Books – Jameyanne Fuller

January 2023 Update

Hello friends! I can’t believe we’re already at the end of January. It feels like this month has flown by, and also like it has moved incredibly slowly. In other words, it feels like it’s January.

I know one of my goals for 2023 was to post more on my blog (a perennial theme at this point), but my January was packed and stressful, so I’m letting myself off the hook for this month. I do have a whole list of things I want to write about, so stay tuned.

So what happened in January?

I had knee surgery.

Turns out knee surgery is a pretty big deal.

I spent the first half of January in a muddle of really bad pre-surgery anxiety. That comes with the territory when you’ve had fifteen eye operations as a kid. But everyone at the hospital was really fabulous at making sure I was calm and comfortable, and the surgery went well.

Then I spent the second half of January in a muddle of recovering. It’s been a lot, and it hasn’t been without hiccups. My stomach objected to the whole enterprise, forcefully and in just about every way a stomach could object. Then I had something that was possibly a blood clot. But I’m improving every day. I started using crutches a week after surgery, and now, two weeks after surgery, I’m down to one crutch and I’ve started physical therapy. Basically, I’m mobile enough to be very frustrated with how far I still have to go. I hope to be back on a bike this summer, but I’d also happily settle for being rid of this giant brace on my leg and being able to walk around without pain and without my kneecap dislocating. I do want to give a huge shout-out to all the family and friends who have stayed with me, taken care of me and my Neutron boy, sent cookies, and just dropped by to hang out and cheer me up.

With all this going on, most of my other regular pursuits have fallen a bit by the wayside. I only read three books in January, partly because I’m busy and partly because I’m still in a reading slump, though I think I might be coming out of it. My favorite book of January was THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND, the first book in Jonathan Stroud’s BARTIMAEUS TRILOGY. It had both a really compelling and humorous voice and really well done tension. I’m halfway through the second book and enjoying that quite a lot too. Perhaps I will write a blog post about the whole series when I’ve finished.

I also really enjoyed THE MARVELLERS by Dhonielle Clayton. This was a really fun, creative, and diverse take on the traditional magical school story, and I’d definitely recommend everyone check it out—though full disclosure, I did struggle with the audiobook narrator for this one, and I usually don’t have problems with audiobook narrators. I’ve been reading a lot of magical school stories in the last few months, so I’m thinking I might do a post on what those stories look like these days.

After a few weeks without much progress on my own work, I am writing again, slowly but surely. This is also helping to improve my mood immensely. I’m one of those authors who gets very cranky when I don’t write for more than a few days. I’ve decided that my writing goal for 2023 is to finish the two manuscripts I’m working on. If I have time, I have a stretch goal of going to look back at one of my older projects and do some work toward reimagining it and/or disecting it for parts, but that’s definitely a stretch goal. Otherwise, I’ve been brainstorming some ideas for fun writing posts for this blog.

Oh, one more thing. I received two short story acceptances in January. The contracts aren’t all signed, sealed, and delivered yet, so I can’t share more details, but watch this spot! I’m really excited for you to read both of these little tales.

More soon! I hope your 2023 is off to a good start and you have a happy February!

Reading, Writing, and Swimming in July

In my last blog post, I mentioned that I wanted to try something new, more of a general life update than just a roundup of all the books I read that month. The monthly reading roundup posts were starting to feel tedious to me, and I was struggling to have energy to post other things. My hope is these posts will be more fun for me, and you, going forward and that they will give me more energy to write other things for this blog. So let’s give it a shot!

July was a pretty good month. Yes it was a million degrees in D.C. all the time, but I was able to wait to take walks with Neutron at least until the sun went down. It wasn’t much cooler then, but at least we weren’t being baked alive. I did a lot of outdoor barre classes, which was fun, and at the end of the month, the studio opened up for indoor classes, mask optional if you’re vaccinated (and they check, which makes me very happy). I also finished rewatching all of the Tangled series in Italian, and I’ve so far really been enjoying the adaptation for The Mysterious Benedict Society.

In mid-July, my friends and I went up to New Jersey for a long weekend. It was meant to be a writing retreat, and some of us got writing done, but mostly it was hours of playing a travesty of volleyball, with a beach ball, in the pool. We christened our game “sport,” because we writerly types are so creative. It was a great weekend all around. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in a really long time, and I went back to D.C. feeling much less stressed about the state of the world.

In other good news, one of my friends at this retreat had a cold (she tested negative for Covid, otherwise she wouldn’t have come), and I did not get sick. This was the first time I can definitively say I was exposed to germs since I found out I had lime disease at the start of the pandemic. Staying at home for a year and a half and wearing a mask whenever I go out has meant I haven’t been sick in all that time, which has been wonderful and such a welcome change from the constant illness I was dealing with all through my last year of law school, studying for the bar, and my first few months in D.C., but I had no idea if my lime had become chronic or if the antibiotics had worked. So this weekend I was away with my friends, I knew for sure I had been exposed to a cold, and I did not get sick. I am absolutely delighted, because I’m pretty sure this means the antibiotics worked and I don’t have chronic lime. I feel really lucky and so relieved.

I read fourteen books in July, bringing my total for the year up to 84 books. I finished the Princess Diaries series and for the most part really enjoyed the ending (though I wish we got to actually see the royal wedding). I also finished the Greystone Secrets trilogy by Margaret Peterson Haddix. I read the first two books last year and loved them, and I reread them this month before reading the third book. The third book, The Messengers, was a lot of fun, but honestly things got weird and it didn’t feel like it pulled the mysteries together for me. This month, I also discovered the Extraordinaries series by T. J. Klune and Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. The Extraordinaries was a lot of fun, I absolutely adore the voice and the characters, and I can’t wait to find out what happens in the third book. But a major caveat for me is I’m really not sure how the subplot with Nick’s father, who is a cop, and the issue of police brutality, is handled in these books. It felt forced and shallow to me, and this made me uncomfortable. I’m hoping it comes to something in the third book. Illuminae was cool because it started out as a typical YA romance type thing, except in space, and then about a third of the way through you realize that is not what this book is at all, and it was great. But then at about the two thirds mark, the book did something that made me think there were only two possible endings, and I didn’t like either of them, so I stopped caring. The ending is something totally different and it’s really cool and I can’t wait for the sequel, but that last bit where I didn’t care really put a damper on how I feel about the book.

