On this last October day, I leave you with this mini October wrap up! And boy, do I wish we could just turn away and pretend this reading month didn’t turn out the way it did!
Salutations Chapterlings! I hop you’ve all been staying snuggly and sipping tea, staying health I hope! Myself? Not so much and there are many regrets, but I digress. We’re here to talk about my October wrap up and boy, October was a cruel and vicious mistress to my reading and myself this month. This might actually turn out to be my worst reading month for all of 2020. And after we left September on such a high note, too! I only read five things this month and the results… oh boy, they’re looking pretty grim. To clarify, I only had one five star read and one four star read. The rest… can we just look away? No? Well, it wasn’t good and one book didn’t even receive a rating. On top of all of that, since a lot of the books impacted my mental health so badly, I hit a reading slump… pretty darn hard, if I do say so myself. That slump prevented me from picking up any books and even caused a great deal of internal stress.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that someway, somehow, I can turn the last two months of the year around and finish the year off strong. However, November and December are both months that heavily revolve around my family. If you’ve been here a while, you know my family is at the very core of my heart and soul. So during these two months, reading sometimes gets put to the side, but I digress, again. I’m really hoping I can turn my reading around soon. And with that being said, I hope you still enjoy this wrap up even though there’s not many books to talk about.
🎃 Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Buddy Read with Robin 💜
I absolutely fell in love with this book and these characters. Truly, this is the best read from all of October. Originally, I was going to rate this book a strong four stars, but the more I thought on it, how I felt about this book, and the three main characters we follow, I decided to just go ahead and give it the five stars this book truly deserved. From the atmosphere to the unique writing style, this makes for the perfect spooky season read and rainy day read. I can’t wait to draft my full review for this book.
🎃 Victor and Nora A Gotham Love Story by Lauren Myracle & Isaac Goodhart ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I love graphic novels and the DC Universe is one of this first universes I fell in love with when I was first diving into this comic book world. Most importantly, Victor and Nora is my all time favorite love story throughout the entire Gotham universe. I know there’s so many other relationships, pairings, etc… but I truly love and cherish everything and anything that revolves around Victor and Nora. For those who aren’t familiar with these two characters, their love story and even Victor’s villain backstory is one of a Greek tragedy. Nora is terminally ill and dying, and upon learning of this news, Victor ends up freezing Nora until he can find a cure. Ultimately, Victor becomes a villain as he continues to search for a cure for Nora, doing whatever it takes to save the love of his life. There are many love stories in Gotham, but none that burn quite as fierce and bright like that of Nora and Victor. To love someone so much that you would move mountains, you would become a villain to everyone who doesn’t know the full story, and to give up your life using your skills in science to find a cure to a terminal illness all for the the one you love; it’s a tragic story, but truly, a story that resonates with the flames in my soul.
🎃 Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo ⭐⭐⭐ | Buddy Read with Robin 💜
Let’s just rip the band-aid right off, I dnf’d this book at 80% through this book and yes, I still gave it a rating. Now, I promise my full review for this is the first one coming because I have so much to talk about when it comes to this book. Here’s a brief run down with things I liked and strongly disliked. Starting with the things I enjoyed, I loved the atmosphere and I loved how the characters weren’t perfect. I really enjoyed those two elements and I wish more authors wrote characters like this. Hands down, this is a fantastic book to read for the spooky season and during rainy days.
However, there were things I didn’t like. Starting with pg 50 and pg 51. I love how no one, absolutely no one talks about how this author decided to bring up an actual crime and traumatic event that was committed concerning Geronimo’s remains and the desecration of his grave, and how the author just wrote it off like it never happened. Maybe you need someone who’s Apache, like myself, to step in and remind you that if you’re going to write about these events, especially when this event did happen and we knew about the five people involved in this whole incident, the entire event devastated the remaining family and relatives of Geronimo, and resulted in an actual court trial that came of nothing and the Chiricahua chief to rule leaving the burial site where it is despite the request from the family, to remind non-Indigenous authors to write and speak about these events accurately instead of brushing it off, down playing the whole incident like it wasn’t a problematic situation in the first place, and using these events as a way to cause tension between two non-Indigenous characters in your book.
Then there’s page 165 and I quote, “He didn’t want to spend the evening fielding judgmental snipes from Manuscript because Alex had felt the urge to dress as sexy Pocahontas.” Another thing concerning First Nations and yet no one is talking about this. Her name was Matoaka and she was one of the first stolen and missing Indigenous women from the colonization of Turtle Island. I don’t know about anyone else, but just these two snippets from this book alone made me really uncomfortable and in my opinion should have never been included in this book in the first place. I also didn’t enjoy how the traumatic events in this book felt like they were being used for shock value and to forward the story. Literally, content and trigger warnings about everything and anything for days. I digress, I digress. This wasn’t meant to be a rant. These are just some of things I’m going to be talking about in my final review because no one wants to talk about any of this and I think we should be talking about it.
