Hey there, readers! I hope you all had a fantastic start to the new year and that January was as productive for you as it was for me! I started the year off right by reading 13 books, and I am so proud of myself!

Anyway, how did everyone else do this past month? Meet any personal goals?

Take It from the Top

You know I quite like this book. It was a fun, quick read. It’s definitely for young readers like teenagers, as the book focuses on that age range. Still, it deals a lot with exactly when it comes to performance, and it also deals a lot with classism, period. You have these two friends, and they are our best friends, but one of them has money, and the other one doesn’t have money.

When the one who doesn’t have money discovers that her friend has been while her friend’s father has been paying her scholarship so that she can go to this costly theater camp, it shatters something in her. That’s a lot to deal with, but the author did it in a way that built up the story and gave it a lot of depth. But otherwise, it was fun. It was a quick read, and of course, what are they performing in this camp? This year’s wicked, so you gotta love it for just that.

All This Twisted Glory

I really thought I would enjoy this book way more than I enjoyed the second one. But I’ve realized that this story is being stretched so very thinly. As Bilbo Baggins once said, it feels like water is spread over too much bread. I mean, it’s empty calories. That’s what this novel feels like. It feels like empty calories, and I do feel like the second book and this book could have been one, and that would have been it. It just feels like a lot of nothing happens.

I feel like I can summarize the book in one sentence, and that’s bad. I don’t want to summarize a book in one sentence, or I’m able to. I want to do it in five sentences, a pleasant small paragraph. That way, it’ll give you the whole story scope, but no, you know your love interest has switched. She discovers he is being controlled by the devil, which was in the first book again, and she has made her peace with that and has determined to marry Cyrus. That’s it.

Nothing else happens. It feels like nothing happens, and I’m so irritated by that. Am I finished reading this series that I thought was a trilogy, but I’m now discovering five books? Yes, I will finish reading this series to see where it takes me.

The Nine: Origins

This was a gift from the publisher, and I was impressed by this novel. It follows one young girl, Blake,  who discovers she has paranormal abilities. She thought she could see the future all her life, which just made her weird. Still, it turns out she is part of a whole culture, a whole group of people who call themselves the nine who also have powers like herself but also different powers ranging from being able to speak to the dead to telekinesis to being able to conjure things out of thin air. And it’s cool. The novel moves at this breakneck pace, but I couldn’t put it down. It just goes and keeps you hooked from beginning to end because it’s relentless storytelling, and it’s excellent storytelling, in my opinion. I quite liked it.

Cursed Crowns & Burning Crowns

I don’t normally like to group the books together, but when I go from one book to the next, I feel like I have to. Curse Crowns and Burning Crowns were on my TBR for ages, and I have finally gotten to read them this year. Oh my God, I love these two books, and I love this trilogy as a whole. I can’t wait to see what happens next. Rose and Wren are so amazing.

These two sisters balance each other well; Rose and Shen are cute. And so are Tor and Wren. They’re just so amazing and wonderful, and I loved everything about this book. I love the battle at the ending, the witchy element to the story, the pacing, the storytelling, and how it has grown and evolved. I think this is such a fun rom-com fantasy that it just made me happy reading it, and I’m so excited to see the sequel series I’m keeping that on my TBR, and I hope that you guys will add this trilogy to your TBR. If you like twins who are witches, rom-coms, and fantasy separated at birth, this is your cup of tea 100%.

The Maze of the Beast & The Valley of the Lost

Once again, we are at the Deltora’s Quest. This is a series that I read when I was younger, but now I read to my son every night. I love that he gets excited when I pull this book from my nightstand to read to my son. This is a series that’s full of adventure. It has excellent characters, Lief, Barda, and Jasmine, who are on this quest to restore the seven gems of the Belt of Deltora. Just because my son is so excited, this is such a good series. And it has aged well.

I’m rereading it to him, and I get so excited because I wanna see what’s gonna happen next, but I can only read a chapter at night. We’re just going through the motions to get in bed, and we read. He’s excited to look at the map to see the characters’ locations. He’s excited to see what’s gonna happen next. I feel like this is a series that feels very cinematic, action-packed, and very easy to understand. It has excellent qualities that make it great to share with a child.

Ami

I love this book, and I am a Sailor Moon fan. What makes this book even greater is that it reminds me of a lot of Beauty and the Beast while also keeping true to the magical girl trope. We have new characters but have not forgotten our original characters from the first book and it’s very inclusive. I liked the fact that the novel is very inclusive. You have LGBTQ representation, you have transgender representation, and it just is there. They’re just elements of the story, just like that community is part of our world.

And it’s fun, light-hearted, and full of adventure, and you know what? This is just a wholesome book. Ami is great, and I love that her name is Ami. I love that she has short hair. She’s so much like Ami from Sailor Moon, also known as Sailor Mercury, and I love that so much. It was just such a fun read. I am so excited that Yulee is coming out this year, and I cannot wait to read it myself.