My favorite book of July was Amari and the Night Brothers by B. B. Alston. This book was absolutely amazing! It’s a middle grade book about a young black girl, Amari, who joins the bureau of supernatural affairs to try to find her missing older brother. She confronts bullies, entrance trials, and evil magicians and she is awesome! She also has an illegal talent making her life a whole lot harder. This book is heartwarming and beautiful and so so powerful, and I cannot wait for the sequel! In the meantime, you should all go read it right now!

Unfortunately, I had a least favorite book of July as well, Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I read this because it was on the Hugo ballot, and I did not like it at all. I normally try to find something good in every book I read, even if it turns out that it wasn’t the right story for me, but I just couldn’t here. Not only were there so many problems with the writing and the story, but I found the ablest tropes it employed to be incredibly harmful and just all around gross. I have so much more to say on this book, and it has inspired me to work on another post on how to write blind characters without perpetuating harmful stereotypes, which I will hopefully have ready for you all next week, so stay tuned.

In happier news, I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s 2020 writing lectures at BYU on YouTube and binged them all in a week. A lot of the lessons were things I already knew because I’ve been writing a long time myself, but I definitely picked up some useful nuggets and new ways of looking at things that I think will improve my writing. I have since been listening to all of the archives of the Writing Excuses podcast too and really enjoying it. I’m very late to the party on this podcast, obviously, but in case you’re like me and haven’t listened to Writing Excuses before, I recommend it. Each episode is only fifteen minutes long, so it’s very digestible and I’ve learned a lot.

I’ve also been super productive with my writing this month. I finished a draft of my fantasy mystery project, the memory wiping Academy novel I’ve mentioned on here before. My writing group has been reading the final chapter this week and they’re giving me feedback tomorrow. The book needs a lot of work still, but I think this draft is definitely the closest I’ve been to the story I’m trying to tell.

I’ve also been hard at work on some final revisions to the middle grade space adventure novel. I’ve been trying to add more emotion and voice for each of my point of view characters. At first it was kind of a counterintuitive revision for me, because I tend to take “show don’t tell” to an extreme when it comes to character reactions and feelings, but this isn’t the best approach for middle grade, and once I got into it and adjusted my mindset, it’s actually been a really fun revision.

Finally, four years ago when I was at Seeing Eye, I had a free course on writing flash fiction, and I got about halfway through it before training with Neutron became too consuming for me to consider. I had the beginnings of seven connected flash fiction pieces set in my Phoenix Song universe, and I had middles for most of them, but I never finished, and whenever I’ve sat down to work on the project over the years something hasn’t felt right about it. This month, I had the idea to put the flash pieces together into one short story, and it worked beautifully, though my ending may still need some work. It made me really happy to finish this story and have another Phoenix story completed. Hopefully I’ll be able to share it with you soon.

When I write it all out like that, July was quite a month! I hope you’ve all been keeping safe and having fun. What have you all been up to this summer?

June Reading Roundup

Happy July everyone. Summer has really hit, and we’re steaming away here in D.C. I was still really worried about what was going on with Neutron for the first half of the month, but then Seeing Eye came to work with me and we decided that at least right now we’re totally safe, which was a huge relief. Otherwise, it was a pretty chill month, except for the temperature of course. My writing group had a few in person gatherings, but we’re still doing our regular meetings remotely for the time being because the metro has some summer construction we’re trying to avoid.

In addition to reading, I finally finished watching the Tangled TV show on Disney Plus, and I just want to give it a shout-out because it’s adorable. Tangled is probably my favorite Disney movie, and the show was a great sequel. Also the music is very catchy. I also discovered in June that I can watch so many things on Disney Plus in Italian, and since I’ve been feeling like my Italian is rusty, I started rewatching the Tangled show in Italian. It was hard at first but ultimately really fun. Half my thoughts are in Italian now, which is just the way I like it.

Collage of the seven books I read in June: A Little Princess, The Bone Shard Daughter, The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Princess Mia, Throne of Jade, and The City We Became I read seven books in June, the same I read in May. It was almost all sci fi and fantasy books and then one classic. The classic was a standalone, I continued two series I’m in the middle of, started two other series, and one of the books I’m not sure if it’s meant to stand alone or be the start of the series. My writing group is going to Worldcon this year, since it’s in D.C., so I also started working my way through the books that have been nominated for Hugo Awards. I’ve already read some of them—Raybearer, Legendborn, and the Murderbot series at least. Harrow the Ninth is nominated for a Hugo, and since I haven’t read the first book in the series, Gideon the Ninth, I decided I should read that first. Honestly, I couldn’t get through it. I got about a third of the way through and still had no idea what was going on, and I ended up putting it down. As you know, I don’t put books down lightly. I think I can name all the books I’ve put down ever. There might only be three. A lot of my writing group is really insisting that I give Gideon another try, and maybe I will, but we’ll see.

I also want to throw it out there that I reread all the Nevermoor books again (this might be the fourth time this year), but this time I read them in Braille. It was a really interesting experience to see things like punctuation and spelling sentence structure that I didn’t necessarily notice when listening to the audiobooks. I am also super excited that we now appear to have a title and a synopsis for the fourth book, even though it won’t be coming out until the end of 2022. I realize I have gotten myself stuck in a loop of Nevermoor, but there are far worse loops to get stuck in, and it makes me happy, so I don’t care.

But now let’s chat about the new books that I finished in June.

