Review: THE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE by Charlie Mackesy

Rating: 4.5/5 stars 

This is a lovely little story about friendship and self-worth.

“Don’t measure how valuable you are by the way you are treated,” said the horse. “Always remember you matter, you’re important and you are loved, and you bring to this world things no one else can.”

At first when I saw this book at the bookstore, I judged it harshly because the entire thing was handwritten in messy half-cursive that’s hard to read sometimes, and I couldn’t believe the publishers let the book be published like that.

Then this book won the 2019 “Book of the Year” award at Barnes and Noble. Being a bookseller there, I walked by the display every day and saw the book fly off the shelves and sell out across the country. And I couldn’t believe it! This little mess of a story beat out all the other books for “book of the year”?

Then I finally started hearing what people had to say about it: it’s beautiful, timeless, and breathtaking. People wish they had grown up reading it as a child. People were gifting it to everyone they knew. And it was then that I realized I needed to read it for myself to understand all the hype. It’s not too long; it won’t take that much time.

Well I just read this story, at 11:30 at night while waiting for my Fitbit to charge enough so that I can put it back on before I fall asleep. I finally read this book that I’ve heard nothing but praise about for months.

I shouldn’t have judged it so harshly before I read it.

This story really is lovely. It’s less of a story and more of a collection of quotations and maxims about life accompanied by simple watercolor drawings of a boy, a mole, a fox, and a horse, who all become friends. You could open up to any page in this book for a short positive pick-me-up because almost each page is a self-contained quotation within the overall story.

It starts with a boy who befriends a mole. They talk about life and cake. Then a fox comes along and then a horse comes along and gives them advice. They talk about friendship and happiness. It’s short and sweet while still being honest and powerful.

There are lots of great concepts in this book to teach to children (or to adults, because we all forget the simple truths): be grateful for the little things, remember you are valuable and loved, no one’s life is perfect, you will be okay in difficult situations, there is so much beauty in the world to notice, believe in your dreams instead of your fears, etc.

Honestly every page could inspire a whole conversation. It’s a very inspiring and powerful book that’s full of positivity and definitely worth a read. Don’t judge it before you read it like I did because you’re missing out.

“What’s your best discovery?” asked the mole.
“That I’m enough as I am,” said the boy.”

Review: UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED by Sarah Gailey

Rating: 1/5 stars

I quite enjoyed Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars that I read earlier this year, so I thought their novella about feminist gunslinger librarian spies sounded pretty cool, but ultimately this was rather lackluster and forgettable for me.

This novella tried too hard to be gay and feminist in my opinion. Like those themes overshadowed the entire plot and all the characters became caricatures of those concepts. Esther was so naive about everything that it felt like on every page the other librarians had to teach her how to be a feminist and that girls can like girls and that non-binary people exist, and it all came off as really preachy to me, unfortunately.

I’ve also realized that I do not like the Old West setting, even though this story is set in an alternative near-future where the world has regressed back to an Old West style. I don’t know what it is but the “cowboys and guns” desert setting just doesn’t appeal to me at all. And I also am not fond of reading about time periods when it was risqué for women to wear pants.

So while Upright Women Wanted has a cool premise and covers some important social issues, I felt like it tried too hard and it ultimately just wasn’t for me. If this wasn’t so short, I would have marked it as DNF less than two hours into the audiobook because I knew early on I wasn’t going to like it. But I gave it a chance and finished it and my feelings didn’t change. I didn’t like this story but if you think it sounds interesting then I encourage you to give it a go because this was a case of my personal preferences not matching the style of the book.

Review: THE TOLL by Neal Shusterman

Rating: 5/5 stars

Wow, what a RIDE! This has quickly become one of my favorite series. I’m honestly surprised at the quality of the final two books because while Scythe was good, it wasn’t stellar. But Thunderhead and The Toll were outstanding! The twists and reveals and the direction the plot went! I thought I could see the destination but the train was derailed so many times that I completely lost track of where we were going until we got there.

Okay, enough with the metaphors.

