September Minireviews // Part 1

Okay, September!  This feels big!  September was only one season ago, so it feels like I’m actually getting caught up LOL

September was insanely busy for me at work, and it’s reflected in the fact that I only read 13 books.  So I think we should be able to get these wrapped up in two batches!!  Here we go!

Outside the Gates by Molly Gloss – 4*

//published 1986//

I’ve seen this slim (97 page) book listed on a few “modern classics” lists, so when I saw it for a dollar on Book Outlet, I got a copy.  Gloss obviously doesn’t spend a lot of time world-building, yet the sparse writing somehow kept me completely engaged.  I can see myself rereading this one at some point – the apparently simplicity is somewhat deceptive as I found myself continuing to think about this one long after I finished it.

Moonlight Cove by Sherryl Woods – 3.5*

//published 2011//

The next installment in the mediocre-why-am-I-still-reading-these Chesapeake Shores series wasn’t that bad.  The main part that got on my nerves was the absolute obsession with the fact that the MC, Jess, has ADD.  Like, it’s mentioned on almost every page.  I get it, she struggles, she’s struggled in the past, she’s working hard to make it work!  Okay!  Sheesh.  It got to the point where it felt like she was using it to excuse anything that went wrong in her life.  Actually, everyone has trouble remembering things sometimes, and most of us need lists/notes/a system to make sure everything gets done – not saying that her ADD wasn’t making it more difficult, but it’s not like she’s the only person in the world who has ever forgotten to pay a bill.  However, I liked the love interest and it’s always fun to see the other family members in the background.  Not a fabulous read (literally none of these have been), but perfectly reg.

Everywhere It’s You by C.B. Salem – 1*

//published 2015//

Hey, you know what’s annoying?  Being sold half a book and not being told it’s half a book!  I’m not talking about a cliffhanger ending, I’m talking about it literally just stops.  At only 170 pages, I felt like demanding $6 for the second half of a book (!) was a bit ballsy.  I was already only moderately invested in this one as the writing was mediocre and riddled with typos and coincidences, so having the book just abruptly stop annoyed me enough that I no longer cared.

The Reef by Nora Roberts – 4*

//published 1998//

I order from Book Outlet about once a quarter, and almost always get a few Nora Roberts books for less than $3 each – she’s just so prolific!  I think it’s crazy how she can choose some completely random setting/job yet make it work.  Here we have shipwreck salvagers and marine archeologists – jobs I’ve never even really thought about!  The first half of the book kind of stressed me out because I knew that something bad was going to happen to bust up Tate and Matthew’s relationship, and I never like that feeling of impending doom.  However, I did like both of those characters and liked them together.  Tate’s parents and Matthew’s uncle were fun and engaging characters, and the villain was totally someone you wanted to see get punched in the nose.  This was one of her more slowly-paced books, to the point that a few times it felt almost draggy, but on the whole it worked.

The Fallen Man by Tony Hillerman – 4*

//published 1996//

Another solid installment of the Leaphorn and Chee books.  I love all the recurring characters and the setting, so these books have all been wins for me so far.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary – 4*

//published 2019//

This one was a reread for me, and my original thoughts from 2019 still pretty much stand – this is pretty adorable all the way through, with some more serious notes that are handled fairly well.  I really like both Tiffy and Leon (especially Leon lol) and the way that they both help the other work through life complications.  I think that even if you aren’t into romance, there is still a lot to enjoy in this one.

Arc of a Scythe Trilogy // by Neal Shusterman

• Scythe
• Thunderhead
• The Toll

These books were April’s unexpected win.  They had been on my TBR for quite a while (as usual), but I didn’t have high expectations for them.  They just sounded kind of… weird, I guess, and I wasn’t sure if they would be my kind of weird.  Well, they absolutely were.  I was completely sucked into this trilogy, and even if it didn’t end the way that I personally would have chosen, I still appreciated the way everything came together.

In the future, an AI named Thunderhead has indeed become sentient and now rules the world – but whereas people from the past feared this would lead to all sorts of evil situations, in reality it has solved all of humanity’s problems.  Hunger, homelessness, poverty, disease, crime, war – all things of the past.  Since the Thunderhead took charge of humanity, it is able to perfectly predict and control everything.  Even death is no longer something that happens naturally, because humans have been enhanced with speedy healing nanites in their systems to take care of things even if something wildly unexpected happens – which rarely does, because of the Thunderhead’s ability to predict and prevent accidents and tragedies.  When people get old they can “turn the corner” and basically reset themselves back down into their 20s and start life over, feeling just as young and fit as ever.

But this has led to the potential of overpopulation on Earth.  To solve this, a organization was created to deal out death.  These people are called Scythes.  Different Scythes are in charge of different regions of the world, and are given certain quotas of death to meet (and no exceed) each year within their region.  If a Scythe taps you for death, there is nothing you can do about it.  And the only area of Earth that the Thunderhead doesn’t interfere with is Scythe business – Scythes operate outside of the rest of the world.

