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Hidden Gems (Top Ten Tuesday)

By Brookelorren on September 11, 2018September 11, 201828 Comments

It’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means! Another Top Ten Tuesday post. This week, we’re going to be talking about Hidden Gems. I’m guessing that this is the opposite of the Hyped Up Books topic that we did at the end of July. So today I’m writing about some books that I liked, that don’t get talked about a lot. Since I’ve only been book blogging for about four months, I apologize in advance if I include a book that was once really popular but I haven’t heard much about.

I’m only including books that have already been released.

As always, Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

So before I dig around into the Goodreads vault to find some books that I liked that I read a long time ago, I’ll start with some YA books. One recent book that I really liked was Echoes, by Alice Reeds. I couldn’t put it down, and ended up reading it in one day.

Not that reading a book in more than one day means that I didn’t like the book (it took me a few days to read King’s Cage and I thought that was great), but in the absence of having to go to work and reading a book that is über-long, it usually takes me a day to read a really good book like this.

Another story that I read this year that I thought was pretty good was My Real Name is Hanna, which is a story about a Jewish girl who struggled to survive in the Ukraine during World War II. I haven’t heard a lot about this story, which is pretty sad, because the story was enjoyable.

From here we go back in time, although The Weight of Feathers was released in 2015, so it wasn’t that long ago. I read it this April, however. This book is a little like Romeo and Juliet, in that it is about two teens from feuding families that end up falling in love. It has a different sort of ending, however. It won some awards, and I found out about it because my library posted a link on Facebook about it.

I don’t know if you’d really consider The Book of Lies to be a hidden gem, because I first heard about it on television, but this book has been around for a while (it came out in 2008) and I’m sure it doesn’t have many people talking about it any more. I only remember bits and pieces of this story, but I remember I liked it quite a lot, and I ended up staying up late to finish it. Did you know that Superman has something to do with the Bible? The answer to that connection lies in this book.

The Heavenly Man is definitely a hidden gem. I first heard about it in church, LOL. I really loved this story, and I’ve heard from a few people that read it later, and they really enjoyed it as well. It made me rethink the concept of miracles. We seem to think of them as things that no longer exist today, but I think that maybe we rarely see miracles because we don’t need them that much.

At this point in my list, I think I’m running out of truly hidden gems; maybe if they ever decide to do this list at some point in the future, I’ll have more for you. Prior to book blogging, I heard of most books on TV, so they can’t really be that hidden, can they? But I’m sure that the rest of these books won’t be on very many Top Ten Tuesday lists this year anyway. One of those books that I really liked was 1421: The Year China Discovered America. I thought that this was a really interesting idea, and China did have quite a fleet at the time that Menzies thinks that China might have sailed to America, so who knows? It is an interesting idea.

Again, I doubt that we could call Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature to be a hidden gem, because I heard about it on the radio several times before I finally got around to putting it on hold at the library, but I also doubt that it’s going to make too many Top Ten Tuesday lists any time soon.

This book made my list of top books that I read in 2017. I found it to be really interesting. We always think of our own times as violent, but when compared to the past, it’s actually not. If you’ve ever wondered where the phrase “cut off their nose to spite their face” comes from, or have ever pondered whether medieval torture techniques would fly today, this might be an interesting nonfiction read.

I thought Defying Hitler was a great book, even though it’s unfinished. And yes, I first heard about this book on television. In my German class way back in middle school, I remember hearing about Germans who had to bring wheelbarrow loads full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. This is the story of someone who actually lived through it, all the way to after Hitler started to come into power, and people had to go to indoctrination camps. It was an interesting true story.

In the Garden of Beasts is another one of those World War II books that is quite eerie. This is the story of an ambassador and his family that came to Germany right about the time that Hitler came to power. Also probably not hidden, but as this book’s been out for a while now, I doubt it gets talked about as much as it used to.

Never Stop Walking is a book that I reviewed earlier this year, and you still don’t hear a lot about. Christina Rickardsson grew up in caves and then in the slums of Brazil. For those of us who grew up living in homes and never really had to seriously worry about our friends getting killed by the police or having to kill someone in order to get something to eat, this story is a journey into a life that we don’t hear a lot about. This book still remains fairly hidden.

