while I go hide in a corner and feel old.)  In early 2015, while I was working in Italy, I set up my book recs page, and I’ve been adding to it with my favorites of the books I read each year. Recently, I looked through the list and realized that not only is it getting to be a bit unwieldy, but there are also several books I wouldn’t recommend anymore, and the list doesn’t accurately reflect my tastes as a reader and books I would want to share with friends and family. So this week, I removed a bunch of books from the list, and you can go see the new and improved list right over here.

This pruning of my book recs page also made me think a lot about myself as a reader. I have read a lot over the past five years. And I mean a lot. Since I started tracking my reading goals on Goodreads in 2016, I have read 514 books: 62 in 2016, 77 in 2017, 176 in 2018, 109 in 2019, and 90-one so far in 2020. Yikes! But reading so much so fast has changed me as a reader, and I’m certainly not the same person I was at the start of 2016. So I thought this was also a good time to take a step back and think about how my reading tastes have changed and how I evaluate what books I like and what books I love so much I would recommend them to others.

I’ve read a lot of new genres and authors over the last few years. Recently, my reading habits have definitely skewed toward fantasy and science fiction. I’ve especially been  enjoying getting into new science fiction stories, because I never used to read sci fi, though I definitely prefer my sci fi to be more space-related than not. I’ve also become pickier about the literary, contemporary, and historical fiction I read. I’ve struggled a lot more to get into those books, and I actually put a historical fiction book down recently, which is really rare for me. In terms of middle grade and young adult, I’ve found that while I adore middle grade fantasy, I’m usually not as captivated by contemporary middle grade stories, though there are some that I do love dearly and are still on the list. I want to read more middle grade science fiction, because what I have read I really like, and also I’m working on a middle grade sci fi project right now. I’ve also found I’m pickier with YA of all genres. I tend to like the fantasy and sci fi books more, but there are some contemporaries I still absolutely love as well.

My big takeaway from looking at all this is that I have become a lot pickier and a lot less forgiving as a reader. I really only find myself recommending books I absolutely love, and if I feel like I need to recommend a book or series with a caveat, I tend not to recommend it. So the books I list on my book recs page now are books that I not only loved when I read them but books that I still love, books that have stayed with me in some way or another and are still meaningful to me.

I’m not going to list here which books I removed from the page. To be clear, these were good books and series, and I really enjoyed them when I read them, so I certainly don’t want to put them down by calling them out. That being said, if you remember something was on the old list and want to talk about why I cut it, I’m happy to chat about that in the comments.

Generally speaking, there were a few reasons I removed the books I did. at this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you what some of the books were about, so while I enjoyed them at the time, they obviously haven’t stuck with me, and I don’t feel like I can honestly recommend them now.

Some of the books and series that I recommended in the past were books and series that I enjoyed even though I recognized they had serious flaws. Sometimes I recommended them because I was interested in the flaws, or because the flaws inspired me as a writer. I have removed these books for a few reasons. Firstly, because as I’ve said above, I’m a lot less forgiving of major flaws than I once was. And secondly, because a book recs page that is just a list of books I would recommend with no explanation of whyI recommend them doesn’t seem like the place for these books. In the future, I might write posts about what intrigued me or inspired me about these books, but they aren’t books I would recommend.

Finally, I removed books that I felt I could not recommend for social justice reasons. Over the past several years, I have become much more aware of diversity, inclusion, and representation in what I’m reading, and I have become much better at critically engaging with the text. This is not to say that all the books on my book recs page are paragons of diversity and representation. Several certainly have problems, and one day I will write a whole post on how you can love something and recommend something while still recognizing and engaging with its flaws (thank you to the folks over at the Tortall Recall podcast for teaching me this important lesson). But there were a few books on my list that I have come to realize have serious enough problems that I am just no longer comfortable recommending them.

Which brings me to the one and only series that I removed from the list and am going to call out by name: Harry Potter. This is also the series which I regret most removing from my book recs page, because it has meant so much to me over the years. I’ve bestruggling with how J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments all summer affect how I feel about the books. Rowling has always been a writer I admire, and the Harry Potter books have remained incredibly important to me. It broke my heart that someone who wrote such powerful books about accepting difference and love being the strongest kind of magic could believe and say such awful, hateful things. This letter on Tor.com does such a good job expressing my feelings. I am not trans, but I have friends who are, and I have been bullied because I’m different too. I can’t stand by silently mourning how she has forever-tainted the book series that has served as a beloved touchstone for my whole generation, and worse, the harm she is doing to trans people all over the world, because to remain silent is to condone her comments. And her comments have become more and more hateful in the last few months.

