All the Crooked Saints

Thursday Quotables: January 4, 2018

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This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week; whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written.

Darkness, though, grows like a cave formation. Slow drips from the uneasiness harden over the surface of a slick knob of pain. Over time, the darkness crusts in unpredictable layers, growing at such a pace that one doesn’t notice it has filled every cavern under the skin until movement becomes difficult or even impossible.

Summary:

Here is a thing everyone wants: a miracle.
Here is a thing everyone fears: what it takes to get one.

Any visitor to Bicho Raro, Colorado is likely to find a landscape of dark saints, forbidden love, scientific dreams, miracle-mad owls, estranged affections, one or two orphans, and a sky full of watchful desert stars.

At the heart of this place you will find the Soria family, who all have the ability to perform unusual miracles. And at the heart of this family are three cousins longing to change its future: Beatriz, the girl without feelings, who wants only to be free to examine her thoughts; Daniel, the Saint of Bicho Raro, who performs miracles for everyone but himself; and Joaquin, who spends his nights running a renegade radio station under the name Diablo Diablo.

They are all looking for a miracle. But the miracles of Bicho Raro are never quite what you expect.

Thank you Bookshelf Fantasies for this fun book meme!

What Are You Reading Wednesdays: January 3, 2018

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What Are You Reading Wednesdays #WAYRW is a weekly feature on It’s A Reading Thing. Everyone is welcome to participate.

Grab the book you are currently reading and answer three questions:

  1. What’s the name of your current read?
  2. Go to page 34 in your book or 34% in your eBook and share a couple of sentences.
  3. Would you like to live in the world that exists within your book? Why or why not?

  1. All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater
  2. Judith used to be the most beautiful woman in Bicho Raro, but then she’d moved, and now she was the most beautiful woman in Colorado Springs.
  3. I mean, I’d like to, as long as I don’t have to be a pilgrim. Because I know I have darkness inside me and I really do not want to know what it would manifest as! Yikes…

 

Musing Monday: January 1, 2018

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Musing Mondays is a weekly meme, hosted by Ambrosia at The Purple Booker, that asks you to choose one of the following prompts to answer:

I’m currently reading…
Up next I think I’ll read…
I bought the following book(s) in the past week…
I’m super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…
I’m really upset by (book/author/bookish-news)…
I can’t wait to get a copy of…
I wish I could read ____, but…
I blogged about ____ this past week…

THIS WEEK’S RANDOM QUESTION: Do you take part in any book challenges? If you do you find yourself keeping up and making the posts on the other blogs?

I’m currently reading…
All The Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater

I had been waiting to start this one and finally got it from the library last week. I’m only about 1/4 of the way in so far, but I’m liking it. The narrator is pretty funny and the descriptive language is fantastic as always with Maggie.

Do you take part in any book challenges? If you do you find yourself keeping up and making the posts on the other blogs?
I do the Goodreads challenge, but I’ve yet to try any other challenges. I would like to, and almost did last year, but I just kept forgetting like a dodo….

December 2017 Reading Wrap-Up

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The Waterless Sea by Kate Constable
(The Chanters of Tremaris, book 2)
Rating:  ★★★★☆
Review:  No
Reading Dates:  December 11 – 12
Read Count:  2
Favorite Thing:  Chanters vs. Pirates from the beginning.
Least Favorite Thing:  Ooomg so many sexist desert-dwellers!

I started to reread this series earlier in the year and then just totally got side-tracked, but I’m back now! (Also I think I completely blocked out the end….)

My Posts About The Waterless Sea

The Tenth Power by Kate Constable
(The Chanters of Tremaris, book 3)
Rating:  ★★★★☆
Review:  No
Reading Dates:  December 12
Read Count:  2
Favorite Thing:  The reveal about Cal’s family 🙂
Least Favorite Thing:  Um… Keela’s entire original personality?

Man I zipped through this one! I was so anxious because I couldn’t remember in detail how this book went so I just devoured it!

I definitely recommend the Chanters of Tremaris series to anyone who likes YA Magical Fantasy and those who, like me, love stories about nature magic.

My Posts About The Tenth Power

The Swan Maiden by Heather Tomlinson
Rating:  ★★★☆☆
Review:  Kinda?
Reading Dates:  December 12
Read Count:  2
Favorite Thing:  Lavena had me cackling!
Least Favorite Thing:  Seriously why does her entire family have to be Like That?? I just wanted to climb into the novel and systematically throttle them all…

I was actually surprised by how little of this story I remembered from when I first read it years ago.

My Posts About The Swan Maiden

The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan
(Trials of Apollo, book 1)
Rating:  ★★★☆☆
Review:  No
Reading Dates:  November 23 – December 13
Read Count:  1
Favorite Thing:  Actually dealt pretty well with the portrayal of a relationship between a child and their abusive parent.
Least Favorite Thing:  Apollo is so fucking annoying. I miss Percy.

Seriously the only parts of the book I truly loved were the parts with Percy. I didn’t even realize he was my favorite, but he’s obviously my favorite. Lovably sarcastic dork….

My Posts About The Hidden Oracle

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
(Brian’s Saga, book 1)
Rating:  ★★★★☆
Review:  No
Reading Dates:  December 13
Read Count:  2
Favorite Thing:  I love the way Brian thinks about things, like referring to the fire as his “new hungry friend”.
Least Favorite Thing:  That moose was a dick. (Honestly, I can’t think of anything I didn’t like about the story/writing.)

I’m really glad I decided to try rereading this again. I wanted to see if I still liked it after all these years and I think I actually like it more now.

My Posts About Hatchet

Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao
(Rise of the Empress, book 1)
Rating:  ★★★★★
Review:  Yes
Reading Dates:  December 15 – 18
Read Count:  1
Favorite Thing:  Had me totally rooting for someone I knew was technically a villain!
Least Favorite Thing:  I really didn’t need the mental images of killing small animals… (To be clear, it’s not often and it’s not like gratuitous slaughter, it’s just the descriptive language Julie C. Dao is good at made things a little too vivid for me for that particular couple scenes.)

I was so excited to get my hands on this book and it didn’t disappoint! I feel like wandering around town yelling about this book like a street preacher. Seriously, I recommend it to everyone, especially if you like fairy tale retellings.

(I almost put that my favorite thing was that there was literally zero white people in this entire novel, but I thought that might be a little tactless…oops!)

My Posts About Forest of a Thousand Lanterns

Mind Games by Kiersten White
(Mind Games, book 1)
Rating:  ★★★☆☆
Review:  No
Reading Dates:  October 22 – December 23
Read Count:  1
Favorite Thing:  Fia being all small and kick-ass.
Least Favorite Thing:  It just didn’t hold my attention very well…

I think it’s a pretty decent book, there was just something that made it hard to stay in the story. Still it ended on a minor cliffhanger so I guess I’ll be reading the sequel at some point!

My Posts About Mind Games

Hold Still by Nina LaCour
Rating:  ★★★★☆
Review:  No
Reading Dates:  December 23 – 26
Read Count:  1
Favorite Thing:  The photography.
Least Favorite Thing:  I’m surprised to find there isn’t really anything I didn’t like from this book. Everything felt very honest.

I was afraid this book would be really hard to read because of the subject matter, but it moved really well and was a very honest portrayal of grief and recovery.

My Posts About Hold Still

In Progress