All the Crooked Saints
January 2018 Reading Wrap-Up
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review: No
Reading Dates: January 6
Read Count: 1
Favorite Thing: Sneaky sneaky sneaky!
Least Favorite Thing: Ooooh Nick is such a douche!
I’m so grateful to Kelsie @ BilboBookins for putting Gillian Flynn back on my radar and making me really consider reading her books and Marina @ The Review Marina for her review which put to rest my worries about whether having liked the movie, I could enjoy the book too. If it hadn’t been for these two I probably wouldn’t have picked up this amazing book at all and I’d have really missed out!
Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Review: Yes
Reading Dates: January 7 – 10
Read Count: 1
Favorite Thing: The diet secrets “monologue”.
Least Favorite Thing: Boredom.
For something with “Gilmore Girls” all over the cover, it had surprisingly little Gilmore Girls in it. (This is neither a good nor bad thing, just an observation.)
My Posts About Talking as Fast as I Can
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review: No
Reading Dates: December 27 – January 11
Read Count: 1
Favorite Thing: The way Beatriz thinks.
Least Favorite Thing: Waiting for something to Happen in the beginning of the novel.
As I mentioned in my rating post, my complaint about this book was just that it was hard to get into, but I really think it’s worth it.
My Posts About All the Crooked Saints
Jackaroo by Cynthia Voigt
(Tales of the Kingdom, book 1)
Rating: ★★★★★
Review: Yes
Reading Dates: January 11 – 12
Read Count: 4-ish?
Favorite Thing: Burrrrl!
Least Favorite Thing: Cam is so much more annoying than he was when I first read this in middle school lol
This is my favorite series, and this is one of my favorite stories from the series. It makes me so sad that no one seems to know about these books anymore (admittedly they are a bit old, but they are so good)!
On Fortune’s Wheel by Cynthia Voigt
(Tales of the Kingdom, book 2)
Rating: ★★★★★
Review: No
Reading Dates: January 12 -15
Read Count: 4-ish?
Favorite Thing: Birle at the end, with Nan.
Least Favorite Thing: The part at the slave market where that nasty fucker shoves his fingers in Birle’s mouth while he’s deciding if he wants to buy her. I literally had to stop reading and go brush my teeth, the passage evoked that visceral a response from me. (Actually I may need to again now just remembering…)
This one always gives me a little trouble during Part 1, because it moves slowly, but once I get past that, Parts 2 & 3 speed by so fast because this book is amazing.
Note: Also published as The Tale of Birle, which is the copy I actually read this time, since I don’t have access to my own copy right now.
My Posts About On Fortune’s Wheel
Live Through This by Mindi Scott
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review: Yes
Reading Dates: January 17
Read Count: 1
Favorite Thing: That life goes on as normal even with the bad things that are happening.
Least Favorite Thing: I wish we got to know what came next. I mean I get it, but I still wish.
Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault
Despite the harsh subject matter, I really liked this book.
My Posts About Live Through This
Counterfeit Son by Elaine Marie Alphin
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Review: No
Reading Dates: January 20
Read Count: 2
Favorite Thing: The sailing.
Least Favorite Thing: The mom at the end. Spoiler: [start] I just hate that the book ended without her even acknowledging that he was really her son or anything other than standing there… [end]
I’m not sure what made me think of this book all of a sudden, but once I did I suddenly also wanted to reread it.
My Posts About Counterfeit Son
Gallows Hill by Lois Duncan
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Review: Yes
Reading Dates: January 25 – 26
Read Count: 1
Favorite Thing: Piecing together all the little tidbits that didn’t get direct explanations.
Least Favorite Thing: The usage of the g*psy slur & negative stereotyping of Romani people. (It was a part of the characterization of the antagonists, but it was still left a bad taste in my brain.)
I decided to go on a Lois Duncan reading kick, and Gallows Hill was the first one I grabbed.
The Wings of a Falcon by Cynthia Voigt
(Tales of the Kingdom, book 3)
Rating: ★★★★★
Review: No
Reading Dates: January 21 – 29
Read Count: 4-ish?
Favorite Thing: Oriel & Griff’s friendship.