I have come to the conclusion that whatever she says, the Harry Potter books are ours now, not hers. I love them. I can’t turn that off. They have still affected how I read and write even today. They are flawed books, certainly, but they still send a strong and lasting message about the power of love and friendship and acceptance. But there’s a difference between me continuing to love the books and me actively recommending the books. Because as Lindsay Ellis said in this video about death of the author, recommending the books gives J.K. Rowling more power and more influence. I do not in any way agree with J.K. Rowling’s views, and I do not want my continued appreciation of the original Harry Potter books to be construed to mean that I do agree with her.

If I were to recommend the Harry Potter books, it would come with a major caveat: borrow them from the library or from a friend, or by them from a used bookstore, because by purchasing these books new, you are supporting an author who has turned out to be a hateful bigot. But part of repising my book recs page, as I said above, has included removing books that I would recommend with caveats. And so it is with a heavy heart that I have taken Harry Potter off the list.

That turned into a bit more of a rant than I originally intended, but as much as I didn’t want to remove Harry Potter from the list, I would also be really uncomfortable doing it silently, without explaining why. As with the other books I took off the list, I still think the original Harry Potter series is really good and worth reading, but it doesn’t belong on my list anymore.

And that’s it. You can go check out my leaner book recs page over here, and if you’re curious why a book you remember being there is gone, I’m happy to chat about it in the comments. I’d also like to know if you’ve read any of the books on the list and what you think of them, and of course I will always take more book recommendations.

August Reading Roundup

I was all set to post this on Friday, and then the news of RBG’s death broke, and I reached levels of despair about the state of the world I haven’t felt since March. It’s hard to believe that 2020 could get any worse, but on top of the plague, huge parts of the country are literally on fire right now, I don’t even know what hurricane is hitting where at this point, and I don’t even have words to express what RBG’s death and the upcoming battle for the Supreme Court means to me, so yes, 2020 did get worse. A lot worse. To my friends affected by the fires and the floods and the plague, my thoughts are with you. Please stay safe. And for anyone feeling hopeless, there are steps we can take beyond just wringing our hands and panicking. I never wanted this blog to be about politics, but I can’t ignore the fact that our very democracy is at stake. This is the time to call your senators, donate to campaigns, volunteer, and vote, vote, vote.

But this post isn’t really about politics. It’s about books. So let’s talk about books.

Nothing major happened for me in August. I continued to stay home and work from home and take Neutron for as many walks as I can. This past week marked my one-year anniversary working at the FCC, which is really cool. I definitely feel more confident in my work than I did on day 1, but it also doesn’t feel like it’s been a whole year, probably because half of that time I’ve been at home.

Collage of the covers of the books I read in August: Midnight Sun, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Life and Death, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, A Constellation of Roses, Uprooted, Sticks and Stones, Artemis Fowl, Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, and The Mystwick School of Musicraft.I read eleven books this August. This felt like a minor miracle to me when I counted them all up, because in case you didn’t read my whole post on Midnight Sun, I got kind of hung up on Twilight again. Two of the books I read were in Braille, which gets me up to eight Braille books a month, which means I’m back on track to reach my goal of reading twelve books in Braille this year. There wasn’t quite as much variety in what I read last month as I’ve noticed in the past few months, but I still really enjoyed most of what I read. Three of the books I read were rereads, but the rest were new to me. I read one YA contemmporary; four middle grade fantasies, one of them a mystery, and two YA fantasies; three YA paranormals; and one fantasy that I’m honestly not sure what age category it belongs to. I also got two books on the day they came out in August and just blasted through them. I haven’t done that in a long time and it was really fun. For one of those books I also got to attend a virtual launch party, and I’ll talk about that experience in a bit.