The Last Bookstore on Earth

So this was the January pick for Barnes and Noble’s Young Adult Book Club, and as much as I liked this book, I wish I had loved it. The premise was fascinating. I like that it’s a natural disaster dystopian novel following one girl who’s living in an abandoned bookstore. I’m just crying, trying to survive. But I don’t know, something was lacking for me. I like that we do go back and forth to see her life before the storm and her family, and then we find out why she’s alone and how her family died, which, by the way, was a very gruesome, yeah, memorable theme, and I like how we’re seeing how society has changed. But I don’t know if there was something I wanted more.

I wanted to connect to the characters more, and I couldn’t do that, which is a little disheartening. If I were alone trying to survive natural disasters, I would live in the bookstore. That is for sure where I would go, so I think that’s why I wanted to connect to the character a little bit more and see more of Liz’s life, of her working in the bookstore, because when we finally got to see those scenes, I felt a stronger connection to her. Still, overall, it was a decent novel.

The Nine: Alder House

Just like with The Nine: Origins, this novel has a rapid pace to it. I’m enjoying the series as a whole thus far. It’s cinematic. It moves at a key quick pace. I like that there’s more development between Blake and Nicholas’s characterizations, and I like that she’s bonding with her sister and that there’s a lot of familial drama intention added to the story, as well as a lot of romantic tension. The story is evolving excellently.

My only hindrance, and I can’t give this book five stars, is that it seems like the author is trying to make Blake the chosen character. The chosen one trope is okay, but it is overplayed. Not only is she a multi, but she now has three abilities. The author does establish that she’s not unique and that there are other people in her community who are also multis and have multiple abilities, and that’s the only saving grace here. But I think the author is trying too hard to make her super special when she was already special.

Elektra

Let me start by saying that I love Jennifer Saints’s writing style. That said, I did not love Elektra as much as I had loved Ariadne. With Ariadne, you only had those two distinct personalities that tied together nicely. The story follows Ariadne, and it also follows how her sister was affected by her death. My issue with Elektra is I wanted to see more of Elektra and Agamemnon’s relationship when she was a child. I wanted to see more of why she was so devoted to her father because you only really get one scene, and I do know the mythology find it, so I wanted more story behind it. This novel moves fast, showing the decline of her relationship with her mother, Clytemnestra.

However, we also have the third POV of Cassandra, who is the sister to Paris and was taken as a prisoner by Agamemnon. So Agamemnon is what ties these three characters together. However, for most of this novel, as quickly as it was moving, Cassandra felt more like a side character. Even though her story was so powerful, I wanted more of it. Jennifer could have done much more with her characterization and given her a little more attention and, I think, a little more history on the relationship between Elektra and Agamemnon. That also would have made me enjoy the story more because I wanted more.

I think Saint is a wonderful storyteller, and a Saint does a masterful rendition of Greek mythology. That is probably why I wanted so much more for her, but I still like the story; I just wanted to love it.

Defend the Dawn

I’m so happy I read Defend the Dawn this last month. I could not put this book down. I love the pacing, the storytelling, and how We are going from land to sea. So now our adventure is on a boat, and there’s so much going on I can’t begin to tell you everything that’s going on. Tessa and Corrick are great characters. Don’t get me wrong, there were many times when I was reading it, and I was getting very frustrated with Tessa as a character. I understood a lot of the tension there. It made sense, given the past, how his country perceives Prince Corrick as cruel Prince Corrick.

However, she knows him. She knows who he is, so I was getting frustrated every single time she would doubt him and every single time she would pull away from him, and I just wanted to be like, Oh my God, get your head out of your ass and kiss the boy tell him you love him. But you know what? The tension made sense, and I love the pacing. I could not put this book down; I was reading it one day, and then the next day, I was almost done with it, and it was so amazing.

I enjoyed this series much more than A Curse So Dark and Lonely, which I almost ended up not even finishing because the second book for that 1 was boring. However, this book is the complete opposite, and I cannot wait to see how Destroy the Day will end, so I’m excited.

In the Labyrinth of Drakes

I absolutely love this series. This is a different kind of fantasy series. You’re following Lady Trent, who is a dragon historian. So what she does is study dragons. It’s not a fast-paced novel. It’s almost like an alternate version of Edwardian, so it’s borderline alternate history, but not its historical fantasy. I hope that makes sense. It’s just such a fun novel, and I love the storytelling. I love the shenanigans that Lady Trent gets herself into. I mean, the situations she gets into are hysterical at times, but they fit the story, and they aren’t that outlandish. And I love how she has such a scientific mind and ohh her love interest, he’s just dreamy, and he admires her, and he wants to be much like her and be with her in their scientific endeavors, and they’re just such a cute couple, and I love them so much.

It’s just a fun novel. It’s not very fast-paced, but it is intriguing and has a steady pace to it, so if you’re looking for something different, this is going to be for you mainly because it involves Dragons, and it has a lot of beautiful illustrations throughout the novel. Because again, this is the memoir of Lady Trent as she recounts her time in the desert in the Labyrinth of the Drakes, and the illustrations are too said it’s from her, so it’s fun. I liked it.

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