🐲🌊🦄🦛🧌🐙 Help! I'm Caught in a Series Loop!

 

    I have read and enjoyed Naomi Novik's series Scholomance and several of her stand-alones like Uprooted and Spinning Silver. I am pleased she has another series, Temeraire, of which  His Majesty's Dragon is the start. I have been reluctant to read another series about dragons and the people who ride them. The book captivated me from the beginning, with an origin story set in the Napoleonic Wars, in which dragons fight for both sides. They are trained and treated like cavalry horses. However, Temeraire is different. Captain Will Lawrence fights on the sea for England. The ship he captains captures a French ship with valuable treasure: an unhatched dragon egg. It hatches early and bonds with Captain Lawrence, changing his life's trajectory. He must now join the Dragon Corp. Both dragon and rider must learn to fight as a team in a service that isn't well respected and is resentful of the newcomers. Novik paints vivid action scenes within the fast-paced plot. The characters are witty and likable. I'm hooked!

🐉🐲🌊⛅️

    Where the Library Hides by Isabel Ibañez is the second in the duology, Secrets of the Nile.  I reviewed What the River Knows here: https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/2025/02/books-with-magic-and-magical-food.html. I found Ibañez to be effusive in her descriptions.  The plot moved forward, but it occasionally gets bogged down in minutiae. The world she's built contains trace magic, but it is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Life-threatening injury? Surprise, the main character finds a healing potion. Need to communicate with someone far away? Oh, look, someone brought a magic teacup that makes that happen.  I didn't like how it ended. It reminded me of a Mission Impossible episode.  I would read more from Ibañez because she has clever ideas and creates interesting characters. I'm betting she will improve over time. 

💍📜🗺️

    I heard a quote recently, and I can't chase it down. Still, the gist was that people sought escape when anxious, like how movies boomed during the Great Depression. I have been into fantasy a great deal lately. Hmmm. I have read everything Matt Dinniman has published--at least according to GoodReads. The Hobgoblin Riot is the second book of his Dominion of Blades (DOM) series. He wrote it before his more famous series, Dungeon Crawler Carl.  I can see the seeds of characters and plot lines being explored in DOM. It is a fascinating peek behind the creative curtain. The book ends on a cliffhanger, and I'm curious if Dinniman plans to revisit the series.  I do like things tidily wrapped up.

🦄🦛🧌🐙

🔮🪐🌟🐸🦹‍♂️🐉Childhood Classic, Fantasy, Dystopian Future, and Historical Fiction

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle was the March pick for my book club. We are having a great time reading Newberry Award Winners. Not everyone is a fan of Sci-Fi/Fantasy, so I wanted to know how this book would land with some of the others. It is over 50 years old! It has held up well. I appreciate how genuine the characters are portrayed: an angry fifteen-year-old girl, a popular athlete with a tough home life, and, of course, the beings from outer space. L'Engle has universal themes about the pain of growing up, being caught between good and evil, and the importance of love. What makes the book endure is that these topics are not dealt with tritely but sincerely and with great compassion. It's a winner.

🔮🪐🌟

 

    Apprentice to a Villain is the second in a series by Hannah Nicole  Maehrer. Fun fact: The series grew out of TikToks Maehrer, which was made around the idea of what it would be like to be an assistant to a villain whose job involves torture and general evilness. Here is a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDoN6GpjTb8&t=187s

    The second book continues the story with some problems solved and others cropping up. Maehrer developed her characters, which grew and changed. There are many nascent romances. She leans heavily on the frenemies-to-lovers trope. I found it annoying that the main characters, The Villain and Evie, his former assistant and now apprentice, refuse to admit they love each other, but I'm also amused at the ways the author finds for them to "have to" kiss.

I'm looking forward to the next book.

🐸🦹‍♂️🐉

    I have seen several ads for the movie The Wild Robot and decided to read the book before watching it. It is YA fiction. The Wild Robot by Peter Brown is about a robot from a shipment stranded on an unpopulated island. The Robot, Ros, is anthropomorphized, having feelings and forming relationships. I listened to the audiobook but understood the physical book has fantastic illustrations by Peter Brown. There are more books in the series. I would file this book under heartwarming.

🤖🪿🐿️🦫🦌🌳

    A friend recommended The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff. It is historical fiction about British female spies who aided the French Resistance in World War II. They trained for functions but primarily worked as covert radio operators. I am somewhat burnt out on World War II books, but I tried it. The story is told by three different women: two women in 1944 and a war widow in 1946. The story of the women clumsily fit around the story of actual events and felt forced, but it was still enjoyable and compelling. I'm glad I read it. 

