You probably can't tell from the amount of books in the picture (six books plus one I ditched), but I didn’t read that much in April. Mostly because after the first week I picked up writing again. The silly story my friend and I built back in January. It took three and a half weeks and the first draft is finished, yay! Will it be good? How should I know? 8-D But I’m having fun, even if the real work is only starting now.
On to what I read in April!
Daresh - Im Herz des Weißen Waldes (Daresh, at the Heart of the White Woods or something) (Katja Brandis): This is one of the worst books I read in a while. I read this at my artist alley table at a convention and I cannot keep a nice face when I read bullshit and I didn’t want to scare customers away with my scowling face the second day, so I just stopped reading after the first half. I was so frustrated with the book. If you're interested in the full tale, refer to the end of the post. :)
The Merceneries of the Stolen Moon (Tales of the High Court 4) (Megan Derr): I knew from the moment Charlaine was introduced in volume 3 that he would be important just by the way his presence is on the pages. I think, the author likes him. :'D Jac and Myra have been around since volume 1 and never gave off so heavy protagonist vibes. Anyway, here's another book trying to break out of the mold, introducing a polycule and all. Personally, with my aro brain the thought of two people finding each other and fitting together so perfectly is beyond me, so three people feeling that way towards each other seems like a even more of a miracle. Good for them, I guess! I read this right after Daresh and damn, what a blessing to my soul. The difference in writing and worldbuilding. One might argue, yeah, one was written for kids, the other for adults, but there's plenty of good books for kids and plenty of bad for adults, so that's not it. One book in the series left!
Lord of Silver Ashes (Rowan Blood 2) (Kellen Graves): Of god, I naively thought, this would end with volume 2. It DOES NOT. I learned halfway through and lost my will to read for a while. xD It does make sense from all the stuff that is happening. Because there is a lot and it builds up and builds up and builds up. But still. If I had known what I got myself into ... It is a good story though. It just took me so much longer to read than I'm used to, because of all the descriptions and pretty words. I have respect for how it is written, as in the style and the plot building. It's not just some easy, smutty lovestory with fairy princes. Behind the veil masking the beantighe's face is a whole complex person. And so is this series. (But it took soo long to read! I don’t get it!)
Spellbound (F.T. Lukens): This one was just cute. So warm and fluffy. There are some serious things going on and all and there characters have issues not to be taken too lightly. But overall, it was a total comfort read for me. Settle back into your cozy sofa and let your heart be healed. (Also there’s a magical cat.)
The Last Sun (The Tarot Sequence 1) (K.D. Edwards): This was kind of a culture shock. Took my brain a while to adjust. Adult men, modern setting, but still some sort of (wild) magic, so much action. But it’s interesting. And how to say it ... not sappy? While there’s a lot of danger to the protagonists’s life, it’s still not overly emotional and I like that once in a while. Also, Brand is great.
Shade & Revenant (Oracle of Senders 1+2) (Mere Joyce): After The Last Sun I found that I didn’t have anything in my book pile that felt right to read, so I had a look in my potential reads and chose this. And it was perfect, exactly what I needed. Simple, not too dramatic, but still engaging, nice characters, quite short. Pure 14-year-olds in the first volume, the cutest little romance in the second volume. I read both volumes back to back and only stopped because I wanted a little more time to enjoy. :D
And now, my full thoughts on a bad German fantasy book that I didn’t even finish! Daresh by Katja Brandis:
The Story: The world of Daresh is split into 4 territories for 4 guilds: Earth, wind, fire and water. And they hate each other. There are also half-humans (different animal races that can talk) who are mainly kept as slaves. Heroine Rena, 16 years, touches some important stone in the castle of the Queen and gets the ability to understand the half-humans’s language and is also hunted because touching is prohibited! She runs away, meets a woman from the fire guild, there’s some secret stuff going on and they decide to go unite the guilds.
The Worldbuilding: I hate it. For a long time I wondered why it bothered me so much, until I realized, it’s probably because I couldn’t figure out the intended audience. The heroine is 16, her love interest and other allies are even older, so I thought, it’s a story for 15- or 16-year-olds. But. The way the world is built is very black and white which I don’t find acceptable for readers that age. Teenagers are smarter than this. Where’s the nuance? The guilds all hate each other, they have a lot of prejudices and are not willing at all to rethink. And this is going on for many many years (100 maybe, I have no idea), but the heroine is apparently the very first person ever to think differently. And sorry, that is not believable. Even if people don’t speak up or actively do something there will always be some who do not share those beliefs. Not in this book. Maybe I just want to believe that people a generally good. In any case it was super annoying.
The Love Story: Is shit. 1) Why is it there in the first place? 2) The way it is written kinda grossed me out. (I can’t even say why. I read smut involving three people the day after and it was fine, but the way this girl swoons over her guy was so icky to me.) 3) The guy is so bland. I didn’t like the heroine as a character very much, but the guy was so nondescript. Also, he had an anger problem? And I’m not sure if it was intended to make him seem dangerous and therefore hot? If so, it didn’t work well.
So, there’s the girl and she has a crush on some neighbor’s boy who doesn’t even notice her in the beginning. All good. While on the run already, she meets him by chance out in the woods (totally believable), he is mean to her, because she ruined his important day (the reason everyone went to the castle blabla), and she realized “oh, now I don’t like him anymore”. Alright. Then, like 5 pages later, literally the next male she meets who is around her age (a few years older), she falls for. Hmmm. They exchange like three words. She meets him again half the world later. He saves her life. They run away together and maybe talk more, but we hardly get any of that. They spent the night sleeping 200feet apart and the next day both are madly in love and after a fight with some thugs they kiss. Errr.... Another few days later they reach the next town, vanish into a room to do stuff that is not written (thankfully in this case because I would have vomited all over my table) and then they fight about something silly. I think they reconciled before I stopped reading but I don’t even care. A review for volume 3 of the series told me she gets another guy there, so ...
The Writing: Was fine for the most part, but. There’s no metric system instead every unit is something from nature like breath and person and ... I forgot. The breaths, though, were so annoying? They’re like seconds and come up every other page. There’s no “after a short while” or “it took a long time”, it’s “it didn’t take just 300 breaths, but 3 times 300″ and “after 4 times 11 breaths”. For real. It was so stupid. Who sits there to count till 300? Or starts calculating? I hated it so much after a while. 8D
I do regret a little that I didn’t finish because now I always have to say “maybe it got better after the first half”. But at the same time I don’t really care. I’m not wasting more of my life with these books. (The way the first half frustrated me I would probably be blind to anything good in the second half anyway.)