So those are some hidden gems for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday. Next week I’ll talk about books that I hope to read this fall.

The Wolf and the Rain is Worth Reading

By Brookelorren on September 10, 2018September 7, 2018Leave a Comment

I recently read The Wolf and the Rain by Tanya Lee. It is a book about a dystopian world set in the future. Although it was not my favorite book that I’ve read (even this month) it was fairly enjoyable. I received an advanced reader copy of this book free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Wolf and the Rain follows the story of Samarra, who also goes by Sam. She has a fairly good (although perhaps shady) job, in a place where good employment is scarce. The world is a fairly dangerous place, where most people don’t know how to read, and knowledge of things like basic sanitation is limited.

The story switches back and forth between the North (where Sam works at this shady job) and the South, where there is a completely different storyline going on. We know that Sam is from the South, and so it’s fairly simple to deduce that the storyline in the South is probably about her, but the whole switching back and forth between the two timelines can be hard to follow, at first.

In the South, life is completely different. They know about basic sanitation. People have work. Yet everything seems so… regimented. It almost feels as if the people in the South have no freedom or identity. This is a huge contrast to the North, where chaos reigns, but people have choices to go to parties and aren’t told what to do for most of the day.

From the beginning of the story, Sam seems obsessed with the disappearance of a girl that she’s never met (in the Northern storyline, at least). She spends her free time trying to track down the girl, even though it puts her into danger. For much of the story, I was wondering “why does she care so much?” This remains a mystery for most of the book.

While this is a dystopian book, there is also a puzzle to it. You’re left trying to piece together why Sam is so interested in the missing girl, what happened to the girl, and how do the timelines from the North and the South intersect? Sadly, you won’t get the answers to ANY of these questions as you read this book. Although the puzzle starts to come together, it doesn’t completely form into a whole picture by the end. There is supposed to be a sequel, and I guess the answers lie there.

The book started off slow. The multiple timelines were confusing at first, and at first, I didn’t really care about the outcome all that much. Towards the end of the book, after I got to know the characters and I started to figure out what was going on, it got interesting and I wanted to find out more.

I do plan on reading the sequel to The Wolf and the Rain at some point. While this isn’t one of my favorite books, it was interesting and I thought it was worth reading.

Batman: Nightwalker Was Good

By Brookelorren on September 6, 2018July 16, 20188 Comments

I recently finished reading Batman: Nightwalker by Marie Lu. When I first heard about the book, I wasn’t planning on reading it; I am so not a superhero person. My husband drug me to see a couple Spiderman movies a while back, and I’ve seen the Superman movies and some others… but it’s definitely not my genre. That being said, I loved Brad Meltzer’s Book of Lies, which has something to with Superman, that I read several years ago.

Anyway, I had started saying that Marie Lu could write about the alphabet and make it interesting. If I really believed that, then I should read her Batman book to see if it’s true. It actually was good, so that theory still holds. It’s probably my least favorite book that she’s done (but she set the bar really high with her other seven books), and it’s not going to make my top 10 books of 2018 list (which is okay because she might have two books on that list anyway), but I definitely enjoyed it.

The story follows Bruce Wayne right after he turns 18, about the time that he’s graduating from high school. He’s already fabulously wealthy, and is already realizing that there are some people that just care about him because of his influence. He’s ready to spend his last summer before college with his two best friends… until he happens to run across a crime scene.

He has a cool car that can chase down the bad guy, so he does — and gets in trouble with the police as a result. He is sentenced to community service at the local insane asylum. There, he discovers a little more about the string of crimes happening in the area, committed by a group called the Nightwalkers. He ends up bending the rules a little bit, but in the process ends up saving the day. Oh, and he also develops a thing for a criminal that may not be as bad as she initially seems to be.

One of the things that I love about this book (and pretty much all Marie Lu books in general, I’ve come to realize) is that it shows compassion for people that many would otherwise dismiss. People sometimes can be condemning of people because they happen to be the wrong race, or had to make difficult choices because they were poor, or did something stupid in their past. Our villain, Madeleine, might be a criminal, but there were forces that drove her there. I love how the book delves into the reasons why she chose the path that she did rather than just writing her off as a bad person. This book also deals briefly with sexual harassment, which is very timely in the #metoo era.