This system has worked for many years.  Death rates are still a tiny fraction of what they were during the Age of Mortality, and most people live to “turn the corner” many times.  But there is a new rumble in the ranks of the Scythes, a group that doesn’t view death as a serious, somber responsibility, but instead believe that killing should be embraced and even enjoyed, that Scythes, rather than living quietly and unobtrusively on the outskirts of society, should instead be front and center, rulers of humanity.  And it is at this time that Scythe Faraday takes on two apprentices, Citra and Rowan – two apprentices who end up changing the course of history.

Were these books perfect?  Absolutely not.  There were definitely gaps in the world-building and certain aspects that didn’t make a whole lot of sense if you really dug into them.  But on the whole, I found the concept to be intriguing and engaging, the pacing excellent, the characters likable (or hate-able as necessary) and completely blasted through all 1500+ pages in just a few days.  I didn’t completely love the way the series ended… it’s not exactly what I would have done… but it was still a solid ending that pulled together most of the loose ends.

Maybe part of it was that I had pretty low expectations for this series, but I really enjoyed it a great deal, and definitely see myself rereading these sometime in the future.  I’m not always a fan of dystopian fiction, but I really found these engaging, and look forward to seeing what else Shusterman has written.

January Minireviews – Part 3

Here is the last batch of January reads!!

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  Frequently, I’m just wayyy behind on reviews and am trying to catch up.  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway – 4*

//published 1952//

One of my 2022 goals is to clear at least 12 books off my classics backlist, and this one was very satisfying because it was so short!  I didn’t exactly like this book, but Hemingway writes in such a way that I had trouble putting it down, despite the fact that it’s literally an old man going fishing.  There is a tautness to his writing that makes it work, and so many layers to what is, at surface-level, a simple story.  I personally wasn’t a huge fan of the way it ended, but you can’t make everyone happy.

The Story Girl by L.M. Montgomery – 4*

//published 1911//

The Kindred Spirits Buddy Read group on Litsy is continuing their foray into Montgomery’s works through 2022, and this was our January pick.  It had been a very long time since I read this one, so it was fun to revisit.  It’s a rather episodic book, but I did overall enjoy it although it will never be one of my favorites.  While the characters here are fun, they somehow lack depth – each of the children seems to fit a role and not go much beyond it.  And despite the fact that the story is being told in first person, the narrator is probably the one we get to know the least, which is odd.  Perfectly pleasant, but it will probably be another decade or so before I bother to reread this one again.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte – 2*? 4*? No stars?

//published 1847//

The Litsy group that read through all of Austen’s works last year (the PemberLittens) is continuing into 2022 by reading books about Austen and also other works from women from the Austen-ish era.  Wuthering Heights was January’s book, and since I had never read this one all the way through – I remember abandoning it halfway in high school with the general feeling that the only “happy” ending would be for everyone to die of the plague – I thought I would give it a try as an adult and see if it was more palatable.  In a word – yes, it was, but… it’s really hard for me to rate this one.  First off, it was just absolutely ridiculous.  I actually found myself snorting with (inappropriate) laughter in multiple spots because it was just so over-the-top.  On purpose?  Who knows.  I was also absolutely befuddled by the fact that some people consider this a romance, or consider Heathcliff and Catherine to be a romantic couple.  What?!  These two are both mentally ill, unstable, obsessive, selfish, and creepy.  At one point, Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s dead body.  This isn’t romantic!  What is happening?! But I weirdly did like the way the story ended, although some of my fellow-readers thought it was too tidy.  I felt like Cathy, unlike her mother, actually outgrew her selfish whims and gain some balance to her personality, and I liked that.  I can’t say I exactly enjoyed reading this, but it did keep me engaged.  I was so confused by multiple people having the same name/being related that I printed off a little cheat-sheet towards the beginning of reading it and thoroughly enjoyed X-ing out everyone as they died… which was pretty much everyone, so my high school desire to have everyone die off for a happy ending was very nearly fulfilled lol  All in all, it was a worthwhile read, I think, but not one I see myself revisiting.  I did use this buddy read as an excuse to buy this pretty copy, though, which I’m perfectly happy to keep on my shelf.

Nation of Enemies by H.A. Raynes – 3*

//published 2015//

This was another one that is a little hard to rate.  It was also kind of creepy because it was published in 2015 (i.e. pre-Covid and pre-“vaccine passport” insanity) but was all about a future where the entire world is using a chip-based medical system where every person has a MedID rating based on how healthy they are and various genetic features that extrapolate how likely they are to be sick in the future (i.e. cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc).  People with good Med numbers are able to get good jobs, housing, move from place to place, etc. while people with bad numbers are relegated to the outskirts of society.  Many people tout this as a positive as eliminating the low numbers means that we are on track to eliminate said diseases, but others are beginning to grow uneasy with how swiftly the system has been used to alienate huge sectors of the population into second-class citizens.  The MedID chips have now become a way to not only track medical history, but everything else, making it easy to decide “criminals” (both real and determined by people who don’t like people) are unable to purchase groceries, travel from state to state, or get a job.  The story opens on the cusp of a huge presidential election, with one candidate determined to build on the MedID system and other poised to begin removing it, restoring the freedoms everyone once knew.  In the decade since the MedID was instated, the country has descended into a state of constant terrorist attacks, many by frustrated low-MedID citizens, others by various anarchist groups, some by other political powers playing on the emotions of vulnerable individuals.

