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 June. As a friendly reminder, every month I try to read at least one book that fits into one of the following prompts: Library Book, Nonfiction, Book of the Month (BOTM), Classic, A Requested Review, a book that Starts a Series and one that Finishes a Series. And in April, I added New Release. I am realistic and know that I will not complete all of these prompts every month. But I do try. And because more books is my motto, I am adding even more prompts this month. One is to read a YA book, a book in Spanish, and a Book Club book.
1. BOTM: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
This is one of the most popular contemporary romance books of 2021. It is also one of the most overhyped books of last year. Unfortunately, it was not a book for me. Read my full review here.
2. CLASSIC: Silence by Shüsaku Edo
I think this book is worth reading. The only drawback I found is the way it is written (translated). It felt very told, and that kept me from immersing myself completely in the story. In fact, I put it down for several days and I think I finished another book before finishing this one. Oops. However, the topic itself is very interesting. I gave it an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
3. A Flicker In The Dark by Stacey Willingham
Regrettably, this book is rather forgettable. I will say that this book has an interesting premise and I thought it might be A BOOK (not THE BOOK though; I think it is probably not possible to find THE BOOK) that might help me like this genre a little bit more, but unfortunately A Flicker In The Dark did not deliver. The story is slow, and we spend a lot of time going back and forth between the main character’s memories of the past and the present. This in itself did not bother me, but it takes forever for something to happen, and the pacing bored me. I did like that the author never makes us forget that Chloe lives in constant fear every day and that she barely has a control on it. Anything could make her lose it. However, I also felt like the author was trying too hard to be descriptive. Everything Chloe did was described to the minutest detail. This got annoying fast, and it felt like the author was just adding one adjective after another in every sentence trying to reach her word count.
This is the first book I read where the main character is addicted to prescription pills to numb pain or fear, and I can’t say that I enjoyed it very much. It made her an unreliable character, yes, but I didn’t like it. I also did not like her playing detective, and I’m coming to realize that books where the main character (a young woman who knows absolutely nothing about conducting an investigation such as this one) plays at detective following every lead possible are just not for me. The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James is also like this; it is about a young woman who is investigating the disappearance of a family member, and I did not like the main character playing detective there either. The only reason why this book is getting an Okay rating is because I did not guess who the killer was (the real one), but, in my defense, I hardly ever read suspense thrillers such as this one.
4. YA: Defy The Night by Brigid Kemmerer
This is Robin Hood retelling, and I have yet to find an author who tells this story well. I read Hood, the first book of the King Raven trilogy, by Stephen R. Lawhead, several years ago and I liked it well enough, but the second book was disappointing, so I did not continue. In this case, I had already read Letters to the Lost and More Than We Can Tell by this author and liked them both, so I decided to read this one too. And I didn’t particularly like it, but I didn’t hate it either. Unfortunately I wasn’t as engaged with this book as I was with the other two. Truth be told, I couldn’t find myself to care about the main characters in this book. I wasn’t attached to either one of them. I had been expecting to completely fall in love with Corrick, for example, but I didn’t.
I guess my main problem with this book is that Tessa is already head over heels in love with Corrick (and vice versa) at the beginning of the book, and we don’t get to see them fall in love. Yes, the romance between the two main characters is not the plot/story of the book, but even the plot itself felt poorly developed. And I mean this in the sense that we never get to see Tessa and Wes (spoiler alert: aka Corrick) become outlaws and start stealing medicine for the poor; they’ve already been doing it for some time since the start of the book, so I felt a bit cheated by this.
A lot of people have fallen out of love with this author after her Cursebreakers trilogy (which I have not read), but in my case I think I’ve fallen out of love with the genre a bit (this doesn’t bode well for my reading challenge prompt, I admit). I know there’s romance in this author’s books, but the couple here just didn’t do for me. I don’t know why. And the rest of the book (the plague and the revolution, the politics behind it all) just wasn’t engaging enough for me to love it. It had the potential to, but it didn’t. Maybe politics and YA don’t mix, but I felt that the whole plot was rather simple for what it could have been. I gave this book an Okay rating. I’m not going to keep it though and I will likely not continue with the series.
5. BOOK CLUB BOOK: The Bone Ships by RJ Barker
I liked this book, but I do have some things to say about it. First, it is a book heavily focused on world-building (and I mean heavily focused). This got a bit tiring after a bit. Not boring though, just tiring. It takes more than 200 pages for the pacing of the book to change and for the premise to actually begin. Before that, the author is primarily focused on introducing the world and its current state of war after the extinction of the sea dragons, the creatures whose bones are required to build the legendary bone ships. I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of books where most of the story (or parts of it) takes place on ships. I don’t know why, and ironically I have found myself reading several books of this sort lately. Part of the reason, I think, is the jargon. I don’t understand it very well, and I get lost in it very easily. This is one of the reasons why reading the first 200 pages of The Bone Ships was so exhausting for me. This book has a lot of naval jargon; like a lot lot. It’s insane. This is a dark and grim world; a world at war, and we are introduced to it through the eyes of a less than perfect protagonist. And I liked this about Joron Twiner. He is the shipwife (later demoted to deckkeeper) of The Tide Child, a ship whose crew is serving a sentence of the living dead. And it is this black ship that, in a bid to end the war, finds itself protecting the first living sea dragon sighted in years. I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating, and I will definitely be continuing this series.
6. START OF A SERIES: Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu
This book was a surprising read for me this month. Truth be told, The Song of the Shattered Sands series by this author has been on my radar for some time, but I’ve been rather hesitant to start it because I still have to find a book (and series) that I like set in the desert. Similar to what happens to me with books set on ships, I have not liked any of the books I have read thus far set in the desert (of any world) and I have found that I am slower to pick these up than I would other books. However, this book surprised me, and I enjoyed it a lot. This is a character-driven story, and ironically I found myself liking the twelve kings more than I liked the protagonists. I felt that the author still has to work on the main characters’ development a bit; both Çeda and Emre need more depth to them but given that this is the first book of the series, I understand that this is a work in progress. However, I am enjoying the story thus far. Also, I am liking Çeda’s storyline more than I am Emre’s but I’m curious to see where his storyline is heading. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating, and I will continue on with the series.
7. Rise of Empire by Michael J. Sullivan
This is the second installment of The Riyria Revelations, and I liked it just as much as Theft of Swords. Royce and Hadrian’s friendship and camaraderie is still one of the best things about this series. I also enjoyed that Arista comes into her own in this third and fourth books and that the author doesn’t turn her into a damsel in distress, whose only worthwhile characteristic is her sex. I liked her character development and how it is she and not her brother Alric who shines. The only thing that I might say made me read this book a lot slower than I would otherwise is the fact that a good chunk of the fourth book takes place in a ship, and I am not a big fan of that as I said earlier. But that is just one of my quirks. The book is nonetheless good and highly enjoyable, and I am understanding now more and more why the adventures of this pair of thieves are so popular among fantasy readers. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating, and I will definitely continue on with the series.
That is everything for this month. Thank you for reading. Next month I will begin with the prompts that I could not finish in June.
