This is the first Brian Sanderson book that I have read that I did not hate.  I was fully prepared not to like it, but it turns out that it was pretty clever.  The fantasy world was fascinating, with the ocean of something-not-water, the talking rat, and the hexes. The main character, a young woman, is constantly underestimated by everyone ,including herself, and my favorite plot twist was a brilliant strategy she came up with to out-maneuver another character and foil their evil plot.  I didn't see the twist coming and I was just so impressed with how she turned the situation on its head, all while realistically suffering from imposer syndrome and working her way up from the very lowest position on a boat of pirates.  Despite my traditional dislike of the Sanderson books, I am going to give this one a recommend.

Recommend.
​
Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

I really enjoyed Beyond the Cerulian Sea and so I was disappointed that I did not love this book.  I really don't like being spoon fed morality in my novels and this one left nothing up to interpretation.  The metaphors and symbology were just too obvious and the pionts felt like they were being rammed down my throat at some points.  I obviously think that having trans representation in fiction is important and powerful, but my underlying take away from this book was that only magical beings (read Queer) can take care of magical kids and magical beings can only depend and trust magical beings. I can understand where this mentality comes from, but I just think that there is a lot more nuance than what this books allows for.  I found it pretty depressing, rather than inspiring, and a letdown.  The first book took quite a while to grow on me, but once it did, I was all in.  This one had the benefit of my coming in really excited for it and just progressively getting more and more let down as it went on.

Do not recommend.

​Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

I somehow missed that there was not just one, but two new Hunger Games books and a new movie since I last visited this series.  What a treat it is to read a series where the books hold up on their own and don't invite a cliffhanger so you have to get the next book to feel a sense of closure.  Both of these books, which are prequels to the original trilogy, were really well down and worth reading.  I love that we aren't spoon fed the analogies to modern politics, but the complexity of the relevance is nevertheless there.  

Highly recommend both of these.

Click here  or here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.
​

An elaborate modernization of Animal Farm, this book creates a world of sentient, talking animals in a fictionized African country as it flows from being colonized to an oppressive regime to complete chaos after the dictator is driven out. I think it is technically supposed to be an allegory, but it just feel too obvious, with the parallels too similar to the current world.  With situations and even language that clearly is lifted from real life current oppressive regimes, fascist leaders, and bigoted politicians from around the world, I thought it lacked nuance and was just force feeding us the analysis instead of letting the reader do any independent thinking or analogizing.  This, plus it used a literary tool in which the same words or short phrase was repeated over and over again--so much so that it became an irritant. This may not have been so aggravating in a paper book where your eyes could skip over the 2 minutes of repetition, but in an audio book, it was just distracting and it was so many times. It felt gimmicky, even if it was obviously being done to make a point.  The point was just too obvious.
​
Not recommended.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

I just can't with these fantastical fantasy  books that so many people I really like just love.  This bizarre story of a world sort of like ours but not really was just weird.  It felt unnecessarily complicated, as if unexpected and impossible things were just added to the story for no real reason.  Similar to other books I have hated, like Going Postal, Piranesi, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and  Small Gods, there just wasn't anything here that called to me or drew me in.  I just could not suspend disbelief, get invested in the characters, or care about what happened.  I had a hard time even paying attention for a lot of it, even though I was traveling and thus had more mental bandwidth available to focus on the storyline.

Do not recommend.

 Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.
​

I feel pretty terrible about this review. In a time when I think it is particularly important for us to reflect on the Holocaust, the violence of othering, and the horrors of ghettos and "camps" and determining human survival based on the official papers you carry, I am very sorry to report that this WWII book about all these topics is not to be recommended by me.  WWII historical fiction is usually a pretty easy sell for me, so this is almost certainly not why I didn't like it.

It started weird. This is because the story takes place in two time periods, while also telling a fictional vampire horror story that one of the characters wrote.  But you do not discover that is what is happening until really far into the book and it makes for a very confusing read.  And it felt almost like the author was deliberately trying to make it confusing.  Maybe she thought it would build up like a mystery and, to a large extent, I would call it a mystery, but it felt forced and unnecessary.  Yet, if you ignore the bizarre allegory vampire storyline distraction at the beginning, I found the book interesting enough at first and quite enjoyed the early character development that was mired in intrigue.

