book reviews – Jameyanne Fuller

May Reading Roundup

I hit a bit of a reading slump in May. I only read seven books this month. Part of it was that I struggled with a few of the books I was reading. The rest of it was being busy with the perpetual novel edits, going to a friend’s wedding, and then life becoming very, very stressful.

In mid-May, I had an experience while Neutron was guiding me that clarified some odd behavior I’ve been seeing from him in the last few months. This set off a flurry of vet visits and then ophthalmology visits and then calls with the Seeing Eye and finally a visit from the Seeing Eye. I actually wound up going up to New Hampshire to see the veterinary ophthalmologist we’ve seen in the past, because the new ophthalmologist my vet in D.C. recommended couldn’t see me until late June and this felt more urgent. The long and short of all this is that Neutron has iris atrophy, which means his pupils can’t constrict in bright light. Right now it’s minor, and after working with the Seeing Eye, the consensus is Neutron’s guide work is still perfectly safe, but it’s definitely something I’m going to keep an eye on. Pun intended. I’m so glad this is how it all resolved, because I was well-aware that the alternative was probably retirement sooner rather than later and I was not ready for that. So though it turned out well, it made for a very stressful few weeks.

But you can see why I didn’t read as much this month and why it took me so long to get this post up. I’m just glad I did it before the end of June.

Collage of the seven books I read in May: Talking to Dragons, Red White and Royal Blue, Lost Moon, His Majesty's Dragon, Sweet Sixteen Princess, Valentine Princess, and Princess on the Brink Like I said, I read seven books in May. Four were continuations of series I’ve been reading. One was the start of a new series. One was a stand-alone. And one was a science/history nonfiction. Looking at the picture, it was a very pink month. Let’s dive in.

I started May with the last book in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. This book takes place sixteen years after the cliffhanger ending of the third book. Daystar’s mother, Cimorene, has sent him out into the Enchanted Forest with no explanation and only the instruction to not come back until he knows why she sent them out there. Daystar winds up on a quest to reach the castle, accompanied by a magic sword he doesn’t understand, a fire witch whose kagic is ruled by her emotions, and a host of other characters, battling the usual wizards and swamp monsters and so on. This book was fine. The big problem I had is that because we’ve read the first three books, we know exactly why Daystar’s mother sent him out into the forest and what the secret Daystar doesn’t know, so a lot of the tension was lost for me. I understand Patricia C. Wrede wrote this book first in the series, and that makes more sense, but coming as the fourth book it just didn’t work for me. There were other things that also didn’t work, like how there just weren’t enough feelings for my taste during the resolution, and how much I kind of hated Cimorene in this book. On the whole, I would probably recommend the first book in the series, Dealing with Dragons, and maybe the second, but I’m not sure I would recommend the rest of the books in the series.

Next, I read Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. This is set in an alternate 2020—no pandemic, a fictional democratic president—and is the story of the president’s son falling in love with the prince of England. This book was so much fun. There was a bit too much description of the sex for my taste, and I’ve confirmed that romance novels really aren’t my favorite thing because I was more interested in the subplots than the romantic relationships, but on the whole this book was really quite delightful.

After that, I read Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. This is the book Apollo 13 that the movie is based on. I found the science and the history really interesting, and obviously the drama of the story of Apollo 13 is gripping and powerful. I read this book in high school and wrote a history paper on it, so it wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me. What I was surprised by was also how dry the writing was. Like this is a high stakes story. The spaceship is broken and we’re not sure if they’re going to make it home. But honestly the number of times I fell asleep while listening to the audiobook, woke up and turned it off an hour later, and then felt that I could have gone on without rewinding and wouldn’t have missed much, was unfortunately high. I described this book to my parents as simultaneously one of the most interesting and most boring things I’ve read. If you’re interested in delving deeper into the science of what was happening inn the Apollo 13 mission, then I’d definitely recommend giving this a read (and that was what I was interested in, so I’m glad I read it on the whole). But otherwise, I’d say you’re probably better off just watching the movie. It’s good.

