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The Heirs by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé. Rating: 3.25 stars.

Read from July 17th to 19th.

This wasn't a book I intended to read this month, but the book I had chosen for July for my NetGalley Rejected Me Challenge got taken off of my library's online catalog for ebooks by the time I went to borrow it. Since I wanted the challenge to focus on ebooks (that being the most similar experience to a NetGalley ARC) and since I wanted to get all of these books from the library to read, I had to choose a different book. The Heirs was something I don't remember requesting and getting rejected for (which shows just how often I get rejected by NetGalley) but rereading the synopsis made me pretty excited for it. The Heirs follows Leontes Button who adopts five orphans to experiment on with the Button Method. His goal is to create five child prodigies, proving that Nurture is more important than Nature. When the now 17 year old children must return for the 10th anniversary of the Prodigy Ball (a celebration of the Button Method and other like minded individuals), things are finally coming to a head and not everyone will survive the night.

I am a sucker for this kind of story. Rich people problems, rich people not having a clue about how the real world actual works and being absolutely clueless, an inheritance, a giant mansion with a secret passage or two, and a murder mystery to tie it all together. I think the author did a great job of making the reader care about these siblings and the unique, and not healthy, way they were raised. This was also a pretty quick read for me seeing as I had such little time to actually sit down and read most days. I was intrigued the whole way through. I had no idea who could have done it or why. I mean, they all had a reason, didn't they? I felt like this was a combination of The Umbrella Academy and The Inheritance Games in a lot of ways which feels like it has to be a winning combination. And it worked pretty well for most of the novel.

I was expecting more investigating than we got. We don't even see the characters get interviewed by the police. I think calling this a Mystery is sort of misleading. I would say we spend a lot of time getting to know the characters and their histories and never actually explore what happened and why. We get an answer in the end (with one giant pulled punch that I absolutely hated) and we even get some answers to some questions that I thought were going to be left hanging. A nitpicking thing that bothered me from the beginning is that Button adopts these children from all over the world but these characters are never described which means I had a lot of trouble picturing the children until something in the story needed a description. I spent almost 100 pages not knowing anything about how these characters looked.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Rating: 3.25 stars.

Read from July 11th to 16th.

I feel like I need to start off this review by explaining who I am as a reader. I feel like I tend to read pretty widely as far as genres go. I'll read a Christmas Romance one week and a SciFi Horror the next. But one of the few genres I intentionally ignore most of the time is Classics. I also don't like Historical Fiction which feels pretty similar to Classics. Something about them just drives me up the wall. They feel hard to get into and, especially Classics, hard to understand all of the context for when the book would have come out and what was going on in the world at that time. The only Classics I've ever read were ones I was forced to read or ones I did for reading challenges. This one is technically also from a reading challenge. But I decided to give it a shot when I saw a Tumblr post saying that Henry Tilney never did anything wrong. (Which...yes.) After that, I knew I had to give this a chance.

I feel like this story could be a lot of different stories. Because we see the heroine going to Bath to experience the season for balls. In this we get the John Thorpe of it all and different relationships. But we also see Catherine go to Northanger Abbey and let her mind get away from her about all the different Gothic horrors she may experience (she doesn't realize she's basically in a turn of the century RomCom). But then we get more relationships and drama at the end. It does all fit together but as I was reading it, it felt very disjointed. Catherine as a character was hard for me to categorize. She felt young (because in the book she's 17, so she is) and kept doing or saying things that really made me cringe. It feels like that was sort of the point but, as the person doing the cringing, it wasn't the best time. I agree with others that the book was pretty boring at times. I wanted more satire on the Gothic genre than we got.