My first book of August was A Constellation of Roses by Miranda Asebedo. Tricks has been on her own and on the run from the foster care system ever since her mom abandoned her. And she’s good at being on her own, because she can steal anything she wants, and she’s never caught. When the police finally do catch up with her, she’s given a choice, prison or going to live with her father’s family in the middle of nowhere. Tricks never met her father, never knew she had other family, but they welcome her with open arms. And it turns out she’s not the only one who do magic with her hands. All the women in her new family have special, powerful talents. As you must know by now, I’m a sucker for found family stories. Throw in a pie shop and a little magic, and I’m hooked. I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend.

After that, I squeezed in the second Upside-Down Magic book, Sticks and Stones, by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. Strange things are happening at Nory’s new school, and everyone is blaming the Upside-down Magic kids. They’re even starting a petition to end the UDM program and kick the UDM kids out of school. Nory and her friends have to figure out who is trying to frame them, and working in a little kittenball wouldn’t go amiss either. This book was just as fun and delightful and full of heart as the last one. By this point I’ve read the third one too, and I can say this series is definitely going on the favorites list unless it goes, well, upside-down.

Then Midnight Sun came out and I was lost. As I’ve discussed at length over here, I loved Midnight Sun despite the many reasons I probably shouldn’t. And then, because Midnight Sun got me stuck back in the Twilight world again, I read The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and Twilight Reimagined: Life and Death, both also by Stephenie Meyer. I think I read Bree Tanner my first year of college, though I didn’t remember it until I reread it. And you know what, it was actually a lot better than I was expecting. Life and Death, though, was another matter. I was torn between hysterical laughter and utter horror as I read it. Far from demonstrating that the story would have worked if Bella was a boy, I actually feel like Life and Death made the mysogyny in the Twilight books that much worse. The two scenes in the original series that involve sexual violence against female characters are simply changed to muggings gone wrong, which is an excellent example of the idea that if the crime can be changed that easily, then it’s only a sexual crime because the victim is a woman and that’s not great. Never mind that Edythe (AKA female Edward, also I can’t get over the spelling of that name) frequently has less agency than Edward, and her inability to stay away from Beau comes across more as because she’s a girl, and I’m just going to stop here because this book made me really angry and I don’t even want to rant about it. Life and Death was an interesting experiment, I guess, but it didn’t work for me. But on the upside, it did the trick of getting me out of Twilight world for the moment.

After I read Midnight Sun, but before I read Bree Tanner and Life and Death, I spent a lot of time trying to find books that interested me enough that I wanted to read them instead of reading Twilight again. I ended up reading Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Did I pick it up because a friend described it as like Twilight for her? Yes, yes I did. But I didn’t find it to be very like Twilight for me. Every ten years, the lord of the valley, the immortal wizard called the Dragon, chooses a seventeen-year-old girl to be his servant for the next ten years. This is the price for the Dragon’s protection against the corrupted wood encroaching on the valley. Agniescka is seventeen this year, but she, like everyone else, is convinced the Dragon is going to choose her best friend, Kasia. Except, of course, he picks Agniescka. Because Agniescka has something the other village girls do not. She has the power to become a witch herself. The strongest aspects of this book for me was Agniescka discovering and grappling with the consequences of her new power and Agniescka and Kasia’s friendship. I didn’t really find all the political intrigue, epic war, and romance parts of the book all that interesting, and on the whole I felt like I was dragging myself through the book, which was unfortunate. It’s entirely possible I was still in recovery from Midnight Sun, but on the whole I’m sorry to say this isn’t a book I would recommend.

Next, I read Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. I’ve never read these books before, and after a lot of friends telling me they were good, and a desire to be able to join in on the discourse around the new movie, I got the first one out of the library and gave it a shot. Artemis Fowl is an evil genius. Also a millionaire. And a criminal mastermind. And did I mention genius. His father has disappeared and his mother is slowly going insane from the grief of losing his father. And Artemis has concocted a plan to get his hands on some fairy gold. Only he might have bitten off a bit more than he could chew when he kidnaps the fairy lieutenant Holly Short and soon finds his house under siege. This book started out slow for me, but it picked up really quickly and on the whole was fun and engaging. I have the second book out of the library now and I can’t wait to read it.