Then I read the first Temeraire book, His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, and oh my goodness I loved it. William Lawrence is a captain in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. When his ship captures a French ship and they discover a dragon egg on board, and then the egg hatches, Lawrence becomes bonded with the baby dragon, and they set off to join the British Aerial Corps to train and then fight in the war from dragonback. I loved Temeraire, the dragon. I also loved all the other characters we got to meet. The book was well-paced and exciting. And maybe because of what I was going through with Neutron at the time I was reading this, I actually noticed some interesting paralells with working with a service dog. For example dragons live a really long time, so they will have a series of handlers, and that can be really hard for them. It reminded me of how a guide dog user will have many guide dogs and how a lot of us say that is the hardest part of having a guide dog. That really spoke to me, as did the bond between dragon and handler. The only part of this book that I was not a big fan of is how Levitas’s subplot was handled. I don’t want to give spoilers, but Levitas deserved so much better, and I am prepared to shout that from the rooftops. I read the second Temeraire book in June, so I’ll be talking about that soon, and I’m on the waiting list to get the third one from the library.

Finally, I read three Princess Diaries books in may, the novellas Sweet Sixteen Princess and Valentine Princess, and the next full-length installment in the series, Princess on the Brink, all by Meg Cabot. The two novellas were fun, but they also felt very similar in that they’re all about Mia being worried about her relationship with Michael because she either wants or doesn’t want something and Michael seems to want the opposite, only to find that if they’d just communicated better it would have been fine, and in the end, everybody goes home happy. Princess on the Brink was quite a book, , and I’m not exactly sure in what way I mean that. Michael is going off to Japan, both to prove to Mia’s family that he’s worthy of her and also to get some space from Mia because he’s distressed by the fact that she won’t sleep with him. Mia is devistated. Mia decides to sleep with Michael in an attempt to get him to stay with her in New York. This goes terribly, because to be clear, this is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea. I just felt like Mia was so so stupid in this book, like so stupid, and we’re now eight books into the series, and I would have thought she would have learned something—anything—from the last seven books and three novellas. Suffice it to say I was frustrated by this book but interested to see where we’re going next.

And that’s it for May. Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? I’ll be back soon with my June books and some exciting writing news.

January Reading Roundup

Happy February everybody! I am always a big fan of the month of February in general, because it’s short, and it just doesn’t seem to drag as much as January, and before you know it we’re in March and springtime is in sight. This year in particular, when winter has been long and cold and so so difficult, I am very glad to find myself more than halfway through February. Almost to the end of February at this point because as usual I am a slow poke.

And as usual, I meant to post this sooner, but I am embroiled in novel edits, and I also returned to my apartment in Virginia and that was complicated.

Collage of the fifteen books I read in January: Save the Cat! Writes a Novel; Because of Winn-Dixie; Everything, Everything; The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue; The Thief; MiNRS; Cemetery Boys; The Big Shrink; The Princess Diaries; The Princess Bride; and all five Murderbot books. I read fifteen books in January. Many of them were quite short, which is how I got through so many. I was also almost definitely avoiding stress with books, which isn’t the worst thing in the world but which I’ve realized I need to be aware of. But I also just loved so many of these books.

Two of the books I read were in Braille (yay!), and the rest were audio. It was a pretty even split between fantasy and science fiction, with a couple contemporary books and one writing advice book as well. And none of these books were rereads.

First, I read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab. I actually started this book last November but didn’t finish it before my copy from the library expired, and I didn’t get it out of the library again until the very end of December. When Addie LaRue runs away from a wedding she doesn’t want in 1714 France, she makes a deal with a demon: she will have immortality, time to live her life, but no one will remember her. Then, three hundred years later, she meets someone who does remember her. This is the best I can describe this book. It spans 300 years of Addie’s life, crossing continents and wars, and it has such a beautiful, flowing, lyrical style. And I just love it and will definitely recommend it.

