Mid October Wrap Up

 In the first half of October, I've finished/DNF'd 8 books.

I'll start first with the DNF. After 117 pages of Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemme, I put the book down. The writing was nice but the story was incredibly slow and I just wasn't in the right mood. I may pick it up again in the future but felt forcing myself to continue might put me in a slump so I decided not to finish it.

I read The Vela and wrote its own review in a previous post.

I re-read Nevermoor and Wundersmith by Jessica Townsend in preparation for the release of the third book in the series which comes out later this month. These re-reads were both 5 stars. I loved re-visiting the worlds and picked up more this second time around.

Eagerly I picked up A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. This is a fantasy set at a magical school. However, there are no adults and the school is constantly being infiltrated with harmful magical creatures/demons. Our protagonist is incredibly powerful but not well liked and she works hard to find alliances who will watch her back. I loved almost everything about this story, except the shoe-horned romance and occasional YA whininess. I gave it 4.5 stars and am excited for the sequel.

Another new library hold came in so I read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. The story focuses on a woman who is unhappy with her life so she attempts suicide. While in limbo between life and death, she visits a library which allows her to pick books that contain parallel lives she could've had by making different choices. I was wishing for a bit more sci-fi elements that it actually contained. This read like contemporary and was reasonably entertaining, but didn't leave much of an impression on me. The ending is sweet and the book definitely was uplifting and contained some good messages. I gave it 3 stars.

I finally picked up the poetry collection Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus. He is a mixed race Deaf poet who writes about his experiences feeling like he's on the outside. A few of the poems really impacted me and I will likely pick up future collections. His style reminded me of Danez Smith but with less grim themes. I gave it 4 stars.

Lastly, I read Allie Brosh's new graphic novel Solutions and Other Problems. This was for the most part, hilarious. There were chapters where I was literally gasping for breath. Some chapters are more serious too as she includes some of the difficult things that have happened in the 6-7 years since her last book. My only complaint is that it was a tad too long. Some chapters were just not necessary. I gave the book 4 stars.