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 has been a surprisingly productive reading month for me; I was able to read 9 books. I think the most I have read in a month is 11, but 9 is still a very good number. Here are my thoughts on all of them.
1. FANTASY AND YOUNG ADULT: Fireborne by Rosaria Munda
I picked this book up back in January 2021 when it first came out and several people on YouTube couldn’t recommend it enough. Even people who didn’t usually read young adult books were recommending it. So I decided to give it a chance, and I liked it but it is also overhyped. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it and I loved the dragons in it. I just didn’t think it was worth all the hype. Sorry, but true. I will say this: the book is unusual in its genre. The author is heavily influenced by classical Greek literature to build her world like Plato’s Republic, Homer’s Iliad, and Sophocles, and you can tell (if you’ve read those works). She even borrowed Greek names from literature to name her characters. The female lead’s name, for example, is Antigone (shortened to Annie), and her personality is similar to that of the original Antigone as well.
The book introduces us to Lee and Annie, the protagonists of the story. Lee is the only surviving son of Leon Stormscourge, one of the three dragonlords toppled during the Revolution, which we are told about in the prologue (no spoiler here); Annie is the only member of her family left alive after they were all killed by a dragonlord—Lee’s father. Born a serf in the old regime, Annie is now an orphan, but now she has the chance to become something more. And her journey from orphan to dragonrider begins when Aela, a young aurelian dragon without a bondmate, Choses her. Lee becomes a dragonrider too; he is Chosen by Pallor, also a young aurelian dragon in search of a bondmate. In his previous life, however, Lee was meant to ride a stormscourge, like everyone else in his family. But he is no longer Leo Stormscourge, the youngest son of Leon Stormscourge. He is Lee sur Pallor. And now both Annie and Lee find themselves at opposing ends when they compete against one another for the position of Firstrider or commander of the fleet.
Lee however soon finds out that not everyone in his family died during the Revolution. What remains of it now lives in New Pythos—previously known as Norcia—, where they set themselves as the new lords of the island. However, the exiled dragonlords long to recover their lost home and are planning a counterrevolution to usurp the usurpers that toppled them and Julia, Lee’s cousin, is trying to get him on their side.
There’s drama, angst, love, longing, betrayal, and intrigue. Lots of political intrigue, surprisingly so for a young adult novel and I found this to be a strong first book in a series.
2. NONFICTION AND PHILOSOPHY: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
This is one of the most famous philosophical treaties in literature, and I picked it up as a short read for one of my book clubs. It is also the second time I read this book. I picked it up before as required reading for one of my classes in college, and I thought it was an interesting read back then too. It is definitely a product of its time, but many things that Machiavelli talks about are true and still apply today. This time around, however, I picked it up as complementary reading to Othello by William Shakespeare and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, who does a superb job in portraying a Machiavellian Satan. I am currently reading this book, and this character is the epitome of Machiavellian mischievousness.
I also had the opportunity to listen to a lecture about Machiavelli after I finished this book, and it helped me understand The Prince better. I even enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
3. CLASSIC AND DRAMA: Othello by William Shakespeare
I loved Othello, and I’ll be the first one to tell you that I wasn’t expecting this. I have always had a love/hate relationship with Shakespeare and most of the time it is hard for me to finish one of his plays. I read Hamlet and had to perform it for one of my classes in high school and I did not like it. I have also tried to read some of his comedies but have DNF’d all of them. So when I picked Othello up for one of my book clubs, I was expecting to not finish it as well. But I did, and I liked it very much. I was also lucky enough to have access to a superb lecture on the play by a Shakespeare enthusiast and that allowed me to enjoy it even more. Sometimes you just need the extra help, and that is what I needed here and it helped enormously.
4. FANTASY AND YOUNG ADULT: House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig
This book is a young adult/horror retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and, surprisingly, I liked it. The protagonist is Annaleigh, one of twelve sisters who live with their father and stepmother in a manor, Highmoor, next to the sea. Once, Annaleigh was the sixth sister but now she is the second, and next in line to inherit, after all her older sisters, except Kamile, have died. The most recent sister to die—Eulalie—fell off a cliff, and now, after four quick deaths and four funerals, there are rumors that the girls at Highmoor are cursed.
In this world, there are humans making Faustinian bargains with vengeful gods, creepy gods and goddesses (granted, I don’t read a lot of horror so the bar’s rather low), meddling in human affairs, mysterious strangers with their agendas, and gruesome and enigmatic deaths. And the author does a really good job at interweaving the horror aspects of the story into the seemingly innocuous fairytale of The Twelve Dancing Princess. The book is also a quick and easy read. This was the second time I read this book, and despite already knowing how it ended, the creepy parts were still creepy. It’s all in the details, and after 2-3 years (I first read this book in 2020), there were a lot of details I didn’t remember.
5. FANTASY AND YOUNG ADULT: House of Roots and Ruins by Erin A. Craig
This is the second book of The Sisters of Salt trilogy by Erin A. Craig and in this one we see again several of the characters we first met in House of Salt and Sorrows. The protagonist is Verity, the youngest of the twelve sisters at Highmoor. She is 17 now and all of Verity’s living sisters have left their home, except Kamille, who is Duchess, to build a new life for themselves. Now, Verity thinks, it’s her turn. And she has that opportunity when she is asked to paint the portrait of Alexander, the son of a celebrated botanist. To do so, however, she must leave Highmoor. Except Kamille won’t let her because Verity is still seeing ghosts. She just doesn’t know it.