🎃 Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Dragons & Tea Book Club September Pick 💜
The first book I’m not giving a rating for. The world must be freezing over because I always rate my books. No matter how good or bad. However, I feel that for myself, personally, rating this book isn’t beneficial. Here’s why. If I were to rate this book, it would be a low rating because of various reasons (and the fact that this book made me vomit on several occasions), it benefits no one because this isn’t a bad book. In fact, this book does exactly what it’s supposed to do, it’s a horror book that’s designed to crawl under your skin and make you all kinds of uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I’m the type of reader who doesn’t read horror often, I try to avoid it at all costs because I know how it impacts my reading and myself. So if there’s one thing you take away from this, let it be that this book does a fantastic job in the genre it’s designed for, but it impacted me in the way that I dnf’d this book at 75% because it destroyed my mental health, that includes going in knowing content and trigger warnings.
🎃 The Fangirl’s Guide to the Universe by Sam Maggs ⭐⭐
Let me just say this before I lay this all out. I have been active in various nerdy communities for a very long time and still am. Seventeen years worth of knowledge and experience, of LARPing, gaming, cosplaying, attending conventions, etc… and this book made my blood boil. I strongly disliked this book. Not only does this book not talk about the actual statistics or even give accurate information on how much of an influence women have had throughout history in the development of various nerdy communities, but this book has multiple underlying themes of misandry, and refuses to accurately talk about female/female and male/male harassment within these communities. If you’re going to write a guide book or a self-help book and you want to talk about these things then you need to write about it accurately, you need to include the whole spectrum of how harassment impacts the community as a whole, and if you’re going to repeatedly write how you support men then don’t go onto the next page talking about how terrible men in the community are. You can’t preach about how as a community we’re all in this together and then continuously throughout the book contradict yourself by writing how terrible all men are, how their actions are nothing but horrible things, when that’s not the actual reality of things. But I digress. This just wasn’t a good book, in my personal opinion and I’m actually dreading writing this review which is one of the main reason why I haven’t written it.
Whew, I may have ranted a few times, whoops! As you can see, though it was only five books, some of these books I have some pretty strong feelings about, some that made me feel a certain kind of way and I promise, these will all be addressed in reviews. I’ve mentioned this a lot this week, but as soon as I’m better and recovered from being sick, these reviews are getting written up, I promise! Anyway, did you have a good reading month? What book did you love the most? Please let me know! Until next time, I hope you enjoy All Hallows Eve! I love you! 🎃🖤
Chapter Malliumpkin 
I had such a good time buddy reading with you this month! Even though one of the books was a bit of a bust 😅 At least we both finally got to read the wonderfulness that was Strange Grace ❤️❤️
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Yes! I love our little buddy reads! Oh gosh, it was a struggle, but Strange Grace made up for it with it’s loveliness!
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Oh, I’m so shocked no one’s mentioned those bits in Ninth House. I’m very anti-it already because of the appalling way the trigger warnings for all the abuse were handled, but that’s really awful. Great to see your point of view. I’m glad you had some reads you enjoyed though!
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It’s definitely a very polarizing book. Many readers who love it are big fans of the author and those who usually dislike the book seem to have issues with the authors past work. There really is a lot of wonderful things about this book, but there’s also a lot of really bad things that were handled very poorly that should have gone through a second, third, or even fourth round of editing. And the best way I know how to rate this book is a three stars because it’s not a terrible book, but it’s definitely not great and definitely should have gone through the editing process more thoroughly.
I’m glad I had some good reads too. There always needs to be a balance. Hopefully November will be much better!
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You’re totally right, the majority of blame lies with the publishers in their editing and marketing. Thank you for bringing the culturally insensitive aspects to my attention – more people should have been talking about that already!
Here’s to a fantastic set of reads for you in November!
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Yeah, I don’t think many readers would notice because they’re such small remarks and technically, you you’re looking at this from a read for pleasure kind of perspective, they’re not important context, but even critical readers haven’t even pointed it out. So I think due to the context being so brief, I think this added to critical readers missing that information. However, it’s very common for people to use the suffrage and trauma of Indigenous people, taking that information and twisting it to fit their own narrative, which then continues to aid in the erasure of Indigenous voices, their history, and adds to the continue discrimination of Indigenous people.
I hope going forward, authors and editing teams really start to consider the weight that falls upon them when the consider mentioning and talking about certain events concerning Native/Indigenous people can impact. Hopefully, we see that change, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Yes! I hope we both have a good reading month!
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