After much prodding and finally just handing me a book, @echointhehalls finally got me to read Sabriel! 🔔 Good news, I was not disappointed at all. Sabriel is a great character and the world building of the necromancy was so well done. Some low key forced romance/heteronormativity aside, it was def worth the read. (Sadie here is not quite Mogget colored, but she did a pretty great impression for me.)

It's always a little nerve wracking reading more from an author after you fall so desperately in love with one of their series, but Scorpio Races definitely held its own in my post-Raven Cycle slump. Such amazing creation of a feeling, and no spoilers but the last line killed me in the best way possible 🐎 The back of the book includes a recipe for the very delicious-sounding November Cakes, so I decided to make some to celebrate. 🍊

"If you can't be unafraid, be afraid and happy." ?It's been a long time since a book series has felt transformative, and this one is buried in my soul. Without a doubt this is now one of my favorite series of all time. Do yourself a favor and read these fucking books.

If Blue takes a step back in Dream Thieves, it's made up for in Blue Lily, where she absolutely shines. As Maggie put it, the theme of this book is perhaps "Try harder, Blue Sargent."

I'm going to stop pretending I can come up with coherent captions for the rest of these and just post them. Just take my word for it and read them, but also don't say I didn't warn you that they would consume your soul. 🍃

3 books later, still super jealous of Grove's ability to build hundreds of believable worlds and never even pause the plot. I did feel like by the end the myriad of plot points and characters didn't quite come together in the satisfying way I would expect from a trilogy, but it was certainly worth the ride. Most importantly of all I found the written description of Theo doing finger guns so funny I started using it in emoji 👉🏻👉🏻

I was so slow to pick up this series despite seeing the growing fandom on Tumblr and boy do I wish I had given in sooner. I was hooked on the first page. The development of the characters, particularly with so many dynamic side characters, is incredibly impressive, and the plot is complex without being convoluted. I finished all 4 in about a week, and will never look at Top-Siders the same way.

Sometimes you finish a book and days later you're still trying to figure out what it did to you. The first half of this I was trying to figure out where it was going to go. For a while it looked like it was going to try to be a teenage Frankenstein love triangle, and then boy did it take a TURN. This is not a satisfying book, but you'll be thinking about it for a while.
🤖🔧💔

I'm here to defend the necessary and beautiful epilogue. HP is about love and family (chosen and blood). A battle does not properly end a series about that. What does is a return to relative normalcy, of jokes and parenting and friendship. (And then there's Teddy, an orphan of war, the only other child of the Marauders, happy and cared for, the cycle broken.) The epilogue is necessary for completing the theme and narrative arc of Harry Potter.

Weirdly I have trouble saying something concise about this book, because it always just feels like the prologue of Deathly Hallows to me. None of the others feel quite like they're hurtling towards the inevitable in the way this one does. So for lack of deeper thoughts, let's acknowledge the appearance of the quintessential Hinny ship line: Several Sunlit Days.

OOTP lets Harry grieve for longer than a few pages. It lets him be angry and broken and horrified at the way he himself is changed. He survives in a way that's very different than winning a duel. I just think having a book like this is so incredibly important. It was important to me. @thehpalliance

Here's the haul from ALA Annual. 📚 I tried to be pretty selective this year - I'd like to say I'm the type to expand my reading horizons and pick up any genre, but the reality is I live the middle grade/ya fantasy life and I have a hard time getting out of it. These are mostly in that realm!

It's easy to think that the hinting at danger in the first 3 books is going to stay low key, but then you get to the graveyard scene and realize "oh shit, we're going for this." Suddenly the whole series takes on more weight, because the consequences are real.

One more down for the @thehpalliance Remembrall Readathon. This is my second fave in the series after Order of the Phoenix, which I guess means I enjoy being emotionally compromised idk. 🌕

1 down for the readathon to Cursed Child, another 6 to go. 📕⚡️ You can join at thehpalliance.org/remembrall) I had SO MANY props to choose from for this I really had to narrow it down lol.

I don't know that I've seen a better way to describe the professional feeling of "I am not sure I am most qualified or prepared to do this but...I gotta."

You know when you finish a book and you're just angry about how good it was? The Glass Sentence and its sequel are like that. Incredible world building, and manages to pull off dozens of worlds within worlds and move effortlessly between them without feeling like whiplash.

By the last quarter I was skimming just to see how it ended. An unlikable protagonist, overuse of writing devices, and at the very best questionable treatment of female characters really soured this book for me. Unfortunately it didn't live up to the hype.

Damn tho.

Starts off goofy & quickly becomes littered with "ow" moments that sneak up on you. It's like magical realism got mixed up with Night Vale & the result is stellar. Whatever you think the resolution of this book is going to be, you're probably wrong.