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2024 Book Round up and Ranking!

This is gonna be a longgggggg one. I only just started getting back into reading this year and I've read 21 full length novels and 2 novella/short story collections and 3 middle grade novels (nostalgia). I have not read more than two full length novels in a single year in at least 5 years so while I know what I read is considered "not a lot" by some folks it was a tonnnnnn for me :)

First we'll start with my ranking. I'll only be ranking the full length YA/adult novels I read because I feel like it. I didn't dislike any of the books on this list because if I disliked a book I would have just DNFd it. Luckily I didn't have to do that this year! Also I pretty much only read fantasy books with a healthy dose of romance :3

Forging Silver into Stars (Forging Silver into Stars #1, Brigid Kemmerer)

Legendary (Caraval #2, Stephanie Garber)

The Queen of Nothing (TFOA #3, Holly Black)

Caraval (Caraval #1, Stephanie Garber)

The Wicked King (TFOA #2, Holly Black)

A Day of Fallen Night (Roots of Chaos #0, Samantha Shannon)

The Cruel Prince (TFOA #1, Holly Black)

Finale (Caraval #3, Stephanie Garber)

A Heart so Fierce and Broken (Cursebreakers #2, Brigid Kemmerer)

A Vow so Bold and Deadly (Cursebreakers #3, Brigid Kemmerer)

Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows #2, Leigh Bardugo)

A Curse so Dark and Lonely (Cursebreakers #1, Brigid Kemmerer)

The Prisoner's Throne (The Stolen Heir #2, Holly Black)

The Stolen Heir (The Stolen Heir #1, Holly Black)

A Curse for True Love (OUABH #3, Stephanie Garber)

The Ballad of Never After (OUABH #2, Stephanie Garber)

Once Upon a Broken Heart (OUABH #1, Stephanie Garber)

Priory of the Orange Tree (Roots of Chaos #1, Samantha Shannon)

Six of Crows (Six of Crows #1, Leigh Bardugo)

Heartless Hunter (Crimson Moth #1, Kristen Ciccarelli)

Morgan is my Name (Morgan le Fay #1, Sophie Keetch)

There's a few factors that determine which books I liked more, but the big one for me is simply how much I enjoyed reading the book. Of course good characters, good writing, and unique ideas matter, that's what adds to enjoyment usually, but at the end of the day if you hand me a book full of classic, overdone tropes written up in a fun, enjoyable way, I'll probably enjoy it.

Now on to me yelling about some of the books/series that left me with more thoughts than others (aka the real reason this post exists)

Forging Silver into Stars

Oh my god I cannot stop thinking about this book. I read it in May and anyone who will listen to me yell about books has probably heard me yell about this one and it's been months. My friends tell me it is a very "me" book and I could not agree more. If there were any book (other than my own) written for me, it would be this one. Dumb boys who can't communicate is one of my favourite things and this does a great job at it. Not to mention the friendship at risk because the characters fall in love with men on the opposite sides of a rebellion. Andddddd the aforementioned rebellion. This book simply brought me so much joy to read and it lives in my head rent free and I am dying waiting for Carving Shadows into Gold.

Caraval Trilogy

I think this trilogy did so many things right. The dynamic of the sister's and their wildly different personalities were super fun for me. And I loved the world so much. The whimsy and magic within this book are far beyond what I've encountered in most media I've consumed and it was absolutely delightful to read. I feel like I can't say much else because everything in this book feels like a spoiler haha. Also Jacks. I love him so much and for what?

The Folk of Air Trilogy

Oh my goddddddddddd. Jude and Cardan are everything. Absolutely everything. I loved this trilogy because it's just shitty people making each other worse and what's more fun than that? Jude is a really compelling protagonist and you're like "yeah she's awful but she literally could not have turned out any other way." AND CARDAN. The petulant boy king of Elfhame how I love you so. Every single thing about him is delightful from his silly tail to his tilted crown to the way he is absolutely useless in comparison to Jude. This man consumes many of my thoughts. I really loved that both characters went "they suck, I'll be worse" and committed to it. Super fun concept and a super fun world made for a delightful read.

