Book 73: The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

The second book in the Queen's Thief series, this one really threw me for a loop! Just. After the shock and disorientation of the unreliable narrator of the first book, the second book really doubled down on that for this one, and I genuinely was not expecting basically any of the twists or turns that got us anywhere. 

After the events of The Thief, Gen is now back with his Queen and in her kingdom, except he's also being sent out on missions constantly. And finally, the Queen of Attolia captures him, after he steals from her one too many times. Rather than executing him, she cuts off his hand, thereby destroying his identity, and things go from there. I am still not entirely sure how we got from that beginning to the ending, but I do know that it worked, which is part of what made it so compelling. I'm currently just getting to the end of the sequel to this book, and it's a trip attempting to put myself back into that mindset again. A great read!

Grade: A

Book 72: Nevertheless She Persisted Anthology

This is an anthology of flashfiction published by Tor that takes its inspiration from Elizabeth Warren and the famous "Nevertheless She Persisted" moment of 2017. Each story jumps off from that phrase and tells a story of resistance, of hope, of despair, of rage. I liked the concept very much, and they were all interesting takes on a project like this, but none of them stuck with me for as long as I would have liked. Worth reading, but I was hoping for a bit more. 

Grade: B

Book 71: Drive by Daniel H. Pink

A pop psychology book! I read a ton of these ten or fifteen years ago and then, much like memoirs, that genre began to feel a bit played out for me. This was a book I had read the first fifty or so pages of at some point and then never finished. And now I have! It was both very interesting, and slightly discouraging. The basic gist of it is that the things we tend to think should motivate people--direct monetary rewards and fear of punishment, primarily--are actually extremely unsuccessful except under very specific situations, and this applies basically equally to tasks we can take some intrinsic pleasure or satisfaction from, and ones that are mindless drudgery. We crave the innate reward of learning something or otherwise creating from the former kind of work, and value autonomy and control, rather than threat of punishment or a reward incentive, from the latter. Paying a kid to read more rarely works, but allowing a kid to select the kinds of books they want to read quite possibly will. 

The reason I found this book discouraging is because so little of our society is set up with any of these concepts in mind. Our entire economy is one big punishment/reward system, even the 'good' jobs that allow either for expression or autonomy. This fall has felt like one big flashlight on problems we seem able to recognize and yet not solve, and this book just made that feel even more obvious. It was hard to know how to apply much if any of what the book was suggesting, even if it did give me a greater appreciation for why I love doing puzzles for no 'reason' or write for free. A good book, if not one with a clearly identifiable next step. 

Grade: A 

Book 70: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

This is the sort of book that I initially started this blog four and a half years ago for - I have owned The Thief for so long that I can't even remember where I got it. I'm 90% sure that it was a Christmas present, but when and from whom is truly lost to time. But I always wanted to read it, I just...never got around to it. Well, I finally did, and just in time for the sixth and final book in the series to have been published!

So there's this thief, you see, and he's imprisoned in a king's prison, and then released under the conditions that he has to go help someone steal something that's impossible to steal: a mythical artifact. It becomes clear fairly early on that the narrator is extremely unreliable, both in terms of what the narrative omits and also how information is presented, and the reveals are extremely well done and satisfying. I think this is a book that will reward a reread a lot. The setting is very much a pseudo-Ancient Greece, with a mythology that is clearly inspired by the same region, and overall there's a vague Guy Gavriel Kay approach to history here, which to the probable surprise of no one works very well for me. It is also a wonderful first book to a series because while I was very enthusiastic about starting the next one in the series, it also stands alone extremely well, and I really enjoyed having it exist on its own. If you are also like me and have only been hearing abut this series referred to as The Queen's Thief but haven't read it yet, I really recommend it! 

Grade: A

Book 69: We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

This is one of those books that I took out from the library after hearing about it...somewhere, probably because it's gay and YA (or close) and well, that is how I roll. And it was both of those things, but it's also about grief and trying to figure out who you are when your link to your past is suddenly gone, and the space between what you've been told and what's the truth grows wider and wider. 

It's also a book about an unreliable narrator, and telling a story with tension so you keep reading it in order to find out what the Thing was, why we're in the place in the present that the story is about, and it's extremely well-done and effective, but also the structure felt stronger to me than the actual story at times. I did desperately want to know how Marin had ended up where she was (alone, a freshman in college with no family and nothing tethering her to anything), but the explanation felt both too big and also not big enough, somehow. It was hard for me to not poke holes in it, which isn't a great way to go into a story. 

Still, the language was beautiful, and the specificity of her college town and life in the Mission back in San Francisco both rang extremely true for me. I just wanted a bit more oomph from the eventual reveal. 

Grade: B

Book 68: The Sugared Game by KJ Charles

I had an interesting time with this book! Primarily because it is a classic middle book of a trilogy in a lot of ways, where there has to be continuing existing conflict, and especially when it's a romance trilogy where the main pairing have already met and gotten together to some degree in book one--there has to be a reason they haven't gotten to the happily ever after yet, and are stuck at happily for now, and that's hard. 

It's especially hard, I think, in a series like this, where the central conflict of the first book is that Kim is keeping secrets from Will, and while not every issue would be resolved if he just stopped doing that, so many of them would be that it feels increasingly convoluted that he won't come clean and just tell him what's going on. It's slightly better in some ways that he's keeping secrets from everyone, not just Will, but man. 

Having said all that, I still really enjoyed this book! The dynamic between Will and Kim is so good, the sex is extremely hot, the commentary on the Bright Young Things is very funny, and Phoebe and Maisie are delightful. It just felt like it went back to the well of undisclosed secrets and unreliable narrators one (or two) too many times, for my liking. I'm definitely looking forward to the final book of the trilogy, though.

Grade: B