Batman: Nightwalker introduces us to Bruce Wayne discovering some of the cool Batman toys that he’ll later use as Batman. I thought it was also cool how the book goes a little bit into his interest with bats.

I thought that Batman: Nightwalker was a good story worth reading. My daughter is reading it now and also likes it; she enjoys superhero movies in general. Although this book isn’t in a genre that I routinely read, I did find it interesting.

Books Made into Movies: Which Was Better? (Top Ten Tuesday)

By Brookelorren on September 4, 2018September 3, 201850 Comments

It’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means… another Top Ten Tuesday post. Today’s Topic is supposed to be “Bingeworthy TV Shows/Movies”, but I’ll be doing a post on “Books That Were Made into Movies: Which Was Better?” Because I’m sure that you’re not interested in this:

Or this:

And since I usually only watch TV shows during my Russian meetup group, I think I’ll stick to books (the last one, Red Queen, has nothing to do with the Aveyard books). These are in no particular order.

How could I write a Top Ten Tuesday post about movies without including Divergent? Divergent was the movie that got me into reading YA. I actually saw the movie trailer before I read the book, and I read the book before I saw the movie. Despite the fact that I own all the movies in this series and have seen them several times (mostly in Spanish to practice my language skills), I actually don’t think the movie was all that great. I don’t think Shailene Woodley did an outstanding acting job here, and although Theo James is kinda hot, his acting was just okay as well. Plus, they get the stupidest details wrong in these movies (eye color, tattoos, location of the safe house in book 1…). I understand that they changed some of the details for artistic license, but these movies could have been a lot more faithful to the books. Maybe I’m bothered by it because of the hours and hours and hours of Divergent trivia that I’ve played on QuizUp.

Verdict: Books were better.

The Hunger Games is another book series that I loved that was made into movies. I think I watched the first movie before I read the books, but I read the rest of the books before I saw the movies. This was a series that I read in both English and in Spanish.

I think that they did a great job on the movies here. They seemed to stay fairly faithful to the books, and the acting was decent as well. I would have liked the movies even if I hadn’t read the books.

Verdict: Both the books and movies were good.

The Little House on the Prairie books are classic books. I don’t know how many times I read the set when I was a kid. The television show that ran in the 1980s was fairly popular as well. When my kids were younger, we’d watch the TV show with them, and it’s still pretty good.

However, even though the television show was pretty good, I still think that the books were better. The TV series had a feel-good message and moral lessons, but it wasn’t enough to beat the books.

Verdict: Books were better.

Anne of Green Gables is another series that I’ve read that they made into movies. I haven’t watched the Netflix series based on this show, but I did see some movies that they did of this show years ago. I wasn’t really that impressed (I think that I’ve seen two different versions of this book to screen adaptation). Even if the movies had been good, they didn’t cover the entire series, and Rilla of Ingleside is actually my favorite book of the entire series, I think.

Verdict: Books were better.

Forrest Gump is one of my all-time favorite movies. I just love the story, and the music is wonderful as well. I’ve seen this movie quite a few times.

The book, on the other hand (pictured here), is not quite as good. I don’t remember it all that well, but I do remember that it was just okay. I think I found it on sale, along with its sequel, Gump & Co. Forrest is not the same guy in the book as he is in the movie, and he’s not as likeable. Not by a long shot.

Verdict: Movie was better.

Like Divergent, I had never heard of The 5th Wave until I had seen the movie trailer. I went ahead and read the book before I saw the movie though. I thought the book was fantastic, and I flew right through it. This book made my top ten list of favorite books for the year that I read it in (the other books in the trilogy were not as good and didn’t make my favorite books list, however).

I thought the movie was pretty good, however, it really paled in comparison to the book.

Verdict: Book was better.

I was so excited when I heard that they were going to make Dragons of Autumn Twilight into a movie. After all, I named my kids after characters in these books! Alas, instead of making a really cool live-action film like The Lord of the Rings, they ended up making a really terrible cartoon instead. We were really disappointed.

