Rest of the year reads

November and December were pretty decent reading months. I don't feel like writing proper reviews so here we are.

November 

3 Agatha Christie books, all excellent mysteries that kept me guessing per usual:

• The Mystery of the Blue Train (Hercule Poirot) - classic murder on a train, locked room mystery. Murderer/s ended up being something out of left field that I feel was not set up well enough for the readers to have guessed it; it felt like cheating a bit. ★★★½

• The Seven Dials Mystery (Superintendent Battle, a new guy to me. He's a police super and looks big and wooden and dumb but is actually very smart.) Young people keep getting murdered, and a secret society called the Seven Dials might be behind it... The biggest twist ending of all of them! Some Jeeves books vibes with the Bright Young Things friend group. Very exciting. ★★★★

• Cards on the Table (both Hercule Poirot AND Superintendent Battle! glad I read T7DM first) A dinner party that is half murderers, half detectives/police results in a murder, naturally. Still is very twisty. Got wlw vibes from the two roommate bestie girls, but sadly no (not that I actually thought AC would go there). ★★★★

These were all ebooks. I usually try to stick to reading AC books in physical form since that fits the books' vibes better, but B&N did this weird thing where they had a ton of excellent legit ebooks (rather than the usual self-published stuff) for free, so I downloaded a bunch (including the above 3) before they changed their minds. 

I also read an excellent and relevant nonfiction book suggested by my therapist, but I overshare enough on this blog as it is, so I'm not telling you what it is. :P

December

I usually go ham on SimonTeen's 25 free reads of December, but this year I was very busy in December and/or wasn't feeling most of the books. There were some great ones I definitely was interested in and would have read under different circumstances, but alas. The only one I managed to read was Love at Second Sight by F.T. Lukens, whose book Otherwordly I read last year as it was part of SimonTeen's offerings for the 2024 25 free reads of December. This one is also a gay YA fantasy book, but this one is set in a world where witches and vampires and werewolves, etc. exist and live alongside humans. 15-year-old human Cam's plans for a normal sophomore year with his nonbinary witch bestie Al are derailed when he has a very scary premonition about the violent death of a young woman, and it turns out he's a clairvoyant with rare abilities whose alliance is desired by every supernatural group in town. Cam has to deal with the sudden popularity, the supernatural society politics he hasn't grown up with, his parents' anti-supernatural bigotry, and his popular werewolf crush noticing him. Oh, and he has to figure out how to stop the murder from happening.  I liked this book and found the mystery most compelling; the romance was cute but felt a bit underdeveloped. There was a lot going on in this book, though. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes this sort of thing (urban fantasy, I guess?). ★★★★

I had plans to finally read some of my Christmas romance ebooks I've downloaded over the years during this holiday season, but for some reason instead I reread The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis because I found the copy I had left at my parents' house (I have one at mine, obvs). It's basically CSL doing a take on The Pilgrim's Progress (a heavily Christian allegory about conversion and the Christian walk, etc.) but with his own spiritual life and conversion. This was not particularly easy to read, despite the chapters being fairly short; it's very philosophical and uses lots of academic language and quotes in Greek, Latin, and French that are not translated. I can kind of suss out the latter two depending on how similar the words are to Spanish, but this is not ideal. It's one of CSL's weirdest and weakest, I feel. Also it's racist and sexist ("brown girls" are a metaphor for lust 🤮). Not recommended unless you're studying him and his works academically or something. ★★★

I reread Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories by L.M. Montgomery, as I do every holiday season. The Christmas stories are much better and generally happier than the New Year's stories.  

