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 January. This month was a pretty good reading month for me. I managed to read 8 books, and I will list them here in the order that I read them. None of them are ranked from worst to best or vice versa. I did, however, like some more than others, and I will let you guys know which ones I loved more. In this post, I will provide a brief summary of each book and the rating that I gave to each. Each one, however, will have its own review later. Now, let us begin:
1. To Green Angel Tower, Part 1 and 2, by Tad Williams
To Green Angel Tower is the third and final book of the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn fantasy series by Tad Williams first published in 1994. It is also perhaps the longest book that I have read in the last 4-5 years (The paperback edition is 1066 pages long; I read the mass market paperbacks though, which were printed in two different parts or volumes). I read the first and second books of this trilogy in 2020 and admit that I wasn’t all that certain at first if I wanted to commit all those hours into reading the entire series, especially since I didn’t know if I was going to like it or not. It is a monumental task because all three books are ginormous. Now that I finished it though I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it. I know I didn’t love it, but I liked it enough to read all three books. I put in the hours, over 120 of them. However, there were things about this book and the series in general that I didn’t like either. The first, if not entirely pertinent to the story itself, was the series’ length. At times, I admit, I was deterred by the books’ massive page count, and the third book’s length in particular, that I needed to stop reading it for a couple of days or so. Also, some parts of all three books were really slow and that too made me stop reading several times. There are slow and very slow parts throughout the entire series; some even that I was tempted to just skip. I also had issues with some of the characters and parts of the plot, but I will go into more detail about those and the stuff that I did like about this series when I post my review for this book and the other two in the series later. Suffice it to say for now that despite this series being an important and relevant series within the fantasy genre, I am not sure if I liked it enough to ever read it again. Even now, after I have finished reading the whole thing, the page count is still making me think twice about a reread. I gave this series a general rating of 3.8 stars.
2. The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffmann
This book is one of two prequels for Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic series, and if you watched the movie back in the early 2000s, like I did—the movie was first released in 1998—you know that the women of the Owens family are always born with grey eyes, they have magical powers and are cursed in love. The curse, which Maria Owens, the matriarch of the family, enacted upon herself and her bloodline to prevent them from suffering as she did, says that any man who falls in love with an Owens woman will die. The curse is a result of Maria Owens’ ill-fated love affair with John Hathorne, a witch-hunter who abandoned her, accused her of witchcraft and later condemned her to death for it. Frances, Jet, and Vincent, the protagonists of The Rules of Magic, however, know that all three of them are different from their contemporaries, and explore their magical powers together in secret, all the while trying not to fall in love, and failing miserably at it, in this coming of age story set in the 1960s.
I am not a big contemporary reader, and I admit that this book was a little bit (that’s an understatement, of course) out of my comfort zone. However, I’ve watched the movie so many times now that I was curious, and I’m glad to say that I was not disappointed. Even though the main theme of the book is love, both for yourself and others, and how loving yourself is the only way to accept and be yourself, the book also explores issues related to sex, drugs, death, grief, depression, same-sex relationships, and family; issues that I think every modern reader has lived or experienced themselves to not be able to connect with these characters and live through their heartaches and misfortunes along with them.
Overall, I gave this book 4 stars and I look forward to reading both Magic Lessons and Practical Magic later on.
3. Perfume: The Story of A Murderer by Patrick Süskind
This is a book that I first heard about in college, and one that I had been meaning to read ever since. It is a classic mystery bestseller about a man who has “the best nose in Paris”; he can smell anything and everything, except himself. For, ironically, he has no scent. And thus begins his obsession with creating a scent that will make him smell like a human. To that effect, he becomes a perfumer. It isn’t, however, until he catches the smell of innocence on a young virgin girl living in the Marais, close to the Louvre, in Paris, that his obsession reaches exponential levels. He has found the perfect scent, and he seeks to replicate it in a perfume. But the scent eludes him for years and he cannot replicate it to the point where he garners a severe hatred for humanity, the tool of his art, for not giving him what he needs. Thus, he leaves Paris and lives in a self-imposed exile for seven years. But it isn’t until he comes out of his self-inflicted isolation that he catches the smell of innocence again and continues on with his life’s work to obtain it and replicate it. A work that he now knows requires him to kill, and he does so without remorse or sorrow. After all, the women he kills are just tools he needs to perfect his art.
This book is good, but it also has its slow parts and at times it was hard for me to read it. I put it down several times wanting to start another book in between, and if it hadn’t been because I was reading it in its audiobook format, I don’t think I would have finished it as fast as I did. The book starts out strong and the ending is strong, but the middle is slow. And it was hard for me to get past it. But I finished it, and I am glad that I read it. However, I ended up not loving it as much as I thought I would. It is a good book, and I understand why it is deemed a classic. It is also a book that has been allotted the importance it deserves, given the time it was first published, and I recommend it, but it is not a book I would consider as one of my favorites. I gave it an overall rating of 3.5 stars.
