Tag: reading challenge

The Thief

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Megan Whalen Turner
Genres: Fantasy
Read: Mar. 2018

The Thief was the first book in my March Challenge to read 3 fantasy novels. It’s been on my TBR since Thick as Thieves came out last year and I heard that the series has gotten really good reviews. I’ve heard that the second book, The Queen of Attolia, is really the star of the series, so I wasn’t sure if The Thief would be that great, but I still really enjoyed it!

It’s a short book and it has a fairly simple plot, but it was a lot of fun! Gen claims to be able to steal anything, but he finds himself trapped in the King’s prison at the start of this novel. He’s very weak from being confined to the prison, with painful wounds on his ankles and wrists from the chains. But he’s offered a chance to get out of the prison when the King’s Magus appears to take him on a quest to steal an item for the King of Sounis. If Gen is successful, he’ll be granted immunity and allowed to walk free, the only catch is that he’s not told where they’re going or what they’re going to steal.

Gen sets off on a journey with the Magus, his 2 apprentices, and a solider, Pol, to steal an item of great value to the 3 kingdoms: Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia. This item will give Sounis a political advantage against their enemies. Gen isn’t interested in the journey or the task at hand, but he does want freedom, so he agrees to aid the Magus in his task.

I thought Gen was a fantastic character. He’s a bit full of himself and a bit dim-witted – he got thrown into prison because he spent too much time bragging in a wineshop about what a good thief he is. He’s got a dry sense of humour and his only real joys seem to come from eating and sleeping. He may be along for the journey, but he’s not going to make it easy on his captors. He knows that he has no real power, but he also knows that they need him, so he takes the opportunity to mess with them a little bit since they don’t want to see him harmed before he can steal for them.

It is a bit of a slow moving plot – there’s a lot of journeying and not a whole lot of action until the second half of the book, but I enjoyed the writing and the characterization. But the ending is what really made this a great book. The plot seems simple, but it’s the first of 5 books, so you know this book has to be setting up the rest of the story, and it is, but Turner puts in a great twist at the end to really give this book a meaningful start to the story.

It reminded me a little of Howl’s Moving Castle, one of my favourite middle grade books, in that a lot of seemingly random, unimportant stuff happens and it’s not until the end that you realize that all those incidents and conversations actually do mean something and that this book was actually a lot more complex and clever than you realized. You have a great epiphany at the end and everything comes together so well that you can’t help but be impressed with the structure and writing!

So definitely a great start to a new series, I’m just lamenting that I can’t jump right into the next book!

March Reading Challenge

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I have to admit, I’m pretty pleased with myself and how my January and February challenges have gone. If I hadn’t challenged myself to read them, I don’t think I would have got to any of the books on my February challenge, and they were all really good, so I’m glad I finally set aside time for them.

It can be kind of hard to pick them up sometimes. I like being able to just pick up and read whatever I’m feeling in the mood for, which can be a challenge when I’ve already set myself 3 books for that month, plus my monthly book club read. But it has been paying off, so I’m going to try and stick to it for now.

I’ve got a huge list of challenge ideas, so every month I’m torn about which one to pick, but I’ve been wanting to just do a generic Fantasy challenge, so I decided to go very broad on my March picks. I’ve got a huge pile of fantasy novels at home, so it’ll be nice to set aside some time for them. So my March Challenge is:

Read 3 Fantasy Books

Like I said, I’ve got a huge stack, but I do still want to be intentional about which ones I pick, so I’ve settled on 3 that have all gotten great reviews and that I’d like to finally get to. My only concern is that these are first books in multi-book series, so my TBR will only grow and I have a feeling I’ll be trying to fit some sequels in there too. My March picks are:

  1. The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
  2. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
  3. This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab

The Thief is a older fantasy series that was first published in 1996 and had 4 books, but the author just published a 5th book last year, so it seems to have been getting a lot of hype again. To be honest, I don’t actually know what any of these 3 series are about, but they’ve been on my TBR for ages because they’ve all gotten such great reviews. I know The Thief focuses on a thief (duh) who the King has released from prison to try and steal something for him and I believe each of the books in this series are from a different point of view, but are all political fantasy-type novels about a place called Attolia. So I’ll see how accurate my description is and report back!

The second book I want to read is the first in the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin and is called The Fifth Season. Again, all I know about this series is what’s in the goodreads synopsis, but it’s about the world ending and it sounds brutal! I’ve heard so much good stuff about this series and I’m excited to read it because it falls more within the adult fantasy/science fiction genre, whereas most of the fantasy books I read are very much YA fantasy books.