 

I decided to read a couple of children's books I had bought and hadn't read yet. It's my reading log and I'll count picture books if I want to :P 

Frida Kahlo y Sus Animalitos by Monica Brown, translated into Spanish by F. Isabel Campoy, and illustrated by John Parra, is a biographical nonfiction picture book about Frida and her pets. I didn't add it to my LibraryThing and there's no record of it in my order emails, so I must have bought it in person at a local indie bookstore, probably Cellar Door Books. The art style is very colorful, bold, and naive, which suits the subject matter. The book makes it sound like Frida had a lot of these pets as a child, when she actually had them as an adult (I'm pretty sure; I'm also sure she did have pets as a kid but don't remember having read about them). It's a cute book that's worth buying if you're a big a fan of Frida Kahlo as I am. ★★★★ 

 

Go Forth and Tell: The Life of Augusta Baker, Librarian and Master Storyteller by Breanna J. McDaniel, illustrated by April Harrison, is a picture book biography of a very important Black librarian who knew the power of stories to let people know what is possible and how to rise up. Ms. Baker curated book lists of books with good African American representation (as well as writing her own) and went on to be the coordinator of children's services for the entire New York Public Library system (the first Black person to do so) and was hugely influential. This was an excellent book with bright, vivid, interesting mixed-media art, and I highly recommend it. I also enjoyed the author's story about the impact of her own childhood librarian. ★★★★½

Book review: The Classic Tales of Beatrix Potter

The March pick for The Enchanted Book Club was the tales of Beatrix Potter. I loved them growing up, as I did all animal books. My sister and I had a mini BP book set in a cardboard drawer that I think my grandma had thrifted; she (my sister) still has the drawer and the remaining books that haven't been lost. I checked out The Classic Tales of  Beatrix Potter: The 23 Original Peter Rabbit Books from my work library since I don't own them (yet). I had read most but not all of them; I don't think I'd read the pigs', hedgehog's, or squirrels' stories. The story I remember best is that of Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-Tail, who fall into Farmer McGregor's hands after eating too much lettuce; that story taught me the word soporific.

I enjoyed the stories very much; the art is beautiful and realistic, with each detail lovingly rendered. The animals really look like their real-life counterparts; Beatrix Potter was a nature illustrator, so this makes sense. The animals are so cute in their little clothes. I had to force myself to slow down and stop reading so fast and look at the pictures. I used to pore over the illustrations as a kid; who knows when that stopped?

I had read an article a while back about how heavily Beatrix Potter had borrowed from the Brer Rabbit stories without crediting them; this kept me from fully enjoying the stories as much as the first time around. So fucked up to steal folklore stories from enslaved people who were literally stolen from their countries and those stories were the only things they had left from their home countries, right?? That really bothers me. She should have been honest about her stories being based on someone else's stories. I was going to bring it up during the bookclub zoom meeting but I chickened out (there wasn't time for everyone to talk anyway). 

Something I'd completely forgotten about was how often the animals are in danger from humans. Of course I'd remembered the danger Farmer McGregor posed to the Peter Rabbit family, but I was kind of surprised by how often the threat of humans turned up with the other animals. It makes sense that the animals would hunt each other and whatnot, as they do in nature/the real world; what weirds me out is that these are sentient, talking animals who often wear clothing and walk on their hind legs, yet the humans in the BP world have zero qualms eating them. If I had talking animals as my neighbors, who could say good morning to me and inquire as to the direction of the market, I would not feel comfortable seeing them as food options, let alone killing and eating them. Why don't the humans consider killing and eating a sentient, talking, clothes-wearing animal to be murder? There's a story where a sailor manipulates a young pig (aka a child) into going on a ship with him, then feeds the pig until he falls asleep, and the ship takes off with the pig trapped on board, all so the sailors will have a pig to fatten and eat on their voyage! That's basically human trafficking, albeit with a pig. No one feels a moral quandary about this? The pig story is BP's fanfiction about how the pig with a ring in its nose got to that island the owl and the pussycat go to in the poem. Funny how she did credit that story. 😒

Anyway, highly recommended. If you want to read this to young children, keep in mind a lot of the animals are often in danger from predator animals and human beings, and a decent percentage of them get animalnapped. That may scare or bother toddlers and small kids; I know my nephews would be like "but why??" 