After that, I sped through Midnight At the Barclay Hotel by Fleur T. Bradley. This was a middle grade mystery/ghost story that reminded me a lot of And Then There Were None, the one and only Agatha Christie book I’ve ever read. A whole bunch of people are invited to the Barclay Hotel in the mountains of Colorado for a weekend getaway. Twelve-year-old ghost hunting JJ tags along with his mother, and bookish Penny comes with her grandfather. JJ and Penny befriend Emma, who’s lived at the hotel her whole life. They’re all set to have a fun weekend full of cupcakes and bowling and swimming pools and of course trying to find the ghosts rumored to haunt the Barclay Hotel. But then the butler announces that the owner of the hotel, Mr. Barclay, has been murdered, and all of the adults are suspects, so the kids set out to figure out who the killer is and to prove JJ’s mom didn’t do it. This was such a fun, fast mystery with all kinds of twists and turns. I loved the characters, and the twists were exactly right for the story. This was the second book of August that I snatched up the day it came out and just sped through. (Yes, the first was Midnight Sun.) I also went to the virtual launch party Fleur Bradley held, and it was so cool to hear her talk about how to write a mystery and where the ideas for the Barclay Hotel came from. On the whole, this was a great book and I would definitely recommend.

Then I got The Mystwick School of Musicraft by Jessica Khoury from Audible. It was free with their new Audible+ thing, and I’ve had it on my wishlist for a while, so I grabbed it, and oh I loved it so so much! Amelia Jones wants only to go to Mystwick and become a maestro, basically a super high-powered magical musician, and learn about her mother, who attended Mystwick herself and whom Amelia knows very little about. But then she fails her audition in a horrible way—like she gave the maestro a very, very impressive mustache kind of way. She thinks all hope is lost, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. But then a mix-up leads to her getting a second chance. If, after two months at Mystwick, the maestros think she’s Mystwick material, she can stay. But not only is the work harder than anything she’s ever done in her life, someone is out to get her, and something dark and sinister is closing in on Mystwick. I feel like my description of this book doesn’t do it justice, but it is absolutely fabulous. Magical music stories are right up there with found family stories and space adventures for me, so I was probably bound to love this no matter what. But I adore all the characters, and I was hooked from start to finish. It was fast and fun and full of so many feelings. And the audiobook had actual musicians playing the songs the kids were playing in the background, which made it super epic. I don’t know if there are going to be any sequels to this but I would be so so happy if Mystwick was a series.

Finally, I finished the Harry Potter series with Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. My thoughts on the books themselves haven’t changed, but finishing the series this time felt especially bittersweet to me (mostly, bitter actually). I don’t know when I’ll pick them up again. I do plan to reread them in Italian before I go back to Italy, because I need to practice and I already own them in Italian and never finished them. But I don’t know when I’m going back to Italy. The plan was this October but with Covid of course that’s not happening, and it’s not happening any time soon. Also, as she-who-must-not-be-named continues to demonstrate her despicable transphobia, I just don’t feel right rereading the books again when there are so many other books out there that are just as good and whose authors aren’t horrible people. On the other hand, Harry Potter is such a huge part of who I am—it shaped me as a reader, a writer, and a person—and I’m not ready to just let the books go. So I don’t know, and adding all those mixed feelings to the Battle of Hogwarts was a lot.

And that’s it for August. Let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. And of course I will always happily take more recommendations for found family, magical music, and space adventure stories.

February Reading Roundup

I intended to have this post up well before this, but halfway through writing it something happened to the file and I could no longer open it to finish, so I had to start again and that threw me off. And then of course the coronavirus went from “hey this is a not great thing that’s happening” to “oh my god what is happening?!” I’ve been working at home for a little more than a week, trying to adjust to life where everything from barre classes to writing group has gone virtual. So here I am, finally, to tell you about the books I read in February. If any of these sound interesting to you and you can get your hands on them, these might be some good quarantine reading.

At this point I am mostly over my flu and related sinus infection adventure of January and February, but it took all of February to get to this point and it was quite a saga. I am really hoping that I don’t get this coronavirus because I have been sick enough thanks. In February I also finished my next round of revisions for my middle grade fantasy project. And I read eleven books.