And finally, I’m planning to read This Savage Song, which is the first book in Victoria Schwab’s OTHER series. I read the Darker Shades of Magic trilogy last year and at the time I wasn’t as obsessed with it as everyone else seems to be, but I think I may have just read it at a bad time (mid-summer when I was super busy), because even though I didn’t love it, I can’t stop thinking about it. I keep recommending it to people and I feel like I want to re-read the whole thing. So I’ve decided to try her other series, which is a duology, but has likewise received fantastic reviews. This book has monsters! And embarrassingly that is the extent of what I know, but I promise a full synopsis in my review!

I feel like I should start reading these books right away to leave time to fit in some sequels in between them, but I just received an ARC for the Beartown sequel, Us Against You, which was my absolute favourite read last year, so I definitely have to read that and potentially also re-read Beartown before I can get around to these. So I think this may be a very successful reading month. Winter is almost over in Vancouver and transition seasons tend to be my best reading months because I’ve finished up my winter activities, but the hiking season hasn’t started up yet, so here’s too lots of books!

The Break

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Katherena Vermette
Genres: Fiction
Read: Feb. 2018

I flew through The Break, which was the second book in my February Reading Challenge.

The Break is written by Métis author Katherena Vermette and tells the story of a Métis family and the struggles and challenges they’ve experienced, both together and apart. The novel opens with young mother Stella witnessing a crime on the break of land outside her house. She is paralyzed with fear and calls the police, but both the victim and the perpetrators have disappeared and law enforcement is not convinced of her story.

I don’t want to run the book by getting to into the plot, but it’s told from a lot of different viewpoints. There are 4 living generations in Stella’s family and they all have a voice in this story. As the police investigate the incident and the family is shook by violence, Vermette examines all the relationships and history that exist in this family. There are some narrators outside of the immediate family, such as the young Métis officer who investigates the incident, but this is really a story about family, the bonds that tie us together and the conflict that can threaten to tear us apart.

First off, the writing in The Break is fantastic. As soon as I started reading it I knew I was going to like it because it is just so beautifully written and the characters emotions are so tangibly felt. This was an insightful look inside the lives of a Métis family and it was very obvious the love this family had for one another, even through all the challenges they’ve had to overcome, the mistakes they’ve made, and the violence they’ve witnessed.

The tone of this story is very sad. Vermette made it easy to empathize with her characters and their pain felt very real. The story is heartbreaking and it was upsetting for me how frequently the women either experienced or witnessed sexual and domestic violence. But the women are what made this story so beautiful. It’s a very fractured family unit in that very few of the men in the family have stuck around or remained present in their families lives, but in the absence of reliable men, the women (sisters, cousins, aunts, grandmothers) have constructed their own family unit that is incredibly close.

The synopsis reads like this is a mystery novel, which it is in some ways, but it’s mostly a slow-burn family drama, which is one of my favourite types of stories. So I really liked this one and I am in love with Katherena Vermette’s writing. A fantastic read!

February Reading Challenge

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January’s reading challenge was a roaring success, so I’m excited to set a new challenge for February. I loved all 3 of the books I read in January and hopefully I can replicate it again this month. You can see my January Summary here.

I was really torn between two challenge ideas for February. I have a pile of fantasy novels piling up on my shelf, so I was tempted to read 3 of them for February, but I decided to actually challenge myself and get a little bit more specific with some books I’ll be less likely to read anyways. That said, I may set a genre challenge every third month or so to help work my way through my TBR and try and keep my challenges from being too heavy or onerous.

So without further ado, my reading challenge for February is:

Read 3 books about Canada

It’s pretty embarrassing how few Canadian novels I’ve actually read and with CBC posting the 2018 shortlist for Canada Reads, I was inspired to try and knock back a few of my Canadian authors! My 3 picks for February are:

  1. The Boat People by Sharon Bala
  2. The Break by Katherena Vermette
  3. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston

I’ve been anxiously waiting for CBC to drop the 2018 shortlist for Canada Reads and I decided to pick one of the 5 contenders for my reading challenge. The Boat People is based on the true story of a cargo ship of refugees from Sri Lanka that landed on Canada’s shores in 2010. However, instead of finding sanctuary all 500 of the refugees were thrown into a detention centre. The story is told through several different perspectives of both the refugees and people involved in the case. That’s all I really know about it and I’ve decided to read the book before I do any further research. So I guess I’m not done with immigration stories yet, but I didn’t read any books about refugees last month, so it’ll be interesting to get this perspective.

I’m trying to get a diverse selection of books, so I like that The Boat People is written by a woman of colour and that it features Vancouver a little bit (my current home). However, I literally just looked up the author to learn a little bit more about her and I was actually ecstatic to discover that while she was born in Dubai and grew up in Ontario, she currently calls St. John’s home (my hometown!!).