Score: ★★★★.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: March 17-27
From: borrowed from the library where I work

Genres/classification: children's books, children's literature, children's classics, picture books, picture books anthology, animal books, English literature, low fantasy

Book (and Show) Review: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

Spoilers for the current show All Creatures Great and Small (last couple paragraphs)

As you know, I am an enthusiastic consumer of British period pieces, and when I heard about the new TV series All Creatures Great and Small (ACGAS), I immediately knew I would watch it, as I loved the James Herriot books as a kid. Watching the show made me want to reread the books, so here we are. 

For those of you who don't know about this series, it's the slightly fictionalized memoirs of a veterinarian in Yorkshire, England (I think it's a county? or series of counties idk) in the 1930s. They're very funny and full of amazing, gross animal facts and illnesses and treatments. The title is chosen, for obvious reasons, from a hymn. ACGAS is actually the second line, so the second book in the series has the first line in the hymn, the third book has the third line, and so on. Here's the summary of the first book from Barnes & Noble: 

For over forty years, generations of readers have thrilled to Herriot's marvelous tales, deep love of life, and extraordinary storytelling abilities. For decades, Herriot roamed the remote, beautiful Yorkshire Dales, treating every patient that came his way from smallest to largest, and observing animals and humans alike with his keen, loving eye.

In All Creatures Great and Small, we meet the young Herriot as he takes up his calling and discovers that the realities of veterinary practice in rural Yorkshire are very different from the sterile setting of veterinary school. Some visits are heart-wrenchingly difficult, such as one to an old man in the village whose very ill dog is his only friend and companion, some are lighthearted and fun, such as Herriot's periodic visits to the overfed and pampered Pekinese Tricki Woo who throws parties and has his own stationery, and yet others are inspirational and enlightening, such as Herriot's recollections of poor farmers who will scrape their meager earnings together to be able to get proper care for their working animals. From seeing to his patients in the depths of winter on the remotest homesteads to dealing with uncooperative owners and critically ill animals, Herriot discovers the wondrous variety and never-ending challenges of veterinary practice as his humor, compassion, and love of the animal world shine forth.

I enjoyed reading this, of course. I think that this first book, ACGAS, is covered by the first two seasons of the current adaptation. They of course fleshed out the characters (Mrs. Hall, the housekeeper, especially) and swapped some things around (in the show, Tristan gets kicked in the leg by a horse, whereas it's James that gets kicked in the leg in the book). They also made the strange choice of making Siegfried, James's boss, a lonely widower in his 40s who is afraid to get back into the dating world. In the book he's in his early thirties and is a total ladies' man. I guess the series thought it'd be better to have Tristan be the ladies' man. He is one in the book, and he's also depicted as being really smart, which doesn't get really depicted much in the show (television deals in absolutes). 

I really like Helen (James's eventual wife)'s character in the show, although of course they made her more spunky. She did wear trousers in the book a lot, and consequently in the show, which I thought was cool. Helen was depicted in the book as being this nice, perfect daughter who didn't talk much but served her dad and doted on him. They made the dad all gruff and kind of scary in the show, while he was all quiet and small in the book. They kept Helen's little sister, expanding her role (great kid actor. She and Helen really look related), but for some reason excised her little brother. They turned a throwaway comment in the book about Helen's dad maybe wanting her to marry his rich friend's son into a whole love triangle, of course, even going so far as to have Helen leave him at the altar. They've also left out the domineering secretary, but maybe they'll add her in season 3. Tricki Woo remains my favorite, although his mom needs her head checked. Anyway, check out the show! It's a sweet, gentle British dramedy (fairly light on the drama).