Next, I read The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, the first of her Queen’s Thief series. This is another one that I started earlier in 2020, didn’t finish before the library copy expired, and then didn’t get it out of the library to finish it for a long, long time. The Thief follows Gen, a convicted thief who is hired by the king to steal a mystical gem from a hidden temple. Honestly, I struggled with this book. I didn’t really like any of the characters, and most of it was kind of boring. I was very intrigued by the ending, however. Without spoiling anything, this book is one that pulls off an effective twist that didn’t make me mad, even though the twist concerns our first person narrator and it’s something our first person narrator knew all along. I may go on to read the sequel, because it promises to have some fun political intrigue.

In January I also powered through all of the Murderbot Diaries books by Martha Wells, All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, and Network Effect. The first four are more like novellas than novels, and the fifth one is a full length novel. These books follow a security unit who hacked its control systems so that it can slack on its job and watch television, but it gets embroiled in a lot of dangerous situation with its clients and is generally trying to figure out what to do with itself now that it is free. I absolutely adored these books. Murderbot is just plain amazing! I love the characters; I love the voice; the plot is technical but not so technical I couldn’t follow it; the world is appropriately awful; and there is just so much wonderful snark. The sixth book comes out and day before my birthday and I am just so excited!

I also read MiNRS by Kevin Sylvester, the first book in his MiNRS series. Twelve-year-old Christopher lives on a mining colony on the asteroid Perses, and his biggest worries are whether his parents will agree to let him hold a party celebrating the upcoming communications blackout with Earth and why his best friend, Elena, keeps looking at him like that. But then on the eve of the blackout terrorists after the ore mined on Perses attack, killing almost all the adults, and Christopher becomes the leader of a small band of kids determined to survive in the mining tunnels. This book didn’t make a ton of sense, as in it didn’t feel as logically sound as I wanted it to, but it was definitely fun. I’ve started the sequel, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.

Next, I read Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. My agent recommend I read this to help with some structure problems with my space adventure project, and I found it super helpful. The book is based on the popular screenwriting book Save the Cat!, and it goes through all the beats you should hit when writing a novel, with a lot of explanations and examples. I particularly enjoyed all the examples of popular books included. This is one of those things where I don’t know how many times I’ve had three act structure explained to me but it never really clicked. Then I read this book, and something about the way everything was explained and the examples, it clicked. If you’re a writer, I definitely recommend this book. I have in fact been throwing it at everyone in my writing group.

Then I read Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas. This was another book that I started in 2020 and didn’t finish because of the library. I got too many books out of the library at the end of 2020, okay? Cemetery Boys is about a trans boy, Yadriel, who belongs to a family who can see and communicate with spirits and help them pass on. In this family, the men are the ones who help spirits pass on, while the women have healing magic. Yadriel has been trying to convince his family, without success, to let him take his place among the men of his family. So he undergoes the ritual to gain his powers by himself, with his cousin’s help. Then, when he accidentally summons the ghost of a dead classmate, Julian, he’s pulled into the mystery of what happened to Julian so that be can help Julian pass on, only to find that he doesn’t want to let Julian go. I admit that I had a hard time getting into this world, but once I did, I was just along for the ride with this book. I loved the characters, and the world was so rich and intricate. Most of all, I loved the way the characters’ relationships grow and change over the course of the book, romantic relationships, friendships, and familial relationships. This book is also a great mix of fun adventures and grappling with serious, heartfelt feelings and issues. I loved it.

Next, on a way lighter note, I read Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. I picked this up because it was one of the examples discussed in Save the Cat! and I hadn’t ever read it. Opal and her father have just moved to a new town, and Opal doesn’t have any friends and is starting to really feel the absence of her mother, who left when she was little. When she adopts a stray dog, Winn-Dixie, she begins to make friends and become closer to her father. This book was just plain adorable. The characters are so vivid, and Winn-Dixie stole my heart. Minor spoiler alert, I was a little worried as we neared the end that Winn-Dixie was going to die, it I was hesitating to keep reading, because I’m still just such a mess about losing Mopsy and I don’t think I could stand to read a book where the dog dies. But Winn-Dixie is fine. So if you haven’t read Because of Winn-Dixie, it’s a really cute book, and you should check it out.