My second pick, The Break, was recommended to me by a co-worker and then I started seeing it everywhere and have only heard good things about it. It’s about a Métis woman in Manitoba who potentially witnesses a crime on the break outside her house. I don’t know a whole lot about the plot, but the book synopsis informs me that it’s a inter-generational saga that features the narratives of all the people who get tied up in the case. I’ve been loving family dramas lately, so I’m excited to dive into this one. The Break is also written by a woman of Métis decent, so I was inspired to give this in a read in order to support more first nations writers. Side note: The Marrow Thieves has also made the 2018 shortlist and sounds fascinating, so I’m hoping to find time to read this one in the near future as well.

Finally, I wanted to read something about Newfoundland since it is my homeland and I have a deep love for the island, even though I’ve been loving living in Vancouver for the last 4 years. There is a surprisingly amount of literature about Newfoundland, but it was hard to find one that was super appealing. I decided on A Colony of Unrequited Dreams, which is historical fiction about Joey Smallwood, Newfoundland’s first premier when we joined confederation in 1949.

I read Greg Malone’s Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders a few years ago, which is an exposé about how Newfoundland came to join Canada. I found it fascinating and wrote a whole blog post on it here, so I’ve decided to expand my knowledge and give this book a try. I’m a little nervous about it though because my copy is 600 pages of tiny font. Usually book length doesn’t bother me, but I’m worried this one won’t be an easy read, so we’ll see how I do.

Anyways, wish me luck and I’ll check back in in a month!

American Street

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Ibi Zoboi
Genres: Young Adult, Magical Realism
Read: Jan. 2018

Ibi Zoboi! Way to rip my heart out and stomp on it! What even? I was not expecting this.

This was the last book in my January Challenge to read 3 books about immigration. I read Girl in Translation and Pachinko earlier this month and loved both of them. American Street was a whole different kind of story, quite unlike either of the others. It was probably my least favourite of the 3 books, but still really good.

Fabiola Toussaint was born in America, but raised in Haiti because her mother didn’t have citizenship. Her Aunt Jo and her 3 cousins, Chantal, Pri, and Donna all live in Detroit and regularly send money back to Haiti to help out Fabiola and her mother. When Fab is entering her junior year of high school, they send enough money for her and her mother to finally move to America for good. Fab has American citizenship, but her mother has to get all the necessary visas to “visit” America. Unfortunately, when they enter America, Fab’s mother is detained at the border and she is forced to go on to Detroit without her.

Her aunt and cousins live at the corner of American Street and Joy Road. Fab has been desperate to come to America to live in the land of the free, but she doesn’t feel very free with her mother detained in an immigration prison in New Jersey and navigating her cousins’ world is scary and overwhelming. Her cousins are notorious at school and a little rough around the edges. Fabiola is pulled into their world and discovers the dark underside of what it costs to chase after the american dream.

Like I said, this was really different from any of the other immigration books I’ve read this year. I think Zoboi really captures Fab’s Haitian spirit and what it’s like growing up black in Detroit. She intertwines some cultural elements, like Haitian vodou, which is very much a spiritual thing for Fab, but is usually interpreted more like witchcraft in modern society. She weaves in some magical realism which surprised me and first, but I thought really worked with the story.

Voice was key for me in this novel. I’m a privileged white girl who grew up in a predominantly white town, so I definitely can’t relate to Fabiola or her cousins, yet their voices rang so true. I had no trouble believing in Zoboi’s characters. Fab’s uneasiness when she first arrives at her aunt’s house; Chantal’s desire to chase education but her reluctance to leave her family; Donna’s inability to say ‘enough is enough’; and Pri’s fierce and protective love for her sisters. My only complaint would be that Zoboi didn’t actually go deep enough into each of these characters. She formulated some really excellent characters, I just wanted more of them.

I really wasn’t anticipating where the plot of this story went. I thought it was mostly going to be about Fab trying to re-unite with her mom. While this was definitely an underlying conflict throughout the entire novel, Zoboi tackled a lot of other issues in this story. Although I would have liked to have heard her mother’s story as well and learn about what it’s actually like to be detained. I never really knew where the story was going and felt quite out of my depth with some of the content, much as I imagine Fabiola must have felt arriving in Detroit and trying to fit in with girls attacking each other over boyfriends and drugs passing hands on the sly. But Zoboi was quite unflinching in her delivery. I really did not see the end coming in this book and parts of it and brutal.

So like I said, probably my least favourite of the 3 books that I read, but actually very complimentary because this offered a totally different perspective than the other two. The characters in Girl in Translation and Pachinko are very meek and I loved Fabiola’s strength in this novel. She makes some pretty big mistakes, but she’s not afraid to chase after what she wants and she is very brave and courageous. Her culture shock was quite different and I liked getting another perspective. She could have let herself be pushed around, but she wouldn’t stand for it and decided to make her own place. Family is a central theme to this novel and I enjoyed the messiness that was the Francois sisters and Fabiola’s relationships with them.

Way to go Zoboi, this is a great debut novel!