October 2020 Wrap Up Pt. 2
So my last wrap up ended with The Left Handed Booksellers of London. I read 7 more books after that! I'm almost caught up to my reading goal! Here we go!
Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert - I really enjoyed this. I've been reading more romance books lately. Sometimes you just need a Happily Ever After when the world is on fire. Chloe is a young woman with fibromyalgia. It was so inspiring to read about a woman with an invisible illness. It is highly accurate in it's account of her life and struggles. The love interest is incredibly observant and respectful of her limits with her illness. This is almost unheard of in real life. She's a black woman and a little bit fluffy. The fact that she's black comes up exactly once. The fact that she's fluffy is only marginally hinted at. Neither of those things affects the story at all. I'm pretty excited to read the next books in the series!
The Companion by Katie Alender - I was nervous about reading this because I'm not really big on horror books. I told myself that since it is a YA horror book, it won't be that bad. It wasn't bad. It was very good. I did dream about houses for several days while I was reading it, but they were not nightmares. In this book, Margot is living in a group home because she was the sole survivor of a car crash that killed both parents and her two sisters. She wakes up screaming every night. Eventually, she goes to a foster home in the country to be the companion to a teen girl who is catatonic but can see and hear and feed herself. The house is extremely large and has closed off wings and the whole nine yards. Eventually, Margot works out that something very weird is going on and she is determined to figure it out. There is at least one glaring plot hole, but it doesn't take much from the enjoyment of the book.
The Dark Tide by Alicia Jasinska - This was a spooky book, good for Halloween reading. In this island community, the witches who live in the castle off the coast take a young man every year and drown him as a sacrifice to the sea to keep it from flooding the island. Recently, it hasn't been working because two years ago, the witch loved the boy so much that she let him go and sacrificed herself instead. The new witch wasn't able to fall in love with the boy she sacrificed last year, which is a requirement. This year, the same boy that was released two years ago is chosen again. Lina is in love with him and goes to the witches' castle to rescue him and offers herself in his place. Then all hell breaks loose. I enjoyed it. Lots of action and sea monsters and witches and baddies. It was pretty good.
Giant Days Volumes 12 and 13 by John Allison - I love these books. There is only one more graphic novel left in the series after these. Esther the goth is my favorite. We are getting on toward the end of their college days. They are looking for jobs and planning their lives after graduation.
The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson - This one is my favorite of the month. Immanuelle is the daughter of a woman who watched Immanuelle's father die by burning and then ran into the woods. There she met up with some witches. When she was about to give birth, she came back to her parents and died just after. Immanuelle was raised in this extremely religious community and ostracized because it's obvious her father was an Outlander (people who are mostly black). It's a horror novel with witches and curses and beasts, etc. which I wouldn't normally be interested in, but I'd heard such good things about this, I decided to give it a try. I wasn't actually scared at any point. The end gets a little gruesome, but not anything too gross. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this one.
Okay. That's it for October. I almost finished one more book, but I actually finished it in November, so it will have to wait. Let me know your thoughts about any of these books. Also, what you read in October.