A Day of Fallen Night

I know for the others I've covered them in their series, but honestly I just want to talk about ADOFN. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Priory, I liked it enough to read ADOFN after. But I loved ADOFN so much more. The characters in this one were just more compelling to me as were their story arcs. I thought the Sabradaz burn was slow but that was nothing compared to Wulf and Thrit or Nikeya and Dumai. And I lived for every second of these slow burning wicks. Not to mention how much I enjoyed seeing an older queer couple written with just as much energy, life, and drama as all the younger ones. I really loved seeing Glorian grow up too, seeing all the choices she made for her people and her kingdom was just really great. Andddd seeing how the world state in Priory came to be was really cool and I am very glad I read ADOFN after Priory.

Six of Crows Duology

SOC and CK fall at wildly different spots on my ranking, but ultimately they had the same successes and pitfall to me. Let's start with the pitfall, the main plot. Frankly I did not care about it at all in either book. It's largely just get rich, get revenge and that to me wasn't very compelling. In fact I got bored at times when the main plot was happening. Now that that's out of the way let's talk about what I loved. The characters and their relationships. Oh my god the characters. These have got to be some of the most enjoyable and colourful characters I have read this year. The reason CK ranks higher is largely because I loved the characters even more in CK, they just feel like they each get way more time to shine (since it's longer that makes sense though haha). I cannot express how much I love some of these characters. Wylan is my baby and deserves none of the awful shit that happens. I love him so much but if I don't cut myself off I will just talk about how much I love him for 3 paragraphs. So let's move on. Jesper is a fantastic comic relief character with a healthy dose of genuine character struggles. And Nina is amazing, I want to be her istg. Jesper and Nina are so incredibly relatable to me that every time I read their parts I was like "man, this is such a mood." AND THE RELATIONSHIPSSSS. Not just the romantic ones (but those were good and half my motivation for reading CK was to know if Wylan and Jesper kiss) but the friendships and found family of this novel absolutely got me.

Special Mention: The Night Circus

This is the novel that got me back into reading and the only reason it isn't on this list is because I read it at the tail end of 2023, I read it around Christmas time. This book is a great read though and I needed to talk about it. It takes the perfect amount of magic mixed with the real world and gives us characters you can't help but fall in love with and a storyline that keeps you engaged until the end. While I wasn't a huge fan of the ending, everything else was so wonderful that I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Starchaser

@escapingthroughfiction will not stop dragging me into fandoms and it's actually a problem

Anyway, have some Regulus and James bc they won't leave my brain nowwwwwwwwwww

I do not draw enough bc this took stupidly long for how simple it is LMAO

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where's that masterpost of quotes that have no right going as hard as they do. I'd like to submit "Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane"

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Jesper: I dont question my husbands choices because I’m one of them

Nina: Clever man

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So do I look like him?

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Wylan, looking up from his lunch that Jesper brought him: Are you my work husband?

Jesper: Your what?

Wylan: Work husband

Jesper: I’m your actual husband?

Wylan, nodding his head and going back to eating: My all the time husband

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Can we talk about how Jesper was an active gambling addict and still considered kissing Wylan to be better than the game?

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@amnesia-exe

Based on this post by @mymissalicorne

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@escapingthroughfiction you dragged me into this SOC hellhole (affectionate) so now you get tagged :)

this is wylan, unfortunately

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@amnesia-exe

A friend sent me that post and this was the result.

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Some of my favourite Crooked Kingdom quotes :)

So I finished Crooked Kingdom and this post is gonna be a lot less articulate than my last one about the series because...

Who the actual fuck let the last 100 pages of that novel happen???

They were so entertaining but aside from that they had some of the most beautiful sentiments and prose. So I am going to share my favourites from each character's POV in Part Six: Action & Echo :3

Nina: Page 455

"But she hadn't been made for shame."

"Nina had grieved for her loss of power, for the connection she'd felt to the living world. She'd resented this shadow gift. It had seemed like a sham, a punishment. But just as surely as life connected everything, so did death. It was that endless, fast-running river. She'd dipped her fingers into its current, held the eddy of its power in her hand. She was the Queen of Mourning, and in its depths, she would never drown."