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: February 12-13
From: gift, I think
Format: hardcover
Status: keeping at my parents' house, where it has been all along

Trigger warnings for this book: animal death; human death mention; animals injured, in pain and suffering; gross medical descriptions such as body fluid mentions, organs, etc.; alcohol and drunkenness (lots of mentions), animal mistreatment out of misguided love, period-typical sexism, poverty, pipe smoking I think

Books roundup: April & May books

April's book (I am not reading much these days) was The Library Card by Jerry Spinelli, which I got from a thrift store since I loved his Maniac Magee. Instead of a novel, it's a series of short stories about children/teens who have their lives changed by a magical library card that seems to follow them around, and by the public library or a bookmobile. Two of the teens (boys) are troubled, while one girl makes an unlikely friend, and another learns that her television addiction is keeping her from living life. The TV story was my least favorite. The adult up-in-arms anxiety about television rotting kids' minds or holding them in thrall is so outdated, even in the mid-nineties when Spinelli wrote this book. TV has been around since the late 1940s, for pete's sake. The internet/world wide web (since it's the nineties) should be the focus of that concern, if you must have one. Books are healthier for children to engage with than television, overall, but I'd rather have kids watching good television shows than reading crap like Twilight. Adults are always scared of the newest media, but the TV isn't even new anymore. It's silly and a waste of time to write stories like this. Your life isn't going to end because you watch a lot of TV. Just make sure your kids aren't watching trash and they'll be fine. 3.5 out of 5 stars, with half a star off because of the sadness and TV-scare nonsense. Giving away.  Trigger warnings for this book: violence, teen character beats up a child and breaks things, a character attempts to hold up a vehicle and threatens to hurt others with a knife, mental illness, character has history of self harm and has visible scars on her arms, anger issues, homelessness, shoplifting, vandalism

May's book was a small illustrated hardcover book called The Wandering Goose: A Modern Fable of How Love Goes by Heather L. Earnardt, with lovely illustrations by Frida Clements. This read, which I purchased at the dollar store, is very short. It's a philosophical kind of fable on love and the loss of love. A bug and a goose fall in love, but the goose has to leave to follow his wanderer's heart. I'm 99% sure that the bug and the goose represent the author and a significant other she had. The illustrations and prose are very lovely, but the ending is very abrupt and unsatisfying; it just ends with the bug's heartbreak. I was literally like, that's it? Usually when a character's heart gets broken, I want to read about them reuniting with their lost love, or finding a new love that is better than the one that broke their heart, or picking up the pieces and learning to become a strong independent bug who don't need no goose, but we don't get any of that. I will be giving this one away. 3.5 out of 5 stars. Trigger warnings for this book: none that I can think of, besides the oddness of a bug and a goose falling in love. Don't geese eat bugs?

Book review: Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper

Spoilers throughout but honestly it's for your own good

First book of the year! I grabbed this one from the dollar store because of its colorful cover. I know it's a record store but it reminds me of a bookstore, especially with the cat there. The cat doesn't hang out in a record store in this story, though.

Amazon summary:

When five-week-old Prudence meets a woman named Sarah in a deserted construction site on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she knows she’s found the human she was meant to adopt. For three years their lives are filled with laughter, tuna, catnaps, music, and the unchanging routines Prudence craves. Then one day Sarah doesn’t come home. From Prudence’s perch on the windowsill she sees Laura, the daughter who hardly ever comes to visit Sarah, arrive with her new husband. They’re carrying boxes. Before they even get to the front door, Prudence realizes that her life has changed forever.

Suddenly Prudence finds herself living in a strange apartment with humans she barely knows. It could take years to train them in the feline courtesies and customs (for example, a cat should always be fed before the humans, and at the same exact time every day) that Sarah understood so well. Prudence clings to the hope that Sarah will come back for her while Laura, a rising young corporate attorney, tries to push away memories of her mother and the tumultuous childhood spent in her mother’s dusty downtown record store. But the secret joys, past hurts, and life-changing moments that make every mother-daughter relationship special will come to the surface. With Prudence’s help Laura will learn that the past, like a mother’s love, never dies.

