June 2025

 Hi friends,

June was a good month for our family. The girls went to summer camp and are having a blast, and we were mostly healthy the whole month. 

I got some good reads in too, including the start of a great epic fantasy series. As always, let me know what you think about these books and if you have suggestions for further reading. 

Happy reading,

Tonya 

Ship of Magic (Liveship Traders #1) by Robin Hobb

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I read The Farseer trilogy a few years ago and loved everything but the ending, which I was horribly disappointed by, so I didn’t feel motivated to pick up this following series set in the same Realm of the Elderlings but in a different location and with different characters. Then one of my favorite booktubers recommended it, and I figured I’d give it a try. So far, I have not been disappointed. This series is a third person multi-point-of-view epic fantasy narrative with some truly compelling characters. At 800 pages, it’s a long read, but Hobb does such a good job maintaining the tension and making me care about the characters that I didn’t feel like any of the page count was wasted. Our cast of characters includes a runaway daughter, a disowned son, a strained matriarch, a petulant teenage girl, a former priest turned slaver, and everyone’s favorite a legit pirate captain. I enjoyed everyone’s point of views, but I was particularly drawn to pirate Captain Kennit who sets out to become a pirate king by attacking slave traders, freeing the slaves, and then teaching them to be pirates too.  Kennit somehow manages to hide his true merciless and cunning self under a guise of charisma and his own good luck. It is amazing to read how he manipulates everyone around him into not only doing what he wants them to do, but praising him while they do it. There are several plotlines revolving around the Vestrit family drama as the family’s patriarch dies and their fortunes begin to slide as they fight with each other for ownership of the priceless “liveship,” a living ship made of the mysterious wizardwood. It’s excellent. I’m almost done with the second one and will let you know my thoughts on it next month. 

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (Dungeon Crawler Carl #6) by Matt Dinniman

Rating: 4 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: Carl and Donut are back and better than ever on the 8th floor of the post-alien apocalypse, live-broadcasted reality TV dungeon. This level’s gameplay revolves around a magic and Pokemon inspired deck building game where crawlers have to capture monsters and battle one another. There were elements of this book that I struggled with. I felt the whole first half was a little long and drawn out and ended up mostly being setup for the next book. The back half kicks the pacing up to chaos level with non-stop Carl and Donut action. Like, literally non-stop. I wanted the characters to have a second to breath and sit with some of the big emotional events that occur, but they don’t. This book takes the chaos of the dungeon to an extreme, and there were scenes where I had trouble keeping track of everything that was going on. It does manage to deliver some emotional gut punches though. I love how Carl continues to break the game and foil the carefully planned narratives of the showrunners. The outside universe comes into the dungeon more and more as the AI running the game quickens its descent into insanity. Like, there are some truly epically ridiculous AI monologues. We’ve been building up to the events of book seven for several books now, and the ending of this one just left me more excited than ever to see Carl burn it all down. 

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

Rating: 3 stars

Recommendation: maybe

Review: I’ve been a fan of Backman since A Man Called Ove and Anxious People, but I think that some of his books are a miss for me. This one was OK. Backman effectively uses a flashback narrative structure to keep the tension in the story despite telling you how everything ends at the very beginning. He also delivers a pretty surprising twist at about the 80% point that makes you rethink much of what you’ve already read. Backman always has astoundingly good prose and thought-provoking insights that his characters deliver, so I’m struggling to articulate why this one didn’t really land for me. Maybe it all felt a little too contrived? I’m not sure. 

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven J. Lewitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review:  I decided I needed to break up my fantasy streak with some nonfiction. Most of the nonfiction I read is published within the last few years, so going back to 2006 for this one felt a little like a time machine as I remembered how different the world was back then. I enjoyed reading about the economics of south side Chicago gangs and the unexpected connection between the legalization of abortion and the reduction in violent crime, but the authors lost me in the last section about the popularity of baby names. I just straight up didn’t care. So, it was a mixed bag, but a fun fast read that helped me think about the world differently. 

The Whole-Brain Child: Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I don’t read a lot of parenting books because they always make me feel bad about my own parenting and like I’m doing everything wrong and messing up my kids. I think this is a familiar sentiment among parents, and I have enough mom guilt without piling on more about how I’m not using every difficult moment as a teaching opportunity and “flipping my lid” way more than I should. Despite all of those negative feelings, none of which are actually the authors’ faults, I took some good lessons away from this one. It’s more than 10 years old at this point, which made me wonder how some of the neuroscience they discuss has evolved since it was published, but the simplified explanations they provide about how different areas of the brain interact with each other made sense to me. I haven’t had discussions with my kids about how their brains work yet, but I have applied some of the guidance here. There are some good tips about how your amygdala hijacks your executive functioning during moments of high emotion that makes it almost impossible to absorb information or be taught. To be honest, most of the advice seemed to echo what I’ve read in other parenting books but reframed it in terms of how different regions of the brain interact and guide our behavior. 

The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I read Lewis’s newest book, Who is Government, last month and enjoyed it so much that I wanted to pick up another one by him. This one is in the same vein as that essay collection as it focuses on telling the story of what government does and the civil servants that make it function largely and ideally without anyone paying attention to what happens behind the scenes. After the first Trump election in 2016, the outgoing Obama administration prepared days and days of briefings to bring the new administration up to date on the complex workings of the federal government expecting that Trump’s transition team would be knocking down the door the day after the election. But then no one showed up. Lewis tells the story of how Trump thought the money spent on his transition team was a scam and ordered it to stop. Lewis decided to step in and get the briefings that were intended for the new Trump administration team for the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration. He speculates on how the new officials would be able to lead their complex departments without any of the knowledge sharing prepared for them, and I think the results of the first Trump administration largely speak for themselves. So far, the second administration seems to be even worse with those in charge actively antagonistic towards the missions of the agencies they’re supposed to lead. I don’t know how to spin this one beyond saying that it’s a rough time to be a civil servant.