What more does a girl need than a pile of books and a bowl of chocolate? Let’s talk about what we’ve been reading and feeding our inner chocoholics.

Have you ever run into one of those dry spells where you pick up book after book and are left with frustrated by nearly every one? Yeah, that was this last month for me. I read over a dozen books, and I’m not sure why, luck of the draw I suppose, but I ended up with the “I’m ready to throw this across the room” feeling on most of those. Interestingly it was for all sorts of different reasons, ranging from characters being just too stupid to live, to an unanticipated spicy scene turning into the beginning of a diatribe on consent (not that I have a problem with consent, it just didn’t belong in the middle of this particular story), to transparent plot lines, to just plain boring. It was not a good month for my bookish little heart.

There were, however, a couple of exceptions, which I’d like to call out here.

Just so you know, links below are Amazon associate links, so if you buy anything through them, I will get a couple of pennies from that.

The Hanging City

For a young woman who wields the power of fear, humanity’s greatest enemy is her only hope.

Sometimes a writer crafts a book near and dear to their heart. One that they write for themselves and it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of it. This was one of those.

Nothing like her other series that I have enjoyed, The Hanging City was wholly different, a different world, a different atmosphere, a different feeling altogether. But through it all you could feel the strong connection between the author and her characters. It was a wonderful read.

Shadowseer

Dark fantasy meets mystery as a brutal murder in an insane asylum in Victorian London turns out to be more than what it seems. 

I would call this one a Victorian Midsomer Murders meets urban fantasy. And since I enjoy Midsomer Murders and urban fantasies, it was a winner for me.

Usually I get annoyed with ‘poor little orphan’ heroines for one reason or another, but this time I found Kaia rather sympathetic. Detective Pinsley also proved interesting, and didn’t get into that creepy territory that is always looming at the edges when your female protagonist is very young (17 in this case) and the male protagonist is old enough to be her father. Definitely an interesting adventure!

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What are you reading now? What do you do when you run into a book that is turning out to be less that what you’d hoped it would be? Tell me in the comments.