Hi everyone! Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be talking about all the books I read in April. This month I read 5 books and DNF’d 2. Here are my thoughts about them:
1. COZY MYSTERY AND CRIME: The Dark Vineyard and Black Diamond by Martin Walker
I didn’t like this book and that is unfortunate because I had such high hopes for it. But it was not meant to be. The crime Bruno has to solve this time around is arson; the deliberate destruction of a wine vineyard in the outskirts of Saint-Denis and I admit that this plot was not for me from the get-go. I’m not a wine connoisseur and I don’t know the first thing about the process of wine-making, so anything remotely related to it is going to pass me by. And it did.
In this book, the author also decides to up the ante and it is now two women who vie for Bruno’s affection. I am not against love triangles, but these also have to be very well written for me to want to stick around and see which one of the two love interests the protagonist chooses. And, in this case, I’m not sure I’m interested enough to figure it out.
I didn’t want to give up on this series entirely yet though so I picked up the following installment next. And it didn’t get any better, unfortunately. In this third book, Bruno investigates the possibility of fraud at the farmer’s market. Specifically, in the sale of truffles and I wasn’t a big fan of this plot either. Though a better plot than the one in Book 2, I still felt the book drag at times and I had to make myself finish it.
Sad to say, this is the last nail in the coffin. I don’t think I’ll continue the series from here.
2. YOUNG ADULT AND FANTASY: An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
I first read this book in 2018 and back then I had to push myself really hard to finish it. Why? Because I couldn’t connect with Laia. There was just something about Laia that I didn’t like and I instinctively rejected her. From the very beginning. It bothered me how easily she believed what other people told her, how she didn’t think for herself and make simple deductions. Plus, there is just a nauseating amount of tropes in this series that it made me sick to my stomach. So I sold the books (which I regret today because they were hardcover and those are hard to find now), and I didn’t even think about picking up A Sky Beyond The Storm when it came out in 2020, even though I had already read the other three books in the series. Did I care enough to know how the series ended? Not really.
But now I think I was too harsh on poor Laia.
After all, she is just a young girl and seeing your brother get arrested and your grandparents die is very traumatic. Freezing up in fear, then, I think now, is a perfectly understandable reaction and one that many people have. So is trying to save your own life if someone is threatening to kill you, by giving them what they want. And Laia feeling guilty later because she didn’t fight back is also perfectly understandable.
And I really enjoyed An Ember in the Ashes this time around. I loved it actually.
Yes, the series is full of tropes. For example, it has love triangles galore. In fact, it’s a love dodecahedron. The Beautiful Slave Girl (Laia), a Big Bad Duumvirate (what’s worse than one Big Bad (the Commandant)? Two Big Bads, in collusion with each other (the Commandant and the Nightbringer)), Bonding over Missing Parents (Keenan and Laia), Childhood Friends (Elias and Helene), Two “Luke, I Am Your Father” Moments, The Mole in La Résistance, which itself is also a trope, Elias Secretly Dying after his mother poisons him, Laia being a Targeted Human Sacrifice during the last Trial, and Elias’ and Helene’s most hated enemy, Marcus, winning the Trials and becoming the Emperor.
Shock full of tropes. And yet, the book is engrossing. You get hooked pretty early on despite the fact that some twists are blatantly obvious. From the very beginning of the Trials, for example, you know that Marcus is going to win, or that Elias, Laia, Helene, and Keenan will be involved somehow in a love triangle mess. It wasn’t until later that I learned that it was actually called a love dodecahedron in this case. There is one twist that I didn’t see coming and it knocked the rug from under my feet even though I had already read this book 6 years ago and another that I was pretty certain would happen but wasn’t 100% sure, until it happened.
Despite all of this, I Really Liked This Book And Will Probably Read It Again.
3. CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE: It’s Getting Hot In Here by Jane Costello
Unfortunately, I didn’t like this book very much. Although, I wanted to like it. The story itself isn’t bad, and the protagonist is hilarious but she is the one carrying the weight of the story. The male protagonist, on the other hand, is flat. And I mean cardboard flat. This makes the romance, in turn, stale and boring. There is no fire. I liked that the protagonist is 47 years old, that she has a third chance at love, and that she is very relatable to women her age, including myself, but her relationship with Zach has no spark. Yes, they’re attracted to one another, but what makes this relationship the ONE? I couldn’t root for this couple because Zach has no agency. This makes it really hard to connect with him and the romance falls short. Consequently, the book too feels very unbalanced.