Rayes does a great job setting all of this up, introducing the reader to several people within the government and within society who are both benefitting and losing from the MedID system, and showing how various things are working behind the scenes of the big election.  It was really terrifying and amazing to see how this concept, basically where the vaccine passports are headed, had changed the society, and it was all very believable.  But about halfway through the story, things began to lose steam as Raynes slowly turned his story into a more typical political thriller instead of exploring a lot of the nuances presented by a society dominated by this system.  In the end, basically everyone was a bad guy, which was kind of weird, and a lot of ends were left loose.  This was also a really long book, clocking in at 528 pages, so it definitely felt like it could have used some editing to tighten things up.  In the end, a story with some strong potential that just frittered away.

The Magic of Ordinary Days by Ann Howard Creel – 2.5*

//published 2001//

Apparently this book is also a Hallmark movie, but I haven’t seen it.  It was chosen by a member of the traveling book club book, which is really the only reason I finished it as I found the main character, Livvy, to be insufferably selfish and bratty.  Set during WWII in Colorado, Livvy is from an upper-class family and has always lived a rather spoiled life. The author tries to make her a sympathetic character by giving her a dead mother and a distant father, but she never felt like a real person to me.  She gets pregnant from a one-night stand with a soldier with whom she’s gone on a few dates, and her father solves the “problem” by finding a farmer in eastern Colorado for her to marry, sight unseen.  Ray is stereotypically strong and silent, but the main things we have to know about him is that he’s uneducated by Livvy’s standards and thus rather dumb, he immediately begins to worship the ground Livvy walks on for literally no apparent reason, and Livvy’s so concerned about Ray’s “heart” because of his “innocence” around women – she goes on and on and on about this, about how she’s sooooo “experienced” and Ray isn’t, despite the fact that she went on like 3 dates and got pregnant, not sure how that makes her some kind of relationship/sex expert and it REALLY got on my nerves.  But Livvy’s that way about everything.  She’s from the city and she’s gone to college, so she’s soooo smart and clever and worldly and wise and all these other people are just sort of dumb hicks.  I kept think that she was going to recognize the fact that she’s just a blatant snob, but she never really does.  She and Ray have like two conversations and then from there forward Livvy’s always saying things like, “I could tell from the love in his eyes how much he yearned for us to be together” blah blah blah, which was both boring and unbelievable.  There’s this whole story about these Japanese women who are in a prison camp nearby and how the Japanese prisoners are working on the region’s farms, including Ray’s, but it’s really a sort of surface-level look at this because we never talk with Ray, we just get Livvy’s assumptions about how Ray feels about it.  What Livvy assumes is that he completely approves of interning the Japanese and thinks the Japanese are stupid and guilty, despite the fact that he treats them incredibly well and absolutely nothing in his actions support her theory.  Livvy also spends a bunch of time driving all over the countryside despite Ray specifically telling her that his gas rations are supposed to be being used for farm work, not pleasure.  Livvy justifies it by basically saying she’s bored.  I was also amazed at how a farm wife during World War II could be bored and have nothing to do, but here we are.  Everyone else in my traveling book club seemed to really like this one (I was the last to read it) so maybe I’m just being overly harsh, but I found Livvy to be painfully unlikable, which made the whole story drag for me a lot, since it’s literally all from Livvy’s perspective and literally all about her in every way, because to Livvy, Livvy is the most important person in the world.  I had absolutely zero confidence in her long-term happiness with Ray, because Livvy never actually changed as a person.

February Minireviews – Part 3

We’re just going to pretend like it’s perfectly normal to review books three four months after I read them… (because yes, I wrote half this post in May and am only just now coming back to it!)

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  Frequently, I’m just wayyy behind on reviews and am trying to catch up.  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me.

The Substitute Guest by Grace Livingston Hill – 3.5*

//published 1936//

Are GLH’s books predictable and cheesy?  Yes.  Is that what I want sometimes?  Also yes.  This one was pretty normal GLH fare, but that’s not actually a bad thing in my mind – sometimes I just want something warm, relaxing, predictable, and happy.  It’s rare that GLH doesn’t deliver.