February was a great reading month. I read one whole series and two stand-alones. I finished another series I’ve been reading. And I started six new series this month. I also read a variety of genres and age-groups: a bunch of middle grade, as usual, but some YA and adult too, and also some contemporaries, sci fi, and fantasy of all stripes. Ten of these books were audio, but I did read one book in Braille, the first entire book I’ve read in Braille since last July.

Let’s dive in to the actual books I read.

First, I read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. This is the first book in the Thursday Next series. I actually started this book in Braille during spring semester last year, but stalled when I started studying for the bar. This month I got the audiobook out of the library and tried again, and the audio worked better for me with this book. More on that in a second. The Thursday Next books take place in an alternate 1985 Britain where time travel is possible, genetic engineering has brought the dodo back from extinction, and literature is very, very important. Like people regularly change their name to John Milton, proponents of different literary movements regularly get into violent clashes, and Richard III is this world’s Rocky Horror. It’s a bonkers world, but all the details are integrated so well it’s pretty amazing. Our protagonist,Thursday Next, is a Literatec, or literary detective, and when her old college professor steals the original Martin Chuzzlewitt (Dickens) manuscript, she’s pulled into the investigation and crazy adventures ensue. For me, this book shone in its worldbuilding. It’s brilliant at making the wildly weird seem perfectly normal. The  plot is exciting, and I enjoyed the characters, though this might be the first book I’ve read in a while where I shimped two characters and it turned out not to be canon. The part where I struggled with this book was the pacing. After a fast and furious opening, the book slows way downin the middle. This is where I got stuck last year, and because  I read audio faster than I read in Braille, this is why audio worked better for me this time around. I got through the slow part faster. Later on, there was a moment where the plot takes a detour and the characters go on a weird time adventure that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the main plot of this book, though I’m hoping it will be relevant in the sequels. On the whole this was not my favorite book, but it wasn’t bad either, and the friend who recommended it also said the later books are stronger. I definitely plan to continue this series, and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

Next, I read the final book in The Thickety series, The Last Spell by J. A. White. I don’t want to say too much about the plot in this book because I don’t want to spoil the earlier books, but The Last Spell wrapped up this series so nicely. It was everything I wanted from a series finale and more. I particularly loved the growth that we saw from all the characters in this book. And of course I just love this dark and twisty world. This whole series is one that I definitely recommend now.

Next, I read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Full disclosure, I listened to the audiobook and I can’t remember or spell any of the character or place names in this book, so I’m not even going to try. This is a sci fi book about the ambassador from a small space station traveling to the heart of the empire that has conquered most of known space. She is tasked with both finding out what happened to her predecessor, who has gone silent, and trying to prevent the empire from annexing her station. But the empeare is teetering toward a succession war, something is eating ships on the edges of human-inhabited space, and someone has tampered with the ambassador’s memory link machine which connects her to the past ambassadors to the empire. This is the best I can describe it. There was so much I loved about this book: the worldbuilding was really cool, the characters were great, it was political in tffigue that didn’t make me feel stupid, and there was a great queer romance! But I also felt like the plot built and built and built, and the ending just didn’t seem like enough for all that buildup. That being said, the sequel comes out next year, and I’m still onboard to read that. I’m holding out hope the sequel will strengthen the ending of this book. I do want to say that there is a very graphic brain surgery scene in this book. It was well-done and totally justified for the plot, but it also freaked me out, so if that’s not your thing I’d be aware going into this book and possibly skip over that section.

Next, I reread Tamora Pierce’s two trickster books, Trickser’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen. Goodreads tells me the actual title for this duology is Daughter of the Lioness, but I super don’t like that so I’m pretending it’s not the case. These books follow Ali, daughter of Alanna the Lioness, who is captured by pirates and sold into slavery in the Copper Isles. The trickster god enlists Ali to help the native, brown-skinned islanders overthrow the white colonizers. I’kl say right away that these books aren’t perfect. Ali is an almost ridiculously perfect character, and there’s a big white savior problem. And I’m not even going to talk about the romantic subplot. The love interest is a crow and that is all. Trickster’s Choice also has a lot of fanservice moments where we glimpse characters from the other books (fun but not strictly necessary for this plot), and in a lot of ways it feels like setup for the second book. But Trickster’s Queen will always have a special place in my heart, because it was the first Tamora Pierce I ever read and also probably my first introduction to medieval fantasy. The plot of Trickster’s Queen is really great. There are a couple excellent twists, and it moves along at a really good clip. The characters in these books are also amazing. I think I have to agree with the folks on the Tortall Recall podcast that I would love to see these books from pretty much anyone else’s point of view, but acknowledging that these books do have some problem, they’re still favorites.