Poignant, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Love Saves the Day is a story of hope, healing, and how the love of an animal can make all of us better humans. It’s the story of a mother and daughter divided by the turmoil of bohemian New York, and the opinionated, irrepressible feline who will become the bridge between them. It’s a novel for anyone who’s ever lost a loved one, wondered what their cat was really thinking, or fallen asleep with a purring feline nestled in their arms. Prudence, a cat like no other, is sure to steal your heart.

This book was well-written, with the parts narrated by Prudence the cat being the most funny and lighthearted as well as the most infantile and lacking (to be fair, Prudence is only 3). The parts from Laura's and Sarah's points of view are third person omniscient, while Prudence's parts are in first person, which some people might find annoying. 

I found the parts detailing Sarah's and Laura's lives in bohemian 1970s-'80s New York to be very interesting. It is unfathomable to me how two broke teenagers could afford the rent on a loft in Manhattan, even in 1973 or whatever. Their lives sounded very interesting, with Sarah knowing all sorts of fascinating characters and Laura having a rich and well-formed childhood. 

All of this ends when, completely un-hinted-at in the summary, Sarah and Laura are forcefully evicted from their apartment building, and the city bulldozes the building with all of their and the other tenants' belongings inside as they watch. This was a jarring change in tone, even with Sarah's death and Laura's grief and miscarriage being described in the book so thoroughly and sympathetically. The event is absolutely crushing in print, and even more so when you learn, thanks to an author's note in the back of the book, that the event really did happen in 1994 (I think. I'm not looking it up). How could the city of New York do that? Those tenants were human beings! The city should have given the tenants plenty of advance notice so they could pack up their belongings and move. Instead they sent firefighters to lie to all the residents and tell them the building was moments away from collapsing, so that the tenants all ran out with only the clothes on their backs and were forced to stand there in the rain for hours, watching their home (some of them had lived there for decades) being bulldozed with all their possessions and some of their pets still inside, right in front of them. It made me so very angry I was practically vibrating with rage for days. How could they do that? There better be a special place in hell for all those perpetrators, including Bill Diblasio.

Anyway, this is of course traumatic to them both (to make things worse, their beloved elderly neighbor dies of grief) and they spend the rest of their lives together fighting, which caused them to be estranged from each other after Laura left for college. She blamed her mother for choosing her music over her and letting her live in poverty, thinking that they could have avoided the building event if they'd lived in middle class reliability. This is stupid and untrue. They were definitely working class, but Sarah gave up her DJ dreams and made a decent living from her record store, and she was always there with/for Laura. Sarah should have realized her daughter was traumatized by the event and by Sarah screaming at and slapping her after Laura ran back into the building for the neighbor's cat, and talked to her about the event instead of fighting with her. Everything we hear about Sarah's parenting before this is that she is a loving and understanding parent, despite her own selfish and emotionally absent parents (a big reason for why she ran away to New York when she was a teen). I realize Sarah was traumatized by this as well, but she was an adult and should have realized how much worse it was for her daughter, and so many of their relationship problems would have been resolved if they'd just sat down and talked about it. 

Anyway, this book left me angry and depressed, even though Laura is able to mourn her mother the way she needs to, repairs her relationship with her husband, and chooses the kind of life she's going to have for her child, most of it thanks to Prudence. This book was good but I don't really want to think about it ever again. 

trigger warnings for this book: death, grief, emotional abuse mention, one-time slapping and screaming at a teen, drug mentions, teen pregnancy, miscarriage mention, animal death, animal illness, forcibly disenfranchised and made homeless by the city through unscrupulous means

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: mid January
From: dollar store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away 

Book review: The Twistrose Key by Tone Almhjell

I picked up this book from the dollar store, surprisingly enough.* The blurb on the back of The Twistrose Key spoke of everything I like: a Chosen Child uses a mysterious key to slip through a door to another world that is filled with anthropomorphic friendly animals and mythological creatures, and because of a prophecy must go on a quest to perform some important task and save that world. It was inevitable that I would love this book, and I did.

