June Wrap Up

Hello and welcome to another month! This wrap up is brought to you by the five-hour train ride and after a wonderful weekend with my friends I feel relaxed, motivated, and inspired enough to write a lot. I really missed that feeling, to be honest. So much happened in June: Germany legalized gay marriage just last Friday and I’m really happy that we finally reached that step. Some of you might have gotten that from my twitter. Oh, and both Leigh Bardugo and Victoria Schwab liked a tweet of mine recently and well, I think I died? Okay, back to the books. Sadly, the last two books I’ve read where quite disappointing. I had high hopes and they were not even reached half-way.

#1 The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco
Goodreads; Review will be up soon
My rating: ★★★★★

As soon as I saw the cover back in 2016, I knew I had to have it. I’m always a sucker for witches and this had a really nice twist to it which reminded me of Memoirs of a Geisha with magic. The plot, the characters, the setting, it was amazing. It surely raised the bar for all witching books to come.  I wholeheartedly recommend you read this.

#2 Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare
Goodreads
My rating: ★★★★

I wasn’t exactly convinced plot-wise. I think it’s good that Clare is writing about racism and bigotry and how to deal with, but especially since we’ve gone through nearly exactly the same plot in TMI, I’m getting fed up with it since, as in real life, people don’t always seem to learn from the past.
Why I still gave it four stars you ask? Well, what can I say, it’s your classic Shadowhunters book. The Mortal Instruments have been such a big part of my teenage years (Wow, I feel old only writing this) and I can’t seem to let go of these characters. Anyways, I love the Blackthorns and I really want to use a #deservedbetter hashtag, but I’m not going to spoil any of you guys.

#3 Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman
Goodreads
My rating: ★★

The first of this month’s more disappointing reads. I’m not a really a fan of Western’s. A friend of mine bought it because the cover was so pretty and she liked it enough to recommend it to me. I really tried getting into it, but I couldn’t get used to the “Cowboy” dialect at all. Fun fact: no one ever said “howdy”. I liked the plot fine. But then, sadly, Bowman had to add an unnecessary romantic subplot at the end that just didn’t make any sense at all, since Kate had other things on her mind and repeatedly mentioned that she didn’t want to date anyone. Oh well. Don’t get me started on the portrayal of the Apache girl. They didn’t try to learn to pronounce her name and instead just gave her a nickname without her being anywhere near okay with it. Later on when the main character does call her by her name, it is used as a plot device and just felt like such an ignorant thing to do.

#4 A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Goodreads; Review to come
My rating: ★

I rarely give one star ratings. There’s always something that I liked in a book, even if it’s just the first few chapters. But in the end, I couldn’t even finish it without skipping through. A Discovery of Witches was a book I looked forward to reading for months. And then the dynamic began to feel a lot like Twilight. You had your patronizing, overprotective vampires, and a main character that while standing up for herself and having a lot of self-respect was so thirsty for the vampire that she forgot all about that. I have at least two handwritten pages of rant about the many things that I felt were wrong. I’m not going to share them here, but instead you can look forward to a mini review (i.e. rant) soon.

Wow, those last two turned into quite the rant. Do you guys have any books you really loved or hated this month?