Least Favorite Thing: Merlis…
Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. The Thing literally gets harder every time I reread this even knowing it’s coming!
Note: Also published as The Tale of Oriel, which is the copy I actually read this time, since I don’t have access to my own copy right now.
My Posts About The Wings of a Falcon
The Third Eye by Lois Duncan
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Review: Yes
Reading Dates: January 30
Read Count: 1
Favorite Thing: I liked the mechanics of Karen’s gift. Especially the heightened sense of smell. That was interesting.
Least Favorite Thing: Did we really need such a detailed description of a dead dog?
This was the second book on my Lois Duncan kick. I liked it better than the first one I think.
First Lines Fridays: January 19, 2018
First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book!
First Lines:
You can hear a miracle a long way after dark.
Interested? Scroll down for the cover and summary!
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater
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.
By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of it’s artistry and religion of it’s mutability.
– Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints, page 185
Version:
Hardcover, 311 pages
Published October 10th 2017 by Scholastic Press
We took it for granted that two creatures met and mated and made another creature, when we would not expect a cloud or a fire or a cooking pot to be fashioned in the same way.
– Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints, page 181
Version:
Hardcover, 311 pages
Published October 10th 2017 by Scholastic Press
The concept of perfection exists only so that we have something to strive toward: Impossibility is built into it which is why we call it perfect instead of extremely good.
– Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints, page 139
Version:
Hardcover, 311 pages
Published October 10th 2017 by Scholastic Press
Perhaps without trees or cities to dampen the enormity of the feelings, they spread out hugely.
– Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints, page 88
Version:
Hardcover, 311 pages
Published October 10th 2017 by Scholastic Press
She was eighteen years old, a hippie Madonna with dark hair parted evenly on either side of her face, a nose shaped like a J, and a small, enigmatic mouth that men would probably describe as a rosebud but Beatriz would describe as “my mouth.”
– Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints, page 7
Version:
Hardcover, 311 pages
Published October 10th 2017 by Scholastic Press
Completed: All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It took me a while to get to the halfway point, it felt like it was moving quite slowly, but once I reached halfway I didn’t want to put it down, so if you’re struggling at the beginning don’t get discouraged.
WWW Wednesday: January 10, 2018
Welcome to WWW Wednesday! This meme was formerly hosted by MizB at Should be Reading and revived on Taking on a World of Words. Just answer the three W’s!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
Currently Reading: Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham
I grabbed this one because I was getting a little stuck on the other book I’m reading. Lauren has a quarter-serious, mostly comical way of looking at her life and it’s pretty fun to read.
I almost feel as if she’s sitting there just chatting to me rather than me just being curled up reading a book.
I’m looking forward to finding out about behind-the-scenes Gilmore Girls things, but I don’t see how she can top the Top-Secret Hollywood Secrets on dieting.
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater
I am both enjoying, and not enjoying this book…
Basically, it’s fascinating and strange, exactly like I was hoping it would be. But I don’t like it as much as I hoped.
I was warned that it might seem less magical than TRC, which when I first started I thought was erroneous, but the more I read of it the more I start to see what they meant. That’s not to say there isn’t any magic, in fact there’s quite a lot. But that’s my problem. There’s so much magic, it feels… somehow less magical…. And I can’t really explain that very well, but there it is.
Recently Finished: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The decision to read this was pretty spur of the moment. Some other readers had made me want to try out Gillian Flynn’s novels, but I wasn’t going to for little while yet. And then I just sort of…. did? I have no idea what made me do it, but I’m sooo glad!
It was amazing. Except for the parts where I wanted to climb into the book and push Nick off something tall for being a pretentious douche… But otherwise, completely amazing!
I’ve already ordered it online because I know I’m going to want to reread it.
Reading Next: Jackaroo (Tales of the Kingdom, book 1) by Cynthia Voigt
I’ve found myself in a major YA Fantasy mood and I haven’t even managed to finish the two books I’m currently reading!
I thought about looking for a book I hadn’t read before, but I know how much I love the Tales of the Kingdom books so I’m going to reread them yet again. After all, it’s been just slightly over a year since I reread them last!
The hard part will be making myself wait to start until I finish the two books I’m already on.
Darkestwings Reads