Gods of Jade & Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – 3.5*

//published 2019//

This was one of those books that I wanted to like more than I did.  While the concept was quite good, somehow the book just lacked magic.  The third-person narrative – which I usually prefer – here felt distant and almost stilted.  There were times that there would be an somewhat lecture-y tone to the tale, filling the reader in on a piece of culture or fable, rather than letting those things be a natural part of the story’s flow.  This was also a book that definitely needed a map, as I had no real grasp on the distances they were traveling.  All in all, while it was a fine one-off read, it didn’t really make me interested in seeing what else Moreno-Garcia has written.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever by John Donohue & JT Malloy – 3.5*

//published 2020//

It’s always hard to review a book that’s memoir-ish, and this one is no exception. The author was in his late 20s during the Vietnam War. He had been a Marine straight out of high school but was considered “too old” to enlist for Vietnam, so he was working as a merchant marine. When the war protests started to turn on the soldiers themselves, the guys from Chick’s hangout-bar thought it would be amazing if someone could go visit all the active duty guys from their neighborhood, take them some local beer, & reassure them that what they were doing was appreciated & they were missed & loved. Chick’s job enabled him to hop on a boat headed to Vietnam with the idea that he would take 3 days shore leave when he got there & find some of the guys. What with one thing & another, his boat left without him, leaving him stranded in Vietnam in the days leading up to & the first couple of weeks of the Tet offensive!

Reading this book is basically like listening to your old uncle tell his stories from the war. It wasn’t a bad book at all, but it did tend to ramble off & sometimes go into back stories not directly related to the main plot & it wasn’t always easy to tell what was happening “now“ & what was an explanation from the past. (i.e. a few paragraphs telling a story to illustrate why Chick doesn’t like ship captains – it was hard to tell if it was THIS ship captain, or one from his past.) Chick is also very pro-unions, which I’m not against unions but I also got a little tired of every chapter having at least a few sentences explaining why unions are awesome & solve everyone’s problems.

For the most part it doesn’t get too political & there’s some great perspective here on how basically the soldiers were just doing their best to do what they were told. Most of them had been drafted, they weren’t passionate about being there, & they didn’t have the ability to see any kind of big picture concerning how the Vietnamese people really felt about the situation. In the end, Chick decides that the protestors weren’t wrong to protest the war, but still felt that harassing the young men being sent to fight wasn’t the right way to execute that protest.

This is a memoir so it’s inherently biased, but was overall an interesting read for a bit of a different look at the war – Chick is pro-soldier, but also a civilian. It was a pretty fast read & I appreciated that the author decided to keep the language pretty clean throughout.

The Electric Kingdom by David Arnold – 4*

//published 2021//

I’ve read a couple of Arnold’s books now and have enjoyed them all.  This one is his newest and I read it as part of my personal campaign to read new books by authors I like as they come out instead of just sticking them on the TBR and maybe getting to them in five years.  This one is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a girl who has to take a cross-country journey to find a mythical portal that her father is convinced is real.  She meets up with several other travelers on her way.  This was a book that was eerie and engaging, and one that folded back on itself in a way that was somehow believable.  It had just a few too many unanswered questions for me in the end, but still completely sucked me in and kept me turning the pages.  Like Kids of Appetite, it had elements that it felt like I shouldn’t like, but somehow worked.

You Have a Match by Emma Lord – 3*

//published 2021//

After really enjoying Tweet Cute last year, I was interested to read Lord’s new book.  However, this one just fell short for me.  Mostly, there was just too much going on.  The main character, Abby, finds out that she has an older sister who was adopted.  She and Savvy start communicating without telling any of their parents and agree to meet at a summer camp.  There was a lot of potential here to explore the dynamics between the two sisters and how they related with the adults involved, but Lord’s writing gets sucked into typical YA drama, with way too many pages spent on Abby’s crush on her best friend, Leo.  This was definitely a story that would have been significantly better without the love story aspect.  I was looking for an adoption story with Parent Trap vibes and instead got boring YA-romance angst with bits of adoption drama thrown in.  It made the story feel rather choppy and disconnected.  All in all, it wasn’t a bad read, it just wasn’t for me.

The Broken Earth Trilogy // by N.K. Jemison

Oh man, I was SO CLOSE to actually being caught up on book reviews and stuff… and then somehow the entire end of January just disappeared!!! So here I am in February, writing up some January reviews!

• The Fifth Season
• The Obelisk Gate
• The Stone Sky

I’ve had this series on my TBR for quite some time, so when Jemison came up as January’s #AuthoraMonth on Litsy, I decided it was time to finally read them. While the world-building was excellent and the concept quite good, this story was also relentlessly depressing, which made it a difficult read for me. There is also one view of the narrative that’s told in second person – it was annoying to start with and only got more annoying as the story progressed. Even when I found out who was talking and why – I was still aggravated because not only was it second person, it was second person present tense, which literally made ZERO sense within the context of the tale. Finally, the conclusion of the story really depends on the motivations and actions of one character who I felt was entirely too young for that scenario to make sense – and even if she was older, I still wouldn’t have really believed that she was willing to destroy the world because of this one certain situation, which meant that the entire third book/conclusion to the story arc left me feeling a little so-so about the entire series.

I was going to say some more about these books (mostly complain about the second person thing), but now it’s been a month since I read them and a lot of my stronger feelings have faded haha In the end – interesting but so depressing that I’m not really planning to read any more of Jemison’s books. I also felt like there was a strongly polemic undertone about racism that at times felt a little like I was getting clunked in the head with it, and that wore on me after a while.