In between the two Trickster books, I read Blastaway by Melissa Landers. This is a middle grade space adventure, so it was right up my alley from the start. When Ky accidentally steals his parents’ spaceship—seriously it was an accident—he decides he might as well capitalize on this opportunity and go see the Fasti Star Festival, where manmade stars are unveiled and sent off to new homes in the galaxy. On the way, he runs into a spot of trouble with some space pirates, but he meess a girl named Fig at the festival who helps him shake off the pirates in exchange for a ride back to Earth. What Ky doesn’t know is Fig was hired by the same pirates chasing Ky. Fig is the best sharpshooter in the galaxy, and she’s been hired to blow up the star, which the pirates have loaded with dark matter. She also totally intends to steal Ky’s ship. Crazy space adventures ensue. This book had pretty much everything I love: space, space pirates, science nerds, characters keeping secrets from each other, complicated families, and fun hijinks. One thing that pulled me out of the story is that some of the basic science was just plain wrong. Traveling through wormhols? Cool. If you tell me that in the future humanity can manufacture stars and tow them across the galaxy to create new solar systems to colonize, I’ll follow you there. I’ll even go with it if you tell me one of those stars could be filled with dark matter. But space is a vacuum, guys. No amount of technological advancement can change that. Say it with me, folks: space is a vacuum. And sound cannot travel in a vacuum. There is no sound in space. So every time the characters were out in space and heard two ships crash into each other, or heard an explosion, or even talked to each other without radios, it pulled me out of the story and made me angry all over again. There is no sound in space! But if you can get past what really is a small detail, this was a really great book, and it’s definitely a great MG space adventure and I would totally recommend.

Next I read the first Dark Tower book by Stephen King, The Gunslinger. I got all the way through the fifth book in this series in college and then stopped. I don’t remember why. But The Dark Tower came up at trivia a few weeks ago and I remembered it and decided to take another whack at the series. The Gunslinger follows Roland, who is following the man in black and seeking the dark tower. It moves back and forth between the present as Roland journeys through the desert and into the mountains and Roland’s childhood growing up as a gunslinger in training. It’s sort of like a fantasy western. There are demons and weird magic and some hopping between worlds. Honestly, this was a wild book. I spent a lot of the time having no idea what was going on, honestly. There are also a lot of moments and descriptions in this book that made me really uncomfortable and probably wouldn’t hold up under a critical social justice reading today. If I didn’t remember really enjoying the next few books I probably wouldn’t continue with the series. As it is, I do remember really enjoying the next few books, and if that holds to be true I’ll continue the series. If it doesn’t hold to be true, well maybe there was a reason I stopped reading them in college. We’ll find out.

Next, I read Renegades by Marissa Meyer. This is the first in her superheros trilogy, and I really liked it. Nova is an Anarchist, and Adrian is a Renegade. The Renegades are the superheroes who ended the age of anarchy and brought order and justice back to the city, but Nova has a reason to hate them. This book is brimming with secret identities and cool powers and fun spy stuff. Nova infiltrates the Renegades to try to bring them down from the inside, and Adrian picks her for his team, and all of the feelings get complicated. This was a fast, fun read. It’s  hard not to compare it to The Lunar Chronicles, but I couldn’t help myself sometimes. I’ll refrain here. I will say that the plot was pretty predictable. I saw almost everything coming long before it happened, which was a bit unfortunate, and I felt like we were in the wrong character’s head for a good chunk of the climax, but other than these issues, I really enjoyed this book and can’t wait to finish the series (at this point I’ve already read the second book).