First, I read A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This is set in England in the early 1900s, I think. Sarah is sent to boarding school, and when her beloved father dies leaving her nothing, the headmistress of the boarding school makes her become a servant and live in the attic and everything is awful. Frances Hodgson Burnett also wrote The Secret Garden, which I didn’t realize until after I finished this book, but there were several times throughout this book when I kept thinking “this reminds me of The Secret Garden.” In general, I enjoyed this book, hisoough it had that slower, very descriptive quality of older books that I’m not overly fond of. It also had an omniscient narration that told us some things that undercut the tension of the ending. But this was a nice little book, and if you haven’t read it, you might enjoy it.

Next, I read The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart. This is the first book in the Drowning Empire series, and I think the next book is coming out later this year. The Bone Shard Daughter follows a whole bunch of characters living on this empire of floating islands. We have the emperor’s daughter who has lost most of her memories due to an illness and is trying to learn her father’s magic. There is the thief who is searching for his wife who was kidnapped years ago and is now getting roped into saving children from the yearly festivals that give magic to the emperor. There’s the daughter of the governor of one island whose girlfriend is involved in the rebellion. And there are people trapped in a mental fog working on a mysterious island. There is also a very creepy magic system that we discover over the course of the book. My one and only complaint, and it’s a very minor complaint, is that I felt like the emperor’s daughter was supposed to be the main character, especially because of the title, and she was actually the only character I had a hard time being engaged with for a while. But her story did hook me, and once it did, and everything started coming together, it was so great. I particularly loved how all these pieces and layers came together and this book just built and built and built to this great climax and finale. I can’t wait for the sequel.

Next, I read the first two books in Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society series: The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey. The first book is about a group of unusual and talented children who are recruited to infiltrate a boarding school and foil the headmaster’s evil plan. And the second book sees the kids off on new and exciting adventures. These books were a ton of fun. I really enjoyed them, and I’m looking forward to getting the next one out of the library. I’m also currently watching the show that’s coming out on Disney and that’s been a lot of fun.

After that, I read the ninth Princess Diaries book, Princess Mia by Meg Cabot. I believe last month I complained that Mia hadn’t grown as a character much throughout the series so far, and that she was an absolute idiot in the last book. But this book saw Mia really having to deal with the consequences of her actions grow as a character and make some complicated decisions and I love it. It was certainly darker and more serious than the earlier books in the series, but at this point that’s what I needed.

Next, I read Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik, the second book in the Temeraire series. The Chinese want Temeraire back, because they believe only the emperial line can have celestial dragons. Temeraire refuses to be parted from Lawrence, so together they travel to China and political games begin to try and keep Temeraire with Lawrence (the British side) and to keep him in China (the Chinese side). It’s more complicated than that but there you go. I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the first book. The pacing just felt very weird to me. Most of it was very slow, and then the last third or so was a roller coaster of action and political moves and countermoves and it really finished with a bang. That being said, I did enjoy it a lot, particularly the development of the bond between Lawrence and Temeraire, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the third book.

As I mentioned above, I’ve started working my way through the books nominated for Hugo awards this year. In June, I read The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. This was actually my first ever Jemisin book, and I will definitely be checking out more of her work. Recommendations welcome. The City We Became is about how at a certain point cities become actually alive, are born into sentient, human being-type avatars of themselves, but the birth of New York goes wrong, and a bunch of very different people become the avatars for each of the burrows of New York and have to find each other and fight off the evil force that is trying to prevent the birth of New York. If the birth of New York fails, well pretty much New York is gone and a whole lot of stuff around it. What I really liked about this book was how it took a really weird concept and made it really accessible. I also loved the variety of characters we were dealing with. I was not totally thrilled about the ending. This is the book that I’m unclear if it’s meant to have a sequel or not. It’s one of those endings that if there’s more to come, I am totally fine with it. If this is it, it just wasn’t completely satisfying to me.

And that’s it for June. I’ve realized over the past few weeks that unfortunately I’m not enjoying writing these posts as much as I used to. I love talking about books, but these monthly posts about everything I’ve read are starting to feel kind of tedious for me. So starting next month, I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of talking about everything I’ve read each month, I’m going to give you more of a general update on what I’ve been up to with life and writing and then talk briefly about my absolute favorite books of the month. I’m hoping this will make the posts more exciting for me to write and give me some more energy and time to maybe put some other posts up here more frequently. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I hope you’re enjoying your summers and staying safe.

March and April Reading Roundup

March was a really busy month for me. So was April. And since we’re already in late May, I decided I better combine these two months into one post if I ever wanted to get it out there.

In March, I finished my revisions on my middle grade sci fi project; put in a lot of time at work to finish the first complete draft of a major project that I’ve been working on for almost a year; got my first covid vaccine; and basically slept for a week. Somewhere in there I also met my pedometer app’s monthly challenge of walking 105 miles in March, because the weather was generally pretty nice, and I read fifteen books. Eighteen if you count that yes I caved and reread the three Nevermoor books again. I’m not going to talk about the Nevermoor books again in this post, except to say, again, that if you haven’t read them, you really, really should.

Collage of the 29 books I read in March and April In April, I got more edits on my middle grade sci fi project and did a lot of work on those revisions; put in a lot more time at work to finish that major project and release it into the world; had my parents visit for Easter; met my pedometer app’s April challenge to reach my step goal 17 times; got my second covid vaccine (yay!) and accompanying side effects; and ventured into a supermarket for the first time in a year. Oh, and I read fourteen books in April.

So let’s dive right in.

I started off March with Crownchasers by Rebecca Coffindaffer, a fun, fast space adventure with a lot of political intrigue. When the emperor dies, he kicks off a crown chase, a giant galaxy-wide scavenger hunt for the imperial seal, and he nominates his daughter to represent his family. But Alyssa doesn’t want anything to do with ruling a giant space empire. She just wants to fly her ship and discover cool stuff for the explorer’s guild. So she teams up with a friend who is also competing to help the friend win. Then someone starts killing the other competitors. This is not supposed to happen. And things get dicier from there. Like I said, this book was really fast and fun. It was perfect for the rainy Sunday I spent reading it at the very beginning of March. It did get a heck of a lot darker than I expected at the end, and it’s a good thing the sequel is coming out in October because it ends on a cliffhanger. This is one where I think how the sequel goes will determine how I feel about the first book and whether I recommend the whole series. So stay tuned.

