Read Harder is Over, Long Live Read Harder

2025 Read Harder is here, and...I guess I'm ready. (I AM ready, I'm just tired. I may have just woken up from a nap.) As always, there are some intriguing challenges and some meh challenges, but overall, I'm looking forward to them. I got a dice tower made out of a book for Christmas, so I decided that I'll be rolling dice to choose which challenges to do each month. What's more fun than rolling dice and reading books? 24 challenges, so I'm keeping it simple and rolling a d12 twice - one for challenges 1-12, one for challenges 13-24. January's challenges?

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5. Read a book about immigration or refugees

For this challenge, I ended up picking two books. I'll be reading The Only Road, by Alexandra Diaz, and its sequel, The Crossroads. 

24. Pick a 2015 Reader Harder task to complete

I debated between a couple and ultimately landed on "Read a book by someone from an Indigenous culture." I'm torn between two for this one - Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters, a book of short stories by Dan C. Jones, and The Storyteller by Brandon Hobson. They're both relatively short, so maybe this will be another two-fer.

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And so it begins...2025 Read Harder, let's gooooo!

The Luminaries - Susan Dennard

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Hemlock Falls isn't like other towns. You won't find it on a map, your phone won't work here, and the forest outside town might just kill you. Only the Luminaries, a society of ancient guardians, stand between humanity and the nightmares of the forest that rise each night.

Winnie Wednesday, an exile from the Luminaries, is determined to restore her family's good name by taking the deadly hunter trials on her sixteenth birthday. But when she turns to her ex best friend Jay Friday for help, they discover a danger lurking in the forest no one in Hemlock Falls is prepared for.

Not all monsters can be slain, and not all nightmares are confined to the dark."

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The synopsis provided is for the first book in this trilogy; however, this review is for the trilogy as a whole. I posted a review for the first book after I read it but never reviewed the second book...I don't think...so now that I've finished the whole thing, I figured why not review it all? For those of you who don't want to go back and read the first review, I shared that this trilogy is extra special for me because the author did a "Sooz" your own adventure thing on Twitter during the pandemic, which ultimately led to her reviving the manuscript and it getting published. It was such a cool thing to do and the sense of community from it was beautiful, and it just all warms my heart. Also, fun fact, the synopsis in that review is different than this one, so that's interesting.

For the record, I also speculated about whether there was enough backstory and connecting information in the book for people who didn't follow the Twitter adventure to still follow this story, and I asked for volunteers who hadn't been a part of Sooz Your Own Adventure to read book one (for science!). Courageous adventurer that they are, my sister volunteered, and it turned out it's a solid story whether or not you're familiar with the Twitter adventure (read her review here!). 

There is a bit of a learning curve initially as you get up to speed with the structure of the world, but what fantasy doesn't come with a bit of a learning curve, right? Fortunately, once you've got a handled on the mist and the nightmares and all the Luminary houses and what the Dianas are, there are totally no questions at all and everything is super straightforward and not at all stressful.

Hahaha just kidding, this trilogy is so stressful! That's not a knock, though, because it's in the best way. You start off and all you really know is that Winnie, her brother, and her mom got kicked out of the Luminaries after their dad was caught doing magic and revealed to be a Diana. Winnie is convinced he was framed and has a plan for getting their family reinstated to the Luminaries and hopefully ultimately finding a way to prove his innocence. From there, the more you learn, the less you know. Every reveal led to more and more questions, and up until the last couple of chapters, I still was like "ahhhhhh what is HAPPENING?!"

There were so many small details that had to be tied together, and in the end, all the endless questions paid off in a big way. I thought things wrapped up really well, and I can't wait to read this trilogy again and connect dots I know I missed on my first read-through.

Your Blood, My Bones - Kelly Andrew

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Wyatt Westlock has one plan for the farmhouse she's just inherited - to burn it to the ground. But during her final walkthrough of her childhood home, she makes a shocking discovery in the basement - Peter, the boy she once considered her best friend, strung up in chains and left for dead.

