Brooke's Reviews and Sweeps

ABC Book Challenge – J

By Brookelorren on September 8, 2019September 26, 2019Leave a Comment

Hello! Welcome to the ABC Book Challenge! I first heard of it over at Me, Myself, and Books, but as far as I know, it was started by The Thrifty Bibliophile. Every week from July to December, I go through “My Books” at Goodreads and point out some of the highlights.

This week is the letter J. I literally have three books on Goodreads that start with J, and one of them I didn’t really care for, so today’s going to be short.

Jukebox Joyride is a cute middle grade story about a couple of kids who love music and have a time-traveling music box. I listened to this in the car with my boy, and it was a lot of fun.

Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror 1801-1805 talks about America’s war against the Barbary pirates during the early years of the republic. It sounds like it might be interesting, although if this had been any other week, it might not have made the challenge.

So that’s all I have for today! K doesn’t have a ton of books, but it does have more than J, so next week’s list should be bigger.

Wonderstruck Book Tag

By Brookelorren on September 7, 2019September 7, 20192 Comments

Happy Saturday! I hope you’re having a good weekend. I found this book tag over at Berries and Books blog and thought it sounded fun, even though I don’t know much Taylor Swift music (I do like what I’ve heard of hers though). It was originally created by Olivia at Purely Olivia.

Rules:

Link back to the creator (Olivia)
Answer as many or as few of the questions as you’d like.
Feel free to use any of the graphics in this post.
Tag however many people you’d like at the end!

The graphics originally came from Purely Olivia (because she gave permission and I’m kinda lazy about making my own graphics).

I have a love/hate relationship with Allegiant. On the one hand, I loved this book up until chapter 50. On the other hand, I hate chapter 50 and everything that happened afterwards. Then again, it did get me into fanfiction. If it wasn’t for fanfiction, I wouldn’t be writing like I am now. I just don’t accept the ending.

There are a lot of books that I think about after I finish them, and usually they end up being rereads. The Mortal Instruments series was one of them. I’m doing the #ReadShadowhunters readalong (although I kinda finish each book before the schedule says to) and I just finished City of Ashes, but I love this whole series. I want to go ahead and read the next book, but I don’t want to get too far ahead, and I have all these other books I want to read too. So patience.

Before you complain, I actually know that Dragons of Autumn Twilight was a movie. It was a terrible animated movie. No, I want a good movie made out of Dragonlance with the Lord of the Rings treatment to it.

I don’t know about the most beautiful cover, but I absolutely adore the inside of the Queen of Air and Darkness dust jacket. I only showed half of it here, but it’s beautiful. And most of the time it’s hidden.

I can’t think of anything here. Maybe I’m just oblivious to hate. Or maybe I just hang around positive people.

I read the eight books of the Anne of Green Gables books when I was a kid, and ended up inheriting the set I had originally borrowed from my grandmother. Did you know there was a ninth Anne of Green Gables book? I just found that out today when I looked at Goodreads. But I loved this story.

Sometimes you can tell on the first page that you’re going to absolutely love the book. That was how I felt about Enchantée. I fell in love with the words on the first page.

I loved the Little House on the Prairie books. I know some people have problems with them now because the people in the 1800s weren’t the most enlightened people with regards to race, but they didn’t really know any better. It’s not like the people of today are perfect either.

This category could be filled with several books too, but I enjoyed the romance in Alex, Approximately. And since we’re winding down the summer ::sniff::, I figured I’d throw this one in here.

I love Legend (if you couldn’t tell from reading this blog). It’s the only book I’ve written four novels/novellas and two short stories about (and I’m probably going to write a sequel to one of my novellas even though I thought I was done writing in this fandom).

I can’t think of any books like this at the moment.

That’s it! I’m not going to tag anybody, but if you’d like to do this one, please do! Send me a link if you decide to do it.

Ash Princess

By Brookelorren on September 6, 2019September 6, 20192 Comments

Ash Princess, by Laura Sebastian, is a story about a former princess (Theodosia) whose country was overtaken by another when she was much younger. Although the new kingdom has taken her in, she has become the subject of beatings and the butt of their jokes. Overall, I enjoyed it, although it didn’t have quite the addictive properties that some other books I’ve read this year had.

