February 2021 Wrap Up
Despite all the big plans I had for February's reading, I didn't get all that much reading done. Between a major mental health crisis and reading a 1400 page book, not much reading got done. But let's review it just for funsies.
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger - I had a hard time getting into this one. It started out reading a lot like a middle grade book. The content wasn't young, but the writing just felt like it was aimed at a middle grade audience. The story eventually got very good and I enjoyed it. Elatsoe is a Native teen whose cousin is killed in a tragic accident, but at the time of his death, he appears to Elatsoe and tells her he was murdered and by whom. She gets her parents and her best friend involved and they go after the guy who did it. There is a lot of paranormal involvement, including some crazy vampires. My favorite character is the ghost dog.
The Paper Girl of Paris by Jordyn Taylor - I don't generally love WWII fiction. This one was pretty good. It had a dual timeline. One in WWII and one in current day Paris. Alice's grandmother died and left her an apartment in Paris that hadn't been touched since WWII. In that apartment, she found out that her grandmother's sister had been a Nazi sympathizer. Or was she? I don't want to ruin the ending in case anyone who reads this is interested, but the end did NOT go as I anticipated. Taylor really went places most YA fiction authors don't go. I'm excited to read her next book which is NOT set in WWII.
The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang - I read this just for fun, even though it is a YA graphic novel. It's about a very talented dressmaker who gets hired by the Royal Palace as a dressmaker. After she gets there, she finds out that she will be making dresses for the Prince to go out in the evenings as Lady Crystallia. It's fine until his parents want to make him get married. He and the dressmaker fight and things go horribly wrong. It's a cute story and has an important message about personal style.
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo - I did it! It's been at least a decade since I tackled a huge classic like this one. It took more than 6 weeks, but I did it. The sheer mass of the book made my hands ache while I was reading, but I did it. What's more, I want to re-read it and annotate it with notes and page flags and highlighting. It was a really juicy book. I mean, only about half of it was actual story. The rest of it was tirades about things like slang and the gamin children of Paris, etc. Aside from the 50 pages about Waterloo, I enjoyed the asides.
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio - I read this one for a work book club that finishes up this month. It's about the things people who are undocumented in America have to do to survive. For example, in Flint, MI, when the water went bad, they only posted information about it in English. And then they sent people door to door to tell people not to drink the water, but undocumented people don't open the door to just anyone. Most of them found out about the water crisis from their family and friends in Mexico, who heard it on Univision. This is the sort of thing she talks about in her book. It's very enlightening.
**The F*ck It Diet** by Caroline Dooner - This books is really fascinating and gave me a lot of hope for changing my feelings about food and eating in general. I know someone who lost 80 pounds on this non-diet, so I'm hoping for the best? So far I've gotten much better about not stressing about how much I'm eating or which foods are "good" or "bad". We'll see.
And that's it! That's all I read this month. Here's hoping for a better reading month in March because I'm 4 books behind, but I'm not stressed about it. I'll catch up eventually.
What did you read in February?