Next, I read Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. I actually started it a while ago but my library copy expired. I need to stop getting all the books out of the library at once. Anyway, Legendborn is about a girl who goes to a precollege program the fall after her mother dies in a car crash and discovers a secret society of magic. Not only that, one of the members of the secret society was at the hospital the night her mother died and tampered with her memory. So she infiltrates the secret society to try and bigure out what’s going on, facing trials and a whole lot of racism, because the book is set in the south and she’s a young woman of color trying to get into a mostly white male organization. Also the secret society is basically the descendants of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. This is just such an amazing book. It has magic and mysteries and competitions and secrets, which is all great, but it also feels really important for representation and equality. I definitely recommend this book, however the sequel turns out, but also I can’t wait for the sequel.

After that, I read Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis. I want to make it clear that in general I like a lot of Lindsay Ellis’s YouTube videos, but I don’t follow her religiously. I also read Axiom’s End before all the Twitter drama about her happened, and I don’t want to get into that here. So, Axiom’s End. It’s about a young woman who gets entangled in a first contact scenario when she becomes the interpreter for an alien. There were certainly some things I enjoyed about this book, but on the whole, it was just okay. I found the writing overwrought and the characters kind of flat. At this point, almost two months after I read the book, I can’t remember the specifics of my feelings or the specifics of the book, which says a lot. It wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t a great book, and I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

I read a whole bunch of the Princess Diaries books in March: Princess in Waiting, Project Princess, Princess in Pink, and Princess in Training by Meg Cabot. In April, I read The Princess Present and Party Princess. These books continue to be a ton of fun, but I admit they’ve become a bit silly, and Mia’s worries and reactions seem a bit ridiculous. But we returned to the good old fashioned crazy drama with Princess in Training and that was really great. I think that was my favorite of the ones I read in the past couple months. I’m still definitely enjoying the series and can’t wait to read more.

Somewhere around the time I got my first vaccine shot and slept for a week (I suspect the sleeping was more caused by being super busy and pushing myself too hard than the vaccine), I gave in and reread all the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. I tried to keep myself out of the Twilight loop I got stuck in last summer by reading Midnight Sun right after Twilight, then going on to New Moon, then Eclipse, then Breaking Dawn. It only kinda sorta worked. Twilight has this way of drawing me in and trapping me like a venus fly trap or something. Go ahead and judge me. I judge myself a little. Anyway I talked about these books at length last summer in this post about the original series and this post about Midnight Sun, so I’m not going to rehash it all here, but suffice it to say as problematic as these books are, and oh boy are they problematic, they are my guilty pleasure reads and I’m just going to accept that.

Next, I read the third Enchanted Forest Chronicles book, Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. The wizards are at it again, and Morwin the witch and all of her glorious cats are trying to help Mendenbar and Cimorene, king and queen of the Enchanted Forest, stop them. This was a fun book, as usual, and oh what a cliffhanger, but it wasn’t as engaging as the other books, and some of the characters, like the giant talking rabit, were frankly annoying.

Then I read Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale. This is a retelling of a fairytale about a noble maiden and her servant locked in a tower by the maiden’s father after she refuses to marry the man he has chosen for her. Shannon Hale tells this story from the point of view of the servant, a girl named Dashti, as Dashti tries to take care of her mistress, Saren, and help them escape the tower. I normally really like Shannon Hale books, and I was excited to get my hands on this one, but honestly I was disappointed. This book had a great premise, but I found myself kind of bored as I read this book. It’s possible that’s because it was written as a diary, so it felt very distant, and I just didn’t get the feelings I wanted to feel from this book.

Last year, I was slowly working my way through The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. I got through the first six books, but the library didn’t have the seventh one on audio, I wasn’t in love with the series enough to buy the next one, and I didn’t want to put in the effort to read it in Braille. But the library finally got the seventh book, Persepolis Rising, on audio, so I gave it a read this month. Thirty years after the end of the sixth book, James Holden and his crew are embroiled in the attempt of the Martian deserters who escaped to another system at the end of the last book to take over the solar system, and all the other systems, and create a galaxy-wide empire. This book was… I don’t know. It was a fine book. I enjoyed it at least as much as all the others. But I was really thrown by the thirty year time jump. I felt like I couldn’t quite grasp who the characters were anymore and what their relationships were like, and this left me constantly scrambling and floundering to keep up with what was going on and why I should care. If I can get my hands on the next book, I’ll probably keep going with the series, but I suspect the sixth book is probably the best place to stop if you’re reading this series.

Since I was diving back into revisions on my middle grade sci fi project in April, I decided to help myself out by revisiting some of the series that really inspired this project and also some other sci fi books I’ve really loved. So April became a bit of a fun sci fi rereads month. First, I reread the first three Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few. Then I read the fourth book in the series, which came out at the end of April, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within. I loved revisiting the first three books in the series, which I read last year. I adored these books even more the second time around. The fourth book was really great too. I had fun meeting characters from other species we haven’t had a ton of experience with in this series, and I continue to love how generally all these characters are just so nice. I will say parts of this book felt a bit slow and repetitive, and I was a little disappointed to learn that this was the last book in the series, because I wished for something that pulled it all together. At the same time, these really are four separate but related stories, rather than a series, so I think I’m okay with how it ended, and I might enjoy the fourth book more on a reread. This continues to be a series I just love and will recommend to everyone.

You can’t have a fun sci fi rereads month without revisiting The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, so of course I also reread Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter. I’ve talked about each of these books at length in the past, so I’m not going to get deep into it here. You can read my full review of Cinder here, Scarlet here, Cress here, and Winter here. I did not reread Fairest this month because as I discussed here, while it certainly informs Levana’s character a lot, it isn’t a fun place to spend my time.

