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 March. This month I read 6 books and I DNF’d 1. In a way, I feel like I did rather poorly this month (I obviously did not complete my reading challenge) but I also think that I did pretty well if that is even possible. And this is because I completed The Faithful And The Fallen series by John Gwynne and these books are monumental. I feel pretty accomplished by that. The prompts that I did not complete for my reading challenge this month are Requested Review, Classic, and Start A Series. Next month (April), I will be adding a new prompt despite not having been able to complete the reading challenge for two month now. But I still want to do this. I find that it has opened my reading options a lot. The new prompt is New Release, and it is a book that has been released that specific month (e.g., April 2022). Now, on with the books:
1. Valor by John Gwynne
This book is the second installment of The Faithful And The Fallen series by this author (I read Book 1 in February), and I Really Liked It. The book, however, did have its setbacks. There is a lot of traveling in this book, and sometimes it felt like this is all the characters are doing. Back and forth. Back and forth. This book is also written from a third point limited perspective, and it follows several characters that are each traveling in different parts of the continent to different places, and I get why this is so, but all this traveling prevented me from getting completely hooked into the story thus far. I did, however, find myself more invested in some characters’ storylines than others. But it wasn’t until the end of the book that I was completely hooked.
2. LIBRARY BOOK: The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks
This book is a retelling of the life of The Good Wife of Bath, one of the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I read this book fully intending to read The Canterbury Tales again for my Classic prompt this month, but that obviously did not happen. I’d read The Canterbury Tales before, in college, and I really liked it. So, I decided to give this new release a try. But it was a bit of a hit and miss for me, honestly. For starters, the length of the book is a bit deceiving. The book is a lot longer than I’d first anticipated (almost 600 pages) and it took me longer to read than I had originally thought. Having said that, and made my peace with it, it also took me a bit to get into the story. The book is literally separated in two parts; in the first, the protagonist narrates the story of her life by recounting each one of her five marriages, with a pilgrimage in between each one, and in the second, Eleanor describes how she managed after deciding to live as a sole femme when her fifth and last husband dies.
There were parts of the book that I liked, parts that I did not like. But the overall message of the book was hard to miss: Women want control over their own lives. It was true back then, in the Middle Ages, when this book is set, and it is true today. I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again.
3. NONFICTION: Better by Atul Gawande
This book is the third book by this author that I have read in the past two months. And just like in the previous two books, Gawande addresses an issue here that has proved pivotal in his experience as a doctor and that can nonetheless be also put in practice elsewhere: What can we do to be better at what we do? This book relates several cases in medicine where doctors have gone above and beyond trying to find an answer to that question, and I found it an interesting read even though I ultimately didn’t think that this is the author’s best book. I found it to be a lot less personal than his other two books (Being Mortal and A Checklist Manifesto), and that personal touch that the author adds to the cases he relates in his essays is one the things that I like most about his books.
4. Complications by Atul Gawande
This is the fourth and final book by Atul Gawande that I have read, and unfortunately I did not like it. I DNF’d it actually, which is completely unexpected because I thought I was going to love this book. But I did not. This is Atul Gawande’s first book actually, and he wrote it while he was still a resident. Unfortunately, it was not what I had been expecting and I DNF’d it halfway through.
5. BOTM: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
This book was really popular when it first came out in February 2020, and it was probably one of the most anticipated releases of that year for a lot of people. The book is a murder mystery/suspense set in two timelines—1982 and 2017—about the sudden disappearance of Viv Delaney when she was working the night shift in The Sun Down Motel in 1982 and how her niece Carly Kirk sets out to discover what happened to her thirty-five years later in 2017. I read this novel because last year I read Lost Among The Living by the same author, really liked it, and decided to give this one a try. Unfortunately, I did not like this one as much. The main characters, I found, were rather dull and stale. And I found myself liking some of the side characters, not all, more than the protagonists. The mystery itself was a bit predictable, even though the ghosts at the hotel were well-written. I did like that. But still, it wasn’t enough for me to give this book anything more than an Okay rating.
6. Ruin by John Gwynne
This is the third installment of The Faithful And The Fallen series and it picks up right where the previous book ended, and I Really Liked It. I admit the series gets better the further along you read; there are some unexpected twists that kept me at the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens next, but I was also always expecting someone to die. I know that this series is about a war, and that people die in wars, but this author definitely doesn’t shy away from killing his characters.
7. FINISH A SERIES: Wrath by John Gwynne
This is the fourth and final book of The Faithful And The Fallen series, and it is a good ending to this series. A lot of people have said that this last book is the best book of all four of them, but I found myself liking Ruin (Book 3) a lot more than this one. Don’t get me wrong, Wrath is also very good, and I liked the way John Gwynne closes the story but the author’s knack for killing off characters goes up quite a notch in this one and I was saddened that many characters that I had come to like quite a bit don’t survive the war against Asroth and his Kadoshim. It was also a bit frustrating that it took most of the characters that I didn’t like quite a bit to die (I’m looking at you Lykos); in fact, they don’t die until the last couple of chapters of the book actually and I understand why (after all, the conflict has to last until the end), but still I was a bit annoyed that the author resorted to killing quite a bit of “good” characters (as many as he could, it seems) to build the crescendo for the end. I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
