Usually Summer is my slow season for reading – thus my frantic Autumn/Winter reading catch-up every year – but this year I have kept up that pace a bit more through July and I am actually ahead of my target this time.
We are in week 31 of the year and I have finished 39 books so far, which means I’m 8 books ahead!!
How many of those did I read in July?
Seven!
Books Finished
- TRUEL1F3: L1FEL1K3 BOOK #3 by Jay Kristoff (Audiobook)
- Seafire: Book #1 by Natalie C. Parker (Paperback book)
- Ice Planet Barbarians: Book #1 by Ruby Dixon (Paperback book)
- Excellent Advice For Living – Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly (Hardback book)
- A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher (Paperback book)
- The Knife Of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking Book #1 by Patrick Ness (Paperback book)
- The Inheritance Games: Book #1 by Jennifer Lynne Barnes (Audiobook)
Mini Reviews
TRUEL1F3 was the chaotic finale of the L1F3L1K3 trilogy and I loved it. I especially loved that there was a bit of a catch up at the start because I read the last one in January and honestly there was so much going on that I had sort of forgotten who had ended up where and doing what.
As always with the last book in a series, it is hard to review without spoilers, however I can say that the ending was a satisfying one and the whole book was very on-brand for Kristoff’s style of not pulling any punches. I cried, I laughed, I gasped in horror, laughed, winced, cried some more etc etc.
If you like your gritty dystopian future YA sci-fi in flavours like the Terminator but also a touch of the Anastasia legends then this might be a series to pick up.
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I really, really wanted to love Seafire. It was, I eventually worked out, a piratical story set in a dystopian future where a lot of the land had sunk and Pirate Lords ruled the world from the sea.
The story follows a female-only Pirate crew lead by best friends Caledonia and Pisces who are set on getting revenge on the Pirate Lord who was responsible for murdering their families only to discover that their two younger brothers may have survived the attack all those years ago.
What was a plan to ruin trade lines and sink as many ships as possible, suddenly had to turn into a rescue mission whilst the girls worked out who to trust.
I enjoyed the idea, and it was an easy read, but I found it all a little frustrating because every character only seemed to have one trait to make up their entire personality. Collectively, the crew made an interesting person, however individually it seemed like they were all a bit flat – one girl was good at maps, one girl was good at food, one was good at rigging, one was an excellent lookout and so on. There didn’t seem to be much else to any of them, which left me feeling a bit disconnected in times of high-drama. I just found it a bit hard to care about any of them.
I imagine if I had read this when I was younger, I would have loved it and would have eaten it all up with a spoon and immediately hunted out the rest of the trilogy, but as it is, I’m happy to leave it as a one and done. The cover is beautiful though!
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I don’t really know what to say about Ice Planet Barbarians beyond that it was everything you would expect from a steamy alien romance novel. Georgie gets slurped up onto a not-very-nice space ship with a selection of other equally scared young women by some not-very-nice aliens in the business of smuggling healthy human breeding stock to planets in the great unknown.
There is an incident and their cargo pod is ditched on an ice planet – Georgie heads out into the snow to try and find help and finds Vektal who is tall, blue, immediately in love with her, and excellent at using all his, uh, equipment.
There is adorable language barrier comedy, a bit of peril and adventure, and quite a lot of smut.
I quite enjoyed it, and it was well written, with a bit more of a storyline than a lot of books in the genre – but I’m probably not going to be reading the rest of the series. Turns out I’m just more of a dragon-shifter/changeling/fae/shifter/werewolf/vampire romance kind of girl.
*
Excellent Advice was probably supposed to be a ‘dip in and out’ kind of book of witticisms and proverbs, but I just ended up reading it from front to back a page or three at a time in between doing other things round the house.
It was good fun, had some great little bits in it, and most of it was pretty solid advice.
Cute little coffee table book that was worth the read.
*
My book of the month was definitely A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking which was a delight from start to finish.
When magic users across the city start turning up dead, Mona figures she’s probably fine because her magic isn’t exactly threatening – it only works on dough. Want excellent bread or biscuits? She’s your girl. But other than that? Not exactly useful.
Then suddenly she finds herself as the only wizard in the city and there’s an attacking army on the march…
I laughed so much throughout this book and I am genuinely a little sorry that it is a stand alone book because I would truly love to go back into the universe for more.
I bought it at WorldCon 2019 and it has waited patiently for me to pick it up since then. Luckily, it was worth the wait!
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Talking of books I have owned forever and not read – I bought the Chaos Walking Trilogy 10th Anniversary set back in 2018 and only picked the first book up this month. All the people who told me I would love The Knife Of Never Letting Go back in the day were completely right – I did.
Apparently my vibe for July was mostly future dystopia – all entirely different from each other though. Which shows just how wide that ‘genre’ is.
*
Finally, I listened to The Inheritance Games on loan from the library and really enjoyed it – a twisty, puzzly kind of mystery book that kept me guessing and I immediately wanted the next one when it finished.
Currently Reading…
I’m currently reading the second Chaos Walking book (The Ask And The Answer) and I have the second Inheritance Games book (The Hawthorne Legacy) on loan from the library.
2025 Total So Far
Sitting comfortably at 39/52. Let’s see if this unseasonable reading burst lasts through August. Not convinced I’ll get much read at Scout Camp though…
Carole Finds Her Wings 