Last year, I read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. I enjoyed it, but at the time felt like there was too much buildup and not enough payoff, but I was willing to see where the sequel went. The sequel recently came out, so I reread A Memory Called Empire in April, then read the sequel A Desolation Called Peace. I enjoyed Memory a lot more on reread, and Desolation was also very good, but it left me with the same feeling that Memory did, and I was able to put my finger on it a bit more. I have a friend who is a big history buff, and he really appreciated how the book felt like true history in how messy the resolution felt. This was a really interesting point, and I know the author is deep in the history as well, but at the same time, from a narrative, storytelling perspective, it wasn’t satisfying. The internet tells me there will be one more book, and I’m still holding out hope that the ultimate ending will be satisfying, because there’s so much in these books that I love. We’ll see.

Next I read MiNRS 2 by Kevin Sylvester. I really enjoyed the first book, which I read back in January. Christopher and his friends have defeated the Landers who attacked their colony, but more are coming. In this book, the kids are in a race against some pretty evil bad guys and unraveling some pretty big secrets about what’s happening on Earth. Despite all this, I felt like this second book was kind of slow, and the villain was a little too evil for me to take seriously. The kids also had this moral quandery of whether they should fight back or try to just hide and survive, and while I’m not objecting to kids grappling with big issues, it ‘just seemed to drag on a bit long when it seemed pretty clear which way they were going to go. I’m still interested in the third book, and I’ll let you know what I think.

Finally, the sixth Murderbot book, Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells, came out the day before my birthday. So as an early birthday present to myself, I lay on my couch all evening and read it. This short novella is a stand-alone murder mystery. It takes place before the full-length novel and doesn’t do much to move the series along. I didn’t know this when I started reading, and I spent a long time being confused about how this followed the end of the full-length novel (answer, it didn’t, it happened before the novel). Basically there’s a dead body on Preservation Station, and Murderbot is assigned to work with station security, who are afraid of it, to help solve the murder. All I really have to say about this book is oh I just love Murderbot so much! Go read Murderbot!

Generally, I really enjoyed the books I read in March and April, and I’d love to keep talking about them in the comments. Let me know if you’ve read any of these and what you thought of them. I’ll be back soon to talk about the books I’ve read in May (so far it isn’t that many, so it should be a shorter post).

December Reading Roundup

December was a hard month. The world continued to be on fire, but most of my energy was consumed with taking care of Mopsy and trying to keep her as comfortable as possible in her final days. I was an emotional mess all month (I’m still an emotional mess), and for the first time, reading didn’t help the way it normally does. So all in all, I didn’t end up reading too much in December. I only read four books, so this will be a short post. Three of the books I read were fantasy, one middle grade and two YA, and one was a contemporary-ish middle grade (it’s set in the 1980s but it doesn’t feel historical so I don’t really know where it falls).

First, I read The Tower of Nero by Rick Riordan. This was the final book in the Trials of Apollo series, which follows the two Percy Jackson series I read in 2018 (I think). This was a fun popcorn book, but that was about it. As I’ve said when discussing the other books in this series, I felt like Apollo went on the same journey of discovering there was more to humans and basically learning not to be a terrible person several times, and while the plot was exciting and there was a lot of action, there wasn’t much left for this book to do, character-wise, so it felt very familiar. Still, if you enjoy the Percy Jackson books, the series might be up your alley.

Next, I read We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly. We all know I have a major soft spot for middle grade books about kids who love space, and this was no exception. It’s about three seventh-grade siblings learning about space in the month leading up to the launch of the Challenger. It’s largely about their struggles with their home life, because their parents aren’t great, and their relationships with each other and other kids at school. I flew through this book in maybe a day and a half, and it gave me so many feelings. I was a little thrown by the pacing, because the way I read the description on Goodreads, I thought the Challenger launch was going to happen much sooner in the book and we would spend more time with the kids during the fallout of that, particularly dealing with the girl’s dream of becoming an astronaut. But the launch occurred much later in the book than I expected. I think the problem is more with the expectations set up by the description than the book itself. It was, as you might expect, a bit of a downer, and I did wish for more positive resolution for these kids, but that also might have been my mood this month rather than a problem with the book itself. I really did like the book. I particularly loved how it included all the astronauts on the Challenger, most of whom I’ve never heard of before. And like I said, I love middle grade books about kids obsessed with space. This one is definitely worth a read.

And I finished off 2020 by completing my reread of The Remnant Chronicles with The Heart of Betrayal and The Beauty of Darkness by Mary E. Pearson. I’m planning to talk about these two books in much more depth later this week, so I won’t get into them here, but suffice it to say I loved them just as much as I did the first time through.

And that’s it for December. Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? I’m planning to talk more about the Remnant Chronicles, as I said, and I’d like to dive a little deeper into some books I read in 2020 that have stuck with me but won’t be making it onto my 2020 favorites list, but then I’ll be back with my 2020 favorites list.

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.

March Reading Roundup

Over the past several weeks, I thought about blogging more and getting this post up sooner. I meant to do it. I really did. But a solid sense of time and my motivation to do pretty much anything have gone out the window in social distancing life. But here I am now.

I hope everyone is holding up out there. I so far haven’t gotten sick or gone insane, but there’s still time. I did finish my five trillionth round of revisions on my middle grade fantasy project, and then my five trillion and first round of revisions. Now I’m back to the memory-wiping academy project. I also bought myself a television because my iPad or laptop just wasn’t enough of a screen, and I hope to have friends over for a movie night someday ever. I’ve been cooking all the time too. I’ve learned to make some really good bread thanks to a recipe my brother shared with me. I tried lentil pasta, with mixed results, and harissa marinated tofu which probably would have turned out better if I had enough harissa to actually marinate the tofu. But after that it’s been a lot of staples like couscous and frozen veggies or rice and beans or pasta. I’ve also been making homemade ice cream, and there’s no going back to the store-bought stuff now.

Basically I’m doing fine but life is upside down and I hate it so much, even though it’s definitely necessary.