I also picked up Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon, another book discussed in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Maddie has an autoimmune disease that basically means she can’t go outside because she’s allergic to everything. Then new neighbors move in, and she befriends Olly, a boy her age, first by talking through written signs and miming messages through the window, then online. They fall in love, and Maddie has to decide how far she’s willing to push the boundaries set up to protect her in order to be with Olly. There were definitely some things I enjoyed about this book. The way the characters get to know each other was really fun, and Maddie has some great character growth. It reminded me a bit of The parts I loved in Fault in Our Stars. And then we hit the ending, and I don’t want to give spoilers, but I could do an awful lot of ranting about disability representation and just how much I hate this twist. Ultimately the twist ruined the book for me, and I can’t recommend this one.

Then I got the sixth Upside-Down Magic book, The Big Shrink by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. In this book, the kids in the UDM class start a craze at their school for these amazing dragon toys that are kind of like living pets, and suddenly the other kids want to hang out with them, which is new and exciting, and then the teachers get mad because the kids are always playing with the dragons and ban them from the school. The kids plan a revolution. This was a very fun book for me. It reminded me of my own days in fifth grade, when I was circulating petitions to get a longer lunch time (I still think fifteen minutes was too short) and getting the entire class to play squish the lemon until we broke the slide and starting a bottle cap collection craze that spawned quite a few disagreements. I saw a few Goodreads reviews that didn’t really like it as much as the other books, but for me, it felt very realistic and was quite fun.

I also read The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot. This is another one that I never read as a kid. I guess at this point I’m just on a kick of reading middle grade books I missed as a kid. I think I’ve talked before about how I missed a lot of books as a kid because easy access to digital Braille didn’t really come along until I was in high school, and hardcopy Braille and audiobooks were expensive and pretty big-deal gifts. So sidenote, I’m always taking recommendations for your favorite books from middle school. Back to The Princess Diaries. I do know I’ve seen the movie for this one, but didn’t really remember much of it. Mia is a normal fourteen-year-old in New York City. All she wants is to grow breasts, get a boyfriend, and generally not be a freak. But then her father comes to visit and guess what? Mia is a princess. This book was really, really fun. Mia’s voice is just superb, and while some of the jokes and references might be a bit dated (the Trumps keep coming up and I cringe every time), it was just a great read. I’ve since read the second book and watched the first movie, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the rest.

After that, I read The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I absolutely love the movie, and I’ve always heard the book is better. I totally believed this, because the book is always better, but honestly I didn’t feel like the book added to my understanding of the movie. In fact, I found the book to feel kind of flat, as opposed to the lush, intense world of the movie. On the other hand, I did like the framing device in the book quite a lot. On the whole, this is a rare case where I prefer the movie to the book.

And that’s it for January. I’ll be back, hopefully sooner rather than later, to talk about the books I’ve read in February, which I’m just as excited about. In the meantime, have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? And definitely pass along your favorite books from middle school so I can read them too.

The Heart of Betrayal and Cliffhangers

Cover of The Heart of Betrayal by Mary E. Pearson At the end of 2019, I read the Remnant Chronicles by Mary E. Pearson and absolutely loved them. In November and December of 2020, I reread the series, and I’m finally doing what I started to do in 2019 and never finished: raving to you all about them. A couple months ago, I wrote about the first book, The Kiss of Deception, and about how Mary E. Pearson pulls off a twist midway through the book that manages to be surprising without coming out of left field. You can read that post here. Now I’m back with another book review and writing topic post, and this time I’m talking about the second book in the series, The Heart of Betrayal, and what makes a good cliffhanger. Obviously, since I’m talking about the second book in a series, spoilers for The Kiss of Deception are unavoidable. If you think you might want to read the series, this probably isn’t the post for you. Also, since the writing topic I want to talk about is cliffhangers, there will also probably be some spoilers for the second book. I will make sure to flag them in the text, but as usual I will do a general spoiler-free review first before diving more deeply into my discussion of cliffhangers.

