The Cake Flavored Book Tag

I was tagged by Krista over at The Bookish HedgeMom last week. It took me a little while before I had time to sit down and do this tag, but I finally was able to. (Yay me!) Anyway, let's get into this tag.

Chocolate Cake: A Dark Book That You Loved


The Power by Naomi Alderman

This is a very dark story, but I loved how well the author committed to the concept. I also enjoy books where the premise isn't inherently bad (in this case, women all developing the same power) but humanity turns this neutral aspect into something bad. Or maybe i'm just a sucker for a "humans are the real monster" theme. This was one of my favorite books that I read last year and I would recommend it to anyone interested in speculative sci-fi.

Vanilla Cake: A Favorite Light Read


Holes by Louis Sachar

Holes is just a great book. It makes me nostalgic, it's a quick read. I don't know if everyone would say it counts as "light" but I categorize it that way. I often need to be in a certain mood for certain books, but no matter what "mood" I'm in, Holes is a good option. It was one of my favorite books as a kid.

Red Velvet: A Book That Gives You Mixed Emotions


The Giver by Lois Lowry

It's not The Giver that gives me mixed feelings, but the later books in The Giver quartet. The Giver was amazing. Gathering Blue was amazing, Messenger was fine and Son I did not like. So, I'm torn between my love for The Giver and annoyance at how the rest of the series went. In hindsight, it would've been better if there wasn't a series at all.

Cheesecake: A Book That You Recommend to Everyone


Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

I loved this book. I heard it was good and I was surprised to find that I agreed with the majority here. Given that I tend to read either fantasy or science fiction books, this is my current go-to for people who tend to avoid those two genres. I liked the story, I liked the writing and I highly recommend.

Coffee Cake: A Book That You Started But Never Finished


The Savior's Champion by Jenna Moreci

I went into The Savior's Champion expecting to like it. I'd heard great reviews about it. Other readers and bloggers who I follow gave it a lot of praise. I really thought I'd like this book, but I just couldn't get into it. I had trouble immersing myself in the story. So, when I reached a point about 1/3 of the way through the book, and I found that I wasn't enjoying it, I decided to DNF it. I might revisit it later, but for now, I've stopped reading it.

Carrot Cake: A Book With Great Writing


Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

The book that launched a Broadway sensation. While Wicked (the musical) was inspired by this book, I feel like I should make it clear that the stories differ a lot. The book has more adult content and leans more into themes of what separates good from evil. All of that being said, the book is exceptionally well-written. Maguire is able to both recapture the wonder of Oz while also making it his own. The use of imagery and symbolism in this book deserves to be praised.

Tiramisu: A Book That Left You Wanting More


A Dream Within A Dream by Kristina Mahr

This book left me wanting more in a bad way. The conclusion felt very rushed and I just wanted more from the story. Too much attention was given to the romance aspect and not enough to real conflict or characters that the writer had spent two novels building towards. It missed out on a lot of interesting plot-points in my opinion.

Cupcakes: A Series With 4 or More Books


A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

This series was the one of the first, if not the first, series that I read to completion. Like with Holes, some of my love for it comes from nostalgia, but these books are also unique and whimsical in an unexpected way. I love this series. I love the writing, I love the literary tricks Snicket employs within each book. I'm also a fan of the Netflix series that these books were adapted into.

Fruit Cake: A Book That Wasn't What You Anticipated


The Girl the Sea Gave Back by Adrienne Young

This book makes the list because I didn't expect it to be anywhere near as good as it is. I expected it to be a run-of-the-mill YA fantasy story. I had every reason to expect it to be completely average. The writing was better than I expected, as was the plot. There were interesting and unique aspects to the story that I wasn't expecting. This book took me by surprise, so it's the first thing that comes to mind for this category. 

I tag:

• Anyone who finds this tag interesting and wants to participate. I can't think of specific people to tag at the moment

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I'm Fine and Neither Are You

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I’m Fine and Neither Are You is a 2019 literary fiction novel by Camille Pagan. It was released in April  by Lake Union Press. I stumbled upon it while browsing Amazon one day and the title intrigued me. It’s a Washington Post best selling novel. It can be purchased here from Bookshop.org.

