2020 Reading Challenge Reviews: Books 5 & 6
Hello readers!
As you can see from the title of this post, I skipped book 4. Book 4 was an ARC that I read through NetGalley that has it's own post two weeks ago. I like to try and review my ARCs as I finish them, and I try to read them in a reasonable amount of time for the author and publisher. This means, that sometimes the ARC reviews will cut in line from the other book reviews I post each week. (That's why my review for book 4 came before my review for book 3).
Books 5 and 6 were both books I received from Book of The Month. I love Book of The Month, and recently became a BFF for getting 12 months worth of books from them. One of my goals this year is to try and keep up better with reading my Book of The Month books as I get them. Sometimes I end up deciding one book is just not enough, and get multiples a month though so I'm playing a little catch up right now.
Here are my book reviews for my 5th and 6th books of 2020:
I gave this book 2/5 stars on Goodreads. This was one of my books from January 2020 for Book of The Month. Unfortunately, I wasn't thrilled with this choice. To be completely honest, I don't think the description on Goodreads or Book of The Month really prepared me for what I was about to read.
First, Book of The Month usually gives warnings when a book might contain topics or plot points that could be sensitive to some readers. This one did not have a warning, and I thought it could've benefited from one.
I'm going to try not to go into much detail, but this book is described on Goodreads as containing "sex, violence, and self-loathing", so if you are not interested in reading about that or it makes you uncomfortable, please skip to Book 6's review below.
There will be a bit of spoilers in this paragraph, because frankly, I'm not sure how to avoid them and give this book a comprehensive review, but I'll try to keep them to a minimum. This book opens right away with discussions between women about their sex lives, past experiences, and touches on friendships and family life a bit. However, in my interpretation, most of the conversations seemed to have some basis in sexual desire and what the women were looking for in a romantic relationship. Not all of these discussions described situations that felt, as a reader, entirely consensual. However, the women in the novel did not typically describe them as such.
I think this is an incredibly important topic, and perhaps this would be a good book to read with an open minded book club to discuss and understand better how different women in our lives think and what they go through. Some reviews that I saw stated that this book made them feel 'raw' and felt like their 'innermost thoughts were put to paper' and things of that nature; however, personally I did not feel the same. As I stated above, I do think this would be a good book to open discussions up with though. (As long as everyone in the discussion had some warning of the sensitivity of topics before entering the conversation).
Book 6: Fate of the Fallen by Kel Kade
I gave this book 3/5 stars on Goodreads, but it deserved at least 3.5. This was my October 2019 choice from Book of the Month.
This story opens with best friends Mathias and Aaslo, one discovers it is his destiny to save the world, and drags his best friend into his quest as well. However, the world isn't exactly helping their would-be saviors. Instead, choosing to either retreat or surrender to evil. The friends need to figure out how to become heroes and save the world on their own, or at least survive the apocalypse.
This book is described as the first in a new style of fantasy series where there aren't always happy endings and things can go terribly, terribly wrong. It has some comedic moments, while still retaining some traditional fantasy elements, and I think that's great.
I absolutely love fantasy novels. Without giving too much away I love that this had some of those traditional elements like prophecy and fated heroes, etc. However, I adore that it had a lot of really unique twists and surprises. At the same time it is great high fantasy while also being nothing like any fantasy I've ever read and that is truly amazing.
The reason for the drop in stars on this one is that it took me a little while to get invested in it. But now I can not wait for the next in the series to come out.
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