All in all, I don’t exactly recommend this trilogy, but if it sounds intriguing to you, it’s worth giving it a try. In retrospect, the story telling really must have been pretty strong for me to stick out even though all that second person nonsense, but that really did drive me absolutely crazy.

The Grace Year // by Kim Liggett

//published 2019//

This book, set during a time that may or more not be frontier days in the US, in a world that may or may not be the same as our own, is about a young woman in a small village.  The young woman, who is also the narrator, is named Tierney, is on the brink of experiencing what is known as the “Grace Year.”  This village believes that young women, when they reach puberty, begin to develop a magic that is so powerful and dangerous that they must be sent off into the wilderness, to an island where they live for a year, releasing their magic so that they can return back home to, of course, be oppressed wives in this absurdly patriarchal town where men are all power-hungry, cruel, and abusive, and can have their wives put to death just by saying that the wife did some magic.

The girls head off to the compound in the wilderness.  Some of them aren’t sure whether or not they even have magic, but another part of the group yearns to experience it.  Soon all the girls are acting completely out of their heads, and we get plenty of delightful violence.  Meanwhile, if a girl leaves the compound, she’s immediately (and brutally) murdered by a group of men who make their living by killing grace year girls every year, then chopping them up into bits and pieces and selling those bits and pieces back to the people in the village so they can eat them for vague reasons that are never actually made clear – aphrodisiac? Eternal youth? Who knows?

Anyway, Tierney tries to bring the girls together, but has little success for the most part.  She spends a LOT of time wandering around bemoaning her fate (pretty boring), then gets almost killed and spends a really long time recovering/falling in love (SUPER boring), then goes back to the compound to free the minds of the girls she’s left behind (mostly boring), before going back to the village so that basically nothing can change except the women become slightly less suspicious of each other (ish).

Here’s the thing.  This story was… okay.  Tierney isn’t particularly likable or interesting.  The reveals about the society are handed out in a way that feels very stuttered.  I think Liggett is going for some kind of shock factor with each one, but instead drags it out to the point that I’m more confused than anything (and bored.  Did I mention that already?  Sorry.)  So … we let random people hunt and kill the girls during their grace year?  So … we chop up the girls and sell their parts for people to eat for… random reasons that are left vague?  So … the girls don’t actually get rid of all their magic during the grace year since women can be accused of having magic at any point in their lives so the entire thing feels completely pointless?  So … if a girl doesn’t return from the grace year, all of her younger sisters get thrown out of town?  So … returning as body parts in a jar is considered returning and your little sisters DON’T get thrown out of town??  Yet the whole eating the body parts things is like kind of a shameful secret – or is it??  What even is the societal structure?  How do you have a town that produces 1/4 the number of males as females?  Is this entire situation because these people are seriously inbred?  How does no one ever leave or come to this isolated village?  Why do all the women hate each other?

Seriously, I had no idea what was happening half the time, and the other half of the time I was being BORED OUT OF MY MIND by being “subtly” preached to about the evils of the entire male sex while AT THE SAME TIME the author has Tierney be rescued not once, not twice, but THREE times BY A MAN, while at the same time acting SO obnoxious and superior to the men who have protected her.  I just.  Why.

Plus, there were absolute loads of completely illogical moments.  My personal favorite is late in the fall, Tierney accidentally spills vegetable seeds on the top of a hill that we’re repeatedly told is windy and rocky, yet when she comes back in the spring, they have not only sprouted on their own (despite being planted in the completely wrong season) but have somehow turned into an incredibly productive garden, full of produce… also at the wrong season.  How amazing!  Maybe magic is real after all!

To me, the themes of this book are so, so, SO tired and boring.  These days, as long as you write a book full of buzz words and trendy opinions (wow, so edgy to write a book about how ALL MEN ARE EVIL and ALL RELIGION IS A TOOL FOR EVIL MEN TO REPRESS ALL WOMEN), your story is automatically lauded as “deep” and “insightful”.  I’m mind blown by all the positive reviews for this one on Goodreads – my personal favorites say things like, “This will inspire women to rise up and take control of their own destinies!”  Because yes, that’s right, women in the US today definitely don’t have THE SAME EXACT RIGHTS as men and need a book with an incredibly boring, choppy, unrealistic plot to inspire them.

All this book inspired me to do was poke my own eyes out from boredom.  I just don’t think that stories about women being completely and utterly oppressed by a bunch of jerks is particularly inspiring, especially when nothing in this book was about the women truly coming together, uniting, or working together.  There’s one really nice guy out of the entire village who also is someone in a position of power and who actually cares about Tierney, but instead of working with him and finding a way to make true change in their society, Tierney basically just hides away and treats him like trash.  Wow, so inspiring.

I read this one for my traveling book club – it’s obviously not my style of book.  I didn’t exactly hate every page, and at the beginning I thought there was maybe going to be something interesting out of it.  There was one plot twist that I didn’t see coming and actually was interesting.  The rest was appalling dull, unnecessarily violent, and completely pointless.

