#owlsreadathon2020

Currently reading 📚

Saga volume 3 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples: 4/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This series is so action packed and unpredictable and surprising! For those of you who don’t normally read graphic novels, this is a good series to start with. I haven’t read a lot of graphic novels myself before these ones, and was afraid I wouldn’t get into the story properly, but that certainly has never been a problem with Saga. There’s a lot of sex and violence in them, but hey, it makes for some really cool artwork. Highly recommend! 👌

This was for my transfiguration exam, a book that involves shape shifting. You see, there’s a little a ghost girl (who’s been torn in half and has no legs) that can transform into anything to scare her opponents. Need I say more?

Done with four books/exams :)

Arithmancy

History of Magic

Potions

Muggle Studies

Eight more to go!

Title: The King of Crows by Libba Bray (The Diviners, #4)

Prompt: 1) Care of Magical Creatures: Read a book with a beak on the cover. 2) Read a book from an author that you love

Page Count: 510 pages 📚

Rating: 3.5 Stars ⭐

Synopsis: After the horrifying explosion that claimed one of their own, the Diviners find themselves wanted by the US government, and on the brink of war with the King of Crows.

While Memphis and Isaiah run for their lives from the mysterious Shadow Men, Isaiah receives a startling vision of a girl, Sarah Beth Olson, who could shift the balance in their struggle for peace. Sarah Beth says she knows how to stop the King of Crows-but, she will need the Diviners' help to do it.

Elsewhere, Jericho has returned after his escape from Jake Marlowe's estate, where he has learned the shocking truth behind the King of Crow's plans. Now, the Diviners must travel to Bountiful, Nebraska, in hopes of joining forces with Sarah Beth and to stop the King of Crows and his army of the dead forever.

But as rumors of towns becoming ghost towns and the dead developing unprecedented powers begin to surface, all hope seems to be lost.

In this sweeping finale, The Diviners will be forced to confront their greatest fears and learn to rely on one another if they hope to save the nation, and world from catastrophe...

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"Make a better history."

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Okay. I'm not sure where to start with this review to be honest.

I loved The Diviner's so much. I think it was an incredibly clever way to tell a ghost story and I thought it was very witty and engaging. Over time, I feel like there's a bit of a disconnect between this series. This fourth one, in tone, doesn't really match the rest of the series?

It's weird, because the world, characters and powers have expanded so much...but this book felt very narrow and isolated. They spent a lot of time just travelling and not really going anywhere? I loved that the characters were paired in ways that they haven't been before, and that new relationships and connections between the characters were allowed to be explored, but it all felt very slow and a bit mechanical?

Ultimately, what makes this book excellent, is the social commentary. America is haunted by the ghosts of it's dead, the forgotten, the abandoned, the killed and slaughtered. It's haunted by its indiscretions, its misdeeds, its place on the wrong side of history. The prejudice and bigotry that plagues the minorities, the ones not deemed allowed to ve. One of my personal favourite quotes from this series was this one:

"It was always somebody's turn. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Negroes, or Chinese or Mexicans. A great wheel of bigotry, ever turning. Who got to decide what made somebody an american? America, the ideal of it at least, was its own form of elusive magic."

Powerful. And incredibly truthful.

Ultimately, I think this book tried too hard to capture the magic of this series that was a little lost, so it overcompensated with so many filler chapters that it was too long-winded, and the final showdown was barely a couple chapters long. It all wrapped up a little too quickly and it used one of my least favourite tropes (SPOILER ALERT), someone who's passed on coming back to life, but I love who the ultimate saviour is and I appreciate the open ending with the way this book wraps up quite alarming (the last line was particularly chilling).

Title: When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore

Prompt: Astronomy: Read a book entirely at night time.

Page Count: 273 Pages; DNF at 198 📚

Rating: 1.5 Stars

Synopsis: To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel’s wrist, and rumors say that she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in the trees, and for how little anyone knows about his life before he and his mother moved to town. But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches. Now they want the roses that grow from Miel’s skin, convinced that their scent can make anyone fall in love. And they’re willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up.

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"They're expected to forget everything they knew about being anything other than what they're supposed to be."