The Heart of Betrayal picks up right where The Kiss of Deception left off. Rafe has caught up with Kaden and Lia, and he’s lied to Kaden to accompany Lia into Venda. Rafe’s men are going to try and sneak into the city to help Rafe and Lia get out. But while Lia has nothing but revulsion and fear for the rulers of Venda, she cannot help but befriend the common people, and soon they are looking to her as more than just a prisoner princess. They believe, as Lia believes, that she is the one promised in the long ago prophecy Venda, founder of her namesake country, made before her husband pushed her off a wall. Lia is also growing closer to Kaden, much as she doesn’t want to. I feel like I’m doing an utterly terrible job of describing this book, but it’s really good. It’s full of political intrigue and secrets and the characters all have so much heart and resolve.

The Heart of Betrayal is certainly slower than the first book in the series. It’s more of a slow build with a lot of tension than the first book, which was pretty action-packed. We spend a lot of time getting to know Venda, and the characters all spend a lot of time getting to know each other, especially now that they all know each other’s true identities. But even though it is slower, Mary E. Pearson crafts such strong tension you can practically taste it, and it’s actually really important that we get to know Venda and the other characters so well, because that makes it real to the readers as well as Lia, and we can then fully understand her conflict as the book continues. And then of course we learn there are traitors in the court of Morrigan, Lia’s kingdom, and Venda is building an army to conquer Morrigan. And then the plans are laid, they go to escape, and all heck breaks loose.

The Heart of Betrayal works really well as both a sequel to the first book in The Remnant Chronicles and as a lead-in to the third book, which I will talk about soon. It is complex and intricate, but it is also easy to follow and full of wonderful feelings. And the ending is just fabulous

Which brings us to cliffhangers.

I think cliffhangers are something that are incredibly fun for a writer, because we live to torture our readers, but they can also be incredibly frustrating for a reader, especially if they have to wait a long time for the next book. There are a few ways to do a cliffhanger.

You could leave absolutely nothing resolved. Cassandra Clare does this at the end of the second Dark Artifices book. The book ends right as something absolutely terrible and tragic happens. Another good example of this is the ending of the third season of Castle, which ends right after someone is shot.

Another way to construct a cliffhanger is to leave the main character at a point where they have failed in their journey. This is similar to the first way, but often the author will also give the reader something else, a new element that gives the character the impetus to act, which they will do at the start of the next book. The Kiss of Deception actually does something similar to this. Lia has failed to escape, she has watched her brother die, she is surrounded by hostile soldiers and it is likely she will be killed anyway once they arrive in Venda. But then Rafe arrives, and even though he can’t overpower 500 soldiers to rescue Lia, they are now facing this together and there’s hope for an escape in the second book. The ending of Cinder by Marissa Meyer also does this quite well. Spoiler alert: Cinder is in prison, having failed to convince Kai not to marry Queen Levana and also having exposed herself as a Lunar. Queen Levana is going to take her back to the moon to execute her, but it’s this or war with Earth. Then Dr. Errland shows up with a new prosthetic hand and foot for Cinder and the news that she is the long-lost lunar princess and rightful heir to the throne, and we’re left with Cinder’s decision to break out of prison, which she does at the start of the next book. End spoilers.

The third kind of cliffhanger, and the kind I want to talk about today, is the kind of ending where almost everything is resolved except for one, maybe two things, and then there’s one final punch. The second Hunger Games book, Catching Fire, is a good example of this. Spoiler alert: Katniss has blown out the forcefield. She and several others have escaped the arena. But Peeta has been captured. And District 12 has been destroyed. End spoilers.

