March Reading Roundup

Time for this month’s reading roundup! This was a finishing-up-series kind of month, although two of the three series I read are not, alas, finished. But I’m doing this whole thing where I try to read newer books, rather than just binging The Sevenwaters Trilogy or The Dragonriders of Pern for the dozenth time. I’m a nostalgia reader by default (but then, I’m also still listening to the same bands I loved in high school).

I made it through six books in March (although technically I started reading Heir to the Shadows at the end of February). Still a pretty small number of books for me to get through in a single month, but I’ve been extra busy with life stuff—more on that in another post—plus my usual writing spree, plus participating in the March Ink & Iron Challenge for a writing group I’m in.

In order of the chronology in which I read them, here’s a brief rating & review for each book I read in March. And by brief, it varies; these reviews are a little longer than my February roundup reviews were, and it’s because I had a lot of feels. There are also a few spoilers, but those books have been out for decades, so I don’t feel bad.

Anne Bishop, Heir to the Shadows: 4 stars. This review contains some spoilers, so skip to review number 3 if you haven’t read The Black Jewels Trilogy and plan to. I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue the series after finishing the first book, if only because there was a LOT of triggering content in that one—which I knew going in, after reading the warning at the beginning of the book, but otherwise I went in blind and read zero reviews beforehand, so had no idea there even was a trigger warning until I actually opened the cover. Ultimately, I decided to keep going with the series anyway because I was emotionally invested in the characters. Well, one in particular: my boy Daemon. I wanted to see how his sacrifice played out and his eventual reunion with his family and Jaenelle. So when I get to this book and he is missing from 95% of the narrative because he’s wandering around in a fog of insanity and madness, convinced that he SAd & unalived a 12-year-old girl when he in fact did the exact opposite, I was not pleased.

There’s more I want to say, but the reliance on the miscommunication trope—a main character believing two known liars who abused him and his brother for 1700+ years instead of the brother who showed up to break him out of prison--more or less ruined it for me, and I want to keep my reviews as positive as I can. Especially since, like, I'm trying to break into the whole trad-pub thing, so take it for what it’s worth. I’m just some unagented nobody.

So anyway, I spite-read this one. I still rated it 3.5 stars because it did keep me flipping pages until 3am, if only because I refused to stop reading until Daemon could finally either pull himself back to reality or at least be remembered by the girl he sacrificed himself and his sanity to save. Unfortunately, that meant I had to spite-read the entire book, because Bishop kept poor Daemon sidelined in the Twisted Kingdom for literally 8 years aka the whole book. EIGHT YEARS. Sorry for internet-shouting with all the caps lock. I have feelings about this still, clearly.

Anne Bishop, Queen of the Darkness: 3.5 stars. Now that I’ve finished the original trilogy that inspired another author who in turn inspired a genre (why I picked up The Black Jewels in the first place)...I kinda wish I hadn’t read beyond the first book. This was the least satisfying read of the three, because the entire thing turned into one long miscommunication trope with growly, over-protective and territorial “males.” If 90% of the conflict in the book could be solved by a single dang conversation, I’m gonna be mad.

But at least I now know where the obsession with referring to any non-human man as a ‘male’ in the romantasy genre—one of my biggest pet-peeves, besides writing in the present tense—comes from. This whole time I’ve been blaming SJM, but she just took it from Bishop. Male and female are adjectives, not nouns, dammit (and my aversion absolutely has to do with my time in the Military, where ‘females’ is a derogatory term for women and is always spoken in a sneer, so I realize that is a me thing...but the emphasis on using ‘male’ and ‘female’ in romantasy has always struck me as deeply dehumanizing, to the point when I’m reading a book that uses those, I reframe them in my head as ‘man’ and ‘woman’).

Ok. I’m cutting myself off here, because I wanted these reviews to be short and again, mostly positive lol. I got too emotionally invested in these characters—ok, ok, in Daemon—so then got increasingly annoyed when I didn’t get the payoff I wanted from the books. I have zero intention of reading the spinoffs that have since been published after the original trilogy, especially now that I’ve looked up spoilers for them. Nope. Not doing it. I shall pretend Daemon & Jaenelle got their HEA, not just an HFN.

Danielle L. Jensen, A Curse Carved in Bone: 4.5 stars. Overall, I liked this book better than its predecessor (A Fate Inked in Blood). The FMC (Freya) annoyed the crap out of me early on, because she was behaving exceedingly immature with her unnecessary rage, taking it out on everyone and everything. Once she admitted she was being immature and started to work on it, however, it got better and I forgave her. I still love Bjorn. He is definitely on the book boyfriend list now. Nothing has changed in that department. I will say this book suffered from the same issue of predictability as the previous book, with the big twist being a “no, duh” moment for me, but as I am very rarely surprised in books (or movies) because I have a degree in a literary field—i.e. I’ve read a TON and know a thing or two about story structure—I’m not docking stars for that. The minus half a star is because Freya annoys me. I’ll keep this review shorter since a) it’s a newer book, so I don’t want to spill any spoilers; b) I’ve already spent a ton of time reviewing the other books on this list. My bad.

Rebecca Ross, Wild Reverence: 4 stars. Full disclosure...I only picked up this book because it sounded like a promising comp title for the book I’m querying in tone/pacing/tropes, and I loved the premise. Based on some of the reviews I read ahead of time, I wasn’t sure if it would be a book I enjoyed though (despite the fact that I was thinking about comping it). Part of that reasoning was that I have not read any of the other books set in this world, but from what most said, it was a standalone, so reading the rest of the Divine Rivals stuff wasn’t necessary. I will say parts of it do match my own work in tone/pacing, but...I would also say that at times, the pacing was a little unnecessarily slow, and there wasn’t the accompanying character growth (particularly with the goddess FMC) to justify slowing it down so much. She stayed pretty flat for me. Thus, I felt the book could have benefited from a lot of trimming/condensing in the middle as a result of that, but I still feel pretty solidly confident listing this as a comp, and it’s not a book I’d be embarrassed by being placed on a shelf next to. The opposite, in fact. I’d be happy to be compared to Rebecca Ross.

Beth Cato, A Thousand Recipes For Revenge: 4.5 stars. As someone who loves to cook and who firmly believes in small magics rooted in domestic/symbolic acts, the core concept of a cooking-based magic system drew me in immediately. I was not disappointed. Some of the big reveals I saw coming, but two managed to legitimately surprise me, which does not often happen, including the one at the very end. Not saying which because this is a newerish book, and I really do highly recommend you dive into this series. That magic system, man. AMAZING. My favorite magic system since Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer Saga.

Final note: I am such a sucker for a Shadow Daddy, it is truly ridiculous. A deity appears as a vaguely humanoid cloud of mushroom spores, has death powers, and makes a few sarcastic comments while toying with mortals? Gimme.

Beth Cato, A Feast For Starving Stone: 5 stars. I actually had a harder time getting into this book than I did the previous one, which I was not expecting considering the k!ller ending of the previous book, but that might be because the premise of food-as-magic was no longer novel. That said, once I got going, I couldn’t put it down...which was a problem, because I had a lot going on this month and shouldn’t have been up reading until 3am on a preschool night. More to follow tomorrow when I give this one a full review.