There was no reason for me to do this. I just felt like attaining an arbitrary goal that made me feel clever. Do I still have more than 30 books checked out from the library? Yes. Do I have multiple ARCs that I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing and they’ve piled up and I’m starting to worry I’ll never catch up? Yes. But January Jenny read one book per day this entire month. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALS. So here comes a lightning round of all the books I read in January.

There are thirty-one of them.

I’m a goals genius.

Week One

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor – A heavily augmented woman called AO is attacked in the marketplace, after which — she is extremely strong due to all the augmentations — she goes on the run across Nigeria with a Fulani herdsman she meets. A whole world of surveillance follows.

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, Tamsyn Muir – What a weirdo Tamsyn Muir is. I say it with love! Princess Floralinda is the story of a princess imprisoned in, yep, a forty-flight tower. On every flight there is a different monster, and at the bottom there is a dragon, and none of the princes make it very far. With the help of a horrible little fairy, Floralinda slowly begins to make her way downward. But as she’s changing the state of things in the tower, she changes the state of things in herself as well.

Where the Children Take Us, Zain Asher – This was a Booklist read! It’s Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sister’s memoir. Did you know poor Chiwetel Ejiofor was in a horrible accident with his father when he was a kid? He and his dad were on a road trip around Nigeria to help Ejiofor connect with his heritage, and there was a car accident, and the dad died and the son was very badly injured; and anyway, then Zain Asher’s mum raised them all by herself while running a pharmacy in London. The book’s a love letter to Asher’s mother, although I am not personally a huge fan of memoirs.

The Thief on a Winged Horse, Kate Mascarenhas – I got this for Christmas! The author of The Psychology of Time Travel, which I was so in love with, wrote another book that only (curses!) got published in the UK and not in the US. It’s about a dysfunctional family that makes magic dolls, a young dollmaker who comes to town and insists on joining them, and a daughter of the family who wants to learn her family’s dollmaking secrets too, despite family traditions that reserve those secrets only to the men. It’s a slightly chillier book than The Psychology of Time Travel, but fascinating and enjoyable anyway.

Silence Is a Sense, Layla Alammar – A sort of literary Rear Window, from the point of view of a Syrian refugee with post-traumatic mutism. From her window in a council flat, she watches her neighbors and writes essays, anonymously, about refugees and Muslim identity. When her local mosque is the victim of a vicious attack of vandalism, she’s drawn further into the community. The writing in this was gorgeous, although the ending was maybe just a little pat.

Just Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane – My first time out with Mhairi McFarlane! Recommended by my lovely pal Katie, McFarlane’s a Scottish author who writes lovely books about friendship and romance. Just Last Night follows Eve and her group of friends in the aftermath of one of their deaths. As Eve grapples with the loss of Susie, she’s also forced to reckon with her feelings about Ed — which everyone in the group has known about for years. The romance in this one is slightly back-burnered, and I’d more call it women’s fiction, much as I hate the term?, because it’s really more about Eve’s journey of self-acceptance.

The Dating Playbook, Farrah Rochon – I read this out of order! Which is a shame, because the inciting incident of the series sounds delightful: Three different women discover they’re dating the same man. They ditch the man and become the best of friends, and each of the books in the series focuses on the romance of one of them. The Dating Playbook follows Taylor Powell, a personal trainer who gets her big break when NFL player Jamar Dixon hires her to get him in shape to rejoin the league after a major injury. It’s funny and sweet and contains fake dating: everything you want in a romance novel! I can’t wait to read the others in the series!

The Perishing, Natashia Deon – This one’s a literary fantasy novel about a girl who shows up in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or who she was before. She heals with inhuman speed and — later on — realizes that she seems to possess memories from former lives. Lou’s story, which is vivid in its depiction of the time and place, is interspersed with glimpses of a woman called Sarah in the 2100s, who reflects on her past relationships and the generations-long struggle for equality. The novel’s light on speculative elements and is definitely more on the literary fiction side of things, which suits its plotting (uneven), characterization (wonderful), and writing (gorgeous).

Week Two

Assembly, Natasha Brown – A short novel about refusal.