This might be my favorite kind of cliffhanger,. I tend to find the first kind, where we’re left in medias res, to be kind of jarring. And I’m generally frustrated by the second, though I did like the ending of Cinder. I just feel like the first and second options generally feel like the writer just hasn’t taken us all the way through the story. The third type, on the other hand, feels like we’ve reached the end of the story but the door is open for more and then we’re literally punched through that door. We the readers have taken a breath, we may even be relieved, and then something changes and it’s clear it’s not over.

I’m going to break this down in The Heart of Betrayal. Spoiler alert: The plan to escape goes awry. There’s a huge battle on the terrace. The Comizar has murdered the child Lia befriended, Aster. Lia has stabbed the Comizar. A huge battle ensues, and in the midst of it, Lia is proclaimed to the people to be the new comizar of Venda. Lia, Rafe, and Rafe’s men make a run for it. They jump onto their raft to get down the river (the only way to get across to freedom). They’re going to make it. They’re going to make it. And then bad guys show up and start shooting at them, and both Lia and Rafe fall off the raft into the river. Lia is shot, she can’t get her heavy dress off, and then she goes under. And then we switch to Rafe’s pov when he finds her on the riverbank. They are safely out of Venda, but as Rafe carries Lia on foot, we are left with him being unsure if she is going to survive. Spoilers over.

The ending of The Heart of Betrayal is wonderfully brutal. Just when we think they’re going to make it, things go wrong and we’re left unsure and dying for more. It’s everything that I personally love in a good cliffhanger.

If you’ve read The Heart of Betrayal, I’d love to know your thoughts on the whole book, particularly the ending. I would also love to know what kind of cliffhangers are your favorite and why. And of course if there’s a kind of cliffhanger I didn’t think of or if you would categorize them differently, I’d love to discuss. In the meantime, you should really give The Remnant Chronicles a read.

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!

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 Murder I 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.

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 Witching I also read twelve books in October. Wow! This brigns me to a total of 80 books in 2019, and so I’m back on track to meet my goal of reading one hundred books this year, but also I’m straining my collage app to the limit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing Things Up Again

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

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

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

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

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

The Grownup Review

Cover of The Grownup by Gillian Flynn My last book of April was another fast and furious read, easy to squeeze in as a study break. Our final law school book club selection was The Grownup by Gillian Flynn. I say final book club pick, but we’ve actually decided to continue on using skype or google hangouts after law school ends, which I am very happy about. I will wax poetical about how much I love this book club at a later date.

The Grownup definitely fell into the category of books that I was surprised that I liked. I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn a few years ago, and I wasn’t a huge fan for a number of reasons. But I really enjoyed The Grownup.

This book was originally published as a short story in an anthology, but was republished later as its own book. So it was really short, and really easy to read in one sitting in between studying for copyright and legal profession.

Because it’s so short, it’s hard to give a good description without spoiling the whole thing, but I’ll do my best. Our main character is basically a con artist, and her current occupation is being a psychic, among other things. So when Susan comes into the shop complaining of a troubled teenaged stepson that may be caused by a haunted house, our protagonist (whose name I am totally forgetting) goes to “cleanse” the house, make some money, whatever. Then she sees the house, meets the exceptionally creepy teenage boy, and is faced with the very real possibility that he may indeed be possessed by the house. And I can’t say more than this.

I liked how short this was. The writing was really good, and the characters were sharp and vivid and quirky. The twists, because of course there are twists, were all really twisty.

I will say the ending wasn’t entirely satisfying. It was open-ended, which wasn’t the problem, but it just dicn’t make a ton of sense given the circumstances. I wish one of three things had been the case: (1) the book had ended a few pages earlier than it did, (2) the current ending was set up a bit more in the earlier part of the story, or (3) the current ending was stretched out just a bit more to allow the readers to settle into it a bit more.

One of the things that we talked about in book club this week is how Gillian Flynn plays with genres and tropes in this book. We get like supernatural gothic, creepy child, evil stepmother, and a whole bunch more. It was really fun to see all of them turned on their head.