After that, I read Forever, or a Long, Long Time by Caela Carter. This was my Braille book of the month, and I couldn’t put it down. Flora and Julian have been in so many foster homes that they don’t trust it when their new adopted mom says she’s theirs forever. They also don’t believe that they were ever actually born and ever actually had a birth family. So Flora, Julian, and their new mother set out on a journey to discover Flora and Julian’s past. This was just such a sweet, heartfelt book about found family and I loved it to pieces. One reviewer on Goodreads points out that the kids’ questions could have been answered by a trip to city records to see their birth certificates, and I sort of agree, but given the trauma the kids had, I’m not sure it would have worked that easily. But if you’re looking for a middle grade book about foster care and found family that will give you all the feels, I’d definitely give this one a read.

Then I picked up the second Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. In February, I read the first book, The Alloy of Law. Apparently Sanderson is planning multiple trilogies set in different time periods in this world, which sounds really cool. This trilogy is a western, set three hundred years after the end of the first Mistborn trilogy. Wax is a nobleman-turned-constable out on the wild frontier, until he has to come back to the city to save his financially struggling house and gets embroiled in trying to stop a gang that’s stealing from railroads and taking hostages. I really liked the plot and the characters of this book, but I feel like it struggled from being connected to the first Mistborn trilogy. I got too hung up on trying to figure out which religious figure was which character in the original trilogy and how we got from there to here in the development of the world.

Finally, I finished off February with The Strangers by Margaret Peterson Haddix. This is the first book in her new Greystone Secrets series. The second book comes out this spring and I can’t wait. Chess, Emma, and Finn are perfectly normal kids living perfectly normal lives in Ohio (I think?), until one day three kids from Arizona are kidnapped, and these three kids have nearly identical names, the same birthdays, and even look similar to the Greystone kids. And then their mother leaves on a mysterious business trip, and everything just gets really weird. Won’t say more than that because I don’t want to spoil it. This was a fun, fast middle grade book, and I really enjoyed it. The way it’s structured, it does kind of feel like it switches genres two thirds of the way through the book—from contemporary mystery to sci fi—and that isn’t great, but it also makes sense for the plot and I’m not sure how else something like that could have been accomplished. I loved how the author captured each kid’s voice and age so well, and I was so invested in the story. And oh the ending! It’s incredible! Sidenote, if the sequel goes awry I could wind up hating this series but as it stands I loved this first book and would definitely recommend.

And that’s it for February. If any of these books sound interesting to you, they’d certainly make great reading during these socially distant times if you can get your hands on them. And now that I’m getting settled into my telework routine, I’m hoping to get some more blogging done soon. At the very least, I’ll be back next week with my reading roundup for March.

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?

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?

September Reading Roundup

This will be a short post. Honestly I feel a bit silly writing it at all, because I only read two books in September, and I just reviewed both of them this week. But for consistency’s sake, here I am.

September was, as I’ve said, a pretty crazy month. I moved down to D.C. at the end of August. I spent the first half of September learning my way around my new neighborhood in Arlington as well as learning the metro system and the route to and from my new workplace. Then I started work at the FCC. That was a whole new kind of exhausting. During law school, I longingly looked forward to the time when I would work a nine-to-five job and have oodles of time in the evenings to do whatever I wanted. This is not how it works. There’s food to be cooked and dishes to be done and vacuuming and general cleanup, and after eight hours of work I’m tired.

I’m really enjoying my work at the FCC. I’m learning a lot—I still don’t feel like I can do anything on my own but I’m understanding what’s going on a little more every day—and I’m exactly where I want to be. But when I get home from work, I’m tired. And on top of that, I spent a lot of time in September finishing revisions for my middle grade fantasy novel. Those are done now, and since then I’ve read four books and I’m onto a fifth. But I only read two books in September.

One was an audiobook, and one was an audiobook for the first half and then Braille for the third quarter and then text-to-speech for the last quarter because I got lazy. Unfortunately, I had mixed feelings about both books. Collage of the covers of the two books I read in September, Abaddon's Gate and Akata Warrior

First, I read Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey. This was the third book in The Expanse series. After the first book, which was fine, and the second book, which I loved, I found this book to be kind of so-so. I’m not sure if it was because it suffered from being a middle book in the series or if my growing suspicion that this series isn’t for me is correct. I’m going to read the fourth book when I get it out of the library, but if it’s like the third book I might give it up. My full review is right over here.