The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon – I read and enjoyed Solomon’s first novel, so I thought I’d pick this one up! It was fine though perhaps not quite my thing. It’s a novel that alternates chapters between a rather fraught dinner party (delicious) and the protagonist’s college career and tumultuous relationship with one of her exes. Both bits were interesting, but I’d actually have loved it to be just a dinner party book. Y’all know my feelings on bottle episodes!

Diary of a Provincial Lady, EM Delafield – A very long time ago, all the cool bloggers were reading this. It is perhaps not surprising that it took me like ten years to get to it. I found it tiresome when I started, but then I realized that the trick was to read it as it was written — in brief installments, like a newspaper column. Once I caught wise and started reading it like that, a few entries at a time, I quite enjoyed it. Not to reread, but it was an amusing entertainment of an evening.

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville, Akash Kapur – Only once ever have I been so intrigued by the book featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review that I’ve read that review in its entirety, the front page bit and the rest of it that you have to skip to, before reading the rest of the book review. This is because I am fascinated by cults. Auroville wasn’t a cult, but it was, at least, cult-adjacent. Kapur and his wife both grew up in Auroville, and his wife’s parents died there under troubling circumstances. Better to Have Gone tells the story of the founding of this intentional community outside of Pondicherry in India and the deaths of the two people who raised his wife. (Whiskey Jenny and I went to Pondicherry when we were in India, but not to Auroville. I did buy a comforter for my bed, though, that was made in Auroville!)

The Road Trip, Beth O’Leary – Remember how I said a minute ago that I love bottle episodes? Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip is one, and it was great. Addie and her sister and a stranger who’s hitching a ride with them are on their way to their friend’s wedding when she’s in a car crash with her ex-boyfriend Dylan and his horrible posh friend Marcus. They all pile into the car to go to the wedding (it’s a bank holiday weekend, so! no trains!), and everyone is mad at everyone, and I, obviously, loved it. Easily my favorite of Beth O’Leary’s books thus far. Par for the course with her, it deals with some heavy issues, including alcoholism and sexual assault. But also: ROAD TRIP.

Peter Cabot Gets Lost, Cat Sebastian – I mean! As I was already on the road trip theme! It just made good sense to read Cat Sebastian’s latest, Peter Cabot Gets Lost, in which a rich queer Cabot boy goes on a road trip with a (not rich) former classmate he doesn’t have a crush on. As they make their way across America, they’re forced to reassess their initial ideas about each other and also sometimes there is only one bed. Great stuff. Classic. It’s a very very soft book, as Cat Sebastian’s books always are these days, mainly comprising conversations and sex and occasional stops to check out weird Americana. Also, is it a journey to California or a journey to self-acceptance? YOU DECIDE.

Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer – Another memoir for Booklist! This one about farming. My God, farming sounds hard; equally, I bet James Herriot would have liked these two women and their animals. Food for thought.

A Lesson in Vengeance, Victoria Lee – omg so fun. This is the lesbian witch YA dark academia book you’ve been dreaming of. It’s got similar vibes to Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers, except for it’s more focused on academia — our protagonist, Felicity Darrow (they all have names like this), is studying but pretending she’s not studying a bunch of dead witches who once attended her school. She’s also grieving her girlfriend’s death the previous year, a death in which Felicity and witchcraft may or may not have been complicit. Ellis Haley, for her part, wants to write a book about the dead girls, for which she needs to research how to get away with murder. Setting aside the question of whether anything in this book makes sense, it was fucking fun as hell and I will certainly read more by this author.

The Eternal Audience of One, Rémy Ngamije – I loved this! It’s about a Rwandan Namibian guy and his family and his friends. Actually I have a pretty hard time describing what it’s about! But what I will say is that it made me laugh out loud several times, and I am n o t a person who typically laughs out loud at books. Also, love to see Namibia getting its flowers for welcoming refugees from other parts of Africa that were experiencing unrest in the late twentieth century. What a great country.

Week Three

Subtle Blood, KJ Charles – This is the third in a romance series I generally liked but also felt kind of weird about because it’s set in England between the wars, and the Big Bad is a giant international conspiracy of all-knowing people who are highly placed in government and they want to hoard all the wealth. JUST FELT WEIRD. Anyway, Subtle Blood was my favorite in the series because there is the least amount of the giant international conspiracy, and moreover, Kim’s really excellent former fiancee shows back up and I love her.

