Category: Reading Reflections
-
Adult Reader vs. Middle Grade Book: Inkheart
Certain books, you’re bound to love. Others, you can’t help but hate. And some, you find you just couldn’t care less about. If you read my Reading Challenge Wrap-Up from Wednesday, you probably think that Inkheart falls in the middle category. It certainly felt that way sometimes as I read the book. But then I…
-
Reading Challenge Wrap-Up
In case you didn’t catch the The Middle Grade Reread Challenge post, here’s a little TL;DR. Last month, I challenged myself to read five book that I hadn’t read or even thought of since my middle grade years, and I gave myself a month to do it. The books I chose are as follows: Here, There…
-
Sidestepping Monarchy (WoT Setting Study part 1)
The Wheel of Time series is a vast and detailed world, based not on your traditional medieval European setting but rather drawing from a multitude of sources to make each country, even those most resembling the expected medieval England-esque setting, feel very much distinct. As a result, it would be impossible to do a single…
-
Setting Study: Bayern from The Goose Girl
The Books of Bayern is a middle grade fantasy quartet by Shannon Hale, centering around the country of Bayern. The Goose Girl is the first of the series. The protagonist, Ani, is from neighboring country Kildenree, betrothed to a Bayern prince she has never met. En route to Bayern, Ani’s lady in waiting starts a…
-
Story-Beat Study: The Mysterious Benedict Society
As my second middle-grade reread challenge, a book I haven’t read in years, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into with this book. It’s not fantasy. An evil, egotistical genius makes a machine that can be broadcast through the television that brainwashes the general population to think there is a big Emergency from…
-
Setting Study: Here, There Be Dragons
Here, There Be Dragons is the first of a middle grade series by James A. Owen called The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica. It is based off of the concept that many famous fantastical settings from books are real places, and that many of the heroes of those stories were real as well. An unseen…
-
A Memory of Light Spoiler Rant
I did a series review of Wheel of Time, recently, and I intended for it to serve as a book review for the final book, A Memory of Light. I mean, it makes sense, especially for this book. While for most series, the payoff is in the latter half of the final book, the entirety…
-
Book Review: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green
Too often within the SFF genres, the books that we read have pessimistic outlooks on hope and kindness. They frequently portray optimism as foolish at best, danerous at worst; sometimes you’ll read a book that suggests people really would be kind, except that there will always be a few bad eggs that make the rest…
-
Wheel of Time Wrap-Up (Spoiler-Free)
It took me almost a year and a half to read the whole series, but I finally finished A Memory of Light, and whoo! What a ride this has been. A pleasurable one, most of the time, but now it’s time for me to answer the question: Was it worth it? Whether you’re deciding if…
Katie Bachelder 