Off Planet // by Aileen Erin

NB: I received this book via NetGalley, which doesn’t impact my review.

//published 2019//

Every once in a while I find a paranormal series that I actually really like.  It’s rare, and it’s kind of a weird thing because it doesn’t seem like a genre I should enjoy at all, but here we are.  Last summer I thoroughly enjoyed Aileen Erin’s Alpha Girl series and signed up for her newsletter, which is what led me to the ARC of her newest book, Off Planet, the first in a new series, due to be published later this month.

Overall, I enjoyed this read and definitely am looking forward to the next in the series.  It’s an interesting concept, decent world building, and a mostly likable main character.  I liked that friendships were an important part of this story, and there was enough sass between the characters to keep me reading.

The pacing was good for the most part, but did somewhat drag in the middle where it felt like the torturing of Maite went on and on and on and ON.  Consequently, the ending seemed more rushed to me as Erin wrapped up some loose ends, leaving a complete story that still has plenty of lead-ins for the sequel.  I felt like more story could have taken place after Maite escaped, rather than literal chapters of her struggling to survive in a never-ending sequence of performing the same task repeatedly.

Throughout the majority of the book I admired Maite for her strength, stubbornness, loyalty, and determination to do the right thing.  That’s why her sudden character change at the end of the book felt out of place.  Trying to avoid spoilers here, but it’s not exactly a surprise to find out that Maite has A Destiny, and the way she wigs out about it honestly aggravated me.  Like, you’ve spent the whole book being willing to do whatever it takes to protect the people you love, but suddenly your life is all about you and what you want and how hard your life is why does everyone always want you to do stuff blah blah blah.  It really felt like the Maite at the end of the book was completely different from the Maite I’d read about for previous 90% of the story, and that frustrated me.  I think the book may have flowed more smoothly if Maite had been less perfect throughout the beginning of the book – then her flipping out over her Destiny wouldn’t have felt as jarring.

A personal drawback to this story was the frequent swearing.  I find swearing, especially f-ing things, to be 100% unnecessary, and it’s something that really brings down a book’s overall enjoyment for me.  Erin’s characters had some of their own slang/swearing, and I would much preferred that to be developed and used as a way to express outrage and frustration, rather than just falling back on boring f*s.  Obviously swearing doesn’t bother lots of people (maybe even most people), so that’s a personal thing.  Otherwise, the book was pretty clean – no explicit sex scenes or anything like that.

I feel like I always spend more time on the negatives than the positives when I’m reviewing the book.  Despite my griping, I really did thoroughly enjoy this story.  I loved the creative setting, and I’m rarely against the trope of Evil Corporations Stealing Your Soul! – and it’s done well here.  The alien aspect really fit well into the overall sci-fi vibe, and I personally love sci-fi that doesn’t spend too much time explaining the specifics of the sci bits haha  Except for the slightly-repetitive middle (which, I’ll admit, does serve the purpose of showing Maite’s strength of character), the pacing was good, and it was definitely a book I wanted to come back to when I wasn’t reading it.  While I’m little scared of the developing love triangle (please, let’s just NOT develop the love triangle, seriously), I’m overall super intrigued to read the next installment.  The bummer about reviewing ARCs is you have to wait such a long time for sequels…

All in all, Off Planet was an easy 3.5* teetering towards a full 4*, and if you like your sci-fi on the lite side, this may be the read for you.

PS Have to say that this cover is SO much better than the original cover that I see floating around.

Enclave // by Thomas Locke

//published 2018//

So I hate reading books out of order, like a LOT.  Consequently, my favorite thing about Goodreads is that it (usually) tells me when a book is part of a series.  According to Goodreads, Enclave is NOT such a book.  The problem is – it felt like a book that was part of a series.

There’s a lot going for this book.  The premise is great.  Set around a century after the “Great Crash,” America looks nothing like it does today.  Instead, a lack of electricity and gasoline means that people have gone back to doing things the old-fashioned way.  And instead of a central government over a bunch of states, there are lots of city-states known as enclaves.  Each enclave has its own rules and its own hierarchy.  And much like the wild west, in this America, the strongest rule.

So great premise, right?  The problem is, I got most of that from the synopsis of the book, not from the book itself.  While I sometimes enjoy the world-building method that doesn’t specifically explain things, but instead allows the reader to observe how things work, unfortunately Locke doesn’t particularly do either.  There aren’t any explanations at all, and there isn’t always anything clear to observe.  For instance, everyone is riding horses.  Then, later, some of the characters ride a Greyhound bus (albeit an old, decrepit one).  So… there is some gas?  Where is it?  Why doesn’t everyone have access to it any more?  Is it just really expensive?  Do we just not have contact with any Middle Eastern countries any more?  If it’s so expensive, how can people afford to ride a bus?