The allusions to other beloved children's fantasy books are plentiful and obvious, but handled so well that they do not detract from the story. Chosen ones and mysterious keys to magical doors that lead to fantasy worlds are so plentiful I don't have to give you any examples. The frozen land of Sylver with its talking animals is obviously Narnia, while the Snow Queen and Puss in Boots make appearances. There are more references, but I won't list them all so you can be surprised when you read it.

There is danger, sorrow, loss, and depth to this book. Lin is devastated to lose her pet vole, Rufus, when she already has to live far away from her extended family and friends in a city and building she does not like. She is overjoyed to be reunited with him in Sylver, but when her task is completed she must return to her world again and leave Rufus behind. There's more sad stuff I won't share because I don't want to spoil the book for you. When I read about Sylver being a sort of heaven for deceased childhood pets, I immediately thought of Sammy, the large gentle boxer we had that I "rode" as a small child, and my tears made it hard to read as I imagined going to Sylver myself and seeing him. If you've ever lost a pet, especially one you had as a child, this is going to hit you right in the feels.

This book was so good! I'm definitely going to get my hands on everything Tone Almhjell writes. English isn't even her first language and she writes so, so well. I think The Twistrose Key is the first in a series, and I am so excited to read the rest!

Cover notes: This is a good cover, and it is my least favorite part of the book, which lets you know how good the book is. Rufus and Lin's proportions are not drawn correctly; Rufus is said to be about five feet tall in Sylver, and Lin is 11 years old, so she should be rather shorter. The artist drew Rufus to be less than three feet high, perhaps thinking of Narnia. I don't think the sled is drawn correctly either. There are four animals drawn at each corner of the cover image: a fox, a wolf, an owl, and a rat. The four animal families in Silver are canines, felines, birds, and rodents, so the artist should have drawn a cat instead of a wolf (a fox shows up in the story but wolves don't). There is another cover for the hardcover version that just has a big Twistrose key on the cover with the same animal corners, and I rather prefer it.

Trigger warnings I'd apply to this book: blood, child endangerment, violence (PG), kidnapping, many parts can scare children

Score: 5 out of 5 stars
Read in: September 11
From: dollar store
Format: paperback 
Status: absolutely keeping

*surprising that this book was so high quality; obviously I buy books from the dollar store all the time

Book review: The Book of Sorrows by Walter Wangerin Jr.

Spoilers throughout

After reading The Book of the Dun Cow, I was elated to find that my library had a copy of the sequel, The Book of Sorrows. That elation didn't last very long, as TBoS lives up to its name. It is very depressing and sad, and there are so many deaths, including that of baby animals. It has the same message of love, forgiveness and sacrifice, although, Tolkien-like, we are kind of shown they don't go very far.

Amazon summary:

Seeking peace and respite after their devastating battle with the Wyrm, Chauntecleer and his wife Pertelote again lead the animals of the Coop. But their quest is interrupted when Wyrm once again insinuates himself into the lives of the animals. To defeat this ancient evil for good, Chauntecleer will have to face Wyrm again, not on the battlefield, but deep within the serpent’s lair, risking his very soul to ensure the safety of the animals under his protection.

Interestingly, Amazon has this book's title as being The Book of the Dun Cow: Lamentations. I had thought the third book's title, which is also The Book of the Dun Cow with a subtitle, made no sense, but with this new title for the second book, it does.

Chanticleer has dreams that lead him to believe that Mundi Canus is still alive with Wyrm "sub terra", and that he can find and kill Wyrm and tell MC how sorry he is for the things he said to him before MC sacrificed himself. We quickly learn that both are dead, and Wyrm, in releasing himself to death, has become part of winter and all that is bad. Chanticleer loses it and plunges into his corpse to find Mundi Canus' body and take it home for a proper burial. He infests himself with little worms, which eventually kill him (a fight with a wolf helps with that too).

