Welcome to the New Year, 2024! I welcome you in with Blessings and Love.
I invite you to my review of everything I watched, listened to, or read this past year, 2023. This is part one, so we’ll be going over books first.
Spoiler Warning: Stop now while you’re ahead if you don’t want spoilers to any piece of media I’m about to mention. You have been warned.
Books:
We start the list with the easiest, fastest category to eliminate; books.
Above, you see Author Sarah J. Maas.
This year I read more than I thought I would. I believe I read around eight books. Of those eight, I will rank them as follows:
1st Place: Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas
2nd Place: Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas
3rd Place: Sailor Moon Volume 2 by Naoko Takeuchi
4th Place: Sailor Moon Volume 3 by Naoko Takeuchi
5th Place: Codename: Sailor V Volume 2 by Naoko Takeuchi
6th Place: Codename: Sailor V Volume 1 by Naoko Takeuchi
7th Place: Star Bringer by Tracy Wolff and Nina Croft
8th Place: Leigh Howard and The Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor by Shawn M. Warner
I liked Heir of Fire most of all because of Celaena’s major character development and her finally accepting her heritage and real name, Aelin, and being proud of it. Also, I love the end battle with the demons, chills. And I cried when her mind was about to be broken by the demons and everyone she’s ever loved before tells her to get up in her mind. AAAAAHHHHH!!!! And I love the blossoming romance between her and Rowan! Yes girl! Oooh.
Anyway, what can I say about Crown of Midnight? It’s a great book near the end mostly because Celaena is wandering underneath the Library in the Glass Castle and she’s opening these doors with ancient magic seals on them, not knowing she’s let loose an undead sort of supernatural creature. When she turns away from the few remaining doors, she sees it around the corner, I believe and starts running back up all the stairs. Dorian, her friend, hears this as she’s halfway up and comes down to meet her halfway. They both run up to the Library’s hidden door that leads underground where they were and frantically look for The Walking Dead, the book Celaena needs to find a spell strong enough to freeze the monster and kill it. Celaena says Dorian needs to find the book, and when he asks where, she says it’ll find him when he needs it. She holds the door as Dorian looks for the book and finds it. Dorian then holds the door as Celaena opens the book to the page with the spell and successfully kills the monster. YAAAY! Oh, I love SJM and this book series! So far, at least. I still have a couple of books left to go.
Sailor Moon and Sailor V were fun reads. I know it doesn’t count but I just had to say that I just finished with SM Vol. 4 yesterday and I loved it!
Star Bringer is in 7th because the book didn’t know what the plot was. First, they were trying to save the dying sun, then running from the law, and then rescuing Milla and Jarved. And I didn’t like that Ian, Max, and Milla ended up being these clone things instead of siblings. Like what the hell? And they end the book with Beckett not being present, one of my favorite characters in this book that made this shit show a little more bearable.
I liked LHATGOSPM the least because of the incestuous and pedophilic overtones, if you know, you know1. And I didn’t like that Nacho ended up being the villain, I thought it was racist and a waste of a good character because I saw Leigh and him being good friends. Nacho being a criminal assumes all Latinos are just prone to that behavior and that’s not true.
(I do not own any of the works, characters, etc., mentioned above in this post.)
Copyright A.M. Productions
Leigh’s 19-year-old cousin, Myra, talks her into skinny dipping… Leigh is sixteen and she’s related to Myra…
Maas’s books are always so epic! Sounds like you had some fun reads.