I also read eight books in March. I read most of these books in the first half of March, before the lockdown set in. Oddly I haven’t been reading as much even though I’m stuck at home now. I saw a tweet about this somewhere. I can’t find it now, but the gist is we expect to be a lot more productive with life on lockdown, but we’re also spending a lot of time holding the existential dread at bay.

Collage of the eight books I read in March: A Little Taste of Poison, Archenemies, Ash Princess, Lady Smoke, Sandry's Book, Tris's Book, Babylon's Ashes, and The Drawing of the Three While I enjoyed all these books a lot, I admit that none of them really stuck out to me, and I’m having a hard time remembering them, but I think that’s more because of the world getting thoroughly messed up in the last month than the books’ fault.

I continued a lot of the series that I started last month, and I started a couple new series. I also read a variety of genres again, some middle grade and YA, some fantasy and sci fi, and a superhero story.

All the books I read were audiobooks. I’m not doing so great on my goal to read one Braille book a month. But even though I won’t be completely successful on this goal this year (unless one of you knows how to time travel), I’m going to keep trying.

Now let’s dive in and talk about these books.

First, I read the second Uncommon Magic book, A Little Taste of Poison by R. J. Anderson. I read the first book, A Pocket Full of Murder, back at the end of January, and I loved it lots. This was a great sequel. It did a great job following up on the problems left unsolved at the end of the first book, delving deeper into the world, and complicating everything further. My only complaint is there’s this epilogue at the end that, without spoiling anything, puts a new twist on everything, and it’s really sudden and fast and in my opinion makes the book and series feel incomplete. If there’s going to be a third book, I’d be okay with it, but I’m not sure there will be a third book based on my very cursory research on Goodreads. On the whole though I really loved this world and these characters, and this is a very fun middle grade fantasy series.

Next, I read the second Renegades book, Archenemies by Marissa Meyer. I don’t want to say too much in terms of plot synopsis because I don’t want to spoil the first book if you haven’t read it, and almost anything I say would be a spoiler. But we continue with the spying and the secret identities and the superhero teamwork and friends and romance and everything I loved about the first book. Archenemies took the story forward in a logical way but a different way than I expected. It also raised the stakes a lot, and it did a lot better with the issue I had with the first book that I felt like we were in the wrong character’s head during key moments for the other character. And oh my gosh I loved the twists this took for its characters and the complexities it added. I just love all the characters and I don’t know how I want this to end because I’m cheering for all of them (with a few exceptions). I’m really looking forward to diving into the third and final book soon.

Last year while I was studying for the bar, I read Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian. I really loved the book, but also had no recollection of it because I was studying for the bar. And since the third book just came out, I reread Ash Princess this month and then read the sequel, Lady Smoke. And just oh my gosh these books are amazing! Ash Princess follows Theo, the princess of a conquered country who has been kept by the conquering force as a prisoner and tortured to keep her people downtrodden. But when she is forced to do the unthinkable, Theo decides to fight back. These books go some really unexpected places, and I just love how brilliant and driven Theo is. She is willing to sacrifice everything for her goal, and she does. And while she has emotions like any other sixteen-year-old girl, she has iron control over them and she acts for her head every time. The world is also really interesting, and like I said the plot takes some really interesting twists and turns. At this point I’ve finished the third book, and while I’m not talking about this until next month, this series is one I’d love to go back and reread from the beginning knowing what’s coming. If you haven’t read these books, I highly recommend them.

After that, I read the sixth Expanse book, Babylon’s Ashes by James S. A. Corey. A lot of this book felt like fall-out from the events of the last book. There was a lot of political maneuvering and planning and then finally a big battle. We get to see Holden play the mediator again which is fun because he’s bad at it. Some pretty big important things happened in this book that I won’t spoil. But on the whole, it was just an okay book. There were honestly too many point of view characters, characters who were very minor players in previous books and rose to the level of point-of-view characters in this book. Some of them it was cool to see their viewpoint, but on the whole it felt like just too much and it became hard to follow. I’m not entirely sure I’m going to continue with this series, because I can’t get any of the rest of the books on audio from the library, and I’m not sure I care enough to either buy the audiobooks or invest in reading them in Braille. I might just switch to the TV show at this point. I don’t know. We’ll see.

When the lockdown hit and I needed some literary comfort food, I started rereading Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic books. In March I read the first two, Sandry’s Book and Tris’s Book. Did I momentarily forget that the fourth book in this book is a plague book, and now I’m on track to read a plague book in the middle of a pandemic? Yes. Yes I did. Will I read it anyway? Probably. These books have been all-time favorites for a while, and they held up on reread, which is fabulous. They’re just so much fun and full of such great meaningful relationships, and I love them. I also love Tamora Pierce’s Circle world way more than her Tortall world. It’s so detailed and rich. I loved rereading these books, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the series soon.

Finally, I read the second book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, The Drawing of the Three. I enjoyed this more than the first book. It was way more coherent, story-wise. There was also a female main character. Yay! Unfortunately, I’m not really comfortable with King’s representation of mental illness in this book, and his treatment of women still isn’t great. I’ll probably keep reading this series, but not with a ton of enthusiasm. (Spoiler alert: I’m really just in it to get to the talking pink train I remember in the third book.)

And that’s it for March. Have you read any of these books? Do you have any other reads I might want to check out during quarantine?

November Reading Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July Reading Roundup

Hello from northern Virginia. Yes, I have successfully moved and I am writing to you from amid the many piles of boxes filling my new apartment. I am having a lot of fun organizing everything to my satisfaction. I have strong opinions on trash can designs, apparently, and I maybe alphabetized my spices. Shopping for pillows to match my couch and general color scheme is slightly less fun, because I am really bad at telling if something matches or clashes and kept liking things that turned out to be just slightly off. But it’s all coming together, and I’m really excited about it. I’ve also been doing a lot of orientation and mobility, learning my way around my neighborhood, the metro system, and the walk from my metro stop to work. And of course I’m chugging away on revisions to my book. I’m in the home stretch, and I’m happy with what I’ve done. Which probably means it’s terrible.