The Flatshare, Beth O’Leary – Delighted by my success with The Road Trip, I tried the final Beth O’Leary book I hadn’t read yet, so I read The Flatshare. I loved it more than The Switch but less than The Road Trip, and I was very touched by the friendship between Tiffy and Richie.

Mr. Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater – After my absolute adoration of the Raven Cycle, the first book in Maggie Stiefvater’s new Dreamers Trilogy kinda left me cold. Mr. Impossible is just a way way way better book (it contains the following sentence, which I loved: “She was dressed in a cocktail dress that said, Look at me, and also said, Now that you’re looking, did you notice I think you’re stupid? It was a good dress.“), but I still did not feel emotionally connected to it. Everyone is mad at everyone else! The only bits where I felt emotionally connected to the book were when two characters liked each other, so it was pretty much just when Matthew was helping out Jordan and they were bonding. I’ll read the third book though!

A Lot Like Adios, Alexis Daria – I maybe loved this a scootch less than Daria’s prior book, mainly because the previous one was about a telenovela and that’s my jam. This one was still really fun though. It’s also a solid entrant in the “people with jobs” genre, so there was a lot of stuff about the central couple achieving professional satisfaction. I love that shit.

The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee – I am not 100% convinced that I’m smart enough for flash fiction. That’s all, that’s the review.

Lore Olympus, vol 1, Rachel Smythe – Maybe Lore Olympus was too hyped up for me to love it and/or maybe I needed to have read further into it. As I was reading it, I kinda had no idea why the characters were Greek gods at all? Readers please weigh in: Should I press on? Does it take a little while to form a true emotional connection to this book and these characters?

Once More Upon a Time, Rokshani Chokshi – I really should have paired this with Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, as they are both novella-length twists on fairy tales. This is about a couple who were once in love, but because of magical shenanigans, they no longer are. In order to get the life they want, as non-married not-in-love people, they have to go on a road trip to do a favor for a witch. You’ll never guess what happens over the course of the road trip! Never ever once will you ever guess!

Week Four

School Days, Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Linda Coverdale – Look at meeeee I picked up a book while browsingggggg at the libraryyyyyy! I do this all the time, but usually only from the new book shelves. Doing it from the old book shelves felt very smart of me. I have been meaning to read something by Patrick Chamoiseau for ages, and this story about a young boy attending an extremely colonial Martinique school that does all sorts of colonial things. It evoked a really vivid sense of place, despite being overall way too slow-paced for me.

Don’t You Forget about Me, Mhairi McFarlane – Another repeat author in January! I liked this one more than Just Last Night, because the romance was more central, plus there was a pub. It weirdly also had a lot of similarities to The Road Trip. Reading synergy? It’s about a woman leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, and she gets a job in a pub that turns out to be owned by her first love. Great stuff. Plus there is a dog.

Radha and Jai’s Recipe for Romance, Nisha Sharma – I love this type of YA romance, but this specific one didn’t work for me. The central characters were constantly blowing up at, lying to, or misunderstanding each other, so it didn’t feel like a satisfying or coherent relationship arc. I loved all the stuff about cooking and dance though!

Deaf Utopia: A Memoir — and a Love Letter to a Way of Life, Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert – Why am I suddenly reading so many memoirs for Booklist? I was not familiar with Nyle DiMarco, but reading the book caused me to get to watch a bunch of quite cool performances on Dancing with the Stars. Also I love that he represented ASL conversations with the structure and syntax of ASL. I haven’t seen that before!

Future Feeling, Joss Lake – For such an allegorical story (I don’t like allegories) with at least two daddy-kink-heavy sex scenes (I am from the South, where adults call their fathers Daddy, so therefore I cannot with it as a sexual thing), Future Feeling was unexpectedly enjoyable for me. It was funny and heartfelt, and also I loved the escapist fantasy of a global network of trans minders looking out for all trans people.

L.A. Weather, Maria Amparo Escandon – I am actually not sure why this has been getting such a huge marketing push! It’s enjoyable, but I expected there to be more there there, somehow. One thing I did love was the representation of Jewish/Catholic syncretism within this Mexican American family. Apart from that, it’s a perfectly fine family novel! It’s everywhere because publicity decisions were made that it should be everywhere!