But even setting aside that problem, it just became more and more complicated as it jumped back and forth between narrators and time periods and between the actual story and the story-within-the-story.  I love a complex plot that makes me pay attention, but I kept thinking that this was a plot strategy meant to hide the ball.  And indeed, there were pieces of the story that were obviously being withheld--huge pieces of the story, like why one of the main characters has facial disfigurement from some type of trauma that most everyone in the story seems to know about and is alluded to over and over, but isn't spelled out for the reader until way past the point that I still cared.  It ended up just not being this big deal after all the hype to get to it. And again, I just felt like it was deliberately being done that way despite it not making any sense not to tell the reader.

Perhaps the most prominent reason for my not liking it was the gratuitous, graphic details of the violence that felt added for shock value.  Not that the Holocaust wasn't shocking and I don't disagree that some level of description of the details is appropriate and I don't want to discount that for survivors the horrors went on and on and on, each more horrific than the last.  There was just something about the way it was written that left me feeling like it was another game the author was playing with me as the reader.  I don't know how we learn about the time period without hearing about the details of the violence, but here it was done in a way that as I was reading I was aware that I was reading this book about this horrible thing that was designed to convey to me how horrible it was instead of letting the story unfold naturally.  In the context of the other unusual plotting choices, I just could not get into it.  So much so, that I had to take several breaks from it to read other things before coming back to finish it.

Not recommended.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

I was under what I now know to have been the quite mistaken impression that this was a trilogy.  I was sadly, sadly disappointed to discover at the end of this book that it is not in fact a trilogy.  Indeed, it is now planned to be a full series.  I am very aware that this is likely the new Outlander series, where I will get 20 books into a series that is promised to be a 21 book set, with no estimated release date for the last one.  I just don't know if I can emotionally invest at this level again.  I miss the solid trilogies: Hunger Games, Legend (which added a fourth book years later, but the trilogy stood alone), Xenogenesis, Discovery of Witches (I know she added more, but the original trilogy was also a set), and Anne of Green Gables (again, the first three culminated an ending and if you didn't know there was more, all would be good in the world). This was not a solid trilogy. This was a telenovela, designed to suck you in and then using the ridiculously stupid amnesia plot twist to leave you completely hanging at the end of the book. 

This was just such a disappointment.  It was particularly a disappointment because all three books were really intricate.  The plotting was so complicated that half-way through the second book, I went back to the beginning of the first book to read it again because I want to make sure that I was following the interwoven stories of the secondary characters.  These side stories are so compelling and I didn't realize how much they would tie into the main storyline as things progressed.  They are written like backstory, not foreshadowing, and what is included there is really rich in detail that is needed to understand the big picture.  In the middle of the third book, I also backed up and reread about 10 chapters for the same reason.  And if I am completely honest, I also backed up because I didn't want to get to the end. This was because I expected that it was going to be over.  Now, I feel like there was no reason at all to have pre-ordered the book and started reading it on the day it was released.  I definitely should have waited until the series was completed before I even started the first one.

Likely, if there is ever an ending to the series, I might update my recommendation here, but after being rivetted through all three books, completely captivated by the magic and the politics, as well as the love story in this complex universe that was created, I just cannot recommend something that ends on such a cheap cliffhanger.  I really just felt like this was designed to make me have to buy more books and for her to get a deal with Netflix or Max for a series that never ends.  It was just such a disappointment.
​
Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

I am a sucked for a time travel novel. This comes across as a silly, light romance told in a style akin to the classic When Harry Met Sally interview style. I did not love the over-dramatization of the audio narration, so it took me a bit to get over that and let myself relax into the story.  The plot was surprisingly interesting and unusual and far exceeded the quality of the writing.  As the solar flare induced worm hole horizon approaches and the future June reaches back in time to try to warn herself, the plot unexpectedly holds together, which is my favorite part of a time travel story.