I’m sure that you’ve heard to never judge a book by its movie, and that is doubly true for this book. The book series is fantastic! Unfortunately, I think that the movie that goes along with this book is the worst on the list.

Verdict: Book was WAY better.

The Lord of the Rings is a classic book series. I read it a long time ago, and I don’t remember much about it because I had aspartame poisoning at the time (it really killed my memory), but I remember liking the books.

Of course, I’ve seen all of the movies as well, and they were also great. They did a wonderful job making these movies, and I wish that they had done such an amazing job on Dragons of Autumn Twilight as they did on these movies. Before these movies came out, I was never really impressed by fantasy books that had been turned into movies. But these showed me that they could be done well.

Verdict: Both the books and movies were good.

Ender’s Game is another book that I was really excited to see turned into a movie. I read three of the books in this series in high school and I thought that they were really good, so I had to go see the movie when it came out.

While I thought the movie was good, I thought that there was a lot that was in the book that they ended up having to leave out for the movie. I know that they have to edit movies for time and all, but I think that all that ended up getting cut out made the movie inferior to the book.

Verdict: Book was better.

Unbroken was a great movie. It had a wonderful message, and it left me crying at the end. I think I saw the movie on Christmas day, and my dh gave me a copy of the book as a present on the same day, so I saw the movie first.

Even though I thought the movie was really good, there is only so much you can put in a movie. The guy spent a long time on a life raft, and then he went to a prisoner of war camp. Then when he went home he had to recover. It’s difficult to pack into a short movie

Verdict: Book was better.

So that was this week’s Top Ten Tuesday Topic. Come back next week where I talk about Hidden Gems: books that were really great, but not everybody knows about yet.

City of Glass was Magical

By Brookelorren on September 3, 2018September 6, 2018Leave a Comment

I recently read City of Glass by Cassandra Clare. This story was great. I bought this book used off of Amazon.com when I realized that I was #5 on the waiting list at the library, and all the books after this on the waiting list were going to become available sooner. So I spent a few dollars for my own copy rather than waiting for this one to become available, and then waiting several more months for this story to conclude.

While this review doesn’t contain spoilers for City of Glass, it may contain spoilers for the first two books.

My experience was probably different than someone reading it in 2009, when this book first came out, because I had the benefit of being able to look up online what was going to happen between Clary and Jace. I won’t say here what happens because I don’t want to include spoilers, but the whole incest issue between the two of them does resolve itself. In this book. So if you’re thinking “eeew” as you read this book, don’t worry about it. It will get fixed. In about 400 pages.

When we last left these characters, Clary had discovered that there was a way to cure her mother, but it required her to travel to Idris. Jace doesn’t want her to go, however, thinking it’s too dangerous. Fortunately, Clary has a mind of her own and isn’t about to let her brother tell her what to do.

Due to a few things that happen, both Luke and Simon end up in Idris as well, and they’re not supposed to be there.

There are bigger things to worry about than that, however. Valentine still has the Mortal Cup and Mortal Sword, and he still wants to use them to root out what he sees as corruption in the Clave. At least, that’s how he puts it. Part of him just wants to take over the world.

By the time you get to the end of this book, secrets will be revealed and people will die. We also meet new characters. Even though I did look up spoilers to find out what was up with the whole Jace/Clary thing, reading the books up to this point clarified quite a few things.

One of the things that I appreciate about these books, that I haven’t mentioned before, is that there is a lot of Bible and historical literature in these books. For example, Clary wrote Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin at one point, without realizing what that meant. I recognized it as what “the handwriting on the wall” was in the book of Daniel. We also see lines from Milton and some Latin. These certainly aren’t theological books, but I find the references to be clever.

I also love it when books have themes to them. The Mortal Instruments books seem to speak about corruption. How people use power wrongly. How people take advantage of laws to benefit themselves, even if by doing so they are acting immorally. Through the character of Valentine, we even see how evil can package itself in an attractive manner. These details make me enjoy the books more.

I absolutely could not put this book down, and read it in two days, despite having to work and do other things. If you haven’t read City of Glass yet, you should continue with this story.

