October & November 2018 books
Dance of Thieves by Mary E. PearsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was racing against the clock with this one (due at the library), which made the reading experience a little more frantic than it otherwise would have been, but the second half just flew by! I'm not always 100% on board with this author's world-building and weird fragments of scripture, but I really enjoyed this book.
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Crooked Kingdom by Leigh BardugoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Second reading October 2018:
This book was so cosy, so deliciously dark - I looked forward to cuddling up with it in bed every night, even on a second reading!
First reading November 2016:
Better than Six of Crows. Every time I thought the story couldn't get any tighter, more dangerous, or more suspenseful, with higher stakes, Bardugo took things up a notch.
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Bright We Burn by Kiersten WhiteMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book, this series, has so. much. heart. that dangit if I am not here for every moment of it even if the plot and the characters and pacing weren't always my exact thing! There were scenes toward the end of this book that made my eyes well up and my heart pound. You spend three books with White's writing and a trio like Mehmed, Lada, and Radu, and you start to feel All The Things. My favorite scene in book two was when Lada killed all the mansplaining boyars, but in this book, it was the part where the peasant woman tugged a bathtub over to the hearth and let Lada take a break from prince-ing and just soak for a hot minute. It was so lovely.
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The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine ArdenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What a book to read as another Finnish winter settles in!
4.5 stars - the Grisha books meet Juliette Marillier. This book is something you tuck into more than you read. It's like sitting on the couch wrapped in a warm, soft blanket with some hot chocolate in one hand...figuratively and literally. I may have actually gained weight while reading this book because it was so dang cosy! Plus, the characters in it are always on the brink of starvation so I felt like I needed to forage in the cupboards every time I read it.
I did find that I enjoyed the (considerable! like 75% of the book) buildup more than the actual denouement, but even so, this was a positively delicious read. Looks like book 2 will be returning to medieval Moscow...can't wait!
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The Girl in the Tower by Katherine ArdenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hmm. If The Bear and the Nightingale was Juliette Marillier moonlighting for Leigh Bardugo, The Girl in the Tower has Sara J. Maas rolling up her sleeves and stepping in. You know, "let's punch this series up with an emaciated, unknowable heroine with sometimes-powers, and introduce an immortal Mysterious Loner Dude/Loki carbon copy love interest for good measure."
That said...I still totally devoured this book. It is rich, and deep, and cosy, and righteously feminist, and gets most of the relationships (except the kinda-love one, which I was not a fan of) sooooo right. I had hoped changing the setting to medieval Moscow would take things up a notch, and it did!
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Sarajevo: A War Journal by Zlatko DizdarevićMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I only picked this up because my copy of Logavina Street hadn't arrived yet, but it ended up being the perfect book to read on the plane to Sarajevo. It is intensely geographic on an extremely local scale - I read it with a Google map of Sarajevo open on my phone and every chapter I had something new to mark on it. By the time I landed in Sarajevo, I not only had a deeper understanding of the day-to-day of the siege, but I felt like I knew the layout of the city already!
I only wish the book had been longer. It stops in 1993 when the siege was still going strong, and in one of the final chapters, there is a truly chilling reference to Srebrenica being made a safe zone.
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The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven GallowayMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The perfect book to read on the flight home from Sarajevo.
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A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh MafiMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I said about The Hate U Give that it was both Good and Important. This book is Good, Important, and Swoony. WHAT. OK, so I don't dig the part where (view spoiler) but everything else was just a treat to read.
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