As I finish off the year, I know that I will have at least two more books read this year that I have not finished at the time of writing this entry. However, I will not write up separate reviews for them since my December wrap up will go up before the next recent reads.
Here are the four books that I have finished since the last recent reads.
I absolutely loved this sweet, cozy fantasy. Should it have been in the romantasy category for the Goodreads Choice Awards? I really don’t think so. Even though the book contains a sweet romance, it’s not the focus of the story. This narrative focuses on the main character (whose name I do not remember) who flees the capital in a time of unrest back to her childhood home on a remote island with as many spellbooks she
could save from a devastating fire in the grand library where she worked, as well as her assistant, a sentient spider plant full of personality. When she comes back home, she has to find a way to make her life work in this provincial town as she struggles to socialize and keep the spell work a secret since she does not know if the law banning the everyday use of magic has been overturned with the regime. As she gradually finds her place, she sees that the town is suffering because the empire’s closely controlled magic and its practitioners no longer make routine journeys to help. The magic that people used to practice all the time has slowly been forgotten leaving them in a near desperate situation now that the empire has fallen (although since this island is so remote, the islanders know nothing about the rebellion.) The main character begins to practice magic to help and in so doing uncovers a lot of information that challenges the way of thinking she accepted as fact indoctrinated as she was in the city where her parents moved the family years before to make a “better life.” I really enjoyed this book and cannot wait to read the companion as well as Durst’s extensive back list.
I did not know about this book until approximately a week or so ago when I saw Gabby from gabbyreads discussed it in her Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club vlog. I added the book immediately to my TBR when I saw that the author is from the Waorani tribe. As someone who grew up in Christian fundamentalism, I am quite familiar with this tribe due to the highly lauded story of four missionary men who went to proselytize
but were immediately attacked and killed by some of the tribe’s members who saw these strange men as a significant threat. When I first learned about this story, I knew the tribe by another name, a name assigned to them by the white American missionaries who returned to love among them and continue to work with them, a name which I refuse to acknowledge because it translates directly to “savages.” The author spent her formative years in a village where one of the widows of the martyred missionaries, Rachel Saint, lived for years and had outside control on these people’s lives, including singing away their rights to their land to the oil companies – although decades later this was ruled illegitimate. This is a hard but necessary read. Nemonte shares her story with the help of her husband and this is what is so important. She describes her early years and how these Christian missionaries forced their beliefs of everything onto her and the people around them in such traumatic ways and then as an adult how that affected her life and trauma responses. I’m so glad that Reese Witherspoon chose this for her book club so that so many more people will pick up and read this book.
This book confirms that Allison Saft is not the author for me. Unlike the first book of hers that I DNF’ed, I at least finished this one. When I first started reading, I found myself intrigued by the set up with the main character Lorelai, a researcher from a marginalized group that I think was supposed to be Jewish although it wasn’t until well into the novel that I picked up on this), joins an expedition to find some long lost magic
item/place in a group that does not like her and includes her supposed rival. I say supposed because Saft does nothing to build this background. She just states the antagonistic relationship as fact making Lorelai’s angry thoughts towards her rival feel completely in her head and unwarranted, especially because Saft paints the rival as a beautiful and kind person. Of course, the romance develops between these two but that does not make this a romantasy. In fact, I would say that the romance, which does not even become a thing until well after the 50% mark, plays even less of a part in this book than in The Spellshop. The overall plot, though, I did not really understand. It felt patchy, like I missed major portions if I lost focus for a minute or two in the audiobook. This means yet another unhaul of a book box special edition. It’s a good thing I have a subscription audit coming up in 2025. More to come on that in a later post.
When I last mentioned this book at the end of the previous recent reads, I had so much hope. Lapinski had opened the novel with an incredibly engaging premise, a travel agency where the suitcases actually take the travelers to the alternate worlds but not everyone, only those who can see the magic which of course includes the main character. The further I read, though, the less this felt like a middle grade novel and more like something I could
not quite figure out. The main character did not sound like a 12 or 14 year old; I honestly don’t know how old she’s supposed to be. The head custodian of the travel agency is also supposed to be an 18 year old (an interesting dynamic already) but read like a crotchety old man. This disconnect in the tone kept me from becoming immersed in the story. The rather strange plot with some unexplained world-building elements did not help. I’m so disappointed because I really wanted to enjoy this middle grade portal fantasy.
Leave a Reply