It also seems crazy to me that people seem to know how to do stuff again, like make their own clothes/shoes, forage in the woods, make whisky, whatever.  I don’t really know a lot of people who can do those things, and I live in a pretty rural area.  It seems like if there really was a “Great Crash” (which is also never explained – was it a financial crash?  Another dust bowl?  All the power grids collapsed?  A nuclear bomb?  ??????), there would also end up being a significant amount of death, because I’m not really sure how people would survive if suddenly no one had access to a supermarket.  I realize this book is set a hundred years after said Crash, but it honestly still seems like the population would be struggling to catch back up.

I really liked the characters, and I liked the direction Locke went with the story, but I was constantly distracted by questions that were never answered, which really detracted from the enjoyment of this read.  It really felt like this was the second or third book in a series.  Even the way the characters were introduced felt like I should already kinda sorta know about them.

Still, I was set to give this book a solid 3.5* until the end.  The end just… stops.  Nothing is resolved.  I mean literally nothing.  It’s like Locke had a limit on how many pages he could have in his book, and he just wrote until he got there and then just stopped.  I presuming – hoping?! – that this is the first book in a series.  If so, I would rate this book slightly higher.  But if this is genuinely a standalone book, it really lacks credible world-building and any conclusions to the plot lines followed.

I really did enjoy this book while I was reading it, and would definitely read another book in a series.  But as a standalone, I wouldn’t come back to this one.

NB: This book was provided to me free of charge from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

The Infinity Trilogy // by S. Harrison // #20BooksofSummer

• Infinity Lost (2015)
• Infinity Rises (2016)
• Infinity Reborn (2016)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have an unfortunate addiction to getting free/very cheap Kindle books even though I know – know! – that most of them are terrible.  Recently, I took the time to actually sort through the gajillion Kindle titles I own and get them into some semblance of order so I can start actually reading them.  Because I have OCD about reading books in order if they are part of a series, it’s been important to me to find out of if books I own are actually part of something bigger or not.

Anyway, I have a complicated rotation schedule that I use to decide which books to read next, and Kindle books are now part of the rotation, reading through them oldest to newest.  Infinity Lost was an early Kindle purchase, and since I have owned it since October 2015, I thought it was time to finally give it a read!

These were weird books in that they were a bit hard to categorize.  They were kind of pre-dystopian in a way – a story of someone trying to prevent the worldwide catastrophe from happening.  It’s not too far into the future, but technology is doing so much more for humanity.  Many of the advances have been made by a specific company owned by a guy named Richard Blackstone.  The series is about his daughter, Infinity aka Finn.

The story starts when Finn is 17 and away at school.  She’s started having these really weird dreams where she dreams about something that happened in her childhood, except in the dream, it’s completely different than what she remembers happening in real life.  The dream version is usually much stranger and more violent than the reality version.  Except now Finn is starting to wonder which of the versions is actually reality…

Finn’s best friend and roommate is Bit, a computer genius.  When the announcement is made that a field trip has been scheduled for the remote and rarely-visited Blackstone Technologies HQ, Finn has a sneaking suspicion that Bit may have had something to do with it.  No one else at school knows who Finn’s father is, because she is there under a different name for security reasons.  Finn has never met her famous father and was raised on a fancy estate by servants and a military commander named Jonah.

At first, the field trip is awe-inspiring and exciting.  But things quickly go south when the technology is hijacked by a rogue force that seems intent on killing Finn – and doesn’t care who else is in the way.

This was a really engaging story, and I was definitely hooked in while reading the first book.  I wanted to find out about all of Finn’s mysteries, including this strange alternate ego who seems to be lurking within her.  Although this book had a few spots of violence that was more gruesome than my usual fare, I was willing to skim over those bits to get to the story.  The first book was a 3.5* read and left me intrigued to read the next story.

Full disclosure is that the next two books were around $4 each, and even though I was interested in Finn’s life, I’m not sure I was $8 interested, which may say something about my true level of engagement with the story.  However, they were also available on Kindle Unlimited, so I decided to embrace another free month’s subscription and read them that way.

I was very glad I had not paid $4 for the second book, as I don’t see myself ever rereading it.  It definitely suffered from second book syndrome.  A lot of what was happening definitely felt like filler.  There was tons of violence – people don’t just die, they’re shredded or liquefied or get their faces melted or are torn apart, all in full detail.  I skipped loads of paragraphs.  The actual story part wasn’t bad, but it was confusing, because for some reason Harrison decided to have the book start with Finn getting dragged into a bunker almost dead, and then tell what led up to that through a bunch of weird flashbacks, which also involved some other flashbacks, interspersed with conversations of the people trying to bring Finn back around in the present (?).  The timeline was very confusing and disorienting.  I think Harrison was trying to emphasize the differences between Finn and the anti-Finn, Infinity, but it was overly complicated.

Infinity Reborn was a bit better.  Now that we finally had most of the backstory filled in, the narrative actually proceeded in a somewhat orderly manner.  There was still too much violence for my taste, but by this time I was completely committed to finding out how everything wrapped up.

