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.
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).