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.
So Apollo, now a mortal, lands in New York City as a normal teenager. No magical powers to speak of. Not even demigod powers. But it gets worse. Because he’s a god, he has a lot of enemies, monsters and such, and he has to figure out how to survive as a mortal so he can reclaim his godliness. He teams up with another demigod, Meg, and together they head to Camp Halfblood. Meg technically claims Apollo as her slave and gains the power to order him around and he has to do what she says. I forget how that works but it’s a thing. Adventures ensue, but pretty soon Apollo learns that his oracles have gone quiet, and he and Meg set out to find what’s keeping the oracles quiet. And Meg might have some unfortunate secrets of her own.
After the end of The Hidden Oracle, Apollo sets off to Indianapolis with Leo and Calipso. Yay Leo! And of course they’re traveling by dragon. They’re going in search of the next oracle, but Apollo is also hoping to find Meg and to pry her away from her evil stepfather, Nero. And again, adventures ensue.
The prophecy we get at the end of The Dark Prophecy points to the big bad guys going to attack Camp Jupiter. So Leo heads off to warn them, and Meg and Apollo head to the American southwest to journey through the labyrinth, which has rebuilt itself, to find the third oracle. They are led by Grover, and they eventually team up with Piper and Jason. Yay Grover! Less yay about Piper and Jason—I was never a huge fan of them, they’re kind of boring.