The novel follows Penelope Ruiz-Kar, a married mother of two who seems to be doing it all and barely keeping it together. Her best friend Jenny, meanwhile, seems to have the perfect life and marriage. Jenny’s shocking death reveals that her life was far from perfect, leading Penelope to decide to truly confront the problems in her life, starting with her and her husband Sanjay committing to complete and total honesty. As Penelope’s vow to stop keeping the peace turns her life upside down, she begins to wonder if honesty really is the best policy.

First, I feel like I should say that I probably wasn’t the target demographic for this story. While this is adult fiction, and I am an adult, a 26-year-old single woman with no kids is going to have different tastes than a married woman, a parent or someone who is a little older. I didn’t find tis book to be terrible, but it also wasn’t especially interesting to me. The story started off interestingly enough, but it honestly began to feel like it was going anywhere special. The story centers around a woman trying to fix her semi-broken marriage, which isn’t especially interesting to read and didn’t leave me feeling much of anything.

Penelope spends most of the novel thinking about the way her marriage used to be and how happy she once was with Sanjay. Or contemplating how her job makes her a decent living, but its not really what she’s passionate about. Or how confused and frustrated she is about the secrets Jenny was keeping from her that she learned after her death.  It’s a story where the main character thinks about a lot of things, but very little plot happens. Additionally, Penelope isn’t a main character that I enjoyed. I felt like she didn’t have much personality and the most prevalent personality trait that she did have was whininess. Both before and after Jenny’s death, which serves as the inciting incident of the story, Penelope does a lot of thinking about how she wishes her life were different, she thinks about the problems she’s just been ignoring, but it takes an exceptionally long time for her to say or do anything about it. Some of her actions, which are supposed to feel selfless, read as very selfish or self-obsessed to me, especially where Jenny’s family are involved. Scenes that are meant to be read as empathetic instead feel like an excuse for her to talk about herself and problems she’s had in the past. Between a plot that crawled along and a main character I didn’t like, the book was very hard for me to stick with and enjoy.

I think the most frustrating aspect of this novel is that it did have potential. Jenny’s death, and the cause was the reader learns later, was a good opening to talk about an issue that’s very topical in 2019. I’m Fine and Neither Are You could’ve used the set-up to actually discuss the current issue and show it from many different sides. It could’ve focused on the grieving process itself and how to struggle with grieving someone while also being angry at the secrets they kept. These elements feature in the story, but end up taking a backseat to the marriage melodrama. (As an aside, perhaps I’ve read too many thrillers, but I half expected Jenny’s death to have actually been a murder and thus add something to the story). A story doesn’t have to be a sweeping epic to keep my attention, but the story does need to go somewhere. Something needs to happen, and for the most part, nothing really happened here other than Penelope thinking a lot and her talking to other people a little bit.

This review has been negative so far, but there are some aspects I think the story does well. Penelope and Sanjay’s relationship is one of the most realistic ones I’ve read in a while. I know plenty of people in real life whose marriages look an awful lot like theirs. They don’t hate each other, but clearly a lot of the romance has gone and they’re in the stage where things have become routine. The conclusion of the story is also realistic. Some changes take place, but no one’s life has become drastically different. It’s frustratingly mundane. The author isn’t a bad writer, but the story being told is far from interesting or exciting in my opinion.

I’m Fine and Neither Are You is just as its title says. It’s fine. It’s not great, but it’s also not the worst book I’ve ever read. If I had to assign it a color, the color would be beige. Boring, safe and doesn’t stand out in any way. I think my experience with this book shows that I need to pay a little bit less attention to how highly-recommended a book is on the internet as a whole. This book is a best-seller and the composite rating is high, but just because 20k+ people like it doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for me. It’s a short read. You can easily pass time reading it, but I don’t agree with the reviews saying that this book is interesting or deep or life-changing.

