Tag: The Sisters of Reckoning

Posted in Weekly Updates

Weekly Update: July 25-31, 2022

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! Hope this week has treated you well.

It’s been a fairly uneventful week on my end; other than tagging along with my mom to run some errands, I haven’t left the house much this week. I’ve been trying to exercise a bit more—and I have, a little bit—but most of my days have been spent reading on the couch. Not complaining in the slightest. I was gonna go hiking, but after some storms, there was apparently a flash flood AND snow (???) at the place we were going to go, so…nope.

Reading-wise, I’ve had another prolific reading week. Most of it’s been in the 2-3 star range, but by the end of the week, I’d read something incredibly powerful but that made me feel rather sad (Man o’ War), and a sudden 5-star read that made me cry, but…in a good way? (The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects—the short comic “The Magician and the Snake” was the tearjerker in question). I didn’t have a chance to go to the library, so I’ll be trawling the Kindle library for books to read this week.

And now, Camp NaNoWriMo is almost done! I’m about 97% of the way to my goal, and I’ll finish it up tonight!! This year’s Camp was all about feeling my way through—the story, the website, and everything else—and I think it’s gone relatively well!

Other than that, I’ve just been drawing, playing guitar, watching the new episodes of What We Do in the Shadows, and giving one of my cats an extra chicken treat for her birthday. Hobbes turned 6 on Monday.

the birthday girl!

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK:

She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor, #1) – Shelley Parker-Chan (⭐️⭐️⭐️.5)

Ophelia After All – Racquel Marie (⭐️⭐️⭐️.5)

The Blood Trials (The Blood Gift Duology, #1) – N.E. Davenport (⭐️⭐️)

Man o’ War – Cory McCarthy (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

The Sisters of Reckoning (The Good Luck Girls, #2) – Charlotte Nicole Davis (⭐️⭐️⭐️.5)

The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects (20th Anniversary Edition) – Mike Mignola (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

POSTS AND SUCH:

SONGS:

CURRENTLY READING/TO READ NEXT WEEK:

Early Riser – Jasper Fforde

Since I’ve already posted today, head over to my July 2022 Wrap-Up for today’s song.

That’s it for this week in blogging! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Monthly Wrap-Ups

July 2022 Wrap-Up 🫠

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

As you can see above, the melting emoji represents my slow melting, a la the Wicked Witch of the West, because July in Colorado always threatens to melt me into a slushy puddle. At least we got some rain. (And hail, one time? got enough that it looked like snow in certain parts of the yard…)

GENERAL THOUGHTS:

Hot as it was, I’d say that July was another good month of summer. I’ve had tons more time to read and relax, and even though college is always on my mind nowadays, the time off has been good to collect my thoughts. I’ve gone hiking a few times, seen some fun movies, and tried to exercise a little more.

I got to read tons this month, and although it was generally a mixed bag (a lot more books in the 3-star range than usual), I still found some gems in the mix. For Disability Pride Month, I tried to focus on books with disabled characters, and I’ve found some reads with great disability rep—including the first book I’ve ever read with SPD rep! (Thanks, Carolyn Mackler!!) Camp NanoWriMo is nearly over—it’s had its ups and downs (couldn’t find the stats page for a while and fell behind on my word count, hit command v instead of command b and accidentally pasted the whole Pinnochio trailer into my document), but I’m so close to 45,000 words now!!

Other than that, I’ve just been playing my guitar, recovering from the last two episodes of Stranger Things (OW), seeing Thor: Love and Thunder (pure Taika Waititi fun), drawing, and listening to an excess of Peter Gabriel.

Also, I figured I’d give everybody an update on Ringo, since I haven’t posted about him much since we got him; he’s 7 months old now and even more of a menace to society, but he has the sweetest face…

the face of a serial foot biter

READING AND BLOGGING:

I read 25 books this month! This is probably gonna be the most books I’ll be able to read in a month, since it’s the middle of summer. It was a mixed bag, as always, but I found a few amazing 5-star reads in the bunch.

1 – 1.75 stars:

Among Thieves

2 – 2.75 stars:

Fortune Favors the Dead

3 – 3.75 stars:

Breathe and Count Back from Ten

4 – 4.75 stars:

Not If I Can Help It

5 stars:

The Reckless Kind

FAVORITE BOOK OF THE MONTH: The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects – 5 stars

The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects

POSTS I’M PROUD OF :

POSTS FROM OTHER WONDERFUL PEOPLE THAT I ENJOYED:

SONGS/ALBUMS THAT I ENJOYED:

yeah spoiler alert I did listen to more Peter Gabriel
Kate Bush is hit or miss for me but when she hits it for me she HITS it
going through an 80’s period this month I guess??
HOOOOOOOOOOOWEE time go to back to my sad girl roots
I haven’t listened to much Japanese Breakfast but I fell in love with this one INSTANTLY
MORE PETER GABRIEL BC I LOVED SO
I really need to listen to more IDLES bc I’ve loved every song I’ve heard of theirs

DID I FOLLOW THROUGH ON MY JULY GOALS?

