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Hey guys it's Trina and this is my October reading wrap-up. This month I was
planning on reading these five books and out of those five I ended up reading
four of them. And I did attempt to read The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab but I
just wasn't in the mood for it so I decided to put it down. For now it is a
DNF. Maybe I'll come back to it in the future because I do want to read all
of her books but I just really wasn't in the mood for it. But four out of five
books on my TBR did get read this month. I read a total of six books this month
and out of those six only one of them was an audiobook. I did just upload an
audiobooks wrap up if you guys want to hear my thoughts on some of the previous
audiobooks that I've listened to. Getting in to my reviews of the books
that I read this month, I'm gonna start at the bottom of my ratings and work my
way up. It may come as quite a surprise to a lot of you if you've been with me
and my channel for a long time, but my least favorite book of the month was a
Mindy McGinnis book. I now. Who am I? I don't know. I'm having an identity crisis
right now. I love Mindy McGinnis. She's one of my
favorite authors. I was really anticipating the release of This
Darkness Mine and this one is a YA contemporary thriller mystery about a
girl who thinks that her dead twin who she absorbed in their womb is now trying
to take over her life. It's a weird book, it's very strange, and the reasons I did
not like this one were mostly personal reasons. Really it just came down to like
a lot of personal triggers for me. So a lot of this book does take place in a
medical hospital and it deals with things like surgeries and just being
hospitalized for a long amount of time and those things are personal fears of
mine. I had a surgery a year ago, I am about to face being in the hospital for
childbirth, while reading this book I had a trip to
the emergency department because of a health thing - that was not related to
pregnancy or anything, don't worry about that. I'm fine, everything's fine. But I
was really really uneasy and uncomfortable reading parts of this book.
I had to put it down a couple of times. I'd just be like, 'this
is not happening to me, I'm okay.' You know, like, I just get in my head and think
what if this happens to me? And Mindy is a writer who writes things very
descriptively, she doesn't shy away from gore and stuff like that so there are
also a couple of scenes of injury and one of them is self-injury and they're
just very descriptive and gory and I wanted to throw up. So it just happened
that this book made me a little too uncomfortable. Plus the main character is
extremely unlikeable, and I don't normally hate books because the main characters
are unlikable. That's not something that will make me dislike a book and I can
totally see like what Mindy was doing with her character and showing that all
these ways that this character thinks she is perfect, that's not actual
perfection. So like I see the reasons the character was that way but I kind of
hated her which made it hard for me to get into her story, for me to care. Some
other books I've read that have similar plots and similar like endings and
characters I also haven't liked, so it was just kind of a not for me thing but
I see the appeal and I think that this is gonna be for a lot of readers. My
favorite thing about this book was the ending. I thought it was kind of chilling
and like seeing how everything led up to that I still definitely see the appeal
if you like thrillers with dislikable characters, if you aren't bothered by the
idea of hospitalization or descriptive gore or injury and stuff like that. I
didn't like this book. I've read a lot of the negative reviews
on it and I disagree with a lot of those negative reviews. those weren't the
reasons that I disliked it. But if you like weird this is probably a book for you. [laughs]
Next I read The Rattled Bones by S. M. Parker.
This was another one of my most anticipated releases of the year - I
really loved this author's first book - and it kind of let me down. So I just was
having a month like that. The Rattled Bones is about a girl who lives in Maine,
she works on a lobster boat, she's dealing with the recent loss of her
father, and she suddenly starts seeing a ghost everywhere and kind of delving
into a mystery of a nearby island, like something really bad happened there to
the local residents years and years ago. I do think it definitely was very
fitting for like an October fall theme, like
it had those kind of atmospheric vibes. The strong point of this book is that it
is extremely atmospheric. You will really get a sense of the location. A big weak
point of this book to me was that not enough mystery happened and there were
so much time spent at the girl's just day-to-day job. She works on a lobster
boat and I feel like after reading this book I could go work on a lobster
boat. Like I would know kind of the rounds of it because it's described like
almost every single chapter, her day working on the boat in great detail even
though we just had those descriptions the chapter before. So like, you know, it
was a little too much emphasis on that where that had nothing to do with really
the plot and a little less emphasis than I would have liked on the actual mystery.
Things wrapped up really quickly in the end. I don't know how I felt about it.
Like, it's just not my favorite mystery but I do still like this author,
definitely want to check out more by her. One small side thing that I really
appreciated is that there is an abusive relationship explored in this book. It's
just kind of a side thing. Like, it's happening, there's this main plot
happening with this girl doing these big things but she's also dealing with a
manipulative boyfriend and you know that's not the front and center but it
still is a part of her life and she handles it well and so I enjoyed reading
about that, and that was what the author's first book was about - it was all
about an abusive relationship - so that's something that I appreciate about this
writer. But for me he was just a little bit lacking. There were a couple of
really creepy moments in it though, so if you're looking for a couple of scares
without any like big scares this might do it for you. Then I read The Sword of
Summer, which is the first book in the Magnus Chase series by Rick Riordan. This
one is about Norse mythology and we are following a teenager who finds out that
he is the son of a Norse god and he gets wrapped up in like the end of the world
that's about to happen and this big war that has been you know prophesied forever.