​Recommend.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

I have tried to like Terry Pratchett. I mean, I have really tried.  This is my third try reading one of his books.  I really like a lot of people who really like his work.  I have read countless articles that have urged me to fall in love with the Discworld universe as a replacement for the much loved, but now boycotted universe created by the problematic J.K.R. series.  And yet, I have to say that despite all my efforts in this endeavor, I despise these books.  For sure, they are quirk and there are humorous moments, particularly embedded in the quick dialogue the characters often share, but I keep waiting for some meaningful arc to develop, something that I can follow and be invested in.  Instead, I continue to find the books an exercise in performative wit-- so focused on trying to be clever in the moment that the plot and character development seem like just an means to that ends.  Pratchett's distinctive writing style, so revered by so many, truly grates on my nervous with its nonlinear storyline that never quite explains anything about this alternative universe.

Sadly, not recommended.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

Sometimes, a book is just too sophisticated and avant-garde for me.  I started this book twice before I could get past the first 100 pages, plus it took me more than a month to read  The confusion I felt even after reading the beginning three times did not stop there.  After slogging through another 600 pages after that, I remained confused and frustrated with the story on many levels.  First, the main characters in the three different eras are mostly names Charles/Charlie, David, and Edward.  The story starts with an alternative history of the US, the origin of which is the end of the civil war when the South secedes after losing and the West breaks off into its own country.  In this alternative history, racism and classism persist, but homophobia is completely eliminated as prominent men regularly marry each other and take on childrearing, particularly by raising orphans abandoned because of the economic pressures on the poor.  In all three eras, women are relegated to their role as a daughter, sister, (birth) mother, or grandmother.  The book is entirely devoid of strong women, with perhaps one exception at the very end, but she would be considered "strong" in an unconventional way.  Instead, a complicated history unfolds that shows that putting gay men in charge of things does not result in a any better outcome than the mess straight men have made.  

The second section of the book tells another David's backstory growing up in Hawaii, filled with intimate violence and sorrow, and the third section is a dystopian landscape in a future New York under authoritarian rule that comes to power while trying to manage pandemics and natural disasters brought on by climate change.

I spent a lot of time and energy trying to link the three books, thinking that there must be a cohesive family tree I was supposed to be following, but could not.  In reading book summaries after I finished it because I remained so confused (something I almost never do--reading summaries, not getting confused), I think I have finally accepted that the three books were completely independent of each other, other than the tie each story had to a mansion in NYC.  I could have saved myself a lot of intellectual energy if I had realized it was three entirely separate storylines.  I am sure someone more committed to analyzing the books could come up with a lot more themes and B plots that tie it together, but I only caught a couple.  I did find the reuse of the names to be unnecessarily confusing.  

Each of the books were incredibly depressing.  The misery the characters inherit and then create for themselves and those around them is beyond my emotional capacity for the kind of investment this story required.  And yet in many ways the writing, particularly with respect to  character development and the absolutely lovely, detailed descriptions of their misery, was so good that I was sucked into the stories--despite being incredibly confused about who people were and how they related to each other.  As if this wasn't enough, each of the three sections leaves us with a cliffhanger such that I can say that this book at the most unfulfilling ending I can ever remember a book having-- and it had three of them.  I left completely unsatisfied, despite the author having put in an incredible performance in many ways and despite the fact that I invested a lot of intellectual energy trying to keep up with the narrative and figure out what was happening. 

The number of characters alone, many of them introduced quickly at the same time and many of them with the same names, just made this even more complex.  I am all for an intellectual challenge, but I left feeling that I put in a lot of effort only to find that none of that effort actually mattered. Moreover, the story is full of intimate and state violence that was exhausting and was left unresolved and unanalyzed. 

Ultimately, this is one of those books that I feel like I should have loved, but that I ended up feeling like I wasn't intellectually up to the challenge of loving.  

​Do not recommend.
Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.