Rating: 2.4 stars

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Book Reader Problems Tag

I found this tag on The Book Nut's blog and decided to give it a try because it looked interesting/fun.

1. You have 20,000 books in your TBR, how in the world do you decide what to read next?

I actually (and I know this sounds dorky) have a spreadsheet of all of the books on my TBR and use a random number generator to pick the next book.

2. You’re halfway through a book and you’re just not loving it. Do you put it down or are you committed?

I try to stick it out most of the time. Occasionally, I'll come across a book that I just can't get into but that rarely happens. If at the halfway point, I can't find something to make me keep going, it goes into the "Try Again Later" pile.

3. The end of the year is coming and you’re behind on your reading challenge, do you try to catch up? And if so, how?

It depends. If I'm 5 or less away, I'll reread some short books I liked when I was younger. If I'm more than 5 away, I probably wouldn't rush to catch up, but try harder next year.

4. The covers of a series you love do not match, how do you cope?

I don't really care all that much. Having matching book covers isn't a make or break for me.

5. Everyone and their mother loves a book that you do not. Who do you bond with over your shared feelings?

Random people on Twitter. Because if I've learned one thing from the Internet, its that no book is loved by everyone.

6. You’re reading a book in public and you’re about to start crying. How do you deal?

Maybe this makes me weird, but I don't read a lot of books in public for this exact reason. On the rare occasions that I do read in public, I'd probably just leave and let everyone wonder where I'm running off to.

7. The sequel to a book you loved just came out but you’ve forgotten a lot of what happens. Are you going to reread it?

I might, depending on how long the first book is, how excited I am for the release and if, after reading a bit of the sequel, some details start coming back to me.

8. You do not want anyone to borrow your books, how do you politely say no when someone asks?

No one usually asks me. The one person who has in the past year keeps asking at odd times, so I always don't have the book with me and I just kind of shrug and say they forgot to remind me.

9. You have picked up and put down 5 books in the last month. How do you get over this reading slump?

A lot of the time, my slump is due to reading too many similar books, so I'll pick a book that's in a completely different genre.

10. There are so many books coming out that you are dying to read, how many do you end up buying?

I'll buy two or three that I'm completely excited about. The others I'll either get from the library, when its available, or try to borrow from a friend I know bought it.

11. After you purchase all of these books that you’re dying to read how long do they sit on your shelves before you get to them?

It depends, but I try not to let new releases sit for more than six weeks.

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Ankerita

Ankerita: Seasons Out of Time is a 2013 Gothic horror young adult novel by Robert Wingfield. It was published by The Inca Project and released in November 2013. It is the first book in the The Seventh House series. The author’s website can be found here. I was provided with a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The novel follows Ankerita, later called Anna, a woman from the Tudor era who escapes the grave she’s been imprisoned in for over five hundred years after her resting place is unintentionally disturbed. She takes on the life of one of the vandals who released her and finds herself thrust into the modern world. She is able to see restless spirits and is forced to intervene in order to put them to rest. As a woman without identity, Anna must also dodge the attention of the authorities and prevent her return to the grave and succumbing to the plans of demons attempting to claim her soul.

Ankerita, or Anna as I will refer to her for the rest of this review, was my favorite character in this story. She’s incredibly complex and just when I’d start to think I knew everything about her character, there’d be a new facet to her revealed. I won’t lie, when I started reading, I thought Anna was going to be an antihero. Early on, the reader learns that she was imprisoned at an abbey, and later cursed with living death, because she killed her husband. Her first act in the story is to trick Tox, a graffiti artist, into taking her place at the abbey so that she can escape. Yet, Anna isn’t quite an antihero, but instead a young woman trying to recapture the life she was robbed of. in addition to that, when Anna gets into trouble, which happens quite a bit, she doesn’t wait around to be rescued, but in most cases, manages to get herself out of danger. She meets too many people on her journey to list, but there are a handful that left a big impression. Captain Slash, the ghost of a highwayman, she meets early on. He was the character I found to be the most entertaining, especially on the few occasions where he comes to her aid. She is also followed by a demon named Didiubas and its not clear whether he’s helping her or just getting Anna into more trouble. It depends on what exactly she’s doing at the time. While this book had some heavy and dark moments, the characters helped the story feel balanced.