It's such a beautiful sentiment and moment to watch her fully come to love herself again and her new power. I love Nina as a deeply relatable character and this was just so perfect to see her come back to loving and finding herself.

Inej: Page 460

"But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren't chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway."

This gave me chills. Everything about this is utterly gut wrenching and feels incredibly relatable. I reread that line probably 4 times before moving on.

Jesper: Page 471

"It's not a gift. It's a curse. But when it came down to it, Jesper's life had been full of blessings. His father. His mother. Inej. Nina. Matthias leading them across the muddy canal. Kaz--even Kaz, with all his cruelties and failings, had given him a home and a family in the Dregs when Ketterdam might have swallowed him whole. And Wylan. Wylan who had understood before Jesper ever had that the power inside him might be a blessing too."

Jesper realizing that for all the shit luck he has at tables he has been lucky enough to have amazing people in his life. It's just very sweet.

Matthias: Page 483

"Unnatural, said the old, determined voice. Beautiful, said the voice that had spoken the night he'd helped Jesper and Kuwei escape Black Veil. It was newer, less certain, but louder than ever before."

I love this part because it shows just how much Matthias has changed through the two books. It's beautiful and sweet and heartwarming.

Wylan: Page 427

"Wylan summoned every bit of bravado he'd learned from Nina, will he'd learned from Matthias, the focus he'd studied in Kaz, the courage he'd learned from Inej, and the wild, reckless hope he's learned from Jesper, the belief that no matter the odds, somehow they would win."

Okay... I cheated with Wylan's it's from his chapter just before Action & Echo... BUT, I think this sentiment is much more telling than anything in his Part Six chapter. I love this quote because it shows just how much his found family taught him. They're messy, they're brutal, and they're awful, but they are everything to each other. They teach each other, they help, they care, they tease, and that's way more than Wylan ever had at home.

Kaz: Page 480 & 529

"'I also had her stop at the Menagerie.'

She smiled then, her eyes red, her cheeks scattered with some kind of dust. it was a smile he thought he might die to earn again."

"'That's the laugh,' he murmured."

The second quote isn't from his chapter, it's from Inej's final one, but it conveys the same thing as the first quote. It shows what Kaz could have been, that somewhere in there he wants to show Inej can take his armour off, that he is willing to do it for her and I think it's just really gratifying to see.

That all being said chapter 42 was so evil. It had me going from sobbing of joy to sobbing of sorrow and back to joy in the span of 3 paragraphs istg. What the actual fuck Leigh Bardugo???

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SOC and CK allegories for the queer characters (and other thoughts)

I was going to make a separate blog to yell about books but I decided to do it here.

I AM NOT DONE CROOKED KINGDOM AT THE TIME OF WRITING THIS SO EVERYTHING I SAY IS HAVING ONLY READ HALF THE BOOK SO FAR.

The Grishaverse doesn't seem to have any form of homophobia, but SOC and CK are chalk fulllllllll of what I can only see as plots that mimic queer experiences for the queer characters in the main group.

We have four queer characters (that I know of at the moment): Jesper, Wylan, Nina, Kuwei.

So let's start with the obvious, three of the four are Grisha. Obviously not all Grisha are queer, but all the Grisha in the party are. This gives them an automatic plotline of "hide who you are".

It could be said that since Nina is Ravkan she wasn't raised that way, and no, she wasn't. However since leaving Ravka she has been forced to hide for her safety, and not only that but she is frequently told she's "too much" which sounds a lot to me like what some people say about queer people when they think queer people should be less queer. Also Matthias is all about being "traditional" and "proper" and Nina's whole thing is that she is neither. Traditional and proper sound a lottttt like some people's arguments to be homophobic.

Jesper's I think is rather obvious. His father has a clear concern for his son being Grisha since it can put your life at risk. In Jesper's argument with his dad he goes off and asks his dad why did he never let him go to Ravka where he could be himself and learn about himself and his powers. Oh not to mention the fact that him and his dad talk around him being Grisha like it's some sort of virus that can be caught by simply speaking the word.