Second, I read Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okoraforh, the sequel to Akata Witch. I actually started Akata Warrior in August but it took me a long time to get through. There was a lot I liked about this book, particularly Sunny’s relationship with her brother. But it also felt kind of scattered and telly. I admit this might be because of all the times I changed how I was reading it, and I’d definitely be willing to reread this book or read any subsequent books in this world. But on the whole I liked the first book in the series a lot better. And if you’re interested, my full review is here.

And that’s it. I’ve been reading more now that I’m settled into a routine, so expect more reviews soon.

Leviathan Wakes Review

Cover of the book Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. CoreyLast year, when I was working at NIST, one of my roommates was reading the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. He recommended it to me as some of the best science fiction he’s ever read, so I got myself onto the waiting list at the library for the first book. Yes I know that there’s an Amazon show, and one day when I’m not in law school I will watch it, but I’ve always been a book first kind of girl.  In late 2018, I finally got the first book of the series, Leviathan Wakes, out were the library and read it. I read the second book in January, and I’m waiting on the third. Since I’m continuing this series, I wanted to write full reviews for the first two books. This week, I’ll talk about Leviathan Wakes, and I’ll talk about the second book, Caliban’s War, next week.

Leviathan Wakes is set in the far future, where interplanetary space travel is common, and it follows two main characters. Jim Holden is the XO on a big ship that hauls ice from Saturn’s rings back to the asteroid belt and the inner planets. When the ship receives a distress call, Holden takes a small crew and a small ship and goes to help. They find a derelict ship full of dead bodies. And while Holden and his crew are investigating, someone nukes the whole ice hauler. So Holden and his team, the only survivors of the original ice hauler crew, set out to figure out who destroyed their ship and what it has to do with the derelict they were investigating. Meanwhile, Detective Miller is hired by a rich family to find their missing daughter, who ran away to join the revolutionaries in the asteroid belt. Miller’s investigation leads him to the derelict ship Holden and his crew discovered. And so now they’re investigating together. But as they draw closer to the truth, things become more and more dangerous. They’re moving in on a secret that could destroy the solar system and that someone is willing to kill for. At the same time, we have a war brewing between Earth and Mars, and the asteroid belt is preparing to fight for its independence, and all of this is connected.

I liked this book. In general, I really like anything to do with space, so right off the bat I’m in a good place. I did have some problems with it though. Let’s start with what I liked.

For me, the world building in this book was by far its strongest point. It was very detailed and intricate, and all the pieces that we learned about this futuristic solar system became relevant later. I don’t know if the science is accurate, but it’s portrayed with such authority that I believe it, whether it’s accurate science or not.

The plot was pretty strong too. Once I got into the book, there was no putting it down, and the plot and the setting work so well together.

I was less enthusiastic about the characters in this book. I felt like their motivations either weren’t fully explored or weren’t fully articulated to the reader. At least from my perspective, we pretty quickly  pass the point where Holden’s quest for revenge against the people who blew up his ship and Miller’s quest to find the missing girl are the only motivating factors. Too much else is going on. Over and over again, Holden and Miller would make these decisions that just didn’t make any sense to me. Like if there’s some sort of nuclear event on the asteroid and everyone’s being ordered into shelters, but you’re pretty sure that something else is going on, YOU DO NOT GO OPEN A SHELTER TO SEE WHAT’S GOING ON! You get out of there!

Along the same lines, I felt like the characters didn’t develop over the course of the story. They keep making these same types of bad choices for bad reasons, and they just don’t learn from them.

Finally, and this is entirely a personal preference, this book managed to hit all my sci fi squik buttons, from people being thrown out of airlocks to nuclear meltdowns. Things are generally pretty grim. So if you’re looking for a light fluffy space adventure, this is not it.

Overall, as I said,I really liked the plot and the world building of this book, and while the characters got under my skin a little bit, it wasn’t enough to ruin my enjoyment in the book. It struck me as a very foundational book, and it’s the sort of book that I don’t feel like I can form a good opinion about without reading the rest of the series. If the rest of the series is excellent, I will forgive Leviathan Wakes its flaws. If the rest of the series continues to have these same flaws, we’l, then I won’t forgive Leviathan Wakes. I did go on to read the second book in the series, and as I said, I’ll talk about that more next week. But spoiler alert, I liked it a lot more than this one.

In the meantime, have you read Leviathan Wakes? What did you think?