This novel tells the story of a woman out of time, and one of the things that I enjoy about it is the author’s commitment to that idea. Anna is thrown five hundred years into the future and the alien-ness of the world around her shows. She retains some knowledge of the modern world from the body she’s inhabiting, but there are many moments where her actions or behavior shows that she’s brand new to this world. Many times, this takes the form of her wording things in a way that no one else understands, she sounds a bit like Shakespeare at times, but her inner monologue also reveals aspects of that. I enjoyed reading her struggles to understand and live in the modern world and adapt to things. Many stories where a character is thrown forward in time, or backwards in some cases, depict a short adjustment period and no longer-lasting implications beyond that which tends to annoy me because it glosses over how much things change over a few centuries. Ankerita’s depiction of a woman out of time is the most realistic one I’ve read, possibly ever.

The pacing of Ankerita isn’t as structured as some other novels, but that works in the novel’s favor. Rather than having a strict progression of events that lead from beginning to end, the novel is a series of adventures that Anna experiences as she moves throughout the United Kingdom, sometimes by her own volition, and sometimes because of the actions of others. She’s trapped between the real world and the afterlife, allowing her to see ghosts around her with unfinished business. As she moves through the country, and searches for her place in this strange new world, she’s slowly being nudged towards her destiny, which she doesn’t want to accept, but everything she does only pulls her closer to it. it’s a story as much about exploring the world as it is about self-discovery.

I tend to avoid spoiling things in my reviews as a rule. I’m going to abide by that rule in this review, but that makes it a bit difficult to discuss the end of the story, especially given that this is the first book in a series. I enjoyed the ending a lot, especially the twist that came in the last few pages to set up the sequel and make the reader reevaluate everything that had happened previously. Wingfield did an excellent job of bringing the story almost full circle, but not completely in order to deliver a great ending. I finished Ankerita and wanted to read the next book.

I enjoyed Ankerita overall, but unfortunately, no book is perfect. There are a few things I need to address that I wasn’t as thrilled about as most of the story. Wingfield was able to combine humor into the horror aspects of the story pretty well for the most part, but there were a few scenes where it didn’t quite fit in my opinion. The humor in those moments just felt a little off.  There were a few things that happened that were confusing and didn’t really make much sense or weren’t explained enough to make sense. I was able to understand most of the events in the story, but the few that confused me took me out of the story.

Ankerita was a book that surprised me. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. It starts with a great premise and uses that premise to tell an engaging and unique story. The author’s writing style is one that I enjoy and its an easy book to lose oneself in.  As this is the second book I’ve read and enjoyed by Robert Wingfield, the first being Countdown to Omega, its clear that he’s talented at writing in more than one genre. I’d recommend it to any Gothic literature fans out there and I can’t wait to read the sequel.

Rating: 4.3 Stars

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Five Endings I Hate (and Five I Love)

I think about endings a lot. While the beginning of a story needs to be intriguing to get the audience interested, a bad ending can ruin a story. I’ve been thinking about endings a lot recently, due to a few factors. One is reading some books with less-than-thrilling endings. Another is that, as of writing this post, two shows that I’ve watched for years have ended in the last week. While this is a book blog, and I mostly talk about book endings, some of the ideas listed below also apply to shows.

Five Endings I Hate

5) It was all a dream: This category also includes the story being a simulation or the final thoughts of a dying character. This is pretty much the epitome of lazy storytelling, because it was all a dream, like using time travel, means you don’t have to write an actual ending. It means the story, and the stakes, weren’t real and that I shouldn’t have cared. The only time this has worked is in The Wizard of Oz, and that only worked because Dorothy knew she was dreaming the whole time, so it wasn’t some last-minute subversion.

