I’ve been reading a lot lately, and I’ve racked up quite a list. Some of my favorite reads this month span from contemporary all the way to high fantasy. Maybe you’ll be interested in something in this list too!
The Hate U Give
One of my faves this month, I just couldn’t put it down. I bought it on Audible so I could listen to it on my commute to work, and I’ve been late several times because I had to stay in the car and keep listening!
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.
But what Starr does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
A Torch Against the Night
I read An Ember in the Ashes last semester and it was the first book since Red Queen that made me stay up all night just to finish it. An Ember in the Ashes wasn’t a small book, and neither was A Torch Against the Night. I devoured this book!
Elias and Laia are running for their lives. After the events of the Fourth Trial, Martial soldiers hunt the two fugitives as they flee the city of Serra and undertake a perilous journey through the heart of the Empire.
Laia is determined to break into Kauf—the Empire’s most secure and dangerous prison—to save her brother, who is the key to the Scholars’ survival. And Elias is determined to help Laia succeed, even if it means giving up his last chance at freedom.
But dark forces, human and otherworldly, work against Laia and Elias. The pair must fight every step of the way to outsmart their enemies: the bloodthirsty Emperor Marcus, the merciless Commandant, the sadistic Warden of Kauf, and, most heartbreaking of all, Helene—Elias’s former friend and the Empire’s newest Blood Shrike.
Bound to Marcus’s will, Helene faces a torturous mission of her own—one that might destroy her: find the traitor Elias Veturius and the Scholar slave who helped him escape…and kill them both.
A Court of Thorns and Roses
I started ACOTAR hesitantly. I’ve read Throne of Glass and it wasn’t my favorite, and neither was Maas’s writing. But good ol’ JM Tuckerman loved loved loved it and insisted that I read it. Maas’s writing had definitely improved with age and whenever I picked A Court of Thorns and Roses up, it was a struggle to put it down!
When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast-like creature arrives to demand retribution for it. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she only knows about from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not an animal, but Tamlin—one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled their world.
As she dwells on his estate, her feelings for Tamlin transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie and warning she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But an ancient, wicked shadow grows over the faerie lands, and Feyre must find a way to stop it . . . or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.
