#five books but i wrote way too much about all of them ajdsofpiads

[starswallowingsea]

conjure up everything you have cause I want to know if you have any book recommendations (any genre will do)

BOY DO I. I ended up going off on all of these but know that I love all of these books deeply.

So first off I have to mention Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. I read this book for the first time when I was 16 and it changed who I am as a person. Also I picked two of my names from this book. It starts off as a kind of journal/diary/confession of our main character (Queenie) about her time in a Nazi prison in France after being caught while trying to infiltrate the country. They tell her to tell them everything she knows about the Allied war effort, specifically looking at aerial assaults, which gives Queenie an excuse to talk about how she met her best friend. The buys her time for a while, as she does sprinkle in what looks like useful information into her narrative but eventually her time runs out. Make no mistake, this book is a tragedy and will tear your heart out in more ways than one. It's very slow going but I promise it'll be worth it if you can get into it.

In the same vein, I also recently finished the Paris Orphan by Natasha Lester. This book follows a model turned journalist named Jessica May (based on the actual photographer Lee Miller) as she deals with sexism and misogyny during the war effort in trying to do what she wants to do, which is reporting on the war front. Jess meets a soldier named Dan who she instantly connects with while trying not to die in a trench because the field hospital she was supposed to be stationed at turned out to be under fire, and he introduces her to a child he has been looking after since his brother was killed (it's not his brother's child, she's the child of two French citizens who were trying to flee the country and couldn't take a child with them, but she takes to Jess and Dan as her parental figures very quickly). This one is also a bit heavier and includes suicide and rape, but it is still very very good.

Next I'll jump briefly to non-fiction and recommend the book T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez. It's written by one of the lead scientists trying to figure out what killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. While it is about geology and physics, it's not too dense and written in a way most people will understand what's going on, and explanations are provided for anything that wouldn't be comprehensible to the average lay person. Absolutely fascinating read.

Then we have an Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. I found this one on youtube and it sounded interesting and boy was it. It's a fantasy novel set in the Middle East/Western Asia and incorporates the culture into the story very well. It follows two main characters, the son of the overbearing military leader who just wants to run away and live a quiet life and the daughter of two scholars who wants to see her people free to live their lives without fear of being enslaved. Laia, the scholar girl, watches her only remaining family killed and imprisoned before her very eyes, barely managing to escape herself and looks for help in the resistance. Elias, the military leader's son, is planning on running away to the South before he is nominated to take part in a series of trials to become the next Emperor and decides to stay. While I wasn't the biggest fan of the romance in this book, it's not overbearing. Content warnings for violence, death, rape, and slavery for this one.

And finally, Cain by Jose Saramago. This one was recommended to me by one of my professors last semester and it's a relatively quick read at like 160 pages. It's a bible retelling focusing on Cain, where he is cursed by God to wander the world for the rest of his days. He finds himself traveling through time (or in the words of the book, different presents) and interrupting different bible stories to spite God. The writing style takes a little bit to get used to as it's just very long sentences with dialogue only indicated by the usage of capital letters starting new dialogue tags, but it doesn't take very long to get used to it. As for content warnings, if you'd find it in the bible you'll find it here (death, rape, incest mentions).