Recent Updates and Currently Reading | February 12

Is anyone watching The Last of Us? I just need to know others are going through the same thing right now.

Posted Last Week

 Debut Books I Loved - A list of some of my favorite debut books.

Review | Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky ⭐⭐⭐★★ - I'm not sold on my rating here. It might be higher, but you can read my review for my thoughts!

Finished Reading

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire ⭐⭐⭐★★ - This was a reread, and it's still forgettable.

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky ⭐⭐⭐★★ - See my review above! I enjoyed this - maybe more than the 3 stars would lead you to believe.

Currently Reading

The Helm of Midnight by Marina Lostetter - I'm loving this so far! It's a horror with a magic system - I'm a happy reader!

The Scrivener’s Bones by Brandon Sanderson - These Evil Librarian books are meta and a lot of fun.

Added to the TBR

The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz - I mentioned this recently on my list of most anticipated debut novels. I'm looking forward to reading it.

The Helm of Midnight and The Cage of Dark Hours by Marina Lostetter - Thank you so much to the publisher for offering me these review copies. Horror in a fantasy world? Serial killers and magic systems? PERFECT.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez, Megan McDowell (Translator) - This is my most anticipated book of the year. We are starting up a buddy read on the Horror Spotlight discord if you want to join in. This is an epic, sweeping horror, and I couldn't be more excited for it.

Currently Watching

We watched Strange World last weekend and enjoyed it.

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This post is being shared as part of The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz, Book Date’s It's Monday! What Are You Reading? and Caffeinated Book Reviewer's The Sunday Post.

Review | Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Source: personal purchase. This is a review of my reading experience.

Shards of Earth is the first book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Architecture series.

The Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of Children of Time brings us an extraordinary space opera about humanity on the brink of extinction, and how one man's discovery will save or destroy us all.

The war is over. Its heroes forgotten. Until one chance discovery . . .

Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade him in the war. And one of humanity's heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers.

After earth was destroyed, mankind created a fighting elite to save their species, enhanced humans such as Idris. In the silence of space they could communicate, mind-to-mind, with the enemy. Then their alien aggressors, the Architects, simply disappeared—and Idris and his kind became obsolete.

Now, fifty years later, Idris and his crew have discovered something strange abandoned in space. It's clearly the work of the Architects—but are they returning? And if so, why? Hunted by gangsters, cults and governments, Idris and his crew race across the galaxy hunting for answers. For they now possess something of incalculable value, that many would kill to obtain.

Do you ever like a book and have nothing to say about it? My book club read Shards of Earth as our February book selection. We had book club today, and no one really had anything to say. The few of us that showed up and read it liked it (which was a little surprising to be honest), but we struggled to find things to talk about.

I annotate when I'm reading and I had a lot of tabs in this book, but I think pretty much every one of them dealt with unspace and the Architects. For me, unspace and the Architects were everything in this book. I feel like either my mind kind of glossed over everything else or it was just too much for me to grasp right now (highly possible). There were a lot of characters and politics and places.

So - I enjoyed parts of this book very much, but it's also not a favorite of mine outside of the fact that this book gave me the wonderful creeps and it's not even a horror book. I'm starting to realize how many frightening things are in scifi books. I need to start reading more each year than I normally do.

Having read Children of Time, I really thought Shards of Earth would stand on its own outside of the series its in, but that was not the case. The way it ended made it feel like this book was really just the beginning. At 500+ pages, that's a chunky beginning. But I'll be reading more! I need to know more about the Architects and what is going to happen.

I recommend Shards of Earth but not as a first Tchaikovsky book. Read some of his other stuff first so you will trust him enough to read through this one.

3/5 stars
⭐⭐⭐★★

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Debut Books I Loved

I didn't look ahead at the Top Ten Tuesday topics before making my "freebie" post last week. I posted my Most Anticipated Debut Novels of 2023 without realizing that was this week's topic! This week I've decided to keep with the debut topic and share some of the debut books I have loved over the years. Let me know if you've read any of them!

Little Darlings by Melanie Golding

Theme Music by T. Marie Vandelly

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen

The Return by Rachel Harrison

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Root Magic by Eden Royce

Dreams and Shadows by C. Robert Cargill

The Between by Tananarive Due

Recent Updates and Currently Reading | February 5

Happy weekend! Can I just say how much I appreciate each of you? Thank you for everything.

I have recently discovered Land O' Lakes Cinnamon Cocoa, and I think you need it in your life, too.

Do you have a favorite go to cocoa? Marshmallows or no?

Posted Last Week

Book Review | Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire ⭐⭐⭐⭐★

Most Anticipated Debut Novels of 2023 - I was dumb and didn't look ahead at the Top Ten Tuesday topics. The topic this Tuesday is 2023 debuts so now I'm going to have to get creative. Again! If you need any debuts for your list, be sure to check out my post! I'm excited for all of these.

Finished Reading

Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson ⭐⭐⭐⭐★

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

These were both rereads but I'll probably still post some thoughts soon!

Currently Reading

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky - I'm still enjoying this. I don't think this will appeal to everyone who loved Children of Time, but there's some occasional creepy space deprivation that has me glued for more.

The Unknown by Algernon Blackwood - I've only read the introduction by Henry Bartholomew so far, but I loved it. I'm excited to read these fiction and non-fiction pieces from Algernon Blackwood.

Added to the TBR

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey - I can't wait to make time for this one! After loving Just Like Home, I need to read more Gailey.

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky - My preorder arrived! I still need to read Children of Ruin, but I do believe this is going to be the year of Tchaikovsky for me.

Currently Watching

Are you watching The Last of Us? Please tell me your watching. It's incredible. There are so many of my favorite tropes here, and my emotions you guys... I think I've died a couple of times already watching this show.

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This post is being shared as part of The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz, Book Date’s It's Monday! What Are You Reading? and Caffeinated Book Reviewer's The Sunday Post.

Review | Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Beneath the Sugar Sky is the third book in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series.

Beneath the Sugar Sky, the third book in McGuire's Wayward Children series, returns to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in a standalone contemporary fantasy for fans of all ages. At this magical boarding school, children who have experienced fantasy adventures are reintroduced to the "real" world.

When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest – not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can't find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests...

A tale of friendship, baking, and derring-do. Warning: May contain nuts.

"There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door."

I enjoyed Beneath the Sugar Sky much more on my second read. Beneath the Sugar Sky is set in a nonsense world, and I think I struggled a bit the first time to really connect to the characters and the plot in a world filled with sugar and nonsense.. This time around, however, I was really invested in the characters and their mission to save Sumi.

Going back and rereading this series from the beginning, I'm struck by how connected the first three installments of the Wayward Children series is. I'm so glad to be making my way through these books again.

Beneath the Sugar Sky is the first sequel installment where we meet a brand-new character and head into a brand-new world, but we start our adventure at the school for Wayward Children with characters we already know and a problem we are sort of already familiar with. This is such a brilliant springboard for the rest of the series since the next few books throw us into new worlds with new characters and it will feel so familiar.

While there is still darkness in this volume, Beneath the Sugar Sky shows us how different these worlds can be. There are candy corn fields and grounds of graham crackers and oceans of soda, but the world is still dangerous and the stakes are still high. This story is about Rini who is in danger of disappearing and ceasing to exist, but I'm struck most by the story of Cora who used to be a mermaid in a world of reason. I feel like most readers can relate and see themselves in the characters of the Wayward Children books, and for me, I feel like I would belong to a world of reason and I would absolutely be at home as a mermaid. I just love Cora and I love the ending to Beneath the Sugar Sky.  

4/5 stars
⭐⭐⭐⭐★

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