The Toll is the concluding novel in the Arc of a Scythe series. After reading Thunderhead a few months ago and it becoming one of the best books of the year, I was worried that The Toll couldn’t live up to the hype. I mean, come on, the ending of Thunderhead was absolutely bonkers! But The Toll delivered. At least I thought it did; I know lots of people are unsatisfied with the ending, but I appreciate where the story ended. 

We follow a lot of characters in this installment, and it can get tricky to keep them all straight, but I did enjoy each person’s POV. There are so many people doing so many things at different points in time that I absolutely see why we needed so many new perspectives in this book, and I loved all of them. (Though, of course, Citra has been my favorite since the beginning of book one.) 

One thing I really wanted to learn about—and I so hope we get a prequel novella about it—is the origin of the Thunderhead. Clearly, the Thunderhead was developed by humans, and we discover throughout the books that it had to learn and grow as an entity and didn’t just start out knowing everything, so I think it would be super interesting to have a story that begins when the Thunderhead first gains consciousness and is about it figuring out the world and helping to shape it into the world we see in this series two hundred years after its origin. Any POV chapters from the Thunderhead had me absolutely enraptured because I think the idea of the world essentially being run by an AI who can think and feel for itself is so fascinating. AIs are the best characters. So I’d really love to learn more about that. 

There’s not much I can say without spoilers as this is the grand finale, but I will highly recommend this series. It’s unlike any utopian/dystopian I’ve read before, and it has so much commentary about the value of life and the human condition—it’s very philosophical for a young adult series, and I loved that! If you, like me, read the first book and were like, “It’s decent but I’m not sold yet,” then I encourage you to give book two a shot because the stakes are raised, the characters are fleshed out and developed so much more, and the plot goes in directions you’d never expect.

This is definitely a series I’ll be coming back to in the future; I loved it so much. I’m very keen on picking up Neal Shusterman’s other works now as I know he has a lot of books out and this series is the only thing I’ve read by him. He’s a very talented author and I can’t wait to see what he comes out with next, because if Arc of a Scythe was any indication, Shusterman is a mastermind at work. 

Review: AFTER I DO by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Rating: 4/5 stars

Ryan and Lauren have been together for eleven years, and their relationship isn’t how it used to be. They barely talk anymore and frankly, they don’t like each other anymore either. So they decide to separate for one year to sort things out; the only rule: no contacting each other for that whole year.

This book was wonderful. Not my favorite book from Taylor Jenkins Reid but still a solid one that I really enjoyed. She does such a good job at crafting realistic and emotionally deep characters who you can’t help but care about after only a few pages with them.

This book starts out in the present day when Ryan and Lauren can’t stand each other but then jumps back to the day they met and then shows us significant moments in their relationship across those eleven years leading up to the present day. I love how we got to see a backstory for them so we were able to fully connect with them and see how they got to where they are and understand their situation more fully. 

One thing that I absolutely loved about this book and about all of TJR’s books is that the story was so relatable. I don’t know if Reid writes from experience or is just an excellent writer from the imagination, but her stories always resonate so much with me, even if I’m not experiencing what the characters are. Everything that happens feels real and not just crafted for the drama, but it’s still so interesting.

After I Do is a story about finding yourself and learning to live for yourself first. It’s about love and romance and how those aren’t always the same thing. It’s a story about family and what it actually means to be part of a family. It’s about relationships and friendships and finding happiness even when it doesn’t seem possible. I really enjoyed this book and do recommend it, though there are other books by Taylor Jenkins Reid that I would recommend first. 

Review: WOUNDED MAGIC by Megan Crewe

Rating: 4.75/5 stars

I first read Ruthless Magic two years ago so I worried that I would have trouble remembering the details of this world, but I was able to fall right back in the story with no problem. What a relief!

Wounded Magic picks up in the same scene where Ruthless Magic left off. Rocio just became a Champion at the Mages’ Exam and she gets to start her new life as a black ops soldier, running secret missions for the Confederation. Finn didn’t make Champion and thus has to be Burned Out, where his ability to work with magic is removed, and get used to his new life as a Dull. 