  • Read at least 20 books: 25!
  • Get through Camp NaNoWriMo: We’ll see about that later tonight…

GOALS FOR AUGUST:

  • Get through the first few weeks of college (AAAAAA)
  • Enjoy my birthday (which also happens to be on the first day of classes…yeehaw😀)

Today’s song:

That’s it for this month in blogging! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (8/31/21) – The Good Luck Girls

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

This week’s review was a fairly recent addition to my TBR. I found out about this series through a great post by Simone and her Books (thanks for putting it on my radar!), and I had a good feeling about it when I bought it with my birthday money the other day. I’m glad to say that I was right – my favorite out of all the books I bought that day!

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis

The Good Luck Girls – Charlotte Nicole Davis

my copy ft. a few more purplish books (I don’t have a whole lot of purple books ksjdhfksjdhf)

Branded and trapped in a “welcome house” against their wills, the lives of the Good Luck Girls are filled with anything but good luck. Sisters Clementine and Aster have lived their lives in one such welcome house, waiting for the impossible day when they can go free. But when Clementine accidentally kills a wealthy man, she knows she’s put her life on the life. Along with her sister Aster, their friends Tansy and Mallow, and Violet, the prickly favorite of the welcome house, she risks a daring escape, meeting friend and foe alike as she flees into the wild.

HONEYMOON CLUB | Aesthetic gif, Desert aesthetic, Just like heaven

TW/CW: rape, branding, sex slavery, murder, descriptions of illness, misogyny, torture, loss of loved ones/death, substance abuse

Have you ever finished a book and immediately thought something along the lines of “man, why has nobody gotten the rights to make this a TV show?” My thoughts exactly for The Good Luck Girls – its cinematic writing makes it the perfect fit for the small screen, and its effortless blending of paranormal, Western, and dystopian genres made it stand out from all the rest!

I’ve never really read or watched many Westerns or Western-inspired books, movies or TV shows (I’m counting The Mandalorian in there though), but I found myself latching onto the immersive and unique world that Charlotte Nicole Davis presents us with in The Good Luck Girls. It’s equal parts Western, paranormal fantasy, and dystopia, and all of them fit to make a fascinating world! There’s something for everybody. You want girls rising up and fighting the power? FIVE OF THEM! You want ghosts, demons, and other weird monsters? Plenty of those to go around. Magic? Lots of that too. Whatever genre you usually gravitate you, there’s something for everybody in this novel.

The feminism and themes of sisterhood also shone in this novel! We follow a diverse cast of characters (some of them are POC and there’s a wlw relationship between two of them) as they escape a life of sex slavery, encountering no shortage of horrors along the way but sticking together through it all. Especially regarding most of the scenes in the “welcome house,” there are plenty of heavy and hard-to-read topics, but Charlotte Nicole Davis handled them in a way that balanced realism and giving the slightest bit of hope. I’m always up for books with a gang of well-written women taking down the patriarchy (and in the case of this book, fighting against misogyny and rape culture in particular), and The Good Luck Girls delivered 100% in that respect.

As for the characters, I liked most of them a reasonable amount, but I didn’t get completely attached to all of them. For Violet in particular, I liked that even though she was the token “bad-natured one who refuses to get along with anybody else” character, Davis gave her just as much depth and backstory as characters like Clem and Aster. However, I do wish that Tansy and Mallow got more page time; they just seemed like footnotes in contrast to Aster, Clem, and Violet, and we didn’t get much of their backstory. The Good Luck Girls would have been more enjoyable with a multiple POV structure, in my opinion; we got inside Aster and Clem’s heads, but since there’s an ensemble cast, I would have liked to get some of the motivations and quirks of characters like Violet, Tansy, and Mallow from their perspectives.

All in all, an effortless blend of wildly different genres that results in a fiercely feminist and cinematic journey. 4 stars!

✔️|2| 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐍𝐄𝐎𝐔𝐒 [CA:CW] - 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡 | Magic aesthetic, Aesthetic gif, Powers

The Good Luck Girls is the first book in the Good Luck Girls series, followed by The Sisters of Reckoning. Charlotte Nicole Davis also contributed the short story All the Time in the World to A Phoenix Must First Burn, an anthology of sci-fi/fantasy stories by Black women and gender nonconforming people.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!