Unbeknownst to Wyatt, Peter has suffered hundreds of ritualistic deaths on her family's property. Semi-immortal, Peter never remains dead for long, but he can't really live, either. Not while he's bound to the farm, locked in a cycle of grisly deaths and painful rebirths. There's only one way for him to break free. He needs to end the Westlock line.

He needs to kill Wyatt.

With Wyatt's parents gone, the spells protecting the property have begun to unravel, and dark, ancient forces gather in the nearby forest. The only way for Wyatt to repair the wards is to work with Peter - the one person who knows how to harness her volatile magic. But how can she trust a boy who's sworn an oath to destroy her? When the past turns up to haunt them in the most unexpected way, they are forced to rely on one another to survive, or else tear each other apart."

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 Look...I'm going to start this review by acknowledging that this type of book? Really not for me. It isn't my cup of tea, it's never something I'm going to seek out, and I read it more out of obligation than anything else. Disclaimer having been made, I'll also say that the synopsis from the cover makes it sound so much more suspenseful and spooky than it actually ended up being. Former friends, dark secrets, one plotting murder, but then...a grisly twist forces them together. 

Instead, what the reader gets is things revealed that don't totally make sense to reveal, then the narrative sort of pretending like those things haven't been revealed and tiptoeing around them with weird hints even though, hello, that's not a secret! All while things that it would actually make sense to reveal to the reader are inexplicably kept a secret. I didn't totally understand how the author chose what to reveal and what to keep hidden, and it made things both frustrating and a little boring. Maybe I was supposed to get swept up in how Wyatt didn't yet know the things I did, but trying to do that just didn't do it for me.

Add to that that nothing much really happened and...eh. Don't get me wrong, there were a few creepy-lite moments, but thinking back on my reading experience, it was pages and pages of angsty arguing between Wyatt and Peter and then like a few paragraphs of oh my god! And then immediately back to the angsty arguing. It would have been forgivable if all the back and forth between them furthered the story, but it was just rehashing the exact same plot point over and over with no new development. No thank you. Begging you to pick up the pace. 

Maybe I would have gotten more swept away in everything if horror was more my thing, but I don't know. If anything, I feel like my aversion to anything in this vein should have meant even horror-lite gave me the shivers. Instead, I was three hundred pages in and checking to see how much was left, wondering if something was actually going to happen at some point. Spoiler alert: Not really! My approach when I write fiction is "write these big scenes that I already have in my head!" and then "FUCK, now I have to fill in around these, how do I do that?" And this book very much read like that. They had an idea for a beginning, they had an idea for the end, and then...uhh....

Anyway, I totally thought I had finished this review and scheduled it to post yesterday, and I just realized that was not the case. So...enjoy, it was mostly done.

Garden of the Cursed - Katy Rose Pool

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐

From the covers:

Garden of the Cursed:

"Since fleeing the gilded halls of Evergarden for the muck-filled canals of the Marshes, Marlow Briggs has made a name for herself as the best godsdamn cursebreaker in Caraza City. But no matter how many cases she solves, she is still haunted by the mystery of her mother's disappearance.

When Adrius Falcrest, Marlow's old friend and scion of one of Caraza's most affluent spell-making families, asks her to help break a life-threatening curse, Marlow wants nothing to do with the boy who spurned her a year ago. But a new lead in her mother's case makes Marlow realize that the only way to get the answers she desperately seeks is to help Adrius and return to Evergarden society - even if it means suffering through a fake love affair with him to avoid drawing suspicion from the conniving Five Families.

As the investigation draws Marlow into a web of deadly secrets and powerful enemies, a shocking truth emerges: Adrius's curse and her mother's disappearance may just be clues to an even larger mystery, one that could unravel the very foundations of Caraza and magic itself."

Masquerade of the Heart

"The city of Caraza sits poised on the edge of chaos. And cursebreaker Marlow Briggs is at the center of a deadly struggle for power. In the tragic aftermath of the Vale-Falcrest wedding, Marlow is spurned by Adrius, who refuses to speak to her and publicly vows to find a noble wife before the year is out. 