The book has a great character arc. Theodosia starts out as this mousy character that meekly takes beatings. Later, she becomes a heroine that is willing to take risks to help her people, which are slowly being exterminated by the ruling powers.

I really like how Theodosia grows to care for her people and has a conscience. The book has something to say about the world we live in today too:

I suppose it’s easy to be at home in a world where you are on top. It’s easy not to notice those whose backs you stand on to stay there.
p. 26

My comment after reading that quote was “Ouch.” I couldn’t help but think about people in other parts of the world making iPhones and cheap clothing at slave wages when I read that.

Ash Princess has some pretty good suspense to it. The main villain is pretty evil, but he’s not the only person Theodosia has to worry about. There are a lot of bad people in the ruling kingdom.

There’s a little bit of romance in this book and the possibility of a love triangle in the next book. I haven’t read any spoilers for Lady Smoke (the sequel), so I don’t know how that goes. I think the love interests have the opportunity for good character arcs as well. More romance would have been nice in this book; maybe the sequel will have it.

Overall, I enjoyed Ash Princess. It wasn’t quite as addicting as The Cruel Prince or some of the other books that will make my top 10 books of the year, but I recommend it nevertheless. I do plan on reading Lady Smoke at some point; I just don’t know when.

The Underground Railroad

By Brookelorren on September 4, 2019September 4, 20195 Comments

I recently finished reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It was a book that looked good to me for quite a while, and when I noticed it was available on audiobook at the library, I had to check it out. For the most part, I thought it was an enjoyable book; however, there were a few things about the book that detracted from the book (for me).

Cora is a young lady that grew up as a slave. When the plantation she lives on changes hands, she agrees to run away with Caesar, another slave. Along the way, they meet hazards, including slave catchers and even the people that are trying to help them.

What I Liked

The Underground Railroad uses a clever metaphor: the Underground Railroad in this story is an actual railroad. Literal trains take our protagonists to their new locations. It was a clever way to fictionalize the story.

I liked the characters, the tension, and the plot to this story. Cora and Caesar are being chased by a slave catcher, Ridgeway, who is irrationally fixated on them. The book also does a good job at portraying the horrors of slavery, as well as the awful things done to black people throughout history.

What I Didn’t Like

Although I liked the story overall, The Underground Railroad played very loose with history. If there was a time when North Carolina decided to kick all the black people out of the state, I have yet to hear about it. Did South Carolina set up clinics to take care of black people and provide them with free medical care? I don’t think so. While I was fine with the railroad analogy, I find it unbelievable that an ex-slave would have even considered staying in the slaveholding South.

Additionally, there were scenes that were unnecessary and/or confusing. When Cora changed her name, I originally thought it was a new character. There was a chapter about a gravedigger and I have no clue why it was put there. I felt the last chapter about Caesar was unnecessary. Maybe because the story was a little over 300 pages and the author thought the story would be too short without them? I would have rather had more scenes that were central to the story.

Overall

Despite the fact that my section on what I didn’t like was longer than my section on what I did like, I was entertained by the story and gave it four stars on Goodreads. I liked Cora and rooted for her freedom. The Underground Railroad could have been better, in my opinion, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth reading. I recommend it, as long as you’re not looking for a historical book that actually follows historical facts.

Non-YA Books I Enjoyed

By Brookelorren on September 2, 2019September 2, 201929 Comments

Hello again! Welcome to another edition of Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl), where we talk about books! Today’s topic is “Books I Enjoyed that are Outside My Comfort Zone” but I’ll read just about anything (the exceptions would be the ones that I find distasteful or immoral, and I won’t read those on principal). A look at a recent “Currently Reading” list shows that I read quite a variety of books:

There’s a YA book, an adult book, a Spanish book, a German book, and a 3980 page monstrosity whose first volume was published in 1776. So today I’ll focus on non-YA books, since at the moment, YA is what I tend to read the most of.

I don’t read a great deal of romance; many of them seem quite generic and a lot of the covers are a bit of a turn-off. If you’re picky about the guys you find attractive like I am, the generic romance covers often leave a lot to be desired. Anyway, I loved Beverly Jenkins’s Rebel and I’d definitely read more from her.

