As I’m having a really good reading month so far and spring break is coming up (which in theory means more time to read) I decided to split March into two posts, this one covers what I read between March 1 and 15 and the next will cover the rest of the month.
The Endless King by Dave Rudden (5 stars)
This is the last book in the Knights of the Borrowed Dark trilogy, I reviewed the first two here. This is by far my favourite YA fantasy series, it starts off as a very stereotypical orphan finds out he’s magical story but the themes (grief, revenge, trust, forgiveness, parenthood, duty, war and more) and the plot are more complex than most YA I’ve read as well as some adult books. I think this book is possibly my favourite book of all time, I had really high expectations for it and it surpassed those, not only did the trilogy get an awesome last book but we also got some LGBTQ characters as well (just when I thought my love for this series couldn’t possibly be greater!)
Grey Sister* by Mark Lawrence (5 stars)
This is the second book on the Book of the Ancestor series. I first heard about Mark Lawrence last year when Red Sister was released. Red Sister follows Nona Grey, who becomes a Novice at Sweet Mercy (a convent that trains girls to become highly skilled warriors) after being taken from her village and sold. While Red Sister was an enjoyable read, I didn’t absolutely love it. I felt like it took a really long time to kick off and the first 20% of the book or so felt like a lot of information was being thrown at me. However, I absolutely loved Grey Sister. The previous book was the foundations of the world building and getting to know the main characters while this book was a full on dive into the world. The 3 POV were great (I really enjoyed Glass’ and Wheel’s as it provided two new layers of the story beyond the world of novices), there were lots of unexpected twists and turns and I couldn’t put it down. This book is definitely one of my favourites from this year and I can’t wait to see where Nona’s journey goes next.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (4 stars)
Poor things is the best Frankenstein retelling I’ve ever read. The story kicks off with Godwin Baxter telling Dr. McCandless that he found a pregnant woman’s body after she committed suicide and found that the child somehow survived so he decided to sew the child’s brain into the woman’s body, named her Bella and started educating her. Her brain is apparently developing way quicker than usual and the rest of the book follows Bella’s life from then on. The book is definitely interesting to say the least but if you’re bothered by books where you can’t be sure what the true story is don’t read this because by the end of it I felt as if I was back in English literature and had to write an essay with evidence supporting each theory and pick one.
Sing, Unburried, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (4 stars)
This book follows two families in Mississippi, one white, one black, joined both by events in their past and Michael’s marriage to Leonie, which his family disapproves of. Near the start of the book Leonie gets a call from Michael saying that he’s being released from jail. Against her parent’s wishes she decides to take her two children, Jojo and Kayla, with her on a 2 day road trip to pick him up. The book is more of a character story than a plot-driven novel, which I enjoyed. There’s two main points of view in the book, namely Jojo’s and Leonie’s, through which we learn about their complicated relationship, Leonie’s struggles with grief and drugs, Michael’s family’s hatred for Leonie and her children due to their race, Jojo’s attempts at being a parent for 3-year-old Kayla as well as Mam’s struggles with cancer and Pop’s complicated past. The only thing I didn’t like about the book is that towards the latter half of the book a ghost story unfolds, while I do like magical realism, I think the book would have been way more enjoyable for me without that element.
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (4 stars)
is the story of Yejide and Akin and their broken marriage. The book is set in Nigeria, where, given that Yejide and Akin have been married for 4 years and haven’t managed to conceive a child, Akin is forced by his mother to take a second wife. Yejide is against the idea of polygamy, having come from a polygamous household herself, so she finds the news deeply devastating. The books touches on subjects like mental health, tradition, cultural beliefs and the political scene in Nigeria from mid 1980s to 2008. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book as I rarely like books/tv shows/etc that focus on marital issues but I was pleasantly surprised.
Red Clocks** by Leni Zumas (3 stars)
Red Clocks is a dystopian novel set in a near future US where the Personhood Amendment made abortion and IVF are illegal, people who miscarry have to pay for funerals for the foetuses and trying to cross the Canadian border to get an abortion results on being arrested and returned to the US. In addition to these changes, the Every Child Needs Two Act is about to ban adoptions from single parents. The book follows 4 main characters and looks at the effects these laws have for a woman in an unhappy marriage, a woman trying to conceive or adopt a child while being single and struggling with fertility issues, an adopted girl who is seeking an abortion and a “witch” that offers women herbal remedies for infertility and to induce abortions, among other things. While I found the premise very interesting, there were a couple of elements of the book that I didn’t enjoy. Firstly, the main characters are referred to as “the wife”, “the biographer”, “the daughter” and “the mender” which created a distance between the characters and the reader whose purpose is still unknown to me and made it really hard to figure out what was going on and how it was all connected at the start. Secondly, while I got the purpose of the first 3 story lines and the way the reforms were directly affecting their lives and choices I never quite saw the purpose of the mender’s story line, the few things that were directly related were touched upon more effectively on other character’s story lines. Lastly, in between chapters there were snippets of the biography of a 19th century polar explorer (written by the biographer) which reminded me of the Tidal Zone’s Coventry cathedral chapters – something a lot of people liked and thought complemented the story quite well but I thought the book would have been much better without. Overall I’m glad the Women’s Prize Long-list brought my attention to it and the plot covered the repercussions of the laws quite nicely but due to the way it was presented I don’t expect it to be a favourite any time soon.
Franny and Zoey & The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (2 stars)
I rarely review more than one book at once, especially when they’re not part of a series but I’ll make an exception for these two (I’m sure everyone who cares about books enough to be reading book reviews has heard of them before so I’ll skip the plot summary). I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time when I was 17 after a friend found out I’d never read it and recommended it to me. Back then I hadn’t read anything other than textbooks in years and I really enjoyed the book, so much that it provided the last push I needed to convince me to get back to reading. However, this time around I hated it, perhaps because my reading tastes have matured and changed a lot in the past few years. I found the writing style and the characters to be incredibly annoying and I’m surprised I managed to get through both books without giving up.
Sight** by Jessie Greengrass
Unfortunately I chose to DNF this book at 40%. The book felt to me like a journey through the narrator’s mind, visiting old memories, grieving her mother and loosely connecting those memories and feelings to the life of Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered x-rays. The writing is beautiful and poetic, however, I felt there was a lot of distance between the narrator and the reader which made it really hard for me to truly dive into the story and care about it. If you enjoy books that don’t have much of a plot and read like a long reflective piece/monologue then this might be a great book for you but I personally need to really care about a character before reading something like this and I wasn’t able to forge that connection with the narrator.
*ARC provided by Penguin Random House through First to Read in exchange for an honest review.
** I received a copy of the book through netgalley in exchange for an honest review
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