4) The rushed conclusion: If you spend hundreds of pages building up the villain/main conflict and it gets resolved in less than five pages (ten if the book is longer than 400 pages), you didn’t plan your story well. Or you didn’t balance other elements as well as you could’ve.

3) Back to the Start: In most cases, the story/plot is a journey. If the characters don’t change in some way, or they change but end up in the same position as at the start of the story, its not emotionally satisfying. One of the biggest complaints I heard about the Game of Thrones ending was that characters, mainly Jon Snow, started and ended in the exact same place, because it rendered their character arcs pointless. This doesn’t just apply to characters either. If the village/country/world is being ruled by a tyrant, don’t end the story with a different, but just as tyrannical, guy in charge.

2) Tonal Dissonance: Call me crazy, but an ending depends very heavily on the story that precedes it. If the novel has been gritty and dark the whole time, it shouldn’t have a bright, clean “everything’s all better now and everyone’s happy” ending. Similarly, if a book deals with some pretty light topics, or it’s a general coming-of-age story, having everyone die or something horrible happen at the end doesn’t make sense. Don’t have a general fiction novel turn into a spy thriller in the last 20%.

1) Death. All of the DEATH: I’m going to say this, and then get off my soapbox. (This applies more to shows than books, but whatever). I’m a fan of redemption arcs, when done well. I know that sometimes, characters need to die. However, just because a series is ending doesn’t mean you have to kill the main character. “Hero sacrifices his/her life to save the world” is good sometimes, but not others. It’s not the only type of sacrifice that can take place. And, in stories that are about a character finding redemption, killing them off cheapens that redemption.

Five Endings I Love

5) Foreshadowed: I love endings that are foreshadowed enough to give me a hint at what’s going to happen, but not so much that I can guess at the start what’s going to happen. The right amount of foreshadowing makes it look like the author planned and outlined the story really well, and upon editing, refined some of those ideas/plotpoints.

4) Clear Intent: Every book has a theme, or a message the author is trying to put across. The trick is for the author to make it clear what he or she is trying to say. Even if I didn’t like the way the book’s main conflict is resolved, if it’s clear that the author had a specific intent and the ending drives that intent home, I view it as a good ending. I don’t like Animal Farm all that much, but Orwell’s closing sentences did exactly what they were supposed to do and left the reader with the exact message as he was trying to send.

3) Emotionally satisfying: Some stories have happy endings. Some are more bittersweet. And some have dark endings. Which one works and which one doesn’t depends on the story. A lot of series have these, a lot do not. if a book has a central mystery, the mystery needs to be solved. If it’s about overthrowing a dystopian government, government need to get overthrown. As I mentioned above, you can’t give a dark story a happy, shiny ending. And if at the end, I’m wondering why I wasted my time reading/watching this, it wasn’t satisfying. As example of a conclusion that wasn't emotionally satisfying was the White Walker storyline in Game of Thrones. While seeing Arya kill the Night King was cool, it wasn’t emotionally satisfying because the Night King had been a major part of Jon’s story, not Arya’s.

2) Can’t Go Back: Would you like to know what one of my favorite film moments of all time is? It’s in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, when Frodo explains to Sam why he’s sailing to the Undying Lands. He says “We set out to save the Shire, Sam. And it has been saved, but not for me.” I love this scene because its one of the few scenes where a character acknowledges how much their journey has changed them. Frodo saved the Shire, saved all of Middle Earth, and he returns home to find that he doesn’t belong there anymore. Endings that acknowledge this, whether its to this extent or a lesser one, will always outrank one’s where the hero accomplishes their goal and goes home.

1) Not Really An End: I like stories that don’t wrap every single thing up. This isn’t the same thing as an ambiguous ending, though, where you either don’t know what the ending means or the major conflict felt unfinished. I like being able to close the book, knowing how the main conflict was resolved, but still wondering what happened next. It speaks to the idea that nothing every really ends.

Those were some book (and TV) endings that I hated and some that I loved. What are your opinions on endings? Which ones do you dislike? What ending is your favorite? 

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