The Fourth Turning was my favorite new-to-me book I read in 2016 (the second post I ever wrote for this blog). Even though I checked this book out of the library, I recently bought a copy of this book because I kept thinking about it and wanted a copy of it for reference.

Ghost Fire was one of the recent books I received from Bookish First; it’s an adult book set in India and in colonial America that I liked a lot.

I should have bought stock in tissues before reading The Last Year of the War. This was such a beautiful story of two friends who met in the US concentration camps during World War II and were separated at the end of the war. I highly recommend it.

Pennies is a darker book with disturbing themes and is definitely not YA. I still haven’t read the last two books in this series, although I did pick the next book from the random number generator for my fall TBR, so I’ll be reading that one soon

Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then is another adult book (although teens could enjoy it as well). It was the first of three time travel books I’ve read in the last 12 months, and probably is my favorite of the three.

The Kiss Quotient is another adult book, although I wouldn’t recommend it to teens like I would Here and Now and Then. I hope to read the sequel, The Bride Test, at some point.

Never Stop Walking is another adult book, although its contents are mostly appropriate for YA audiences. It is a memoir (which I don’t read too many of) about this lady who grew up in Brazil to a poor family. What she survived is amazing.

Unbroken is the amazing story of Louis Zamporini, who could have been an Olympic athlete if not for World War II. It’s a beautiful story about forgiveness. It’s even more awesome because this is the story of another Trojan like me.

This History of the Renaissance World cover

I was first introduced to Susan Wise Bauer’s works through her Story of the World books, which are great homeschooling books for middle schoolers. I read all of her History of the — World books; The History of the Renaissance World is one of them. All three of her adult books are equally good though.

So there are ten non-YA books that I enjoyed reading. What books did you enjoy that were either outside of your normal genre or are outside of your comfort zone entirely? I can’t wait to see what you have to say.

Next week we’re going to talk about “Books On My TBR I’m Avoiding Reading and Why.” I don’t normally avoid reading books, so I’ll probably do something like “Books On My TBR that I Really Want to Read But Haven’t Yet.” I’ll see you then!

The Future of Another Timeline

By Brookelorren on September 2, 2019September 2, 20191 Comment

The Future of Another Timeline is a time travel story written by Annalee Newitz. I recently had the chance to get an Advanced Reader Copy, thanks to Bookish First and Tor books. Oddly enough, it’s the third time travel story I’ve read in the last 12 months.

The story expertly revolves around two characters: Beth and Tess. Beth is a Riot Girrl in the early 1990s (her timeline starts in 1992). Her life is changed after she goes to a concert and witnesses a murder afterwards. Tess is in her late 40s and works in academia. Her official job is to go back in time to study different time periods, but she’s also part of a secret group that is editing the timeline so that women have more rights. She also goes back to visit Beth in the 1990s so she can fix the damage her former self created (but that’s a secret).

Beth is trying to navigate her senior year of high school, getting good grades, having fun with her friends, and dealing with a friend who has gone off the rails. Tess, in the other timeline, is trying to repair a timeline in which a group of controlling men have tried to create a time when women are nothing more than breeders.

As the story switches between their points of view, you discover more about the world and about the two people in the story. The way Ms. Newitz hides the information is genius. I was surprised to find certain details at different points in the story, but I won’t include them here.

The time travel mechanism in this story was interesting. The time travel machines are built into the earth itself, and you can access them from certain places in the world. Her worldbuilding around this possibility was quite clever. In this incarnation of Earth, everybody knows about time travel (although not everybody can do it). I also liked the way actual historical facts are interwoven into the story.

As a conservative libertarian, I tend to disagree with some of the main character’s politics (and probably the author’s too). The book is a little too pro-abortion for my taste; however, that didn’t keep me from enjoying the story as a whole. It was well-written and, for the most part, I agree with what Tess was trying to do.

The Future of Another Timeline is not a YA book, although some older YA readers might enjoy it. There isn’t anything that’s too explicit; however, some scenes might be a little too mature for younger YA readers. One of the protagonists is in her late 40s.

Overall, I thought this was a well-written story with an interesting plot and realistic characters. If you’re looking for a time travel story with a bit of a punk rock edge to it, you’ll probably like The Future of Another Timeline. It won’t be released until September 24th, but you can pre-order it now.

