Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be doing a wrap up of all the books I read in February.
1. HISTORICAL FICTION: The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn
I first read this book as a new release in April 2022, and it was one of the best books I read that year. Two years later, when I picked it up again for one of my book clubs, this book is still one of my favorites. Set in 1942, The Diamond Eye is a fictional account of the life of Lyudmila Pavilchenko, a university student turned sniper with 309 kills to her name after Hitler launches Operation Barbarossa and invades Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1941. Now, Mila Pavilchenko is visiting the White House in an attempt to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to aid Russia and open a second front against the Germans.
The Diamond Eye is loosely based on Lyudimila Pavilchenko’s biography in which she relates how she was withdrawn from active duty after being injured and sent on a fundraising tour throughout the US. Today she is buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.
Kate Quinn is one of my favorite historical fiction authors. I have read two other of her books, and one of the things I like most about her writing is how quickly she makes you invested with the characters and their lives. From the beginning, you are attached to them. And The Diamond Eye is no exception. Yes, Mila Pavilchenko is the main character but her relationship with the four men in her life is what makes the story so immersive and addictive. These men are her son and three husbands, all three of them present in different times of her life: Alexei, Kitsenko, and Kostia. Spoiler alert. Kitsenko’s death, for example, was one of the hardest character deaths that I have ever experienced. Mila’s grief was so raw, and the author did a superb job at transmitting that through the page.
So, yes, I recommend this book to anyone interested in WWII historical fiction/romance. I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
2. CONTEMPORARY: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende is probably one of the most popular Latin American authors in the US. I see her books everywhere. But her most famous and widely known novel is without a doubt The House of Spirits, the author’s debut novel published in 1982. And before reading this book in 2018, I saw the movie with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Wynona Rider, and Antonio Banderas a lot sooner after it came out in 1993. This, in fact, was my first encounter with Isabel Allende.
So I picked up The Wind Knows My Name, a short novel by this author published last year that talks about a topic that has been hot in the news for at least 3 years: the separation of families at the border with Mexico. Migration is a big issue in the current political scene for both the United States and Mexico. But the separation of families and the displacement of those that leave their home country is something that has been going on for decades, most notably during WWII. This book thus tells the story of a young boy who is sent to England after the fateful night of Kristallnacht in November 1938 when Hitler and his paramilitary forces unleashed a pogrom against the Jewish population in Germany and of a young girl, Anita Díaz, in 2019, whose mother has disappeared after she is separated from her daughter at the border by the American authorities and sent back to Mexico.
What is at the forefront of this story is that displacement still occurs. And a lot of children’s lives are significantly changed by the decisions of those on top. Told from the perspective of four main characters, this book may seem a bit told at times but it still does a good job at portraying how life altering and dangerous displacement can be. I gave this book an I Liked It rating.
3. FANTASY AND MYTHOLOGY: Elektra by Jennifer Saint
In Greek mythology, Elektra is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. She is devoted to her father and never forgives her mother for killing him after he returns to Mycenae after the fall of Troy. The myth of Elektra was written as a play by both Sophocles and Euripides while Sigmund Freud used her name to refer to what is known today in psychiatry as Electra’s complex, a girl’s sense of competition with her mother for the affection of her father. This is the opposite of what occurs in males with Oedipus’s complex.
Elektra is the second book by Jennifer Saint based on Greek mythology. Her first book, Ariadne, is based on the myth of the Minotaur and how Minos’s daughter Ariadne helps Thesus kill the monster. What I like about Jennifer Saint’s books is that she tells the story of less known women in Greek mythology. And in this second book, she retells several myths in Greek mythology to weave the story of Elektra’s life. Elektra’s life, however, is keenly linked to that of her sister Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrifices to the Gods before sailing to Troy, to her mother, Clytemnestra, whose sole purpose in life after Aulis, is to avenge her daughter’s death but who forgets that she has three other living children, and to Cassandra, the Trojan princess and prophetess whom Agamemnon captures after the Fall of Troy. Cursed by Apollo as punishment for rejecting his advances, Cassandra knows that the city will fall soon and that she will die in Mycenae. But no one ever believes her prophecies and she is treated like a nuisance and ignored all the time.
I liked how Jennifer Saint wrote both Clytemnestra and Cassandra. I feel like they are both maligned in mythology and we forget easily that they were both victims of the power men had over them. Agamemnon on the one hand and Apollo on the other. Elektra, on the other hand, is not an easy character to like. Jennifer Saint does a superb job at portraying how much she hates Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon and taking him away from her, as well as for ignoring her and her siblings after Iphigenia’s death. But Elektra comes across as someone who complains a lot in most of the chapters allotted to her point of view, and it was not easy to connect with her. In fact, I did not connect with her at all. But I did think that this book is a lot better than this author’s first novel.
4. CLASSIC: East of Eden by John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck’s seminal work East of Eden is a multigenerational retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel and the author’s attempt at answering the question of how much good and evil is within us during our lifetime. Regarded as one of the best novels in Western literature, this book is all about the choices you make during your life and how those choices dictate whether you were good or evil during your lifetime. This book is monumental and hard to summarize in a few paragraphs here. Suffice it to say that I think it is worth picking it up.
5. FANTASY AND YOUNG ADULT: A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
This book is the first book of The Shades of Magic trilogy by this author and these books are hugely popular. Many BookTubers I follow couldn’t recommend it enough on their channels when I first started watching them years ago, but I always hesitated to pick them up. I even bought them, got rid of them, and bought them again several times; like three times. I hesitated because I wasn’t sure if the books would live up to the hype, and unfortunately I was right. They didn’t. At least not for me.
Like I said, many people love this series and the first book, A Darker Shade of Magic, is fine but it is not great. I thought the story had promise but I felt that the author only touched the surface of the magic in her universe and I was left wanting. I also liked Kell; he had much potential as a mage, but the author didn’t do him justice. Even Holland was interesting. But they were all wasted. Argos and Astrid were wasted as well. They had the potential to be so evil.
But I hated Delilah Bard. If there’s a female character that wants to fit in the mold of the ‘strong female character’ trope so bad it’s Lila Bard. But her personality is awful and I couldn’t stand her. And because I know that she’s prominent in the other two books as well, I didn’t have it in me to read through them and have to force myself to put up with her, so no, I am not continuing on with this series.
6. FANTASY: With Blood Upon The Sand by Bradley P. Beaulieu (DNF)
This is another series that I will not finish. I know I liked the first book in the series, The Twelve Kings of Sharakhai. But I wanted this second book to be over when I was less than 5% into it. And that should tell you something. I gave it several chances because I had the whole series and I was able to read up to Chapter 30 or so, but I just couldn’t continue after that. The book is unnecessarily long and boring. And the main character Çeda was quickly devolving into a Mary Sue, and I cannot stand Mary Sues (though she didn’t top the Mary Sue par excellence Diana Bishop from A Discovery of Witches). Still, I did not want to invest 30 plus hours of my time (time that I will never get back) reading a book I am slowly but surely certain that I don’t like anymore. So no, I will not finish this series either. The moral of the story: Don’t buy the entire series in one go if you can help it.
That is everything I read in February. Thank you for stopping by. See you next time.