On the whole, this was a fast and creepy book, and I’m still thinking about it even though I read it a week ago. It’s haunting, but in a good way. If you like genre-bendy mysteries and particularly short ones, this may be the book for you.

I’ll be back soon with a rundown of everything I read in April and more fun Harry Potter notes, but in the meantime, have you read The Grownup? Do you agree with my assessment?

City of Ghosts Review

Hello from the other side of finals. Almost. I still have a final project for my governing virtual worlds class to finish up, but the exams are done, and they’re always the roughest.

Cover of City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab Last week, I read City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab. I read her Shades of Magic series two summers ago, and I loved it, so when I found out she’s working on a middle grade series I was so excited, and I was not disappointed.

Cassidy Blake’s parents co-write books that are half history, half ghost story, and now they’re taking Cassidy on a whirlwind summer of the world’s most haunted cities for a TV show. Cassidy’s parents don’t really believe in ghosts, but Cassidy does. Because a year ago, she was in an accident where she nearly drowngh, and a ghost saved her. That ghost is name Jacob, and he’s now Cass’s best friend. So Cass, her parents, her ghost friend, and their cranky cat are off to Edinburgh Scotland for some good old-fashioned haunted city fun times. Cass explores the city, getting to see the birthplace of Harry Potter (I’m jealous), and all the creepy graveyards and catacombs (less jealous because they are sooo creepy). But she gets more than that. She meets a new friend who tells her what she is now that she can see ghosts and what she’s supposed to do with that power. And there’s an evil child-kidnapping ghost after her. Cassidy has to confront the ghost with her new powers or her own life might be in danger. Again.

This was a great read. It was fast and fun, and just my right level of creepy. I really loved Cass and Jacob and all the new friends they make in their adventures. The villain was just so deeply creepy and powerful, and I loved watching Cass learn how to use her power and get stronger and more confident with it. The dynamic between Cass and Jacob is also amazing, but Jacob doesn’t want Cass to learn to use her powers. He’s worried that learning what she is and what she can do will cause her to send him on so he can’t “haunt” her anymore. Also, everything was described so well that I felt like I was really there experiencing it all with Cass.

It was a short book too, which was nice as a mid-finals read. But a lot is packed into that short book, so it didn’t feel short at all, and it moves at a great clip.

I have one complaint, and it is so nitpicky and says a lot more about me than the book. There’s a point in the beginning when Cass describes something as that time in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when they’re in the square in Grimauld Place and someone taps the wall with their wand and the headquarters of the Order appears and so other houses slide out of the way. AND THAT IS NOT HOW IT HAPPENS!

Sorry. I’m good.

But really there is no wand tapping in Grimauld Place. That’s Diagon Alley. In Grimauld Place they show Harry the note from Dumbledore telling him where the headquarters is and it just appears.

Okay so yeah this irked me. But I’m good now I swear.

But other than the fact that I get way too upset about incorrect Harry Potter references, City of Ghosts was a really great book. Also the next book in the series is coming out in September, and I can’t wait. If you’re looking for a fast, fun, only slightly creepy read, this is the book for you. If you’ve already read this book, what did you think? Let’s chat in the comments.

When Dimple Met Rishi Review

Hello all. Sorry for the slight delay since my last post. The end of the semester hit, and with it came not only finals but yet another awful cold. I’m on the mend now, and one final is finished, so it’s back to business as usual. Mostly. I still have two exams and a project to finish up before this weekend, so if I drop off the face of the Earth again for a bit that’s why.

Cover for When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon Last week, I read When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon. It took me a bit to get my thoughts together on this one, because I am so conflicted.