Kuwei's took a second to hit me but when it did I was like "ah yep, makes sense" and this is probably because it took me a hot second to realize Kuwei was queer. Yeah, apparently him being jealous that Jesper only looked at Wylan a certain way didn't tip me off... ANYWAY THOUGH. Kuwei is also told to hide who he is, but his dad goes the extra length of literally making a drug to help him hide himself. Is it giving anyone else Dorian's dad from Dragon Age vibes??? Blood magic for the gay son???

FINALLY, I will talk about my baby, the character I love more than anything else. Wylan. Here's the thing about Wylan, while I was reading SOC I wasn't sure if homophobia existed in this world yet and I was half convinced that his dad disowned him because gay. While his dad obviously didn't do that, I still think at the end of the day it portrays an experience that is very similar. Wylan is shamed, hidden, and ultimately his dad tries to have him killed, all because he can't read. His dad loathes him over such a stupid reason, especially since Wylan is absolutely brilliant at tons of stuff and the cutest lil guy. But I think it's that hatred of his son over something so trivial that really lends itself to being about something else entirely, Wylan being queer.

All four of our queer characters in the main group have different plots, but ultimately they all circle around the idea of hiding who you are and being ashamed of who you are. That sounds like a very common queer experience if you ask me.

I don't know if this was intentional or just a huge coincidence. As a writer myself I am all too aware of how easily accidental metaphors and symbols can happen. But I think about it a lot as I'm reading so I wanted to shout about it either way. I also have no clue if this is a common idea or not, I just know when I pointed it out to my friends who had read the books prior, one of who loves and reads them yearly, they both kinda went "oh damn, you right," but didn't see it before I mentioned it.

Anyway, if I missed things (or you wanna yell at me about how wrong I am, which is usually the more likely option) I'd love to know thoughts :)

AND BONUS THOUGHTS

This one is super obvious but I just wanna say it. Jesper is ADHD and no one will change my mind in the history of ever. This man cannot sit still, has been described as having limitless energy, and he seeks constant immediate gratification in the form of gambling and adrenalin rushes. COME ON MAN. I know I know, there's a lore reason, something something Grisha not using magic blah blah. No. No. He is ADHD and you cannot tell me otherwise. And I love him dearly.

Also, not a theory or anything but, y'all, I love Wylan so much. I just wanna give him a hug and a lollipop and tell him it's okay. He's so cute.

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Misty Brightdawn

So I got sick this week and fell into MLP gen 5 bc I grew up loving gen 4 with all my heart that I finally took the plunge and watched alllll of gen 5 that is out (both TyT and MyM ofc).

And I loved it.

There's a lotta things that feel the same as gen 4 but a lot feels different in a good way. I love the more diverse character designs for one thing.

AND I LOVE MISTY MORE THAN MYSELF.

So here's Misty Brightdawn.

I've never drawn textured/coily hair before so I hope I did okay, and if anyone has advice I'll gladly take it!

Alsoooo, I realized after that her hair is more blue than purple but the screencaps I had had her in lighting that made it look purple so uhhhh, whoopsie?

Anyway, she lives in my brain rent free now :)

(Wow Jun consumes more than just JoJo's? And the absolute vibe switch between MLP and JJBA XDD)

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I'm making a game!

Well, the art for a game. @amnesia-exe is writing it and I am breathing LIFE into it with pictures. It's a Twine game, so there's a lot of choices to be made involving heartbreak, violence, and grocery shopping! It's gonna be dope, and there'll be an itch.io page made for it when it's ready :p. Till then, have a sneak peek at the images from the game's prologue!

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I have never been a huge fan of Dio, but the Phantom Blood Musical version of him has me absolutely screaming!!!! They cast him so perfectly and I loveeeee the costume design for him hehehe :3

This shot of him from the trailer gets me every time I had to draw it

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Okay but WHY IS DIO FROM THE PHANTOM BLOOD MUSICAL SO GORGEOUS?!

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I bet Jodio and Dragona would’ve looooved to know their great grandsomething killed the president