Kat Reads Books - January Edition
Jan. 28th, 2024 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kat_lair***
Okay, another part of my 'not resolutions but conscious effort to carve time to do these things that are good for me' is 'read books'. There is also an instrumental aspect to this: I have a lot of books I haven't actually read. Goal is to read more so I can decide what to keep and what to donate. Judging from this month, three books/month seems to be manageable.
So, monthly reads with some commentary. Not sure these are focused enough to be called reviews. But here we go, Books That I Gone Read in Jan. These are all books H got me for Christmas, selected based on an Insta post of 'best current boys kissing boys fantasy'. Extremely valid.
FANGS Vol 1 (Billy Balibally) - Okay, it's a very pretty manga? I assume the actual plot will kick off in Vol 2, but Vol 1 mostly consists of 'here's a pretty vampire, he's new' and 'here's another pretty vampire, he's got a ~past~' and 'now watch them fuck' and 'hang out with their pretty vampire friends'. Like, I'm not opposed to any of that. I did say that it was Very Pretty, right? Read in public with caution, several panels get explicit.
Cemetary Boys (Aiden Thomas) - This was an extremely entertaining YA m/m fantasy that ticked several diversity points. The protagonist is trans. He's part of a multicultural brujx community in LA who have special powers to heal (the women, bruja) and summon/release the spirits of the dead (the men, brujo). In the course of wanting to show everyone that he's a real brujo, our protagonist sort of accidentally summons the ghost of a local bad boy. There's a mystery (I did guess the baddie pretty quickly but the ride was still entertaining) and lots of interesting cultural details and family feels. Found this fun and cute, dealt with some important topics in a way that was hopeful.
Dark Rise (C.S. Pacat) - First of a series (trilogy I assume, aren't most of them trilogies?). 19th century London except an ancient evil king is rising and an ancient order of knights (sorry, stewards) is sworn to protect the world. Some kids with ~destiny~ and also magical powers get caught up in the whole thing and no one is quite what they seem. Okay, listen, I started drafting this review paragraph when I was about halfway through the book and at that point I wasn't super impressed. But then, the last third of it dropped a number of plot twists I legit had not seem coming (I half guessed like one) and it turns out that the story I thought I was reading was a cover for something much more interesting and darker. And the same happened to several of the relationships. Like, I'm not just saying this because of the magical collar of obedience and the extremely strong d/s vibes that pushed to the surface but, well, those things did not hurt. I do, however, have one petty complaint to get out of the way: The author has a weird habit of constantly reminding the reader of what has happened or been said by repeating key phrases in italics. And I get it, it's a 'dramatic emphasis' technique we've all used (like, literally used it myself in a fic recently) but when you do it several times in every chapter it gets, frankly, annoying. Yes, this is a YA book but unless your target audience is teenagers with short-term memory loss, this is excessive. Anyway, regardless of my feelings that some more editing of things like that would've improved the style, I absolutely will be checking out the rest of the story.
***
Okay, another part of my 'not resolutions but conscious effort to carve time to do these things that are good for me' is 'read books'. There is also an instrumental aspect to this: I have a lot of books I haven't actually read. Goal is to read more so I can decide what to keep and what to donate. Judging from this month, three books/month seems to be manageable.
So, monthly reads with some commentary. Not sure these are focused enough to be called reviews. But here we go, Books That I Gone Read in Jan. These are all books H got me for Christmas, selected based on an Insta post of 'best current boys kissing boys fantasy'. Extremely valid.
FANGS Vol 1 (Billy Balibally) - Okay, it's a very pretty manga? I assume the actual plot will kick off in Vol 2, but Vol 1 mostly consists of 'here's a pretty vampire, he's new' and 'here's another pretty vampire, he's got a ~past~' and 'now watch them fuck' and 'hang out with their pretty vampire friends'. Like, I'm not opposed to any of that. I did say that it was Very Pretty, right? Read in public with caution, several panels get explicit.
Cemetary Boys (Aiden Thomas) - This was an extremely entertaining YA m/m fantasy that ticked several diversity points. The protagonist is trans. He's part of a multicultural brujx community in LA who have special powers to heal (the women, bruja) and summon/release the spirits of the dead (the men, brujo). In the course of wanting to show everyone that he's a real brujo, our protagonist sort of accidentally summons the ghost of a local bad boy. There's a mystery (I did guess the baddie pretty quickly but the ride was still entertaining) and lots of interesting cultural details and family feels. Found this fun and cute, dealt with some important topics in a way that was hopeful.
Dark Rise (C.S. Pacat) - First of a series (trilogy I assume, aren't most of them trilogies?). 19th century London except an ancient evil king is rising and an ancient order of knights (sorry, stewards) is sworn to protect the world. Some kids with ~destiny~ and also magical powers get caught up in the whole thing and no one is quite what they seem. Okay, listen, I started drafting this review paragraph when I was about halfway through the book and at that point I wasn't super impressed. But then, the last third of it dropped a number of plot twists I legit had not seem coming (I half guessed like one) and it turns out that the story I thought I was reading was a cover for something much more interesting and darker. And the same happened to several of the relationships. Like, I'm not just saying this because of the magical collar of obedience and the extremely strong d/s vibes that pushed to the surface but, well, those things did not hurt. I do, however, have one petty complaint to get out of the way: The author has a weird habit of constantly reminding the reader of what has happened or been said by repeating key phrases in italics. And I get it, it's a 'dramatic emphasis' technique we've all used (like, literally used it myself in a fic recently) but when you do it several times in every chapter it gets, frankly, annoying. Yes, this is a YA book but unless your target audience is teenagers with short-term memory loss, this is excessive. Anyway, regardless of my feelings that some more editing of things like that would've improved the style, I absolutely will be checking out the rest of the story.
***
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