Category: Reviews

For some reason, I went on a spree of ordering a bunch of books that weren’t out yet. Pre-orders! Pre-orders and their campaigns!1 And this one was one I actually just missed the campaign for, but I still got the book. Let’s check out some more middle grade, right?

Curse of the Night Witch is the story of Tor, a boy who was born with an emblem marking his as a leader. He wants nothing more than to escape this fate and pursue his actual dreams, and so wishes for something else. What he gets instead is a curse that will kill him and, along with his friends, he must find the Night Witch to lift the curse.

This is a middle grade quest book, two things I kept forgetting while I was reading it but two things that it is good at. The main characters are twelve, and Tor in particular does act like it. He starts out only caring about himself and his problems, but gradually comes to think about other people as well. And, given that they’re moving to a new location every chapter or two, he has a lot of opportunities to grow and change.

Given that I haven’t read a lot of quest narratives in recent years, so I kept expecting some of the events to come back around somehow. When it didn’t, I had to remind myself that these are different genre conventions I’m working with and I needed to by a bit more flexible with what was happening.

Overall, it was an entertaining read! I would probably recommend it for a younger audience than myself, which is always great to say about a book intended for a young audience. Definitely check it out, or get it for that younger person in your life!

1. It’s because I’m thinking about doing one myself, tbh [↩]

Another week another attempt at reading more Canadian books! Unlike last week, this one is not, as far as I know, something that won awards, so I went into it pretty hopeful that I’d like it a lot more. And I did!

Strangers follows Cole, a teenager who had moved away from Wounded Sky First Nation to live in Winnipeg some time after a school fire killed a lot of people. He’s tricked back by Coyote, calling himself Choch, to come back to find out that the small town still resents him for not saving more people from the fire when he was seven years old.1 With an illness spreading through the community and several of his old classmates being murdered one by one, Cole has to figure out what’s going on.

The story is a lot of fun. It’s complicated in that there are a lot of moving parts that get revealed slowly throughout the story, but I was never lost at any point and enjoyed finding out what was coming next and trying to put together what was going along with the leads. And in the end, I found that there were enough loose ends that I was intrigued by to consider continuing the trilogy.

I particularly liked the representation of anxiety and mental health. It felt accurate to my own experience, and it was nice to see it acting up at not-plot-relevant moments as well.

Although. This paperback. I need to make some mention of the way the pages are cut on the paperback because I hate it. If your pages look like this:

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

then just don’t. It’s so annoying to flip. Not only that, but they shed little bits of paper, which makes this all so unnecessary.

Overall, though, the story is a lot of fun and it’s definitely worth checking out. It’s Canadian, got some queer content, mental health representation, and fantasy elements that aren’t incredibly western, which is really nice to see.

1. This is not a superhero universe, these people are all assholes. [↩]

I’ve seen this book around for ages. I wanted to read more Canadian fiction and this is one that caught my eye. The concept is that people stopped dreaming and the Indigenous people were being hunted for their marrow because that would allow people to dream again. It sounded interesting!

But it’s also an award winning book. I do not like award winning books. And this one is no different.

The premise of the book does not play into the book. There’s maybe one full dream sequence, you never find out what happens when you lose the ability to dream, and I don’t know who gets the marrow once it’s extracted. It’s weird that this premise is even there at all because this could have been a fictional account of running from Residential Schools, a thing that I seem to remember learning actually happened, and 95% of the book could have remained nearly identical.

The book very much reads like something I would have read for grade 8 and analyzed chapter by chapter. I think the book ultimately is best read in that way, taken apart to study the symbolism rather than read as a whole. Read all together without those pauses, you realize that there’s no tension and that not a lot happens. They are being chased, but you never see the villains except at the very start and very end. There is no real view of how the world has changed since the world was destroyed and, without that contrast to see how people who can’t dream are different from people who can, you don’t really know why anyone would want their marrow in the first place.