While the ending was satisfying for the most part, I still did have some unanswered questions, and I definitely felt like the future was still in jeopardy.  The biggest threat had been removed, yes, but there were still a lot of ??!?! situations floating around.  Like what’s happening with all the Blackstone tech, and why Zero’s identity had been kept a secret and is he still a real person underneath all of that, and why Finn’s dual personality situation was just magically fine now, and what’s going to happen with the technology that made Finn who she was, and whether or not the Infinity project is still considered military property, and a lot of other things.  The big issues were concluded, but a lot of the smaller questions were just kind of swept under the rug with a “everyone lived happily ever after” kind of conclusion.

All in all, I did enjoy these books as a one-time read and would give the trilogy a 3.5* rating overall.  However, they aren’t books I see myself rereading at any point in the future, and they didn’t make me desperate to search out more of Harrison’s writing, either.

Infinity Lost is Book #7 for #20BooksofSummer (#6 is A Wrinkle in Time, which I have read but won’t review until I read a few more L’Engle books and review them together).  The current list can be found here.

June Minireviews – Part 1

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me…

The Wrath & the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh

//published 2015//

I’ve seen this book pop up here and there on various lists and reviews.  A retelling of One Thousand and One Nights (ish), it’s set in a desert country where magic isn’t an impossibility, even if it isn’t terribly common.

I really wanted to like this book, but I honestly just found it rather boring.  The first half of the book is soooo slow.  Basically nothing happens except listening to Shahrzad have a lot of feelings.  She purposely becomes Khalid’s bride so she can get revenge on him because she hates him so much, but it takes her roughly .03 seconds to fall in love with him, and then we have PAGES of her agonizing about her feelings and wondering how she can have sympathy for this horrific monster.  I’m not a huge fan of instalove, but I can understand its sometimes necessity to make a story (kind of) work, but in this case it verged on the absurd.  I will say that what I did like was that eventually Shahrzad and Khalid have a REAL CONVERSATION where they both explain their back stories and are honest with each other, which I really, really appreciated because I HATE it when characters lie to this person they supposedly love more than life itself.  But that conversation happens way further down the line than it should have.

Initially I was still planning to read the second book just to see how everything comes out, but life interfered and it was a few days before I had an opportunity to pick it up.  That’s when I realized that I actually just didn’t care enough to plow through another 400 pages.  The Wrath & the Dawn wasn’t a bad book, and I think that if I had gone straight into the second book I would have probably enjoyed that at about that same middling level, but in the end I just wasn’t that intrigued.  There were things I liked about this book, but the overall incredibly slow pace combined with characters who pretty much do nothing but have a lot of feelings (we hear about Shahrzad’s the most, but they ALL have LOTS of feelings) meant that this was really only a 3/5 read for me.

The Man With Two Left Feet & Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse

//published 1917//

Fun little collection of Wodehouse tales – and incidentally the first time that the Bertie/Jeeves duo makes an appearance.  While these were entertaining stories, it was interesting because they lack the guaranteed lightheartedness of his later works.  While they definitely aren’t downers by any definition, there are little things that made me realize just how careful Wodehouse was to keep his best works completely frothy and untouched by any sad realities!  While this may not be the best place to start if you are new to Wodehouse, they’re definitely worth visiting at some point.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

//published 1977//

It’s kind of weird, because I put books on my TBR and then forget about them for years, then my random number generator chooses my next book… and then it turns out that it’s becoming a movie??  This is the second time this has happened to me this year!  I had had Ready Player One on my TBR forever, and then after I read it I found out it was becoming a movie in less than a month.  (Side note: Still haven’t done a compare/contrast on book v. movie for that one even though I have been wanting to ever since I saw the movie!!)  The same thing happened here – I got this book out from the library (it’s been on the TBR since 2015), and then realized that I had seen a trailer for the upcoming movie.  So weird.

ANYWAY this book was a solid sci-fi read that I did mostly enjoy, but with kind of mixed feelings.  I think what it really came down to was that it was a sad book.  Everyone is so mean to Ender (“for the good of humanity”) and I never enjoy reading books where a character is just being consistently bullied and hurt.  There were also some random scenes of violence that seemed abrupt and disturbing to me.

I couldn’t quite get my head around the ages of these kids.  I realize that’s supposed to be part of the controversy, but seriously?  Six years old?  I just couldn’t buy it.  I think this story would have made a lot more sense if Ender had been more like ten when the story started.  I just can’t imagine even a mind-blowing genius six-year-old having the emotional capacity to make the decisions Ender was making.

All in all, this was a thoughtful book, with a lot to really chew on, but the tone was a bit too heavy/downer for my personal tastes, so even though I gave this book 4*, I decided not to continue with the series.

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

//published 1998//

This was a childhood favorite that is still a delight.  If you’re looking for just a fun, fluffy little fairytale retelling, this one is a great afternoon read.  It’s a children’s book so it goes quickly, but despite its short(ish) length, there is still enough world-building to give the reader a solid glimpse into Ella’s life and home.  I hadn’t read this one in several years, and I was happy to see how well it has held up.