We have reached another Halloween in which I completely forgot/failed to read anything for RIP, despite its being one of my favorite blogging events! I suppose, in retrospect, that Lobizona totally counted. Why did I not call it an RIP read when I was reviewing it?? WHO AM I.
October Reviews
Well, obviously the biggest deal this month was that Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief came out, but I believe I have flailed about it sufficiently in its own post. I also read and adored Romina Garber’s werewolf YA novel, Lobizona, which has a pleasing amount of sportsball and camaraderie even if I had a few notes about it. In romance, Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert was exactly what I wanted in a funny, fannish, fat-positive romance — easily going to be one of my favorite romance novels of the year!
October Books I Didn’t Review
The Dark Tide, by Alicia Jasinska, was a cool f/f take on the story of Tam Lin, with sea monsters! Well, one sea monster. It also contained magical dancing and a complicated sibling relationship, so it was a terrific fit for me. I enjoyed it but maybe didn’t love it — I didn’t have as strong a grip on the characters as I would have liked. That said, Jasinska was doing some really interesting relationship work among her characters here, and the book emphasizes how people can disappoint you without its having to mean that they’re worth having in your life. Which is always nice to find in a book!
Solutions, and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh, is a new book by Allie Brosh! You know how I feel about Allie Brosh! I would give a major content warning for sibling suicide in this book, but I think Brosh speaks about the loss of her sister with insight and compassion (for herself, for her sister, for her parents). I’m so happy Allie Brosh is still out there making art, and I’m thrilled to have this book. (When I say “have,” I don’t actually mean “have.” I bought it for my aunt for her birthday and then read it before I gave it to her.)
The Perfect Assassin, by K. A. Doore, resolves its mystery in a way that made me sad. The book was enjoyable, and I liked the world (so much sand!), but I am an old weary lady, and in this old and weary year, I can’t live with books that resolve their mysteries this way. Highlight if you’re curious: The love interest WHO I GOT INVESTED IN turns out to be the killer, goddammit. It’s not an objectively bad plot device! It just wasn’t what I wanted this month.
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, by Alexis Hall, is an eldritch fantasy Sherlock Holmes adaptation featuring a lady Sherlock character and a very dear, straight-laced Watson. For a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, this wasn’t bad for me! The Sherlock character was too much of a jerk for me, including sometimes too much of a jerk to the Watson character, BUT I adored the worldbuilding and would totally read more books set in this world. Other folks have noted that there’s not a ton of plot to the book, but to me it felt like a video game plot, and I was all on board with wandering around exploring the world.
At Night I Become a Monster, Yori Sumino, translated by Diana Taylor, turned out to be an allegory. I do not like allegories, and I felt a bit tricked at the end to discover it was an allegory all along. This is not Yoru Sumino’s fault. It is a matter of personal taste.
The Best Fic I Read on My Kindle
As I have mentioned here before, I have an absolutely disgraceful Marked for Later list in AO3. I don’t even want to talk about how many fics are on it. One of my problems is that I’m perpetually marking novel-length fics for later and then never reading them, but I believe I have found a solution. I have a new Kindle (acquired from UnclaimedBaggage.com, which I recommend if you want the ease of a Kindle without giving money to dumb Jeff Bezos) to which I have transferred alllllllllll of my novel-length marked-for-later fics. It’s working great! I read not one, not two, but six of them this past month!
My favorite of these was a lettered fic (can’t go wrong with lettered!) called “Away Childish Things.” It’s a Harry/Draco fic wherein adult Harry gets de-aged to ten, with all his ten-year-old mindsets and memories, and Draco has to figure out how to un-de-age him while also taking care of the ten-year-old child he finds himself set with. I thought the portions where Harry is a kid were less successful than the rest of the fic, but I was entranced from the point where Draco finds the fix. I couldn’t put it down! lettered is such a good writer!
Reading Plans for November
My biggest plan for November is Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, which has been duly procured for me by my library system. I’ve heard wonderful things about this book, and its interior design is so gorgeous that I looked up the designer to see if she was on Twitter so I could pay her a compliment about it. Love the paper, love the font, love everything. The book is about a cursed girls’ school that’s having a movie made about it. Sounds fine! Nothing bad has ever happened to anyone who was making a movie about a cursed place!
Also on the docket is Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, which I did not realize is a whole-ass multimedia experience. It’s full-color throughout, with documents and photos and footnotes, and if you thought I was excited about this book before, you should have seen my face when I opened the physical copy and realized what I was in for. It’s going to be a DOCUMENTARY BOOKS-ASS MONTH.
In highly anticipated fantasy novels, I’ve got Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer and Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild; and in romance novels, I’ve got Roan Parrish’s Better Than People which is about a stormcloud book illustrator who falls for his ?hopefully sunshine? dog walker, and Alexis Daria’s You Had Me at Hola, which features telenovela stars. Mmmmm, such good reading ahead of me.
What have you been reading this month? How excited should I be for Plain Bad Heroines?