The Dun Cow shows up again, and this time other animals can see her, especially if they need her.

Anyway this book was so sad I don't even feel like writing about it anymore. I am going to try to track down the third book so I can see how it ends. Usual beautiful writing throughout.

Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Read in: mid August
From: the library
Format: bound paperback
Status: returned to the library

Book reviews: mostly fantasy

I have so many books, you guys. I'm not keeping any of the books below (except for the ebook obvs).

The Secret of Platform 13, by Eva Ibbotson (late February)
This was a cute fantasy story in the vein of Roald Dahl etc. If you've read other books by her then you'd know what to expect (I don't think I have, but the name is familiar to me). The title doesn't have much to do with the story, but I liked it and the characters. I gave it to my dad to give to our local thrift store, but I'm not sure that he has yet. 4 out of 5 stars

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (March 1. Yes, it took me less than one day to read)
AAAAAAAUUUGHGHHGHGHHHHHHHH
They need to teach this book in schools, alongside Brave New World and 1984. Are they??? Why aren't they??? This is like if the Quiverfull movement took over the US. Everything I'd read about it was like "It's still relevant for our times" but I WASN'T PREPARED FOR HOW RELEVANT IT IS. READ THIS BOOK. ATWOOD IS A GENIUS. 4/5 stars simply because it kind of f*cked me up

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen (March 1) *SOME SPOILERS*
This book is a fairytale retelling (my favorite genre) of Sleeping Beauty obviously, but in the Holocaust. The protagonist realizes that her late beloved grandmother's version of the Sleeping Beauty tale she told her growing up was actually a clue to her mysterious past. Lots of promise since I kind of like mysteries. JY is a giant in the fairytale retelling/fantasy genre so I knew it would be good as well as sad due to the setting, but in the end I didn't really like this. The protagonist is college-aged (19-21, I don't remember) but the way she and the book is written, she feels much younger. And there's a shoehorned romance kind of thing with her boss who is like 35? Nope. Plus, while we established that her grandma was Briar Rose in a concentration camp, we never found out who she really was (amnesia due to the gas from the chambers). 3/5 stars

Warriors #1: Into the Wild by Erin Hunter (first half of March)
This is the first in one of those multibook multiseries for elementary/middle school kids that are basically the only way to write/publish books nowadays. It was a free ebook and I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. It's your basic "everyman kid joins a new clan/army/order/fightclub/whatever and while there's suspicion about this outsider, he's accepted, both grudgingly and not. Then he discovers a political plot or The Truth about what they've been told all their lives or w/e and has to save his new home/people and he's The One" but with cats who live in clans in the forest. The political intrigue was actually pretty great, as was the worldbuilding (I can't believe I'm writing this about a book about wild cats). The made-up vocabulary (these books always have new words and dialects etc.) wasn't that corny at all, from what I remember. I actually want to read the rest of them to find out what happens. They're both familiar and refreshing. Recommended for yo' kids (and you obvs if you roll like me). 4/5 stars

TIFITLWIW: Horses roundup (heh)

I was going through the pictures on my phone and realized a good amount of them involved horses. So I thought I'd put them together in a post.

This is by Carol Cable, from a funny book of her cartoons about academe. I saw this and immediately thought of Tumblr.

I saw this and immediately thought of one of my favorite shows. Parks & Recreation takes place in Pawnee, Indiana. There is a Native American tribe on that show, but they are the Wamapoke (sp?) rather than the Pawnee tribe.

This is a funny little horse doodle I found on the back of a book jacket.

Often hardcover books that come with dust jackets will have a publisher's logo or something indented into the book cover (there's a specific term for this I think, like 'stamped' or something, but I don't know what it is). This one's a horse and the initials of the author, who I think is known for writing books about horses. The book (which I just spent like 15 minutes looking for) is The Man Who Listens to Horses by Monty Roberts. I took a pic of this because my initials are MR as well.