Kindle Deals THIS WEEKEND and THIS MONTH

By Brookelorren on September 2, 20186 Comments

Amazon.com has some amazing deals. Their deals are so good that I often talk about them while I’m at work (at Walmart). Here is how a typical conversation at work might go:

Me: Did you find everything that you were looking for today?
Customer: Yes, and then some.
Me: That happens all the time around here. For me, that happens at Amazon.com. I can’t pass up their $1.99 books!

And today is no exception. Amazon.com has some amazing deals this weekend. Not only do they have a Labor Day sale going on, but they also have changed out some of their monthly deals. I have tried to separate them out to figure out which is which, but here are some sales you might want to take advantage of:

Labor Day Weekend Deals:

Veronica Roth’s Carve the Mark is on sale for $1.99! This book took the #2 spot on my favorite books I read in 2017 list. I’ve read this book three times this year (once in Spanish). You can read my review of this fantastic book; it was one of the first books I ever reviewed on this blog. If you don’t have it yet, now’s your chance.

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is another one of those books that you keep hearing about. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems like everybody that read it seems to think that it’s great. It’s not on Kindle’s Monthly Deals list, so I’m assuming that you can only get this book on sale for $1.99 through this weekend.

Ace of Shades Cover Amanda Foody’s Ace of Shades is on sale this weekend for $1.99 as well. This book was on sale a few months ago and I picked it up then; I thought it was a great book. You can read my Ace of Shades review from July. I really liked the book, and for $1.99, you shouldn’t pass it up!

Let’s Talk About Love is another book that everybody seems to talk about. This book is on sale for $2.99 this weekend. I haven’t read this book yet, but if this has been on your TBR for a while and you’ve been waiting to pick it up, now is as good of a time as any to get it.

Those are just some of the deals that I could find that are going on right now that are NOT on the Kindle Monthly book deals list. If you want any of these, you’ll want to act on them right away.

Kindle Monthly Book Deals:

I almost always look at the Kindle Monthly Book Deals towards the beginning of the month, sometimes I might pick up a book or two, and then for the rest of the month I debate about whether to get some of the other books that I’ve been thinking about, but am unsure of. Then I end up logging into Amazon.com on the 30th of the month and end up buying another book before the deal goes off sale.

These books will be on sale for the rest of September but if you want them, then you’ll want to either get them now, or be like me and log in on September 30th and buy them, LOL.

The City of Brass is one of the monthly deals that I’m hoping to take advantage of. It’s got fantasy in a Middle Eastern medieval type setting, which sounds pretty exciting. I’ve seen this book in a few places and it looks pretty interesting. Right now it’s on sale for $1.99.

Fawkes is one of those stories that I keep hearing mixed reviews about. Some of the bloggers that I’ve seen write reviews on this book have absolutely loved it; others have said that this book was just “meh”. For a while, I’ve been debating on whether to read this book or not. I’ve decided on the side of reading this book. I’m a big history person (as you might have noticed if you read my Top Ten Tuesday list of nonfiction books) and I’m familiar with the original story of Guy Fawkes, so I think that this book will probably be something that I’ll like. I’ll definitely be getting this for $1.99 this month, even if I end up logging in on September 29th in a panic because I haven’t bought this one yet.

I don’t know too much about Poison Study, but I’ve seen a couple people mention this on their Top Ten Tuesday lists of books that they really like. This book will be on sale for $1.99 for the rest of September. If this has been on your TBR, now would be the time to pick it up.

These are just some of the books that are on sale on Amazon.com right now. If you want to see more, here is a list of books that are on sale RIGHT NOW and books that will continue to be on sale through the month of September. There’s probably something there for everyone.

August Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on August 31, 2018August 31, 201810 Comments

So today’s the last day of August, and it’s time for yet another monthly wrap-up post. This is what happened in August:

Books Read:

This month I read ten books, and some of them were pretty long. I had a lot of library books come in, and I’ve been trying to make sure that those get read first. Normally I post an ARC/new release review at the beginning of the week on my blog, but because I’ve had so many library books to read, September 3rd’s review will be on an older book, City of Glass. That’s just the way things worked out.