It is interesting to see the Canadian Government as the villain, but that’s also historically accurate. There’s probably a deeper meaning, but I’m not reading books to find the deeper meaning someone else wants me to find.

Overall, I think this wasn’t my thing. It’s a literary book instead of a genre one, and therefore followed different conventions that I’m not that interested in. I know that I don’t like award winning books, and should have probably known better. Still, if it’s your thing, you might like it. It’s Canadian, Indigenous, and it has queer rep that was done pretty well.1

1. Except for the ending. Nice, but came out of nowhere. [↩]

Today in books I’ve been meaning to check out, Magic for Liars! The premise of a murder mystery Harry Potter for grown ups sounded interesting and I figured I might as well check it out.

The story follows Ivy, the normal sister who has opted for a life of private investigation. As someone impartial but aware of the magical world, she is brought to the magical academy to figure out what really happened to one of the professors who was found split in two and very dead. Her twin sister who she has a strange-to-estranged relationship with is a teacher at the school and she gets wrapped up in the universe trying to figure out just what happened.

The mystery was pretty easy to solve, as the answer is in a throw away line pretty early on in the story, though the reason why becomes much more interesting. There were a lot of interesting elements in the way the magic and the world functioned, as well as the pasts of the characters that get brought in so that they can be entwined into the core narrative. It was pretty well crafted as a story, even if you don’t care much for the mystery.

But then there’s the characters. Nothing is bad, mind you, but there was a lot that was unnecessary. Ivy gets into a relationship that doesn’t do anything to add to the story, and the two sibling relationships that feature are much more interesting. There’s also a lot of time spent on very obvious red herring characters that I could have done without, but that’s more about the genre conventions of a mystery than anything else.

I did like that there was a lot of Ivy’s bias in the story. It may not have been intentional, but the way some characters were perceived felt very much like it was because of the perspective and not because of what they were actually like. Also, because Ivy doesn’t understand magic, we never get a full explanation of how magic works, which I think worked to the book’s benefit.

Overall, I really enjoyed it! It’s a pretty light read with some good moments for the characters. Ivy was an interesting protagonist, even if she did get a bit stuck in her own head from time to time, and her observational abilities in a world she was unfamiliar with made the story come alive. The mystery component was not my thing, but otherwise I really liked it.

I got this book for really cheap. I’d seen the title around here and there, and didn’t have very high expectations. James Patterson Presents is a banner that has so far had not so great books inside it. With Girls of Paper and Fire, though, I was pleasantly surprised!

Lei is kidnapped from her family to be a concubine to the king and gains the title of Paper Girl whether she wants it or not. As she grows accustomed to her tasks and lives in fear of the king calling on her to perform the duties she was kidnapped for, she falls for another one of the Paper Girls.

It has to be said that the book has heavy themes of sexual assault. I think it’s handled mostly well, with very little of the assault itself happening on the page unless she escapes, and focusing the attention squarely on her reaction to it. There’s other bits of brutality that are much more explicit, such as the murder of the dog that happens in chapter 21 or the other Paper caste people who step out of line.

The world is interesting in that it actually feels Chinese. There’s a lot of touches, particularly in the terminology and the rituals that are used, that really evoke the feeling of the culture. Even in how the demons are described, something about it just feels very Chinese. I’m not sure why. It may be that I’m Thai, or that I grew up with a lot of Chinese friends, but it feels very authentic even as a fantasy world.

I will say that the middle sags and can be skimmed, though, and there’s some character issues. Besides Lei, no one changes so much as you learn more about their context. With a cast this large it’s understandable, but I was hoping for at least a few of them to get actual arcs.

Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s definitely worth a read, particularly if you find the hardcover for as much of a discount as I did.

1. Which amounts to nothing, the dog is not significant, it’s murdered to heighten the tension [↩]

I’m no fan of minimalism. It’s an aesthetic-turned-lifestyle for people who never have to worry about running out of anything and who can live entirely in the present. I don’t like the look and feel of a bare space.

