Book 15: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

A book club book! This is a charming fable that felt like it was an old fairy tale that I had somehow never heard of before. There's a river that has two giant willows on either side of it, and a land called Arcadia north of those willows, and two sisters who are part of the family that has sung to the willows that enables the roots to create and build grammar. It's a bit metaphorical! The first twenty pages of this novella are basically entirely without characters and plot! But once it gets going, I found the story really lovely, and the liminal spaces it explored to be deeply meaningful. I did wonder whether this was a story that began as a short story and then got filled out a bit, because it felt like there was a lot that went unsaid, and I couldn't entirely tell whether that was a story choice and whether that was a function of the size of the story. But all in all, I enjoyed this quite a bit!

Grade: B

Book 14: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Sometimes books that are a cross between two different genres sound great but end up not quite jelling. And then other times you get a book like The Tainted Cup, which manages to create a whole fantasy world with giant sea creatures that invade a country and then set a compelling murder mystery inside it, with a classic eccentric detective and her beleaguered assistant who doesn't always know exactly what's going on or how important they are. 

It's just a really good read! I read the whole thing on a couch at a vacation house with my girlfriend and two friends and a very cute dog, and honestly what an ideal weekend. Can't wait to read book 2!!

Grade: A  

Book 13: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

A book club book! Although I've read it well in advance for once. 

I think I may have gone into this book with expectations that were too high--there's a lot about this time travel book to like, and I had a really nice time reading it. But I kept expecting either the relationships in the book to really wow me, or for the structure and worldbuilding of this specific time travel project to hit me harder, and instead it was just nice! I liked what it did with the historical event of the HMS Terror and what happened to the men searching for the Northwest Passage, but it never quite clicked into place with the current day story for me, and I never fell in love with the romance the way I was supposed to. 

Part of that is that the narrator felt a bit too opaque and naive for my liking, and while some of that is because of various reveals that occur in the final third of the book, that only compounded what didn't entirely work for me about her. It was all fine! But I had been hoping for something that made me swoon, and unfortunately it didn't.

Grade: B