4. The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
This book is the author’s newest release, and it is the story of Ana, the wife of Jesus. Having been born a Catholic, though not devout, I have always been interested in knowing more about Jesus and the period of history in which he lived in. I know this book is not history though, and I don’t presume it to be. It is fiction, based on a historical figure of whose life we know little of. Actually, it isn’t all that based on Jesus… it is the story of the woman who might have/could have been his wife. There is no historical evidence of a wife, of course, but what if Jesus did get married? Considering the period of time he lived in and the importance of marriage within the Jewish religion, it is a possibility. And if he did get married, what would have his wife been like? This is the question that Sue Monk Kidd sets out to answer in this book, released in April 2020.
What I liked about this book is that it focuses on Jesus as a man; on his humanity, not as a religious figure. By saying this, however, I am not trying to diminish his importance as one. But considering that not many books, if any, that I have read about Jesus and his life mention his humanity and how he lived before he died and resurrected, I found this book’s change of perspective to be a rather fresh one. But what is more important about this book is that it focuses on giving a voice to a woman who lived in a time and place where voices like hers were considered dangerous and silenced. I really enjoyed this book and gave it a 5-star rating.
5. All That Remains by Sue Black
This book did not turn out to be what I had expected, though it is not a bad book either. I would say it is a memoir, where the author relates different personal life experiences in which she has confronted death and the dying. Given the book’s subtitle, however, I was expecting it to focus more on criminal cases that impacted her and influenced the author’s growth as a forensic scientist. That is not to say that she doesn’t mention any cases at all; she does. And the chapters in which she talks about them are all very interesting and I devoured them. But the first part of the book focuses primarily on her education and her experience of several deaths in the family that ultimately helped her decide to become a forensic scientist in the first place. I also understand that she cannot talk publicly about every criminal case she has been a part of; however, I think that I would have enjoyed this book more if it had been what I was looking for at the time I picked it up. I gave this book a 3-star rating.
6. Fireborne by Rosaria Munda
Fireborne is the first book of a new YA fantasy series—The Aurelian Cycle—that explores what happens to the lives of those that have survived a revolution and the violence that changed the old regime into a new one has since settled. Lee and Annie, the protagonists of this book, were both children when the revolution killed their families. Lee, the unknown survivor of the previous regime’s ruling family, the dragonlords, is now competing against his closest friend and confidante, Annie, to become the lead dragonrider in Callipolis’ dragon fleet. Annie, on the other hand, was born in one of the poorest districts of the city and a serf. Forced to watch her family die by dragonfire at the hand of one of the dragonlords—Lee’s father—she was then taken to an orphanage where she met Lee and then became close friends with him. Her relationship with Lee changes, however, when the threat of a possible attack from survivors of the previous regime is discovered and Lee is forced to either betray the only family he has left or Annie and everything he has learned and come to believe in within the new regime. Annie, for her part, is forced either to protect the boy she grew up with and loves or to step up and become the protector her city needs.
This book has a lot of political intrigue, action, and high stakes. It was a very fast and entertaining read, and I liked it enough to continue on with the series. However, I will say that this too was a book out of my comfort zone, and it took me a while to get sucked into it. When I did though, I couldn’t put it down. There was one thing, however, that bothered me a little. And that was Annie. Considering the hardships of her childhood and how strong she needs to be in order to survive in a society that still stigmatizes her for being a former serf, I couldn’t fault her for having to be strong; stronger even than other girls in her circle. But sometimes I couldn’t stand being in her head and the way she reasoned things out. And I couldn’t help but be exasperated and annoyed by her sometimes. I gave this book a 4-star rating.
7. The Gods of Vice by Devin Madson
The Gods of Vice is the second book of The Vengeance Trilogy by Devin Madson, the first book of which, The Blood of Whisperers, I read at the end of 2020. Read the full review for that book here. In this second book, however, we start off where the first book ends, and the author does a pretty good job at maintaining the first book’s fast pacing. In every chapter, something important happens between the two warring emperors of Kisia and their battle for the Crimson Throne. The story, like in the first book, is told through the eyes of three main characters—Endymion, Darius, and Hana—who all go through a significant amount of character development in this book. In my opinion, this is a very solid second book within a trilogy and it does not suffer from “second book syndrome” at all.
I will say, however, that in this book, as in the first book as well, that I am not a big fan of Hana yet. I understand that she is a woman living in a society in which she has no say or voice. And she tries to fight this tooth and nail by not conforming to the role that society has set out for her despite her royal name—that of a powerful man’s (very likely the Emperor himself) quiet and complacent wife—in order to find a place where she can both have a voice and make a difference. However, as of yet, I don’t like her personality very much. Maybe she will grow into her own in the third book, I don’t know. Nonetheless, this didn’t deter me from my overall enjoyment of the book, and I gave this book a 5-star rating. Despite my minor issues with Hana, I highly recommend this series.
That’s it, everyone. I hope that one or more of the books in this wrap up interested you enough to pick it up as well. Thank you for reading and I will see you next time. Cheers!