All in all, life is pretty crazy right now, and honestly, the idea of writing full reviews for all the books I read in July and August and then what I’m reading in September and trying to catch up was starting to stress me out. It got to the point last week when I was considering completely dropping the individual book reviews altogether and going back to just the monthly reading roundup posts. I don’t want to do that, because I’ve been enjoying the individual reviews, so unless you tell me I should do otherwise, I’m planning to continue them. But for the sake of my sanity, I’m going to switch things up a bit.

Today, I’m going to give you a reading roundup for July, and sometime soon I’ll do a reading roundup for August. Then, in the future, between book reviews for the books I’m reading currently, I’ll play some catch-up and write full posts for each of these books. This will allow me to get the full reviews done but also not to stress about catching up. And as soon as I get some of this moving craziness sorted, I plan to figure out a regular schedule for blog posts that I will mostly stick to, so look forward to that.

July was a big month for me. I took the bar. And I moved out of my apartment in Cambridge. Oh wait, that was only one week of July. It feels like that was the whole month because the whole month was building toward that week. But I also went to a friend’s wedding in Rhode Island, finally ditched the walking cane and ankle brace, and read eight books. Almost got to nine but the bar was exhausting so I didn’t read much the last week of July.

Collage of the 8 books I read in July: Presumed Innocent, Stars Above, A Woman of No Importance, The Shifter, Ash Princess, Blue Fire, The English Patient, and Darkfall. So I read eight books in July. One was nonfiction, and definitely a favorite. One was a legal thriller, which is a genre I don’t typically go for and which I actually liked despite being constantly immersed in the law otherwise. One was a short story collection. I reread five books this month—it was, as you recall, the great bar prep rereadathon—but I read three new books, including two books that were the first books in two new series. I also read one book in Braille, which I haven’t done in a long time and which I plan to do more of in the future because I miss it.

My first book of July was Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow. This was the legal thriller. A prosecutor is accused of murdering his coworker, but he’s innocent, and he goes to trial. My friend who recommended this book to me specifically recommended it to me for after the bar, because it gets pretty technical on the legal side of things. I got on the library waiting list, and it came up sooner than I expected, so I jumped on it and read it. And I’m actually glad I read it while studying for the bar. For one thing, I’m not sure I would have wanted to read it after the bar—I was so done with the law by then! For another, this book actually helped me understand criminal procedure and evidence so much better. It tallied with my bar prep course, and gave me some concrete examples to work with in my studying. I will say that I found this book to be oddly paced. Knowing that the premise is that an innocent man is accused of murder, it felt like it took a while to get there. It might not have felt so long had I not known that this was the premise, but it was right on the back cover so there wasn’t much I could do about that. I also felt like the ending of the book was a bit slow. But the middle section was great, and I was on the edge of my seat through all the courtroom stuff. One other note: This book is pretty sexually graphic, so if you don’t like that, you won’t like this book. On the whole, I enjoyed this book. I’m not sure I would recommend it to someone, and though it is the start of a series, I don’t think I’m going to read the other books, but that’s more because the library doesn’t have the audiobooks and I didn’t enjoy the first one enough to buy the rest. That being said, if you enjoy legal thrillers this might be a great book for you.

Next, I read Stars Above by Marissa Meyer. Stars Above is the short story collection that accompanies the Lunar Chroneacles series. You could probably read this on its own, but it’s also probably more enjoyable once you’ve read the series. We get stories from Cinder’s, Scarlet’s, Cress’s, Winter’s, Thorne’s, Kai’s, and Wolf’s, as well as some totally original characters in the universe. This book was a lot of fun. I loved getting more of the characters’ back stories, and I loved the last story in the book which takes place after the end of Winter. This was a reread for me, but my opinion hasn’t changed much since I first read it (I may have only read this book once, I’m not sure). I really liked this book, but I will say that since these stories were so heavily tied into the main series, they didn’t feel like complete stories that could stand on their own to me, but I honestly didn’t mind that in this case. That being said, my favorite story in the book is “The Little Android,” a retelling of “The Little Mermaid,” in which Cinder appears briefly in the role of Ursula (don’t freak out, Iko is not the little mermaid). All in all, this is a good book and a fun way to wrap up the Lunar Chronicles series.

After that, I read A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell. I’ve mentioned this already in a few earlier posts, but I absolutely loved this book. It tells the story of Virginia Hall, a female spy with a prosthetic leg who worked for both the British and the Americans, spent almost the whole war in Nazi-occupied France, and practically single-handedly organized the French resistance. This was a fascinating read, and it was also an enjoyable read. The writing is so strong and vivid, I felt like I was in France with Virginia the whole way through the book. This is definitely one of my absolute favorites of 2019 so far, and it’s one I’ve been recommending to everyone I know. If you like World War II books, you need to read this. If you like spies, you need to read this. If you like feminist or disability issues, you need to read this. Whatever you like, you need to read this. So go read it. Go read it now.

My next reread was the Healing Wars series by Janice Hardy. In July I read the whole series—The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall—in quick succession. This is one of my all-time favorite middle grade fantasy series, and it remained so after this reread. Nya lives in the war-torn and occupied city of Geveg. Her parents are dead, and her younger sister is a taker, which means she can heal injuries by taking pain and transferring it to a special metal called pynvium. Nya can take pain too, but she can’t transfer her pain to pynvium like a normal healer. She can only transfer pain to other people, which no other taker can do. If anyone finds out she can shift pain, she’ll be arrested and sent to the occupying duke either to be experimented on or to be turned into an assassin. But when the takers of Geveg start disappearing, Nya’s sister among them, Nya has to decide how much keeping that secret is really worth. There is so much I love about these books. They’re fun and fast-paced, even as they deal with really heavy subjects—they actually get pretty dark for middle grade, but they always have this light, hopeful tone that I really like. I love that Nya’s sister is actually a strong character in the books, and not just an innocent little sister on a pedestal in need of rescuing—cough Prim from The Hunger Games cough. I have a lot more to say about these books, but I will wait until I write my full reviews. Suffice it to say that this was a great series to reread right before the bar.