When Dimple Met Rishi follows Dimple and Rishi the summer before they go off to college. Both are the children of Indian immigrants to America. Dimple is pretty rebellious. She is totally uninterested in her parents’ traditions, styles, and desires. She just got into Stanford, and all she cares about is coding. She is certainly not interested in snagging an ideal Indian husband. Rishi is pretty much the exact opposite. He is pretty traditional, and he follows his parents’ wishes even when they conflict with his own. He takes being the eldest son of the family very seriously. At the start of the novel, Dimpble and Rishi have never met. But their parents are old friends, and they’re hoping to set up an arranged marriage between Dimple and Rishi. Dimple wants to go to this pre-college coding program for the summer, and to her surprise, her parents let her go. When she gets there, she meets Rishi, who is like “hi future wife,” because he knows what’s going on, and Dimple is like “WHAT?!” And that’s the start of the book.

Full disclosure, I picked this book up after watching a negative review on YouTube and thinking, “This book sounds cool. What is this person talking about?”

So I really, really wanted to like this book. I mean it’s about an Indian-American girl who loves coding and is designing her own app. Like how cool is that? Throw in parents trying and failing to arrange her marriage and this was just set up for a lot of fun. And I did like the first half of the book a lot. It was a lot of fun and so much cute. Dimple and Rishi are made partners for this summer program to design their app, because of course they are. So they have to work together, and they become nerdy friends, and they’re designing their app and having fun and facing down bullies at the summer program. And then Dimple starts falling for Rishi—Rishi fell for her a long time ago—but she’s honest about not wanting a serious relationship because she wants to focus on her coding career, and Rishi listens to her. So they go on a really cute not-date. And I’m still okay with this.

But after this point things fell apart for me, much to my chagrin. For one thing, we lost the cool coding stuff and app design part of the summer program. Everything became focused on them trying to win this talent show which, admittedly, would give them additional money to design their app, but Bollywood dancing has nothing to do with coding. And okay this is a small quibble, but around the halfway point of the book we really do lose the coding stuff, and this book could be happening at any pre-college program. Second, for someone who insists over and over and over again that she doesn’t want to be one of those girls who gives up everything she wants for a guy, well she kind of does just that. And okay she’s not totally okay with it, but she does it. And for a guy who is so great at sticking up for himself and for Dimple when it comes to the other kids in the program, Rishi lets Dimple bulldoze over him all the time. Which brings me to my next concern about consent. I don’t want to go into details, but there’s a scene, and if the gender roles were reversed in that scene, everybody would be shouting about consent.

I admit that these are all relatively small quibbles, and for me, the book could have been saved by a strong ending. I don’t want to give spoilers, but the ending was way too neat for me. My vaguest possible description is everybody gets what they want and realizes the other one was right and they all live happily ever after. Honestly, the way things were going in the book, I wanted an ending where everything blew up in their faces at the end of the summer program, they broke up, and they walked away having learned something about themselves. This would have been a good ending and made all my other problems with the book totally acceptable, if not strong plot points. But this is not the ending, and the ending that was… it just solved all the problems too neatly and made everything too okay for me.

One last thing I’ll say is that I saw a few book reviews on YouTube expressing that this book was inaccurate to the experience of growing up in the United States as the child of Indian immigrants. The author grew up in India herself, so this isn’t really an #OwnVoices story. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up the child of Indian immigrants in the United States—that’s not part of my own life experience or any research I’ve done—so I’m not going to chime in on that particular commentary about this book. If it’s true, though, I find it troubling.

All in all, as much as I loved the first half of this book, and as much as I wanted to love the second half of this book, it just didn’t work for me. I will say that my perusal of Goodreads reviews shows that a lot of people absolutely adore this book, and a lot of people hate it. I fall somewhere in the middle. It could have been so great, but for me, it just wasn’t. It wasn’t absolutely terrible, but it did have some serious problems, and overall the biggest reason it didn’t work for me is the ending.

If you haven’t read When Dimple Met Rishi, I hope my review is helpful for you to decide if you want to read it. Do keep in mind that opinions are widely spread on this one, so my opinion is certainly not the end-all-be-all on whether this is a good book (actually my opinion is never the end-all-be-all. That’s what opinion means). But since opinions are so divided on this one, I’m also really curious what others who have read this think. Do you agree with my opinion? Do you think I’m totally crazy? Let’s chat in the comments.

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