The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed – OH how skin-crawly this book made me, in a good way! It’s set in a post-everything-disaster world, and its protagonist, Reid, gets an acceptance letter from a university, her ticket out of the life that keeps her and her family and everyone she knows working flat out to just barely get by. Her mother doesn’t believe the university is even real, but Reid is determined to take her chance at a better life. The truly special thing about this book, though, is Mohamed’s depiction of the Cad, an infection that lives under the skin of Reid and her mother and numerous others, and it might be semi-sentient. The Annual Migration of Clouds is about hope and choice in the most fascinating ways, a very very strong book to end the month on.

WHEW that was a lot of books. I feel like that song “88 Lines about 44 Women.” How was your January?

The post The Thirty-One Books of January appeared first on Reading the End.

However, there are other things that you might like to read and do that aren’t watching the Star Wars trailer, or reading extensive, important commentary on the Star Wars trailer, or lusting after Oscar Isaac and John Boyega in the Star Wars trailer.

Where to find the filth in the canon of classic literature.

“A lot of the books have Nancy losing consciousness at a vital moment, like one of those fainting goats.” Who is Nancy Drew, really?

What makes a story feel satisfying? And how does that differ among cultures? Marie Mutsuki Mockett talks about American stories and Japanese ones.

Historical costuming is fraught as hell when you’re not white.

This breakdown of office housework vs glamor work — and in general, ways that marginalized groups can protect themselves in biased workplaces — is very very enlightening.

“We’re not incapable of pity for those who suffer the almost unimaginable misfortune of being born into this world alone.” On twins.

When asked what’s next for her, Nnedi Okorafor says, “More, just more.” We are blessed.

This piece about a twenty-years-ago production of Angels in America in East Texas made me teary as hell.

Fanfiction isn’t an adequate substitute for actual sex ed for queer kids — but it’s better than nothing.

“It is much less lucrative for Fox (now Disney) to simply sell you your favorite old show than it is to collect rent on it every month.” The streaming wars are over, and we, the viewers, have lost.

Chiraag Bhakta created an installation about white appropriation of South Asian culture, for the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The curatorial staff immediately demanded the installation be toned down.

The Tiptree Award is changing its name to the Otherwise Award. Which I love! Hooray!

This is a super useful older thread of advice on how to describe images for people who use screen readers.

Members of the Church of Scientology have been buying up beach front property in Tampa and just, like, sitting on it. It’s fucking creepy. What the fuck, scientology?

In conclusion, Finn and Rey and Poe and Rose are perfect treasures who have never done one single thing wrong in their entire lives, including throughout the entirety of The Last Jedi, and I am phenomenally excited for The Rise of Skywalker. Here’s the trailer one more time, just to be on the safe side. I have watched it a very sensible number of times. Don’t worry about a thing.

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The Diverse Books Tag is a bit like a scavenger hunt. I will task you to find a book that fits a specific criteria and you will have to show us a book you have read or want to read.

If you can’t think of a book that fits the specific category, then I encourage you to go look for one. A quick Google search will provide you with many books that will fit the bill. (Also, Goodreads lists are your friends.) Find one you are genuinely interested in reading and move on to the next category.

Everyone can do this tag, even people who don’t own or haven’t read any books that fit the descriptions below. So there’s no excuse! The purpose of the tag is to promote the kinds of books that may not get a lot of attention in the book blogging community.

Find a book starring a lesbian character.

I choose my favorite of Helen Oyeyemi’s books, White is for Witching. It’s about a pair of twins who live in a haunted and xenophobic house. The girl twin, Miranda, goes off to Cambridge and gets involved with a black girl. The house is not happy about it.

Find a book with a Muslim protagonist.

Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Unquiet Dead features a Canadian Muslim detective trying to solve a mystery relating to a possible Bosnian war criminal. This was obviously right up my alley, as I read very widely about genocides in history and their aftermaths. I enjoyed the mystery a lot and was excited to find that it’s the first in a series about this detective, Esa Khattak, and his right-hand woman, Rachel Getty.

Find a book set in Latin America.

