booksinmyhouse

Genre: Romance with some supernatural elements
How it got in my house: Library hold request, made before I started this blog
Recommend: For queer romance full of found family; when you want to read about pre-COVID joys like "parties" and "going to favorite restaurants"

I drank One Last Stop like I'm drinking water on these hot summer days. It was compulsively readable, and I had to find out what happened next. This is a sweet tale of opening up, finding found family, city living, and queer joy. Casey McQuisition also seems to be filling the very specific literary niche of "what if that terrible thing that just happened to the country...didn't happen," first with Red, White, and Royal Blue and the presence of a competent Democrat president, now with One Last Stop, a book all about New York City in 2020 with no COVID. Thus, this book has lots of parties, and gatherings, and meeting new people...all those things that happened in a pre-pandemic world. It was fun, but it also made me wistful and nostalgic. Even though the parties in this book are much larger and seem much more fun than any party I have ever been to. But "makes you nostalgic for a place that you've never been" is one of the special things books can do.

One Last Stop is a good fanfiction-y love story, with Kissing For Research, boatloads of pining, and found family. Putting together the pieces of Jane's backstory is very satisfying, as is seeing August learn to open up to others. A comforting read all around.

Lifetime blog tally:
Number of books read: 6
Net change in unread books in my house: +2

Genre: Fantasy
How it got in my house: Library hold request, made before I started this blog
Recommend: If you like fun fantasy with a vibrant cast

Because of the pandemic, for most of 2020, I found it difficult to read books. Even some of my old favorites could make me grumpy or listless. And even though I've started reading more books again, I will occasionally stutter to an unexpected halt in books I'm loving simply because I expect something bad will happen to the characters.

The list of works of fiction where nothing bad happens is...short.

The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry is a delight of a book. Characters include a down-on-her-luck, poor fire witch; a plucky and wealthy half-troll heiress; a pleasant, bird-loving old necromancer; and a skeletal undead mouse named Buttons. The prose--third-person limited, tight on Delly's internal voice--is unique and full of humar. Characters snipe and bicker and indulge each other and care for each other. Delly is a fully rounded character, which does mean she makes questionable decisions, which did wrack my nerves a bit! Waiting for characters to face the consequences of their actions: apparently torture for my brain in These Pandemic Times.

But I kept reading! Bad things happened to the characters, yet the book continued to be an absolutely great read! It gives me hope: hope that I can tackle more of the books I did not read during the pandemic, hope that I will continue to find more books out there with unexpected and welcome joys like an undead mouse named Buttons.

Lifetime blog tally:
Number of books read: 5
Net change in unread books in my house: +2

Genre: Romance
How it got in my house: Library hold request, made before I started this blog
Recommend: For when you want an over-the-top, larger-than-life romance

Alyssa Cole set out to personally attack me with this book, with a heroine who tries to help everyone, all the time, and whose life is in shambles as a result. Plus, this book features my favorite side character of the previous book in this Runaway Royals series, Bez.

The Runaway Royals series and its prequel series, Reluctant Royals, romp about in fluff of the highest caliber. As one of the characters in my favorite installment says, "Girl, I've read this fanfic. You sent me this fanfic."

Maybe it's my mood and mental state, but this book was actually too over-the-top for me! The surprise!fake marriage plus surprise!boat trip plus multiple secret royalty running around. Very possibly the tropes would have been fun for me another time. The ending, though, was much too abrupt. I was hoping for a lot of time with Bez's family, a good emotional resolution for Makeda's problems with her mom, and a satisfying faceoff between Bez and her terrible employers. But instead, the book zipped through its conclusion.

That said, I certainly recommend this series as a whole! Especially my favorite installment, A Prince on Paper. And I will always look forward to the next Alyssa Cole book.

Lifetime blog tally:
Number of books read: 4
Net change in unread books in my house: +1

Genre: Memoir
How it got in my house: I bought it last week--I could not resist the local bookstore sale
Do I recommend it: YES

So a while ago on this here internet, I saw a prompt going around asking, to paraphrase, "what book can you not recommend to other people because you love it so much?" And this question baffled me. In the intervening years, I've occasionally thought about it and been baffled once more. I always want more people to read my favorite books! I would like to mandate that everyone read Braiding Sweetgrass, for example. Why would you read a book, love it, and hesitate to recommend it?

I get it now.

I loved this book. I don't know how Emezi can write like that--divine power?--but WOW, the things they can do with words! The book was a breathtaking combination of vivid immersion into experiences I've never had and eye-opening connection. It's hard to articulate how much I loved the more-than-human perspective. And because it's that more-than-human perspective I loved, maybe that's why I'm wary of sharing it with other people. I am not good at being vulnerable, and this book is so vulnerable. I loved what it had to say about humanity, divinity, writing, ambition, magic...and I am not good at talking about many of those things myself. But perhaps I can get better at it.

*

Heavy, heavy content warnings on the book  for graphic descriptions of suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts, gore, and reference to rape and abuse.

Lifetime blog tally:
Number of books read: 2
Net change in unread books in my house: +3

Genre: Nonfiction, nature essays
How it got in my house: Gift
Do I recommend it: Yes

Vesper Flights is a book of essays about nature and our place in it with gorgeous prose. And here's the thing: with that description, you already know if this is a book for you or not. I think you know what you're going to get, with a well-written nature book, right? You'll learn lots of amazing things about fish and mushrooms and birds and insects and this wonderful teeming planet around us, you'll read some sentences that make you go "oh" as the world cracks open for you in a new way, and you'll also be reminded (again and again) how it's all dying out.

Nature books are always a bit like Tolkien's elves, in that way. A glorious, grand thing is fading away before our eyes. And elves are much less interesting than real-world animals. No offense to Tolkien, but elves aren't bioluminescent, are they? Do elves spend years at a time flying? Can elves navigate by Middle-Earth's magnetic field? Does Middle-Earth have a magnetic field? Anyway, elves are great, but they can't hold a candle to peregrine falcons or wild boar or the whole scope of this infinitely varied world.

Vesper Flights also criticizes the malarkey companies feed us about individual consumer purchases somehow solving the systematic problem, which is nice. It doesn't offer any practical guidance on taking down the system, but I can't fault the book for that; that's a bit outside its scope. But if anyone does know of nature books that also have some practical anticapitalism tips in them, hit me up.

So this review is more of a confirmation, than anything. If you like nature books, you'll probably like this one! Give it a try! If you don't like nature books, or if you're not up for being sad about the loss of so much wonder in the world, give this a pass.