Crown of Midnight – Sarah J. Maas
My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. – Kevin Powell
Glass Sword – Victoria Aveyard
George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire – Peter Y. Choi
When Elephants Fly – Nancy Richardson Fischer
King’s Cage – Victoria Aveyard
Give the Dark My Love – Beth Revis
City of Ashes – Cassandra Clare
Heir of Fire – Sarah J. Maas
City of Glass – Cassandra Clare

Tower of Dawn was on sale for $2.99, so I picked that one up this week. Now I don’t have to be in such a rush to read it when it becomes available at the library. I’ve found that that is one of the biggest drawbacks to getting books from the library. You have to be ready to drop everything and read them when they become available. Right now, I think I really only have three books that are going to become available soon, and I’ll be able to handle that.

I have plenty of books that I’ve been getting off Amazon.com for $1.99. Their monthly Kindle deals are just too good to pass up! I thought about getting Warcross because it went on sale for $2.99, but I held myself back. After all, I already have two copies.

Blog Stats:

I actually lost followers this month on Twitter, but there’s an explanation for that. Twitter did some sort of purge, and I lost about 90 followers in one day. I thought maybe it was something I had said, but it wasn’t. So I’m at 1523 followers, but if there hadn’t been that Twitter purge I would have been over 1600.
I’m at about 300 monthly users on my blog. For a while, I was higher than that, then I dropped lower. I haven’t had as much time to visit other blogs, but 300 has been a goal of mine, so that’s good.
I have 12 posts written that haven’t been posted yet, which is more than last month. I’m trying to get ahead, because I’ll be really busy during NaNoWriMo. You might find me doing a lot of graphic novel and short story reviews in December because of NaNoWriMo, LOL.

Writing:

I finished writing Like Normal People! Yay! I published my first chapter on January 7th, 2016, and published the last chapter on August 30th, 2018. I had two long bouts of writer’s block with this one. First, in 2016, I had to write about mountain climbing and had no clue how to do it; I was in the middle of a move, and then I just forgot about my story. The second time was in February, where one of the chapters was completely boring me and I didn’t know how to make it interesting. I wrote a bunch of other stuff while waiting for inspiration on that one, even though I only had three and a half chapters left. Once I was able to write that chapter, the story was done in a week.
I already have over 10 pages of notes for my NaNoWriMo novel this year. I have a good idea of what is going to happen in the story, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to have to be a duology, because towards the end it looks like a war is about to break out. This started out in my head as a fanfic of a fanfic, but it has developed a lot so far, and although if you squint, you can see what inspired this story, it will look completely different. I still have 2 more months to plan this before I write, too.
For September, my goal is to finish writing the first draft of Hero. I’m in the wrapping-up phase of this story, so there probably won’t be too many chapters left to write, but I haven’t outlined this one, so I’m not sure how may are left. I don’t know if I’ll get to Saving Adelinetta in October. I want to make Hero look really good first. I’ll probably be spending more time editing and revising my stories going forward, which will make them better, but it will also cause them to take more time. I’m guessing that Saving Adelinetta needs at least 100 more pages to finish it, and that one is going to need a lot of revising (I literally wrote about 200 pages of that story in 10 days).

Life:

Like many people, school has started, and so things have gotten busier. My daughter spent her first day of public school (ever) in the hospital. She’s out now though. It takes about 40 minutes to drive her to school. So… now I get home from work at around midnight and get up at 6 AM to drive her to school. My husband has agreed to drive her on Thursdays and Fridays though, so that is a big help. The upside to that is that I can listen to audiobooks on the way. Right now I’m listening to Everless. That’s like free reading time.

My Spanish and German classes have restarted, and I actually have pretty good enrollment numbers. The Duolingo people decided to change the Spanish tree on me the week before classes, and I had to rewrite the booklet I give to my students over a weekend (it’s 50 pages). Class has been going well though. I’m not as nervous this year, and planning is going a lot more smoothly. I’m learning how to incorporate more speaking practice, which helps the class move forward.

So that’s it for August. How was your month?

City of Ashes was Outstanding

By Brookelorren on August 30, 2018August 26, 20184 Comments

I recently finished reading Cassandra Clare’s second book in the Mortal Instruments series, City of Ashes. I thought it was great. You may recall that I read City of Bones a few months ago and I said that it was just good, but I expected better from books after that, since that was an early book of hers.

