Welcome back to another edition of the Reading Roundup, where I herd all of the books I read this month into a corral and rate them on things like attractiveness, form, substance, and generally just how fun they were to hang out with.
I don’t say mean things about books, so if read something I wouldn’t recommend, I don’t list it. For transparency’s sake, I will disclose the number of books I read that didn’t make it into the corral at the end of the post.
Year-End Herd Count: Since it’s the end of the year, I also get to tally all the books that joined the herd this year, so here we go:
Fiction Books Read: 42
Novellas Read: 12 (Apparently this was the year of novellas?)
Audiobooks: 11
Nonfiction: 6
I was surprised to find my numbers pretty on-par for my average year-end totals, despite the craziness of 2020 itself, and deciding to start a business in the middle of a pandemic. I’m chalking it up as a win. I usually listen to a much larger volume of audiobooks, but they suffered this year because I mainlined pretty much every self-publishing podcast known to humankind, on top of the ones I already listen to. Do podcasts need to join the herd?! A question for 2021, perhaps. Okay, on to the Roundup.
The Queen’s Triumph (Rogue Queen Book 3) by Jessie Mihalik
Hey hey, the conclusion to The Rogue Queen trilogy arrived in December, and I obligingly devoured it. This is a must-be-read-in-order series, so start with The Queen’s Gambit if you’re interested, I promise not to do spoilers.
The Queen’s Triumph is everything you want in the conclusion to this series. From the romance side, we as readers have waited patiently for the main characters to finally get it on. Cue sex. Lots and lots of hot, passionate sex. I was very pleased with this, along with all the snark about said activities from Samara’s friends. From the science fiction side, that revenge you’ve been waiting for is finally served, but oh my god did Mihalik deliver it in the most tense way possible. Like, every time you think it is the last time something will go wrong for the characters, just look at the remaining page count in the book and realize that things are going to go wrong again.
Overall, great sex. great space station setting, and really cool fun battles on said space station. REVENGE. I was pleased. One always worries about the finale to a series but here, there is nothing to fear.
A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes Book 4) by Sabaa Tahir
Here is my usual disclaimer that this is the last book in a series that should be read sequentially, I will not do spoilers, and if you haven’t read it and are interested you should start with An Ember in the Ashes.
Okay, so I know all of the internet has long beat me to the punch of talking about how their hearts were destroyed by this book but, like, is there a support group for those of us just finishing the novel who are NOT OKAY? My favorite character, who I most identify with, had their heart absolutely annihilated, like full-on destroyed, and I may never recover, even if the glimmer of hope at the end of the novel indicates that said character probably will.
Truly masterfully crafted. I always worry about the end book in a series, and especially the final battle in fantasy novels, and I will just say that this one did not go where I thought it was going to go. Like, nowhere near where I thought it would go, and this was good. Heartbreaking, soul-crushing, possibly life-altering, but also good.
It feels like the end of an era, but we must all somehow find the strength to go on. “May death claim me first” (*sobs*, you will understand when you get there).
The Silent Places by Skyla Dawn Cameron
Cameron’s books are like that really really hot person who blinds you so much that when you try to talk to them (or about them, in the case of books) you forget what words are. If I actually tried to do justice to my feelings I’d sit around all day and never write a review, so I’m just going to do the best I can.
For my overused descriptive words, this book is amazing. Spellbinding, but also haunting. Excellent as a thriller, but so much more than that, too. It struck a deep chord within me, verbalizing all the calculations women constantly have to make around men regarding safety, and how nearly impossible it is for many people to escape domestic violence.
I feel like one of the truly wonderful things this book does is take every moment where you had to be extra-cautious, every moment you got a weird feeling about someone and decided to adjust your actions to account for a potential threat, and lets the reader know, Hey. Good instincts there. It shouldn’t be this way, but all too often, it is.
So often people (women, for certain, but by no means is it wholly gender restricted) are told we overreact to the way people treat us, the things they say, but the truth is, our bodies give us warning signs for a reason, but we are often conditioned to ignore those signs. I want to give this book to every woman I know, and then everyone else I know, because really I think everyone should read it.
Okay, now that I’ve bungled this review and failed to express how truly fantastic this book is, take pity on me and go read it.
My Fake Rake by Eva Leigh
For some reason, y’all, I have been hitting the historical romance genre up a lot more than usual. Okay, it’s Courtney Milan’s fault, her books got me hooked. Anyways, My Fake Rake is a wonderful, delightful romp. If you need some good laughs and historical is your jam, give it a try. Gender-swapping the oh-my-god-we-took-off-this-character’s-glasses-and-gave-them-nice-clothes-and-now-they-are-HOT trope (yes, I really did string that many hyphens together to modify the word trope because I can’t get away with doing this in my actual novels), I enjoyed absolutely every line of this book.
Basically, the heroine (Grace) needs a husband, but no one will look twice at her because she’s super smart and into science, so she decides to fashion her other science friend (Sebastian) into a fake rake to shower public attention on her to make other men notice her. So usually when this trope is done, the person making over the other person legitimately did not realize said person was attractive/worthy of affection/had good qualities before their outer appearance changed and this. . .does not work for me. Like, if you were that clueless beforehand, why would we want our bravely-made-over person to grant you their affections? Fortunately, in My Fake Rake, Grace did realize these things about Sebastian pre-makeover, and was interested, she just thought Sebastian wasn’t interested in her.
Cue the hysterical journey of two science-minded, socially clueless people trying to make one of them fashionable (luckily, a non-clueless person comes along to help them out before they embarrass themselves too much). The book had just the perfect amount of back-and-forth yearning, wherein each person wants the other but thinks the other doesn’t want them, which is so one of my favorite romantic plot devices. Ten out of ten, highly recommend.
Number of books I read this month that didn’t make it into the corral: 0