A Latin America-set book on my TBR list that I can’t wait to read when it comes out next month is Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun, which is about three Jamaican women who fight against the installation of a new hotel in their community. It got a ton of buzz at BEA, and my pal Shaina raved about it, so I’m in!

Find a book about a person with a disability.

Do mental disorders count? If yes I am choosing Nathan Filer’s wonderful The Shock of the Fall, which made me cry many times like a tiny, tiny child. The depiction of what it’s like to live with schizophrenia is so beautifully done, without ever being patronizing or overly sentimental. I am tearing up now thinking of one moment in particular. Sniffle, sniffle.

Find a science fiction or fantasy book with a POC protagonist.

Don’t mind if I doooooo. A recent read that I enjoyed a lot, but didn’t get around to reviewing, was Nnedi Okorafor’s book Lagoon, in which a race of aliens makes their first contact in Lagos, Nigeria. All of the various protagonists trying to make sense of this bewildering new state of affairs are black Nigerians, and it’s a weird and spooky and excellent piece of scifi.

Find a book set in (or about) any country in Africa.

Jenny cracks her knuckles and does some jumping jacks in preparation, then remembers she should be reasonable about this and not get all crazy with it. Suffice it to say, I love reading books set in or about countries in Africa, and it is hard for me to pick just one.

I’m going to choose a book from a smaller press, Imran Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System. This book (which I’m still waiting for my library to order for me!) is a novel about the changes in South African society over the last forty years. I have been given to understand that it deals with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which I am extra interested in.

Find a book written by an Aboriginal or American Indian author.

Your recs for this category would be appreciated, as I didn’t have a ton of choices lined up. I’m choosing Ambelin Kwaymullina’s very enjoyable The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, a YA dystopian novel with (I’m delighted to report) a sequel to be published in America this year.

Find a book set in South Asia (Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc.)

I really like Ru Freeman’s book On Sal Mal Lane, which I read a few years back. Set on a road in Sri Lanka at the outset of the Sri Lankan Civil War, it depicts a group of families (some Tamil, some Sinhalese, and some Burgher) dealing with the changing political and racial dynamics of their country. It reminded me of one of my all-time favorite authors, Rumer Godden, and was just altogether great.

Find a book with a biracial protagonist.

Everyone was crazy about Fran Ross’s Oreo last year, when the 1974 satirical novel was reprinted. It’s a comic novel about a mixed-race woman in Philadelphia and New York, and although it has been described as picaresque and that is not really my jam,¹, I am excited for Oreo to become the exception to my picaresque hate.

Find a book starring a transgender character or about transgender issues.

For this one, I’m choosing Meredith Russo’s If I Was Your Girl. Protagonist Amanda has just started at a new school and is falling in love with a boy named Grant; she badly wants to come out to him as trans, but fears how he will take it. I hear amazing things about this book and this author and can’t wait to try it!

The post Diverse Books Tag appeared first on Reading the End.

(I do.)

Who Fears Death is set in a post-apocalyptic Sudan, where a racial group called the Nuru are set on wiping out a racial group called the Okeke. The protagonist, Onyesonwu (her name means “Who fears death?”), is the daughter of an Okeke woman whose village was all slaughtered and who was raped by a Nuru man; as a mixed-race child — what the Nuru and the Okeke call Ewu — she faces discrimination and hostility from the Okeke. As she grows up under the protection of her mother and her kind, affectionate stepfather, Onyesonwu slowly realizes that she is a sorcerer. Her magical training is difficult to begin and difficult to continue, but she must learn to control her powers in order to realize her destiny.

SO.

Outcast child with a special destiny is one of those tropes you soon have enough of. I have read a dozen outcast with a special destiny books, and I have loved many of them (hem Harry Pottter hem), but there are times when you get tired of reading about the protagonist who is the most special of all the special girls and boys in Special Land. There were two reasons I didn’t feel that way about Who Fears Death:

1. Gender stuff. Y’all know I love my gender stuff. The gendered nature of the magic in this book is unusual and fascinating — Onyesonwu’s power is feared because she is a woman and dire hints are dropped about what might happen if she ever got pregnant while also being a magical person. She struggles to find a teacher because she is a woman, and her determination to be instructed in the use of her powers is one of my favorite things about her as a character. Even better, she’s in a relationship with another Ewu, a boy who failed to become a full sorcerer, and the tension between what he believes about women and magic, and what he knows about her, continues to come up throughout the book.
2. The damage stories can do. Is a theme. One of my favorite themes in all the land is the power of stories theme. Everyone in this novel believes in a story called the Great Book, which tells about how the Okeke became too proud and too powerful, and so the goddess Ani brought forth the race called the Nuru and decreed that the Okeke would be their slaves forever. Oh man. I know it’s not everybody’s thing, but I love having the proposed resolution to any problem in any book be to tell a new and better story than the characters in the book have been using so far.