As this review is the second book in a series, it may contain spoilers for City of Bones.

I was correct in thinking that, because I thought that this was a great book. My problems with City of Bones was that there were a few occasions of infodumping, and I found the reaction of the characters to some of the situations they were facing to be unrealistic. I didn’t see those problems here. I did see one paragraph that seemed like a little infodump, but it didn’t affect my thoughts of the book at all.

As City of Ashes begins, the character’s lives have been upended. Clary and Jace seem to have feelings for each other but are evidently siblings, their mom is in a coma in the hospital, and their father, Valentine, is causing trouble.

Jace’s adoptive mother is having trouble believing all that happened in the first book, and calls upon the Inquisitor to find out the truth. The Clave can use the Mortal Sword to force him to tell the truth. But… dun dun dun! Valentine seems to have stolen it. Will he cause even more problems?

The Inquisitor seems to have a thing against Jace from the moment she sees him, and tries to make things difficult for him. Unfortunately, Jace and his friends are also the only people that see what’s going on, and they have to overcome both Valentine’s forces and the Clave’s representative in order to put things right, or at least as right as they can be.

Meanwhile, Jace and Clary still obviously have non-brotherly/sisterly feelings for each other. Clary reacts to this by forming a love relationship with Simon. I personally didn’t like them together. They didn’t seem to have more than friends chemistry.

I love the characters and the world in this book, and although I can’t keep all the different types of demons and blades straight, I doubt that there will be a quiz on it later. I definitely think that City of Ashes was a great second installment to the Mortal Instruments series, and I’m looking forward to reading the next book.

Back to School with Nonfiction: Top Ten Tuesday

By Brookelorren on August 28, 2018August 13, 201825 Comments

So it’s time for the kids to go back to school. My daughter started public school for the first time about two weeks ago, my boy started his homeschool coop last week, and our “Lastname Christian Academy” officially starts the Monday after Labor Day. For today’s Top Ten Tuesday Topic (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) we are doing a back to school edition. This week, I will be posting some of my favorite nonfiction books. They’re in no particular order.

The Fourth Turning has got to be one of my favorite nonfiction books. It was my favorite book that I read for the first time in 2016. It came out in 2007, but it’s very relevant today. I just love how this book describes how history runs in cycles, and it is so amazing how this book is laid out. If you like this book, Pendulum is also a good book with the same idea, but I liked this one immensely better, even though this one is older.

I first read The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin in college, and not for an assignment; it just looked interesting. The book details the history of discovery, from things as simple as the clock and the calendar to more modern inventions, like navigation. I’ve read this book twice, but it’s been a while since I’ve read it last. I’ve also read a few of his other books; they’re also outstanding. A couple of years ago I was able to find a copy of The Creators in hardback at a library book sale and I had to get that one too, even though I had already read it.

If you are a homeschooler, then you are probably familiar with Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World series (they’re very popular). She also has written a set of history books for adults: The History of the _______ World (she has books for the Ancient World, Medieval World, and Renaissance World). They’re all great. If you think you know history because you studied it in high school, you probably are missing a lot. Some of the stories in these books are quite brutal, and I don’t think that they’d get taught in high school just for the brutality factor alone (history can be pretty nasty at times). These are really thick books, and you probably won’t finish it in a day or two like you can with most novels, but you can learn a lot from them.

One of my favorite history books is A History of Modern Europe by John Merriman. I bought the third edition (pictured in the photo here) because if you buy the brand new edition, it’s really expensive. There’s over 1400 pages of text here, so you won’t get this one read in one sitting either, but the book is very readable.

After the Flood by Bill Cooper is a lot shorter and a lot less academic, but I found it to be really interesting nonetheless. I think it’s fairly typical for people living today to think of the ancient world being full of unintelligent people who didn’t know much, but I’m pretty sure that was not the case. This book talks about some of the ancient records that shows that more than likely, ancient people in places like modern-day Britain already had knowledge of the Judeo-Christian God before the arrival of the Roman missionaries that started showing up there after the time of Jesus. I found the ancient geneological records to be fascinating.

