Bookish Thoughts

The danger of falling in love with a new genre is that it adds so many books to your TBR list. It's easy to do a bit of research and zero in on the authors that seem up your alley. And then suddenly you have to read everything that author has ever written. Romance is particularly dangerous in that most authors are pretty prolific. Which is a long way of saying that I loved my first Tessa Dare book. And now there's another 10+ books I need to read. It also makes me that much more eager to try the other authors I've seen talked about in the same articles: Julia Quinn, Courtney Milan, Lisa Kleypas. At least I'm already most of the way through Sarah MacLean's work. The Duchess Deal  is about an arranged marriage, sort of. The Duke of Ashbury was severely injured in the war (what war? It doesn't really matter). His fiance was horrified by his scars and refused to marry him. But the Duke needs an heir, so he proposes marriage to the first halfway respectable woman...

Carry On  is a loving spoof of Harry Potter. It's not quite the fanfic that Cath was writing in Fangirl , but it's not not that either. It positions itself as the eighth and final book in a series, though it relies on tropes just heavily enough for you to easily fill in the blanks of the previous seven books. The action centers around Simon Snow, the chosen one who's supposed to save the magical world from the Insidious Humdrum. The only problem is that he's absolutely terrible at magic: tons of power, no control. With him are best friend Penelope (who is never quite called the brightest witch of her age), roommate Baz (a vampire who is supposed to kill Simon because of family obligations but has fallen in love with him instead), and his mentor, The Magician (who is better than Dumbledore in some ways and worse in others). There are ghosts and secrets and magic and a whole lot of teenage angst. It's a ton of fun. Rainbow performs an excellent balancing act, high...

In the final installment of the Binti  trilogy, Binti goes through some serious growing pains. The previous books had her discovering new aspects of herself. Everything she learned seemed to take her further from her family of origin, even the things she learned about the history of that family. And so here she must learn how to balance all this growth with staying true to herself and her values. This book, and the whole trilogy really, explore how far you can stray from your roots while remaining rooted. How much can you change and still be recognizable as the same person? What's that essential bit of you-ness that remains immutable? By the end, Binti is both unrecognizable, having been modified with alien DNA, microbes, and technology, and essentially the same person, a math whiz who values knowledge and harmony. She's still in the process of accepting all the change she's gone through. But the ending is optimistic that she'll fully integrate her new experiences w...

I thought this was one of Moriarty's better books. Not quite at the level of Big Little Lies  or What Alice Forgot , but miles ahead of The Husband's Secret . At this point, she's pretty much cemented herself as one of my go-to authors. When I'm in the mood for a page-turner with complicated characters and a bit of a mystery, she's a fairly consistent choice. This book follows Ellen, a hypnotherapist who has just started dating someone new. When he tells her that his ex-girlfriend is stalking him, she finds herself more intrigued than off-put. She's fascinated by what would lead someone to that sort of behavior. Little does she know that the stalker is masquerading as one of her patients. This book definitely kept me interested. From the outset it was a little obvious how it would all turn out - Moriarty is a fan of the happy ending - but it was still a fun journey to go on. The ending was perhaps a bit too perfect. Every single detail worked out for the bes...

The fifth installment in the Sandman series is all about identity. The way we perceive ourselves. The way other people perceive us. The things we hold back and the reasons we choose to do that. The ways we declare ourselves to the world or hide ourselves from it. The things we have control over and the things we don't and how those interact to create a picture we call "me". The story focuses on Barbie, who is trying to redefine herself in the aftermath of The Doll's House . After Dream destroyed the vortex that was Rose Walker, Barbie's life more or less fell apart. The two biggest indicators of this are that she stopped dreaming (and lost a big part of her internal world) and she divorced her husband (and stopped being seen as one half of the perfect couple). She's living in a crappy apartment in NYC, trying to figure out who she wants to be. And that's when her dreams come back to find her. Barbie's dreamworld, populated by her childhood toys and...