Hi friends,
Christ the Lord is risen today! I love Easter. It’s my favorite holiday, and I particularly enjoy getting to celebrate the atonement and resurrection of Christ with my family this year.
March was a busy and fun month for us. I don’t actually remember being sick at all, so that was a nice change. We spent spring break with my parents in Utah and had a great time seeing family and doing lots of fun activities with Grandma and Grandpa. We also had a great time celebrating Maya’s 7th birthday. She planned an Easter Egg dying and hunt/pajama party for her birthday, and it was a lot of fun despite some brief tears over the number of eggs some did or did not find at the egg hunt.
I got in a few good reads as well with most of the month spent reading one 1,000+ page epic fantasy book. No regrets. Let me know what you think of these reads and if you have suggestions for further reading.
Happy Easter!
Tonya
Brigands and Breadknives (Legends and Lattes #2) by Travis Baldree
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This was technically the third book in Baldree’s Legends and Lattes series, and to be honest, none of them has captured the magic of the first for me. This book focused on a side character introduced in the prequel story. Fern is a ratkin—basically a rodent of unusual size and sapience—who is basically going through a midlife crisis and realizing that her life as a bookseller is no longer fulfilling. She works through her ensuing depression by abandoning all her responsibilities and going adventuring with a legendary bounty hunter elf and the strange goblin that she’s bringing in for the bounty. It was OK. There’s a lot of work given to themes of mental health, trust, friendship, and doing things for our own reasons and not to meet other’s expectations. There was nothing wrong with it. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t super impressed. I would recommend for fans of the series.
Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of Female Life on the Spectrum by Jennifer O’Toole
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This book was recommended to me as a way to gain insight into the lived experience of a woman with autism and to develop more empathy and sympathy for those living through this challenge. O’Toole went through 30+ years of life before receiving her autism diagnosis. This book is her memoir, and she uses it to explain how her symptoms and experiences were undiagnosed for many years in large part because she was a smart, over achieving, beautiful woman. I highly recommend everyone to read this book. It helped me understand more how the person who recommended it to me experiences and sees the world and be more empathetic and understanding to those around me who do have autism.
We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I’ve read a lot of Lepore’s books, and this one is supposed to be a follow-on to her one volume history of the United States These Truths. I loved that book and was eager to get into this one. Lepore takes us all the way back to 1787 to explain the constitution and its amendments. The constitution has only been amended 27 times, 17 if you exclude the first ten in the Bill of Rights. Lepore explores how these amendments often came in phases with several passing right after the Civil War during reconstruction, another few passing in the 1920s, and another few passing in the 1970s. Each amendment was preceded by large changes in the political, economical, and social landscape of the U.S. Lepore takes a long view at why it’s now so hard to amend the constitution and efforts that have been made by both major political parties at various points in time to make it easier to amend. I found it particularly enlightening to learn that there have been several attempts to amend the constitution to get rid of the electoral college. There was a subcommittee on constitutional amendment for a time in the Senate Judiciary Committee that played a large role in the passage of the last amendments in the 1970s, and that subcommittee held multiple hearings, introduced legislation, and promoted amendments at various points to either seriously change how the electoral college works or to get rid of it entirely and use a simple majority election for the president. One person in the book even notes on the Congressional record that a day could come where a president wins the electoral college but not the popular vote. He worried that would cause chaos and doubts about our democracy and elections. Lo and behold…. Anyway, because of our current inability to amend the constitution, the courts have stepped in as the only legitimate way to change it, which was likely an unintended consequence itself for the framers. Lepore also takes us in the way back machine to understand the origins of the “originalism” method of judicial interpretation. She shows how it started as a fringe conservative idea that was eventually adopted by Supreme Court Justice Scalia and is now one of the most accepted methods of judicial interpretation. Because of originalism, all lawmakers and judges must now also be expert historians so they can understand the intent of the writers of the Constitution and its amendments to determine how to apply it to modern cases. This is how you get people trying to research modern gun restrictions based on case law from the 1700s, and I’m just like “Why is this even a thing?” There’s even a quote from Justice Scalia saying disparagingly that such historical research isn’t that hard and that there are rarely discrepancies in historical interpretation among professional historians. I could practically see the looks of dumb foundedness on Lepore’s face. I highly recommend that everyone read this book who is interested in understanding our political landscape.
Of War and Ruin (The Bound and the Broken #3) by Ryan Cahill
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This book is over 1,000 pages, and unlike some other epic fantasy books of that page count, I feel like it earned it. I don’t mind spending time on a long book as long as the payoff is worth it, and it doesn’t feel like a slog. Both of these were definitely true of this book. This is the third installment in Cahill’s modern epic fantasy series where he writes about, “Dragons and sh**.” His words, not mine. And man. Do I really love reading a good story about dragons, less about sh**. Cahill continues to expand his fantasy world—Epheria— as we learn more about all the different peoples and races that inhabit this magical realm. I loved the worldbuilding and the character work. Each of our leads goes through a really interesting and compelling arc. I enjoyed each point-of-view and didn't feel like there was a particularly weak one that I just wanted to skip over. They were all well-paced and kept me engaged for the whole book. I particularly enjoyed seeing Rist evolve. He’s fighting for the sometimes-evil empire and showing that unlike in other popular fantasy franchises (
cough Star Wars cough) there are many shades of grey to every situation and what may seem like a behemoth empire is actually comprised of individuals with varying motivations and morals. There’s also lots of really cool dragon flying, fighting, and training in this book, which I felt was lacking from the first books. I can’t wait to read the fourth installment in this series. I love dragons.
The Dragonet Prophecy (Wings of Fire #1) by Tui T. Sutherland
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: My nine-year old daughter is obsessed with this series. Like, she’s literally listening to one of these books right now and getting annoyed every time I have to interrupt her for mundane tasks like eating and sleeping. I love talking about books with people, and because I have yet to persuade her to read Harry Potter, I decided I should be willing to read what she’s interested in. That being said, I am not the target audience for this book, and it’s been hard for me to figure out how to rate and review it knowing that’s true. It’s definitely middle grade, and I’ve been trying to figure out what about the book makes that so obvious. I think that it is in part the dialogue, which suffers, especially for our villainous characters. It was also really predictable and followed familiar fantasy tropes without anything interesting to set it apart. The biggest problem I had with it though was the casual violence and death that happened throughout the story. Now, I know that’s going to sound ridiculous coming from someone who just read The Bound and the Broken, which has scene upon scene of gory violence, but it just struck weird coming in a children’s book. I understand that one of the themes of this first arc of the series is the dragons learning that they don’t have to be violent and they can live in peace, but goodness, it’s super heavy handed. In any case, I’ll probably read a few more. I’m not sure I’ll get to all 16 before Chloe moves on to her next reading obsession, but I did like talking to her about the book and what we liked and didn’t like about it.