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I loved Anna-Marie McLemore's novel Wild Beauty. I was surprised at how much I like it, since 1) magical realism just isn't really my thing, and 2) I don't get on with overwritten and flowery sentences. But, despite that, I loved it. I went in with low expectations, so maybe that effected my enjoyment of the novel because my expectations for When The Moon Was Ours where incredibly high. When BooksandLala not only put this book in God Tier, but as a Libra read as well, I knew I had to read it for the OWLs.

But I just...couldn't...do it to myself.

I save 1 stars for books I despise, so this isn't quite on that level, but I think it's fair to say, that me and this book are not friends. It did some things right though; I loved it was a lose retelling of the Wheeping Woman ghost story, I loved the LGBTQ+ rep with it mosty focusing on trans issues, and I liked the Bonner sisters as 'villains' of the story. But that's where my enjoyment of this book ended.

I was just so drawn out.

Whole paragraphs dedicated to the colours of the moons that one of our main characters, Sam, hides around town. Just over and over and over again. Miel would grow flower after flower from her wrist, described in excruciating detail. The Bonner sisters hair was described with so many synonyms for red that I actually wanted to bang my head against the wall. Glass pumpkins sprouted for no reason across fields, long chapters assigned to dispelling the love from someone...

I lost the actual plot of the novel in the description.

Was there even a plot?

This book also uses one of my most hated tropes on novels, and that's when one character makes a decision for another character without talking to them about it. It really irritates me, and it would solve everything. There would still be a story, the author just has to come up with a different way of telling it instead of having me believe that two characters who love each other very much, would be this uncommunicative about something as important as this?

In all the magical realism that floats around this book, of the wrist-roses and the dispelling of love and the glass pumpkins and the forever slightly damp skirts, that was the most unbelievable element to the whole story.

Title: Grace and Fury by Tracy Banghart (Grace and Fury, #1)

Prompt: Divination: let the fates decide, use a random.number generator to choose your next pick.

Page Count: 320 Pages 📚

Rating: 2(ish) Stars ⭐

Synopsis: In a world where women have no rights, sisters Serina and Nomi Tessaro face two very different fates: one in the palace, the other in prison.

Serina has been groomed her whole life to become a Grace - someone to stand by the heir to the throne as a shining, subjugated example of the perfect woman. But when her headstrong and rebellious younger sister, Nomi, catches the heir's eye, it's Serina who takes the fall for the dangerous secret that Nomi has been hiding.

Now trapped in a life she never wanted, Nomi has only one way to save Serina: surrender to her role as a Grace until she can use her position to release her sister. This is easier said than done. A traitor walks the halls of the palace, and deception lurks in every corner. But Serina is running out of time, imprisoned on an island where she must fight to the death to survive and one wrong move could cost her everything.

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"It isn't a choice when you don't have the freedom to say no. A yes doesn't mean the same thing when it's the only answer you're allowed."

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Man, was this a disappointment. It was in my most anticipated shelf and everything. I love sibling bonds being prominent within a fantasy element, so I thought this would be a shoo-in for at least a 4 star? I was expecting action, cunning, bravery, wit, ambition...and what I got was just kinda there?

I loved the idea, two sisters being complete opposites are split up and are in two very different places. The prim and proper sister who was trained for the royal courts is in the fighting ring, and the fiesty and rash sister finds herself hanging out with the princes. I thought that they'd take what they know about each other and learn to apply it (much like Klaus and Violet do in A Series of Unfortunate Events), but that didn't happen.

The problem with duel perspective is that there is almost always one POV that I prefer to the other, and for me it was Serena's chapters that took that title. 1.5 of those stars is for her alone! I thought she was the most boring of the sisters, but I think she experienced the most growth and that was at least a little exciting to see, and I liked her side characters a lot more as well (but gag me with that romance, not here for it).

Nomi, on the other hand, didn't really do a lot of anything except for doing what the crowned princes told her to do, despite not trusting them at the beginning of this novel. She does a complete 180 with absolutely no reason? Just starts trusting them. Just like that. I felt like she had no real depth to her as a character. You can tell me that she's loud and outspoken all you like, but unless you show me, then I don't believe you. And Nomi showed us nothing except that she's very easily swayed. The only thing I liked about Nomi's chapter was one of the other Grace's, I thought she was lovely.

And I saw the plot twist coming from a mile away.