However, I always thought the backlash against Marie Kondo felt a little strange. It’s not something that will work for me, but it might be something that works for other people. Her thoughts on books in particular are not something I agree with, but no one is making you follow her advice, so I didn’t really understand why people got so incredibly mad about it.

So I thought I would check out the book. I went into it knowing that it was going to be talking about a lot of things that weren’t going to be compatible with my lifestyle and with the feeling that there were going to be some strange translations that might sensationalize what the actual teachings are, because that’s how you reach an American audience. I figured there might be a few things in there that I could take an incorporate into my own life. You never know, right?

And here’s the thing. After reading it, I don’t like Marie Kondo as a person.

The lessons and technique is fine. If you’ve never done a mass declutter before, or you want to try something new, this technique seems like a good one to get you started on that initial pass. If you want to try out minimalism, this is good. Keep only that which makes you happy or which is immediately useful. Get rid of anything from the past or for the future that you even think about putting into a maybe pile. That’s all fine. It might be good for some people. It was a meme for a reason, after all.

My problem with her, and this may be a translation thing, is that she has a much greater respect for objects than people. Every object is greeted, considered, and thanked, whether it’s the house or the things being tossed. There is an emphasis at points of allowing the objects to rest and recover from being used, whether that’s in how you store socks or her insistence that you should unpack your bag at the end of every day and repack it in the morning.

People on the other hand… It feels like every human is a child in the midst of a tantrum that she is patiently waiting out. She threw out someone’s coat when he didn’t put it away and he was mad when he found out, but soon after he started tidying so clearly he didn’t care about it. Put things where they belong and not where you use them, you just need to stop being lazy and go to get it and put it back every time. You will never read that TBR pile or use those unused notebooks, so you should not keep them. If you aren’t constantly looking at those old photos, you don’t really value them enough to keep.

I will give it that this may be a translation issue, but I really don’t think so. It sounds too much like my own Asian mother after she would clean my room and throw out the majority of my stuff.1

If you’ve never done a declutter before, this is probably good for a starting point. The advice in the book is fine. But for me, I was surprised to find that I really do not like the author herself. Which, given my track record with advice books, probably shouldn’t surprise me that much.

1. I never got tidier, I just got a whole lot better at hiding stuff [↩]

I’m talking about a new release for once! Well, new-ish. Witches of Ash and Ruin came out about a month ago and it was a fantastic read! Which, well, I really liked The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Grey, so I came in with high hopes which were met. 

The story mostly follows Dayna, a witchling in a small town in Ireland, as she and her coven get swept up in trying to get to the bottom of a returning serial killer that is targeting witches in their small town. Three witches from another coven join them, including an old woman that had been previously exiled, and her two witchlings that have their own baggage to contend with. (I’m not actually sure if the three of them are the entire coven, of if they are just a representation of it, now that I think about it. It didn’t ultimately matter in the narrative.)

I really enjoyed Dayna and her way of experiencing the world. She has a lot going on and also struggles with OCD and a fear of what medication for it might do to her, which is displayed on the page in really interesting ways. She also has a romantic subplot1 that I thought did a good job of not getting in the way of the narrative, but also showcasing how she approaches things like boundaries. I feel like all of her interactions with the people around her, and the different relationships she had throughout the book, really helped to illustrate her as a character. 

Not that she’s the only perspective character in the book. Meiner’s chapters in particular also did a really nice job of showcasing how the interactions with other people really help to show what a character is really like through their actions and reactions. 

The story also unfolded in a really interesting way, especially with the changing perspectives allowing the audience to get a fuller understanding of everything that was happening and why. It still leaves enough room to keep you guessing, though, and more than enough mystery to last a whole other book. Which I’m really hoping will happen! There’s a lot to like, from references to old gods that you don’t see as often in literature and representation in a way that is part of the character rather than a defining feature, which I’m always a fan of. I highly recommend it!

1. A love triangle, I guess? Except it’s really not… [↩]