After finding out that she can see ghosts, Verity runs away. She also goes into denial, and she deliberately blinds herself and refuses to see and accept what is going on in Chauntililie. She doesn’t trust her eyes anymore and she questions everything she sees trying to prove to herself that her eyes aren’t playing tricks on her. And this doesn’t do her any favors. She comes across as rather naïve and gullible throughout most of the book. And it isn’t until she meets Alexander’s discarded brothers that she starts to accept that what she is seeing is true. And this is where things get creepy. But that’s all I’m gonna say.
From the beginning, I knew that Verity was going to end up with Alexander. However, the pairing seemed rather insipid and boring to me. There’s no chemistry and passion between the two, and this is felt even more when Verity herself admits that she feels nothing when she kisses him. She even dreads it when she is asked to do so at their engagement party. But then she meets Viktor and the attraction between the two is palpable through the page, and I found myself rooting for them instead of Verity and Alexander.
I liked this book and will probably read the next one in the series.
6. FANTASY AND YOUNG ADULT: Flamefall by Rosaria Munda
This is the second book of The Aurelian Cycle, and in this one we shift focus and meet the exiled dragonlords that escaped Callipolis after the Revolution. And we see how they have lived for the last 10 years as lords of New Phythos. We meet Delo, Ixion and the slave Griff. And of the three, I especially liked Delo and Griff, though I do think that the author does a very good job in making us hate Ixion, as we’re supposed to. He’s the main villain of the series, not Atreus Athanatos.
In Callipolis, Lee has just proven his loyalty to Atreus by killing his cousin and her dragon. But later he finds out that Atreus had sent him to die. And if he didn’t, the Patriarch was going to kill him after. So Lee breaks ties with the Patriarch and refuses to train and do anything Atreus (through Annie, as Firstrider of the fleet) asks of him. This leaves Annie alone in dealing with the evermore unhappy citizens of Callipolis, who are subject to more and more injustices sanctioned by Atreus and enforced by his dragonriders. Eventually the citizens of Callipolis rebel, and Annie is ordered to put the rebellion down.
This book is fast-paced and quick to read. I enjoyed it and I definitely didn’t think it suffers from second-book syndrome; it sets the stage for the final encounter between Callipolis and New Pythos.
7. FANTASY AND YOUNG ADULT: Furysong by Rosaria Munda
In this third book, the slaves of New Pythos defeat the dragonlords and rename their island Norcia again. This, however, comes at a great price for Annie, who, in wanting to help Griff remove the muzzle off his dragon, has lost Callipolis. Now, Ixion is lord of Callipolis and Lee is a prisoner of his own family. This, I think, is the best book of all three. The stakes are pretty high for both Lee and Annie. This book, however, was the most heart-wrenching for me because of an unexpected character death that affected me more than I thought it would, and those are few in counting. I recommend this story to anyone who enjoys political intrigue, dragons, and the trope of divided loyalties.
This series reminded me a little of An Ember in the Ashes series by Sabaa Tahir, but I think that this one is tons better.
8. CONTEMPORARY AND ROMANCE: Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez
Though I love romance, I have found that there are few romance books that I can actually finish. And I have found that Abby Jimenez’s books are some of those books. I have not liked all of them, of course, but I can safely say that Yours Truly is probably one of her books that I’ve liked the most. There were negatives, but I will start with the positives.
The first thing I liked about this book were its protagonists. Both Briana and Jacob are very easy to like; but what I liked the most is that the author doesn’t shy away from showing us their insecurities (despite being successful doctors) to make them even more human. On the one hand, Briana thinks that she is not lovable and that no man will ever want her considering that her ex-husband of 10 years didn’t and was having an affair with one of her best friends, while Jacob suffers from social anxiety, something that may resonate with a lot of us. And I liked how she portrayed this issue in Jacob’s POV chapters. I liked the banter between Jacob and his sisters; I liked Briana’s loyalty to Jacob. And I liked that Briana was Hispanic. What I didn’t like was the colossal miscommunication between the two leads, which, yes, leads to more conflict (and hence, a longer book) but, OMG, sometimes it was very frustrating and I couldn’t stand how they could read each other so wrong despite being so in love with one another. Sigh. In the end, I was happy how they got together and got past their miscommunication issues. Will I ever read this book again? Yes, probably.
9. NONFICTION AND HISTORY: The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez
Since reading books like Bad Mexicans by Kelley Lytle Hernández and Blood Money by Ioan Grillo last year, I have become a proponent of reading more books about the history and political relationship between the United States and Mexico. There is a lot that is not taught to citizens of these two countries on both sides of the border that should. And I think that The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez is another one of those books that more people on both sides of the border should read.
The Other Slavery is about Indian slavery, the slavery that almost no one talks about but that has occurred both in the US and Mexico. And this has inevitably affected the relationship between the two countries throughout the years. But the problem is that not many people are even aware that this slavery has existed for so long (since before the Spaniards arrived on the continent), and some have preferred to keep it that way. The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) was so much more than the US gaining territory from Mexico and Mexico losing it, which is what most of us are taught in school. And I encourage anyone interested in the topic to pick books like this one up more often.
That is everything I read in March. Thank you for reading.