Second, I was not a fan of constantly being reminded that Lisa is perimenopausal and that what she is feeling can’t possibly be love. This, in my opinion, highlights a specific stereotype of women—the one that says women going through perimenopause are too old to find love—and negative agreements about women that I didn’t care for. Why can’t women over 40 find love? We are constantly being told this and many have come to believe it. What is more, that a woman author is the one reinforcing this is a bit disturbing. Yes, I get that it is meant to be funny but it reaches a point where it just isn’t funny anymore. In other words, it gets old fast.
A third thing that I didn’t like about this book is Brendan. He is a prototypical absent father, and that is an entirely different can of worms. The thing is, I don’t really see his character changing much and I think it would’ve been better if he had just been left out of the plot entirely. This is a romance after all, not a family drama. If his name has to come up (Lisa does have two kids with him), I think it would’ve been best if the author had just dropped his name here and there. Don’t have him show up, as happened in the book, because this deters from the romantic relationship. And that is the core of the book.
Finally, the ending was very lackluster and disappointing.
I Will Not Read This Book Again.
4. YOUNG ADULT AND FANTASY: A Torch Against The Night by Sabaa Tahir
This is the second book in the An Ember in the Ashes series by Sabaa Tahir and it picks up right after the end of the first book, with Elias and Laia running for their lives. In this book, Helene also becomes a point-of-view character. And it is her job, now that she is the Emperor’s Blood Shrike, to hunt Elias and Laia down. Torn between her love for Elias, whom she has been ordered to kill, and her love for her family, especially her father and little sister Livia, Helene soon realizes that she has been sent on a goose chase just to get her out of the city and out of the way of the Commandant’s (and the Nightbringer’s) true intentions.
The pacing of this book doesn’t slow down from that of the first installment, and the author does a very good job at keeping you at the edge of your seat wanting to figure out what happens next. The stakes get higher and higher, and I liked that. By the end of the book (spoiler alert), Elias and Laia have finally rescued Darin from Kauf Prison but the Nightbringer isn’t really interested in Darin. Darin is both Laia’s brother and an apprentice smith and his mentor has been teaching him how to forge Serric steel, the material from which Martial blades are made out of, and what makes the Empire practically invisible. That a young Scholar, a peaceful people conquered by the Martial with that steel, knows this doesn’t seem to perturb the Nightbringer though. All he wants to know about is Laia. So, by the end of the book the Big Bad Duumvirate is still causing havoc and it won’t be long before the Commandant realizes that Elias survived the poison she gave him, while the Nightbringer is preparing himself to release the jinn by confronting the woman he loves (go figure) and true enemy, Laia.
5. FANTASY: Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-Il Kim, Translated by Anton Hur (DNF)
An epic fantasy with dragons and necromancers? Yes, please! Unfortunately, I DNF’d this one, which is sad because I really wanted to love it. Why did I DNF it? It all amounted to the translation. I did not like it. Disclaimer: I do not speak Korean, and I am not saying here that this translation is bad. I do not want to discredit the translator’s work. It was just not for me. Many people love this book. But somehow, the writing prevented me from immersing myself in the story and I was not invested in it at all. So, I put it down.
7. YOUNG ADULT AND HORROR: The Thirteenth Child by Erin A. Craig (DNF)
Finally, The Thirteenth Child by Erin A. Craig. I picked this book up because I have read two of this author’s other books and liked them. And Erin A. Craig is the only horror writer that I have read thus far, and I have liked her writing style. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into this book. It is sort of a mix between the Missing Parents and Cinderella tropes and I wasn’t entirely sold on it. I also didn’t connect or commiserate with the protagonist in her poor unwanted status as a child and put it down. I didn’t get too far into it before I found myself wanting to read something else. So, onto the DNF pile.
That is everything for this month. Thank you for sticking around.