I also read Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian. This is the first book in a trilogy, and I am dying to get my hands on the second one. Ten years ago, Theodosia’s kingdom was invaded, and her mother was killed before her eyes. She was six years old, and the invaders spared her and raised as a prisoner. Whenever one of her people committed a crime, Theodosia was publicly punished as an example. She’s sixteen now, and pretty much broken. And then the king—I forget what his actual title is in this world—forces her to execute a particular rebel, and Theodosia finds a spark of rebellion of her own. I think I read this book in maybe two days. It was so fast, but it was also complicated and there was some great political intrigue, and there were so many feelings. There is actually a love triangle that I can get behind in this one. And without any spoilers, the ending is just what I wanted it to be, and more that I didn’t know I wanted but that is great. I’m really looking forward to reading the next one and to telling you more about it in my full review soon.

Finally, I reread The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient is about four people sheltering in an old villa in Italy at the end of World War II: a thief, a sapper, a nurse, and a patient. It switches back and forth among all their points of view, and time is pretty fluid, as the novel moves back and forth between the characters’ pasts and the present. I first read this back in 2013, as part of my senior honors reading list at Kenyon. I recall really enjoying it when I read it then, but I admit I struggled with it this time around. I think part of the reason is that this is a slow meandering book, and maybe reading it while I was frantically cramming in some last few days of bar studying and also packing and cleaning up my apartment just wasn’t a good move. I really wasn’t in the mindset to read a slow, meandering, complicated book. The first time I read it, I also read it in Braille, and this time I listened to the audiobook, and I wonder if that influenced my opinion too. The audiobook was fine, but I think this is a book that is better read slowly and thoughtfully than listened to while running around an apartment wielding a swiffer. Even so, by the end of the book, I was really enjoying it, and I’m really happy with the ending and the book on the whole. I hope to one day go back and reread the book in Braille, because I think I would enjoy that.

And that’s it for what I read in July. I promise I’ll be back as soon as I and start working on full reviews for these books. In the meantime, I’ve made a lot of progress unpacking in the time between I started writing this post and the time that I’m posting it, and I just have one box left to empty. Yay!

Akata Witch Review

Hello from the land of bar prep, where life has basically become study, eat, sleep, not necessarily in that order. Last weekend at my five-year Kenyon reunion, when I was trying to explain the state of my life to my friends, I accidentally said “I’m a law student studying for the bar. I eat when I’m tired and sleep when I’m hungry.” Yes it’s a funny mix-up, but it’s actually kind of true.

The studying is going well, I think. None of it is particularly difficult—if only all my law school courses had been so clear—but there’s a lot of it. At least that was my outlook until I got my first graded essay back today. Oof. I thought I knew how to write.

I graduated last week too. I’m officially a J.D. I’m excited, but it’s hard to tell because I eat when I’m tired and sleep when I’m hungry and I seem to always be tired and hungry now.

I’m also managing to squeeze in some reading and writing, though less than I would like and probably still more than I should be doing. The bar studying has meant I’ve gotten behind on book reviews. I’m currently reading the second Stormlight Archive book, and that will take me a while and give me time to catch up this week before posting my reading roundup post for May.

Cover of Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor A couple weeks ago, I read Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. This was actually a reread for me, because I read this book back in November or December. The library finally has the sequel, and since I’m supposed to be spending this time rereading books, I thought this was a good place to start.

Sunny is Nigerian, but she was raised in New York until she was nine, and her parents decided to move the family back to Nigeria. Sunny is also an albino, and a soccer prodegy, though she can’t play much because she can’t be outside in direct sunlight. At the start of the book, she’s twelve years old and having social problems at school, because she doesn’t fit in in any way. And on top of that, she’s seeing visions of the end of the world in candle flames, which is just weird, right? Then she meets Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha, and they introduce her to her magical heritage. Sunny, and her new friends, are what are called Leopard People. They belong to a secret culture that practices juju. Sunny’s new friends introduce her to her new world and new powers. They study their magic, have adventures, investigate Sunny’s grandmother—who they think was also a Leopard Person—and get into plenty of trouble. And then they are tasked with finding and stopping a serial killer who has been kidnapping and murdering children in the area as part of a ritual to bring about the end of the world.

When I read this book back in December, I was a little indecisive about how I felt about it. I enjoyed it, definitely, because I put it on my 2018 favorites list. But I also thought it was a bit all over the place in terms of both content and tone, and I didn’t like the treatment of people with disabilities in this world. But this time around, I liked the book much more. Knowing where everything was going helped fit all the pieces together, and it worked really well. I love how down to earth the characters are, and that discovering her magical powers isn’t all fun and games for Sunny. Basically, this book has all the qualities of middle grade fantasy that I love, and now I’m dying to read the sequel.

The treatment of characters with disabilities still bothers me, though. The book makes a big deal about the problem of stereotypes of people with disabilities as people who have secret powers. and yes, okay, calling attention to a stereotype and saying this is not what’s going on here is cool and important. But you can’t say “this is not what’s going on here” and then it is what’s going on here. Akata Witch still does the thing where if you are a Leopard Person, and you have a disability, you are basically superpowered above everyone else because you have natural abilities that you can use without the ordinary tools of Juju. Sunny, an albino, can turn invisible. Orlu, who’s dyslexic, can intuitively undo any Juju he comes across. This means that in this culture, people with disabilities are celebrated, but it also means that the book is actively fulfilling the stereotype it says isn’t true. And beyond that, once you unlock your Leopard Person powers, your disability disappears. Orlu is no longer dyslexic (would love to know how they explain that to the public school). Sunny can go out in direct sunlight without fear of being burned. And if you don’t already know how I feel about characters with magic or superpowers or cool technology that negates their disability, go check out this post. All this was a pretty small part of the book, and it didn’t really affect how much I liked the book. But it was definitely an issue, and I wanted to flag it.

On the whole, though, this was a fun book with just the right amount of adventure and danger for me, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the sequel.

So, have you read Akata Witch? What did you think?

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