What I’ve Been Reading Lately (July, 2023)

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews1 Comment

Happy July!  Summer has arrived with a vengeance here; after a cooler June, July has had much hotter days.  Good for staying in and reading, I suppose!  I’ve been having a month of mostly fantasy books, which has always been a favorite, of course.  Lots of variety within that category, though!

I mentioned in my last update that I was reading a book about a character people forget – that book was The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab.  It sounds like the same premise as The Sudden Appearance of Hope, but it felt and played out very differently.  Hope felt like (fuzzy) science fiction, while this was straight fantasy.  Addie makes a deal with the devil – or at least, one of the “old gods” – in the early 1700s.  She gains “freedom” – immortality but also no one can remember her.  The book intercuts between stories of Addie’s past through the centuries and a modern story when she finally meets a man who can remember her.  This hits multiple story types I love, and there was a lot to enjoy here.  Her story felt deeply sad, though, in a way Hope didn’t, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied by the ending.  So I guess it was 98% of a very good book.

In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune was one I was hotly anticipating.  Klune wrote the incandescently wonderful House in the Cerulean Sea and the hilariously funny How to Be a Normal Person, so that sets up a ton of expectation!  It’s a bit of Pinocchio with a little Wizard of Oz, about a human who was raised by an android and then goes on a kind of quest with three robot friends. This definitely had a lot of Klune markers to it, a found family story where everyone is a little bit against the norm.  The book also, unfortunately, had a tendency to use deep social awkwardness (mostly robots saying inappropriate remarks because they’re robots and have no filter) as humor, and I found that, well, awkward.  That toned down as the book went on, though, and overall I enjoyed it quite a bit. Continue reading “What I’ve Been Reading Lately (July, 2023)” →

Writing Update (June, 2023)

On By cherylmahoneyIn Writing1 Comment

My writing has been bouncing around between different books of my Thorns series recently.  I spent some time going through Thorns 3, my NaNoWriMo project of 2022.  I did some edits and made some notes, and concluded that the biggest changes need to be near the ending, to increase the conflict a bit more.  I then moved onto Thorns 4 for a little while, went through much the same process and came to pretty much the same conclusion – there’s some character things I want to weave in earlier, but mostly I want to make some revisions to the ending.  Thorns 4 is the most separated from the main plot of any book in the series, and I want to make some revisions to make more connections and make the ending more dramatic.

Earlier this month I moved my focus back to Thorns 2, after receiving beta reader feedback.  I’ve gone through those notes now, and am working on making some edits.  The ending is actually already exciting in this one, but I need to ramp up some tension in the earlier parts of the book.

It’s one of the rules in my writing group, that you can almost always add more tension to your story…

So on the whole, things are moving along pretty well!  A lot of things in process, but all of them going forward, and that feels good to see happen.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately (June, 2023)

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews1 Comment

My recent reading seems to have been mostly fantasy and biographies – only one of which is typical!

My television watching has influenced my reading a bit lately.  I watched The Crown, which made me want to read a biography of Churchill, so I picked up Gretchen Rubin’s book, 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill.  I love her Happiness Project, but I’m sorry to report this concept didn’t work for me.  It’s more or less 40 brief essays on different aspects of Churchill, and since the whole idea is to present conflicting views, she doesn’t contextualize or give relative weight to different ideas enough.  There ended up being a lot of seemingly contradictory things and I didn’t know how to interpret them.  It is vaguely satisfying to have read this, though, after first seeing her mention it in The Happiness Project ten years or so ago.

I also read a biography of Mister Rogers, The Good Neighbor by Maxwell King.  My toddler is very into Mister Rogers at the moment, and I’ve been enjoying watching the show with him.  There were no huge revelations in here (Mister Rogers really was as he seems) but some interesting backstory, especially in how he developed the concept of his TV show and the principles behind it.

Over in the fantasy realm, I read a good duology, Spellbreaker and Spellmaker by Charlie N. Holmberg.  A late Victorian fantasy, it has the very distinctive feel of historical fiction set in that time, with a cool magic system and a good romance. Continue reading “What I’ve Been Reading Lately (June, 2023)” →

What I’ve Been Reading Lately (May, 2023)

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews1 Comment

Happy May!  This seems to have been my month for continuing and/or completing series, with a lot of books falling into that category.  I’ve been trying to stay on top of series and read them without too long a gap between books (because I forget too much, or lose track of the series entirely!) so I’ve been focusing some reading there lately.

I finished the last book in Martha Wells’ Raksura series, The Harbors of the Sun.  I’ve loved this series, so it’s kind of a shame to get to the end!  Books Two and Three were probably the best but I enjoyed this installment very much as well, and we got to see some new angles and aspects to the world.

I also finished the Janie series by Caroline B. Cooney with Janie Face to Face.  It was…odd.  The entire series was about the aftermath of a long ago kidnapping, and this book finally brings in the point of view of the kidnapper – in fact, alternating chapters are from her point of view.  Which was fascinating, but she seemed very different from how she was portrayed (by report) in the other books.  Meanwhile most of Janie’s story in this book focuses on her romance with on-and-off boyfriend Reeve, and introduced SO MANY new issues in their relationship that were…never resolved at all.  The book also seemed to be hurtling us towards a more dramatic, more thrilleresque ending finally, but ultimately never really went there.  So, I don’t know – it was all kind of odd! Continue reading “What I’ve Been Reading Lately (May, 2023)” →

Writing Update (April, 2023)

On By cherylmahoneyIn Writing1 Comment

Just a brief update this month! My biggest recent writing news, of course, was the launch of my newest novel, The Princess Behind Thorns, on April 4th.  Still very exciting to have that out in the world!

The second book in the series is currently with beta-readers, so I’ve been turning to Book 3, which I drafted in November, 2022, for NaNoWriMo.  It’s nice to work on a book that was drafted relatively recently, compared to the first two in the series.  It’s also a departure from the previous two in shifting perspective to two supporting characters, Elena and Henry.  I’ve done an initial read-through and plan to go back now for some more extensive changes.  The novel is essentially a heist story, and I need to introduce a few more co-conspirators and work out a few more details of the heist!

That will likely be my focus for at least the next month or so, and then I’ll either get back to Thorns 2 – or maybe look ahead to Thorns 4 briefly?  We’ll see!  Lots of books in play right now!