I read The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours in college, but I also reread it once after that. The stories here are pretty fascinating. It’s hard to tell at times what in this book is real and what was exaggeration. Whether some of the tales are made up or not, what is apparent is that there was corruption in the early medieval period just as much as there is now.

If you’re looking for a reading challenge, then you might want to try tackling Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (unabridged edition). My Kindle says that I still have about 75 hours left in this book, and I’m 2 % of the way through (probably part of that is chapter indexes though). I read the abridged edition years ago, but I’d like to one day read the entire thing, because there’s some fairly interesting stories here (although the reading is not the easiest).

There are several different Kindle editions of this book floating around, some free, some you have to pay for, but I’ve found that this particular edition is the best, because 1) the footnotes are all there and linked, and 2) all six volumes of this book are all together. I’ve downloaded a few copies of this book and have decided on reading this particular edition because it seems to have the best formatting.

I love 1421: The Year China Discovered America, because there is so much about the ancient and even medieval world that we don’t understand. If you like the History Channel shows where they go look at unexplained evidence and try to figure out what it all means, then you might be interested in reading this book too. I’ve always wanted to read his other book, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, but I could never remember the title, but I finally found it. Now that it’s on my Goodreads TBR, I’m more likely to read it.

So far, all the books I’ve put on this list have been history books, which is most of the nonfiction that I read (well, that and political fiction) but I do read whatever nonfiction looks interesting. Freakonomics is a thought-provoking non-history nonfiction book. It explores the economic factors behind things like drug dealing, danger, abortion, and other subjects, but not in a boring way. I haven’t read this book in a long time, but now that I’m talking about it here, I want to read it again.

Wildcard seems to be one of the most anticipated books of the year, and if you’ve read Warcross already, then you probably remember that there’s a place that Emika goes to that is the dark side of Warcross. It’s actually based on a real thing called The Dark Net. While I was reading Warcross, I was reminded about the things that I read about in this book, including the Assassination Market (which is a real thing). If you find those sorts of dark things interesting, you might be curious to read this book. It’s a fairly easy and enjoyable read.

So that’s this week’s Back to School edition of Top Ten Tuesday. Stay tuned for next week where I talk about books that that were made into movies, and which one was better (because I don’t really watch too many movies or TV shows and I’m certain that most of you aren’t interested in watching something like Кухня, so I’m straying off topic a little).

Give the Dark My Love…

By Brookelorren on August 27, 2018August 19, 2018Leave a Comment

I was recently given the opportunity to read Give the Dark My Love by Beth Revis. I received it through Penguin’s First to Read program. It was a good book, although I can’t say that it was my favorite.

Nedra is a 17 year old girl who grew up in a poor village. She doesn’t have many prospects in life… until she gets a scholarship to a prestigious school, where she plans to train to become a medical alchemist. While she doesn’t feel quite like she fits in, she develops a friendship with another student there, Grey, that seems to be developing into more than friendship.

There’s a plague crossing the land, and Nedra wants to stop it, or even try to find a cure. As the story progresses, she ends up discovering that there may be necromancy involved. Necromancy is illegal. Grey is not too excited about this. At the end, there are some twists and turns, and Nedra seems to be sliding into the dark side. Will she be a villain in book 2? I hope to find out.

The Good

There are a lot of good things about Give the Dark My Love. I liked the characters and the family relationships that Nedra had. There’s some political intrigue, and it speaks a little bit about class and privilege. The magical system is well thought out (except in this world, it’s not magic, it’s science). I liked the plot twist at the end of the story as well.

The Not as Good

Overall, I enjoyed the book. I would have liked to have seen more of the relationship between Nedra and Grey, and there was a lot that went on between Nedra and her professor that wasn’t shown either. The writing style didn’t draw me in as much as some of the other books that I’ve read recently have, but it was still quite good.

Conclusion

Give the Dark My Love has at least two books to it, and I would like to continue with the series (although I’ll probably try to obtain an ARC or check it out from the library). For me, I don’t think that this book has endless rereadability, but it I did like it.

This book is expected to go on sale on September 25th, but you can pre-order it now.