Despite her heartbreak, Marlow is still intent on breaking his Compulsion curse. To do so, she'll have to play loving daughter to the man who cast it - the man who's hell-bent on reshaping Caraza in his own image, no matter the cost. But the closer she gets to her long-lost father, the more Marlow starts to question if he's really the villain she's made him out to be. As the lines between enemy and ally blur, Marlow must decide if she's willing to sacrifice her heart's desire to save a city that wants her dead."

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I don't know if I've ever written about multiple books in one review before, but that's what I'm going with for this one because it's a duology that probably could have been one book. I got the first book in a subscription box and it really hooked me, so when it was a duology I was like ok, hell yeah, let's buy the second book! And then second book? Meh. 

The whole storyline is basically unraveling a mystery, so I don't want to give too much away, but basically book one is Marlow taking on rival gang members, corrupt politicians, and the odd person with a grudge as she tries to figure out a. what caused her mom's disappearance a year ago and b. who cursed Adrius and what she needs to do to break his curse. It's full of intrigue and danger, with just enough information revealed to keep you on the edge of your seat. And then, just as things are coming to a head - to be continued.

Then book two just feels so aimless. Honestly, I feel like this is something that happens a lot with duologies and trilogies. The concept is so good, the first part of the series is action packed and full of suspense and then...not enough compelling stuff left for the last book, but you gotta fill the pages somehow, so it drags. In this case, if anything there were too many ideas. It was like okay, I know we need to get from x happening at the end of book one to y happening to wrap everything up, and we could do that via Twist A, Twist B, Twist C, or Twist D...orrrrrrr maybe we do it with ALL OF THEM! There were so many ends that were brought in and then just kind of dropped, it made the whole narrative feel unfocused, and then when things finally did wrap up in the last handful of chapters it was kind of unsatisfying. 

Probably the most unsatisfying thing about being unsatisfied with the ending is that I thought the main plot hook in the second book was GOOD! Truly, if this had been one like...450-500 page book instead of two 350-ish page books, it probably would have been five stars for me. But alas, had to go with a duology, and now here we are, three stars. Not every story needs to be multiple books, y'all. Someone tell that to publishers.

The Last Bloodcarver - Vanessa Le

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"In the harsh, industrial city of Theumas, she is seen not as a healer as she was meant to, but a monster that kills for pleasure. And in the city's criminal underbelly, the rarest of monsters are traded for gold. When Nhika is finally caught by the infamous Butchers, she's auctioned off to the highest bidder - a mysterious girl garbed in white. But this strange buyer doesn't want to use Nhika as an assassin or a trophy piece. She intends to use Nhika's bloodcarving to heal the last person who saw her father's killer.

As Nhika delves into the investigation amid Theumas's wealthiest and most powerful, all signs point to Ven Kochin, an alluring yet entitled physician's aide intent on casting her out of his opulent world. But despite his relentless attempts to push her away, something inexplicable draws Nhika to him. When she discovers Kochin is not who he claims to be, Nhika must face a greater, more terrifying evil, turning her quest for justice into a fight for her life.

Her only chance to survive lies in a terrible choice - become the dreaded monster the city fears, or risk destroying herself and the future of her kind."

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I've been making a concerted effort to read all the books I buy this year, which includes my random monthly book subscriptions. This is one that I've been curious about, and I got into it right away. It was a bedtime read, and I finished it in four nights. It was hard to put down, and honestly if I wasn't exhausted from iron deficiency and a pup recovering from surgery who wakes me up over and over every night, I would probably have stayed up past my bedtime to finish it even faster. 

I found the premise super interesting, and I loved Nhika and her very complicated relationship with her mysterious rescuer, the woman in white, and her family. Without spoilers, I will say that I unraveled the mystery pretty early on in the book, but even with my strong suspicions of what was going on, the story pulled me in. I think my last night of reading I had about a hundred and fifty pages left, and I refused to go to bed without finishing it. Crushing decision, because some of the last hundred and fifty pages are so heartbreaking, so then when I went to sleep I was very sad. But it was so good! 

The only downside to having read this book...is that now the other book subscription books I need to read from this year all sound scary and kind of horror-y and not necessarily my vibe. 😭 I guess there's a reason I left them for last.