I like Rocio’s connection to the magic in this series, that she can sense it’s somehow alive and wants to be used for good, and using it to harm someone also causes harm to the magic. That’s a really cool concept I’ve never seen done before.

This installment deals a lot with the injustices in the world between Mages and those who are Burned Out or Dull. It is clear that the government is hiding information from the masses about the Mage society and about the Exam and its real purpose. Finn and Rocio both try to tackle this issue from different angles, working together but in separate groups, to help the world realize the unfairness between the Mages and non-Mages and to help create equality in the society. I definitely see similarities in this book to the real-world issues happening around us. 

This series takes a spin on the “taking down the government” trope because Finn is of an old-magic bloodline and knows that the privilege he has because of that isn’t right, so he goes against the system from the inside. I loved reading about Finn and all his efforts to make a change to the prejudices in the mage society. He is level-headed when he speaks and doesn’t make rash decisions, and that’s so refreshing to read about. I found myself much more interested in his storyline than Rocio’s in this book because of some of the activities that he gets involved in—I was very eager to see them play out.

I absolutely loved this installment. The epic final scenes led up to a heart-stopping cliffhanger that has me dying to read the conclusion in Fearless Magic.

This is absolutely an underrated series and one that I truly believe is more well-written and well-crafted than most of the popular YA series I’ve read. It plays to all the tropes that people love to read about but takes a fresh twist on them and gives us an unpredictable and entertaining plot with unforgettable characters and flawless execution. Megan Crewe knows how to write and give the people what they want without pulling any punches. This book has solidified for me that I need to read everything she’s written because I love the way she crafts her stories, plots, characters—everything. You absolutely should pick up this series.

I received this ebook from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Review: DRAGONFLIGHT by Anne McCaffrey

Rating: 2.75/5 stars

I didn’t grow up with this series like a lot of people did. I read Dragonflight for the first time at 24-years-old from the recommendation of my brother-in-law who loved it as a child and thought I would like it because I like dragons.

I love the idea behind this book: it’s a huge expansive science fiction world—this book is set on the planet Pern in a different solar system than our own—but there are dragons in it! This might be one of the first books to cross science fiction and fantasy, and I think that’s super cool!

Every two hundred years, Pern passes by the Red Star planet, which has poisonous spores, called Threads, that fall to Pern and are fatal to all living organisms. So the people on Pern use the dragons to fly up and burn the Threads out of the sky before they reach the ground. But it has been about four hundred years since Threads have fallen and many people believe that they won’t come back. The story starts out following F’lar, who believes that the return of the Threads is imminent, as he searches for a girl to bond with the queen dragon. He finds Lessa, a girl of noble blood who is hiding in a Hold under a tyrant ruler, and the story of Dragonflight is ultimately about how F’lar and Lessa team up to save Pern from the Threads.

It took me a while to get into this book; I was well over halfway before I started to really understand what was going on. Because this book was written over fifty years ago, the diction and grammar are much different from how people write nowadays, and it took a lot of getting used to for me. The books I read are almost exclusively modern stories published within the last twenty-five years, so the writing in Dragonflight really threw me off. But once I did get used to the flow of it, I started really enjoying the story.

There is definitely some questionable content in this book, like the relationship between F’lar and Lessa, but when you consider how society was when it was published and that this book was at the forefront of its genre at that time, I think it’s forgivable; the world was obviously a lot different back then and that’s not this book’s fault.

I will also say that I did feel pretty distanced from all the characters, like they just felt hard to connect with, and I’m pretty sure that’s an effect of the writing style, unfortunately. 

Overall, though, I am glad I read this book and stuck with it until the end, and I do want to continue on with this series. I don’t know how much of the series I will read since there are like thirty books or something (it’s unclear to me how many books there actually are in the series), but I at least want to finish the Dragonriders of Pern trilogy and the Harper Hall trilogy. I’ve heard that McCaffrey’s writing and the story issues get better with each book, and I also think that the more I read in this world, the more I will understand its unique terminology and enjoy its journey.