ABC Book Challenge – I

By Brookelorren on September 1, 2019September 26, 2019Leave a Comment

It’s Sunday again, and for the second half of this year, I’m going to go through my Goodreads books and am highlighting books that begin with a certain letter each week. This week, we’re highlighting the letter I (which I have less than a page of). I first found this challenge over at Me, Myself, and Books, but I think it was started by the Thrifty Bibliophile. So here are the I books from my limited selection:

It’s been a while since I read In the Garden of Beasts, but it was a good book. It discusses the days before Hitler really came into power.

The cover to I Wanna Be Where You Are by Kristina Forest is gorgeous! I haven’t had the chance to read this one yet. I haven’t heard much about this one for a little while, but it sounds like a lot of fun.

I got to see The Insanity of God movie a year or two ago. It was pretty interesting, and I thought it would be interesting to read the book that goes along with it.

I was able to read Lynn Vroman’s Into the Hollow last year, and it was really good. It’s one of those books that didn’t get much of a marketing budget so I don’t hear much about it, and that’s a shame, because more people should read this.

Makiia Lucier’s Isle of Blood and Stone was a good book. Sound of the Abyss, a companion novel, just came out recently.

That’s all the I books I want to highlight today. Next week is the letter J, which I only have three books listed… and one of them I didn’t care too much for. So there won’t be much next week. See you then!

August 2019 Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on August 31, 2019August 31, 20198 Comments

Hello! It’s the last day of August, and it’s time for another monthly wrap-up! This month was pretty good. We started school, so it’s been busy, but I’m getting a lot done. So what happened?

Books Read:

Once again, I finished 15 books in the past month.

Start Here – Trish Doller
Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World – Scott McCormick
Isle of Blood and Stone – Makiia Lucier
A Court of Wings and Ruin – Sarah J. Maas
Crown of Coral and Pearl – Mara Rutherford
The Shadowhunter’s Codex – Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis
The Dream Thieves – Maggie Stiefvater
Satellite Bible Atlas – William Schlegel
Truthwitch – Susan Dennard
Ghost Fire – Wilbur Smith
The Lady Rogue – Jenn Bennett
The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
Blue Lily, Lily Blue – Maggie Stiefvater
Rora – James Byron Huggins
The Future of Another Timeline – Annalee Newitz

Part of me doesn’t know if Rivals! Should really count, because it’s only available on audiobook, but it reads like a book, so I am.

Blog Stats:

Twitter: I lost 14 followers, down to 2081. Oh well.
Blog users are slightly up.

You really can’t control how other people are going to react to you, so you just keep plodding along. Nobody likes to see their stats go down, but if I was solely into it for the numbers, I’d just follow everybody and not worry about whether they posted things I was interested in or not.

Writing:

I haven’t focused a lot on The Brightness of Shadow this month. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing!

I realized that Rebel‘s pub date was coming up, and I wanted to publish Hero before that time, so I’ve been finishing up edits on that and have been publishing it to AO3. It’s a Legend fanfic that takes place right after the epilogue of Champion, where Day (now going by Daniel) gets some unexpected news when he returns to the Republic. I wrote the first draft before Rebel was announced, so it’s not canon with that book or with Life After Legend I or II (I hadn’t read them yet). I did slide in one little detail I gleaned after reading the Rebel sampler, but it’s mostly independent. I feel a little like Cath from Fangirl wanting to finish Carry On Simon before the last Simon Snow book came out. If you’d like to read it, the first 18 (out of 27) chapters are up on AO3.

Neither me nor my boy won the writing contest, but I got some good feedback, edited it, and sent it out to a couple places. To me, the important thing is that I’m putting my work out there and trying. I finished my first Attic Notebook, so in a little over a month I’ll be able to start reading those stories and maybe I’ll expand upon some of them.

I got an idea for NaNoWriMo this year. So I have two months to work on the characters and do some worldbuilding.

Life:

Looks like we won’t be refinancing the house for a couple of months. We found out at the last minute that we weren’t eligible for the program we were going with (for reasons I don’t want to disclose publicly). We’ll be going for a conventional loan instead, but that’s going to take looking for another lender and won’t happen right away.