There were times when the book dragged a little, with the characters wandering drearily through the desert and not accomplishing much. There were times when the worldbuilding could have been more precise, and there were times when Onyesonwu was making decisions I didn’t understand and the author didn’t explain. Although the magic system was interesting and cool and I liked watching Onyesonwu become stronger and learn to do more things, the logic of it in important plot moments didn’t always make sense to me.

Y’all, I feel so silly, but I just realized writing this post that these problems? The above ones? Are the exact same problems basically that I had with Akata Witch, and that book is by the same author. I am forgetful but at least I am consistent by God. My other problem of course was that sexual violence upsets me a lot. It was worth it for this because of the complex and fascinating way Okorafor wove gender and gendered violence into the magic of the story she was telling; which is to say, I’d read more by this author but I might not read this book again.

Have a happy Fourth of July if you celebrate the Fourth of July! I will be back next week to chat with you about the Tudors and the Plantagenets. (I know. You are so excited you can’t hardly stand it. HISTORY.)

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Akata Witch is that tricky, tricky thing to pull off, an origin story. I spent several long sentences on the origin story stuff and one sentence on the serial killer stuff, and the reason for that is that origin stories often have this same problem. It’s this: An origin story means there is a lot to establish about the rules of the magic and the stuff that exists in the magical world, and sometimes the plot part can get shunted off to the side, and VERY SUDDENLY AT THE END, all the plot happens really fast at once. The plot stuff of Akata Witch, when it finally happens, is really cool, but it represents only a small amount of the book.

(Cf., among others, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone & that new Spiderman movie with the unrelentingly adorable Andrew Garfield & Emma Stone. Origin stories are tricky.)

Another origin story issue was that the set-up felt forced and inorganic — the characters seemed to be narrating the premise/rules of the world rather than experiencing them. A character would say, X should happen! or Y is happening!, and then that’s taken as a given in the future. For instance, Chichi and Sasha and Orlu and Sunny say at one point that hey, the four of them are a coven! I’ve never heard of a coven before in the book, but okay, they’re a coven now. Sure. Actually the Most Important Evil-Stopping Destiny Coven Ever. And it just doesn’t feel earned. Or as another example, their magic teacher sends them out to meet people, without explanation, and then, hey! Those people are going to be mentors to Sasha and Orlu and Sunny! We didn’t know mentors was a thing in this world, but okay, they have mentors now. I don’t object to the plot points themselves, but I just wanted them to feel more necessary to the story.

That said, the magic system and the world of magic was really cool. Chichi, we find out, lives in a hut that is absolutely stacked full of books. They are sitting on piles of books when they go there. HOORAY. This isn’t super related to the system of magic and I’m just mentioning it because stacks of books are wonderful. There is also this thing where you have a juju knife, and you use it to cut the air, and then you summon music from the hole in the air that you’ve created. Cool, right? And the different places in the magic world — although the reasons to go to the places are thin, the places are interesting and unexpected. I would definitely be up for reading a second book in this series. I’d love to see what Okorafor would do with this world when she doesn’t have to spend all her time setting everything up.

Also cool is the fact that Leopard People’s powers are often related to physical anomalies. I love when people have all different powers from each other within the same supernatural universe. It is why I watched way more episodes of Alphas than I enjoyed it, and it is also why the X-Men movies (the first two) are my favorites of all the superhero movies. (Also because, Hugh Jackman.)

In sum: Basically good, but I require further convincing.

Other reviews: Good Books and Good Wine, Charlotte’s Library, Reading in Color, The Happy Nappy Bookseller, Waking Brain Cells, So Many Books, So Little Time., APOOO Book Club. Let me know if I missed yours!

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