This book was sent to me by Disney Hyperion just to kind of you know
promote it in a past video but I did genuinely want to read this series. This
one I think the character is like 16, which normally I think is a YA age but it
very much reads like middle grade or at least that it would be very appropriate
for middle grade readers or maybe like a transition. It's pretty clean.
A lot of times the characters like censor themselves if there's gonna be
like a curse word or something. I think that if you liked the Percy Jackson
series you would definitely enjoy this one too because the main character
Magnus Chase is just as snarky, he still has that sense of humor, which is
something that carried me through the series which I really enjoyed. Now I am a
little bit less familiar with Norse mythology than I was with Greek
mythology so a lot of stuff in this book kind of went over my head. The one
biggest criticism I would really have in this book, which isn't really a bad thing
it was just like a me thing - I felt like this book was kind of too cluttered. Like,
it just went from action to action to action to action. There were no low
points to really get to know the characters or if there were they were
very brief moments and so a lot happened but that's kind of typical of Riordan's
series. But I did enjoy it overall and I want to see where the series goes and I
definitely think you would like this if you liked his Percy Jackson series. Next
I read Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas, which is a YA mystery about a group
of friends that goes on spring break to Aruba and one of them ends up being
murdered and the local authorities think someone in their group did it. This book
has been recommended to me so many times by so many people and so this month when
I like wasn't getting the real suspenseful vibes out of the books I had
picked for my October mysteries I just randomly on a whim decided to go back to
this one and finally check it out and it did not disappoint.
I really had fun with this book. It's not a perfect book, there's a lot of stuff
that I think a lot of readers are not gonna like, like slut-shaming, but oh my
gosh the suspense is the type of suspense that I need when I'm reading a
mystery. It just propelled me through it. I always needed to know what was going
to happen. I was always questioning everything,
trying to figure it out, and I did like the ending. Um, it's not the best that I
would have enjoyed and I wish there had been a little bit more closure because
things were a little bit quick but I really enjoyed the ride. And something
that I really loved about this book was the format. It jumps around in time, so
one chapter will be like during the spring break trip before the character
was murdered, another chapter will be like a transcript interview between an
investigator and one of the suspects, another chapter will be like after
the trial has happened and what these characters are going through now. And for
some reason a lot of times formats like that can feel kind of jumbled but it
worked for me. I was totally just in the right mood for this book. Definitely a
case of the right book at the right time. It got me out of a little reading funk
that I was feeling, kind of like re-energized me, so I really enjoyed this
and I would recommend it if you're looking for a really fast-paced mystery.
This month I also read The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo, which is her
collection of short stories that exist within the Grishaverse world. So this is
not following either of her Grisha series, the Grisha or the Six of Crows
series. It's not following any of those characters. These are like the bedtime
stories that those characters in that world might have heard as they were
growing up. Like how we have Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast, they would have
these kind of stories set in their world. There are six stories in this book and
three of them were previously published online for free years ago
and so I had previously read those three and I absolutely loved them. These
stories are like my favorite novellas or short stories, like just supplementary
content to a series that are out there. They're so rich and just beautiful and
they made me realize that I want to start reading like more things based on
folktales and lore and maybe get into more retellings because they're
just beautiful. I really love them and the three new stories were just as
beautiful. The only criticism I could say of it is that some of the stories ended
kind of weak. They were just kind of abruptly over and I don't know maybe
they could have been stronger endings but the stories themselves were just so
magical and whimsical and I really enjoyed them and the ideas that were in
them. The illustrations were also very beautiful. They kind of like grow as the
story grows so it's just a very visually pleasing book and I really enjoyed it.
If you've read the Grishaverse books you don't have to read this. It doesn't
have any information in it that's crucial to those series. And if you
haven't read those books you can read this by itself if you want to. Again,
they're not really related. It's just kind of like these are the fairy tales
that might exist in that fantasy world. So yeah, I would recommend it if you like
fairy tales at all. It was really fun. And the last book
that I read this month was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK
Rowling, which is the third book in the Harry Potter series. I listened to this
one on audiobook. I am doing a reread of the series via the audio because I've
never listened to them before. I've always credited Prisoner of Azkaban
to be my favorite in the series but that's because it was the first book
that I actually read in the series. I watched the first two movies before I
decided 'you know what I like Harry Potter, I'm gonna try to read them,' so then
I got the third book and a funny thing was when I was trying to decide if I
actually wanted to read it I had looked up an online like full plot summary
spoiler synopsis and it's talking about how Ron's rat is really a dude. And I was
like, 'that's stupid. That can't really be what the third book is about.' So I went
and bought the third book and I was surprised when that [laughing] turned out to really
be what this was about. It sounded so strange to me at the time but then you
know that was really the plot [laughs]. But it was the first of the books that I
read so it kind of holds a strong sentimental spot in my heart. I really
did enjoy getting to listen to it. I have said this a couple of times as I've been
rereading the series but the audiobook just brings it to life in a whole new
way. If you haven't listened to this series on audio and you love the series
I definitely would recommend checking out that format if you're able to
because it's just delightful. So that's what I read in October. I would love to
hear from you guys if you've read any of these books if you want to discuss them
more in the comments or if you have any questions about them that I didn't
really address in this video you can definitely feel free to ask me down
there and I will do my best to answer you. And I would love to know what your
favorite read of October was. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see
you in the comments. Bye!
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