🕵️‍♀️🔘🌇

💀🌇🚀 A Week Where I Read Lots of Books

 

    How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler was recommended because I've read some LITRPG (Literary Role Playing Game) and liked it. This was a similar plot type of a human gamer, Davi, who has been caught in a fantasy game for about a thousand years. On this restart, instead of trying to lead the good guys to victory, she chooses to try and become the Dark Lord because that's who has won every time so far. Here is a motto I occasionally tell myself when making decisions, especially about a reoccurring issue: If you want something different, try something different. I liked the setup and the feisty lead character. The further I went, the less I liked it. The main character thinks about sex frequently--the reader is party to her thoughts-- and it took away from the story for me. What was the author's point? The story or the sex? My conclusion is the sex. I found the story anemic.

💀🧌🧝‍♂️

    It has been a while since I've read a memoir. I listen to Kara Swisher's podcast, Pivot, and she frequently refers to Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. Tech business is something I know little about, so I was lost at times by the events and people she mentions. Swisher is a feisty person reporting on Tech personalities and the businesses they've started from its earliest days. I learned things.

💻🛜💿⌨️

    The Restaurant of Lost Recipes in The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood. I read the first of the series and enjoyed it. There is a thread of magical realism that runs throughout the book. A remembered meal can restore the heart. There are compelling reasons customers come to the detectives to have them recreate meals from the past. Kashiwai describes his food so well that I come away hungry. I looked up unfamiliar dishes to see what was in them and what they looked like. Each chapter contains an entire story, making the book easy to pick up and put down. There are more in the series awaiting translation. Hurray!

🍱🍚🍥🍣

    I was not a fan of Call Me Home: A Memoir by Alexancra Auder. Auder was raised by her mother in New York's Chelsea Hotel, famous for its bohemian guests and residents. Recounting her childhood is intercut with her current life as a mother. The mother/daughter relationship is a strong theme. Viva Supreme was a Warhol model. As a mother, she vacillated between permissive and despotic. Auder relates her story with painful honesty. She recounts her struggles as a mother to a teenage daughter while still managing her mother's wild mood swings. I wanted a tidier story that showed triumph in the face of tragedy. Auder is wise to show the messiness of relationships. 

🌇🫣🎭🏨🎥

    Matt Dinniman is the author of the Dungeon Crawler Carl(DCC) series, which I have enjoyed, so I'm reading his backlist. Dominion of Blades predates DCC. It contains seeds of ideas that have fuller expression in the DCC. The characters aren't as flamboyant as those he later creates, but he still has a group of unlikely heroes who fight for one another. If you want more Matt Dinniman, this is almost OK.

🚀⚔️🫏🛸

🫐😘⛪️ Fantasy and Romance AND Theology!

 

    I have fallen hard for the romantasy genre. The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst is a solid writer of the marriage between fantasy and romance. This book is appropriate for anyone--grandma to tweener--not too spicy but interesting with likable, honorable characters; a confident and surprising plot; and a delightful mish-mash of creatures.

🍓🪄🧪🫐

    A writer I've especially enjoyed lately is Katherine Center, defender of the Romance genre. I am working through her backlist as they become available. This week's reading was Happiness for Beginners. I first watched the movie of this not knowing it was based on Center's book. A woman has gone through a recent divorce and decides to join an Outward Bound-type hiking trip to reset her priorities. She has never hiked before. Her much younger brother's good-looking friend is on the same journey. She is not pleased. What will happen? I've read enough of her work to detect a pattern: a woman in a life transition (i.e, divorce, career change, big opportunity), someone with a medical condition, past demons will be faced, and there will be kissing. It is a formula Center does well. 

👿🏥😘

    To those who think I only read fiction, not only, just mostly. I didn't read John M. Frame's Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief, a book of 1220 pages, in a week or even a year. It took me three years to get completely through it, listening off and on to the audiobook. It is intended more as a reference book than a straight read-through. It covers theology like the Doctrine of God, Man, the Church, and more. Frame's work is balanced and understandable. It has an excellent index (I also own a hardcover copy for looking up topics). Frame is a Reformed theologian (if you know, you know), but he fairly examines all sides. I did not understand everything he discussed, but it has expanded my understanding of the basics of Christianity. It is a solid resource, and if you're ambitious, you could read the entirety of it, like me.

✝️ ⛪️ ☦️