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The Gilded Blade by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Rating: 4.5 stars.

Read from August 11th to 13th.

This is how you end a series! What the hell. I've been reading for hours upon hours today so coming out of it into the real world is a bit disorienting for me right now. The plan wasn't to spend a whole afternoon and part of an evening reading on the couch but needs must. I found the middle to the end of the novel to be so compulsively readable. The pace of the story, the short chapters, the way those short chapters end on micro cliff hangers to keep you reading. This one reminded me so much of reading The Inheritance Games for the first time and feeling truly mentally unwell. And that's something that has been so lacking for me in my reading lately. I want a book I get absolutely lost in. I want a book I become obsessive over. I want a book that literally takes my breath away. And Barnes has done it again.

I loved the settings in this one because the other books really made me miss Hawthorne House and getting to visit it again felt a little nostalgic for me. But we know the real highlight of The Inheritance Games series(es) is the characters. I don't know how or when I fell in love with Rohan, Savannah, and the Rohan and Savannah of it all. Because I distinctly remember not liking either of them the first time I read The Grandest Game. But then this book has me crying over them and highlighting almost whole chapters of their nonsense. It was so deliciously angsty. I also loved Gigi for the entire time I've had her in my life. I love that there is someone who sees Gigi for exactly who she is and that they realize just how strong she really is when so many people underestimate her. The emotions this book made me feel were so overwhelming at times. I cried multiple times in the book. And then there's the angst and the drama. This book also harkens back to the first book in that I kept getting taken out of the story by things in this Hawthorne world matching up with my real life a bit. Libby, her past, her nicknames, her personality. The Gilded Blade being what it was and the reason for its existence. The epilogue takes place on my birthday which was a surprise. Also, the lemniscates of it all harkens back to my wedding and getting married on 8/8 so I definitely had a few moments of getting pulled out of the novel but that's definitely a me thing and not a book problem.

The plot itself does lean into the JLB of it all. I remember the first book of hers I ever read (The Fixer) and how I thought the ending was absolutely insane. And somehow this was even more so. But written better. I felt like there was so much that had to happen in this one to make it the final book and there was so much left to explain that we were just moving at a constant clip. It felt like there were things edited out of the novel for pages sake which I wish hadn't been. I know. I know. Yet again I'm saying that a long book should have been longer. There's something wrong with me for sure. But it would have been nice to have been able to take a few seconds to breathe between all of the action.

Corpse Creek by Vincent Ralph. Rating: 3.5 stars.

Read from August 8th to 9th.

Before I get into the review, a quick thank you to both the publishers over at Wednesday Books for allowing me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review. Corpse Creek is the third novella in the Bleak Haven series. Each one takes place in a town where mysterious and sometimes supernatural things happen. We follow Ethan whose brother drowned in a curse creek four years ago. Now Ethan's back at the creek looking for closure. But something that looks a lot like his brother comes out of the creek demanding a sacrifice to take his place. But is Ethan really willing to do the unthinkable to bring his brother home? Corpse Creek comes out on September 15th and is available for preorder now.

This one surprised me in a few ways. I expected more thriller-y aspects than what we got and we got way more discussions on grief and what it means to live with grief. It makes so much sense to have Ethan explore his grief and the grief of others in this town where so much bad shit happens. It also gave the reader a moment to explore the questions of why someone would stay in this small town where all the horrible things keep happening and how these people can just keep living life with so much darkness in it. I appreciated that by the end of the novel Ethan's dad is starting to pull himself together. It was nice to see him acknowledge that he was putting too much on his son by not being a present parent.

I really didn't like Ethan's friends. All of them were horrible the whole time which made me feel like we could have had an out there for the whole someone taking Brody's place thing. But Ethan didn't kill his friends which is a damn shame. Between one of them stealing his brother's song to play at a concert, one of them using him for their college essay, and the other writing fan fiction of his brother's death...I kind of feel like a little death was warranted. Also, I'm sorry, but you had two roads for that ending and somehow we took both and messed it up. It looked like we were going one direction (which would have raised my rating to be honest) but then the author pulled their punch and went down the second road instead. I know it's supposed to make sense for who these characters are and whatnot, but it just came across as the author being unwilling to go there. In a lot of the morally grey stuff I read, I find that what I enjoy most is when the author is willing to go there. Take the story to the dark place. Allow the characters to explore what going there will mean for them morally but also for their feelings about themselves and for their future. Fiction isn't meant to be only a shining moral example of what we should do or how we should be. We have to be willing to allow ourselves this fictional space to explore things we would never or could never explore in the real world. Do I want a real person to do what almost happened here? Absolutely not, I would find that really upsetting in real life. But I do think it makes a better story.