My daughter started public school and is doing great! She gets up on her own, and all I have to do is make sure she leaves at the right time. She pretty much does it without my help, but I’m not going to leave that to chance. Her grades are going great.

No trips to the hospital this month! It’s been 2 1/2 months now. We did get a bill for about $59 because my husband rolled a wheelchair for less than 100 yards to take my family member to her room. The $59 was for “mileage”. It’d cost less than $59 to drive a Bugatti 100 yards! It amounts to more than $1000 a mile. It costs about $20,000 to rent a Bugatti for a day, so if I pro-rated that based on the fact that I’d probably drive a rental car more than 20 miles, the mileage on that wheelchair was more expensive.

My boy started school too, and that’s going well. At the homeschool coop, the only thing I’m doing is TAing for an improv class. That should be fun.

In exactly one month and 33 minutes from the time I type this, I get to read Rebel! Yay!

Since I’m getting a copy on the Kindle (I ordered a signed hardback too) that means at exactly 10 PM on September 30th, I get to read it. I called it a school holiday so I can stay up all night to read it and go to sleep afterwards. It’s the homeschool coop’s fall break, so lucky me, I can actually pull that one off.

So that’s my August. How was yours? Hope you have a great September.

On the Come Up

By Brookelorren on August 29, 2019September 2, 2019Leave a Comment

On the Come Up is a book by Angie Thomas about a girl that wants to be a rapper and whose prospects are looking good. I recently had the opportunity to read this book on audiobook. I highly recommend this book on audiobook because of the lyrical nature of this book. This book is musically oriented, which was probably one of the things that drew me to it.

Bri is a girl living in a poor neighborhood that is bussed to a school in a nicer part of town. Her mom is having difficulty making ends meet; her brother helps to provide for the family. Her dad was killed several years ago; prior to his death, he was an up-and-coming rapper.

Bri has skills and is compared to her dad all the time. When she gets the opportunity to battle in the ring, everybody else finds out she’s good too. It gives her opportunities which draw her into a world that might be a little too much for her. She has to decide whether to follow her heart… or fame.

There was a lot I liked about this book. One thing I liked was the immersion into the rap world. Bri’s lyrics are pretty good (especially on audiobook). I used to listen to a lot of rap, so all the references to the old-school rappers was pretty enjoyable.

Bri herself is an interesting character. Ms. Thomas makes her well-rounded, with a little bit of a temper but a heart for her family. The world is also populated by a struggling single mom, an aunt with some questionable ties, and friends that provide us with realism and tension. I also enjoyed the setting.

I definitely recommend On the Come Up. It is an issue book that deals with topics like poverty, racism, violence, and being true to yourself when you’re pressured to be someone else, so I’d skip it if you’re looking for something light and fun. If you are looking for something with a little substance, then you might want to pick this up. Especially on audiobook!

Satellite Bible Atlas

By Brookelorren on August 28, 2019September 2, 2019Leave a Comment

I recently finished reading the Satellite Bible Atlas by William Schlegel. This is the best book of Bible maps I’ve ever seen. If you have a Bible, you probably have a few maps in the back of your book… but none of them are likely to compare with the vast variety of maps assembled here.

After a few general maps of the Levant, the Satellite Bible Atlas is arranged in chronological order. It starts with Abraham and moves all the way through the years of early Jewish rebellion in the Roman world. As the settlement names change over time, the adjoining maps also change. Each map is accompanied by a page of explanation. Often, the explaining page will include quotes from the Bible or even archaeological tablets that have been found discussing the events from that time period.

Sometimes when I read the Bible, my eyes glaze over at all the place names I don’t recognize. Maybe it’s just me, but probably not. This book helps me visualize where most of these places are. It’s certainly not a book that you’ll want to read in a day. It’s not meant to be a page-turner like a lot of books I review here. However, this is a book that you can use as a reference book. Even though I’ve finished reading the book, I’ll probably refer back to many of these maps again at some point in the future.

I’d recommend the Satellite Bible Atlas to several types of people. If you’re interested in ancient maps, if you want to know where all those little towns in the Bible are, or if you’re interested in ancient history, you might like this book. Otherwise, you probably won’t find this book to be very interesting. But if you are, then this is the best collection of Biblical-era maps I have seen.