January challenge update - a.k.a. "I thought I wrote this already"

If you were to throw yourself a 13-13-13 birthday party, what would you plan? Because yesterday was my 13-13-13 birthday, and I find the idea of a 13-themed birthday party so much more fun than a 40th birthday bash. 40? So cliche. 13-13-13...who does that? (Probably no one, because it's weird. And I accept that.)

Speaking of births and days...how about that Read Harder challenge, huh? You'll never believe it, but I fuckin forgot that I came up with the roll the dice thing to choose challenges.😬 Sooooo yeah, I read two books for challenge #2, reread a childhood favorite book - Beauty by Robin McKinley and The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. Love them both so much, even though I find it silly as hell that the main "conflict" to Beauty when you boil it down is her not being pretty. Anyhow, after I remembered that I was rolling dice to choose which challenges to do, I started working on my challenge #5 books and challenge #24 books. Have I finished them? No. But I still have five more days in January, so there's time. So far, I like them, but man, in the current climate, The Only Road is making me cry even more than it normally would.

Pending completion of my January books in the next five days, for February I'll be completing challenge #6 and challenge #14. For #6, read a standalone fantasy book, I'll be reading Briarheart by Mercedes Lackey. My unofficial goal for this year was to choose books I could add to my school library for as many challenges as possible, but sooooo many middle grade fantasy books are part of a series, I got tired of looking for an intriguing standalone. Briarheart has been on my list for a minute, so it'll be good to finally read it! For challenge #14, read a comic in translation, I'll be reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, translated from French. I also kiiiiind of want to read Persephone by Loic Locatelli-Kournwsky, also translated from French, so I guess we'll see how my reading goes.

Castle of the Cursed vs. The Immortal Dark

Remember back in the roaring tenties, aka the 2010s, when two movies would come out and it was like...I mean, these are two versions of the same movie, did one studio pass and then steal the idea while another studio picked up the original? You know what I'm talking about, right? Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman - retellings, but still, same year? No Strings Attached, featuring Natalie Portman and famed rapist-apologist Ashton Kutcher, and Friends with Benefits, featuring dumpster fires Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake? (Per the IMDB trivia, NSA actually tried to title their movie FWB when their original title was rejected and couldn't because...you know, a movie with that exact title and the same plot was coming out a handful of months later...)

Anyhow, I guess this is a thing, they're called Twin Films, movies with similar plots coming out at similar times, which usually would get flagged but every once in a while slips through the cracks. This happens with books too, obviously, and while I always really enjoy reading a book and being like heyyyy I've read something similar to this before, this time I happened to read both books at exactly the same time, and it was a really interesting experience for me so I figured hey, why not blog about it. And here we are.

For starters, personally? These book covers are different variations on the same theme. Similar vibes.

Also, there's an orphaned main character who has lost the last of their known family due to mysterious and probably nefarious circumstances. Both, mostly unwillingly, take a journey to live at a place they find distasteful with an aunt they don't know and don't trust, where both end up allied (tenuously?) with a vampire. Both have lost their native tongue and attempt to relearn it. Both discover their families have complex, mysterious, and dark legacies. Both protagonists are dealing with mental health stuff, with PTSD in the forefront of that stuff.

There's more, but to be honest I thought I had finished this review days ago and foolishly didn't make any notes, so a lot of the more nuanced stuff I'm having trouble remembering and a lot of the less nuanced stuff is spoilers. So I'll just say, interesting experience reading two books that are so similar in overarching plot yet so different in storytelling style. If a person could only read one and asked me for a recommendation, I would say go with Castle of the Cursed if you like things that are mysterious, slightly creepy, but also relatively straightforward when it comes to worldbuilding. Go with The Immortal Dark if you like much more complex, lore-heavy stuff where the book is as much about building the world as it is about advancing the plot. 

What the Woods Took - Courtney Gould

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

From the cover:

"Devin Green wakes in the middle of the night to find two men in her bedroom. No stranger to a fight, she calls to her foster parents for help, but it soon becomes clear this is a planned abduction - one everyone but Devin signed up for. She's shoved in a van and driven deep into the Idaho woods, where she's dropped off with a cohort of equally confused teens. Finally, two camp counselors inform them that they've all been enrolled in an experimental therapy program. If the campers can learn to change their self-destructive ways - and survive a fifty-day hike through the wilderness - they'll come out the other side as better versions of themselves. Or so the counselors say.

Devin is immediately determined to escape. She's also determined to ignore Sheridan, the cruel-mouthed, lavender-haired bully who mocks every group exercise. But there's something strange about these woods - inhuman faces appearing between the trees, visions of people who shouldn't be there flashing in the leaves - and when the campers wake up to find both counselors missing, therapy becomes the least of their problems. Stranded and left to fend for themselves, the teens quickly realize they'll have to trust each other if they want to survive. But what lies in the woods may not be as dangerous as what the campers are hiding from each other - and if the monsters have their way, no one will leave the woods alive."

 📚📚📚

I've commented many times on here about how I'm not a horror person, but after reading a spate of horror and horror-adjacent books recently (thanks, I guess, Owlcrate), I might have to revise that to say that I'm interested in horror, but only a very specific sliver of the genre. I don't even know what that sliver is, though. Maybe more thriller than horror? Psychological? Whatever subgenre it is, this falls into it. I could not put it down, ended up finishing it in about a day.

For starters, the whole premise of a bunch of teens sent to an ill-fated (aren't they all) wilderness "therapy" retreat hooked me immediately. I used to know someone who worked for one (🤮) and I knew someone who, uh...benefited isn't the word...from being sent to the same one. As far as I heard, neither of them experienced anything supernatural on their retreats, but even hearing about them back then I found the whole concept off-putting. This really cemented that impression.

I mean, for starters, who sends a group of "troubled" teens out into the wilderness for fifty days with adults as outnumbered as these two ill-equipped counselors were? You have five teens, at least one of which was sent there for her "violent outbursts" (are my sarcastic air quotes doing enough work here? I'm not sure), and only two early-20s counselors? Excuse me while I laugh my ass off. I truly don't think Ethan could have held his own against a group of sixth graders, let alone whole-ass teens, so that was an interesting choice. One "counselor" and one "wilderness guide" is in no universe adequate - and perhaps that's one of the many reasons why these retreats fell so out of favor (although they absolutely still fucking exist, I drive past the HQ for one every day on my way to and from work).

Anyway, yeah, premise, strong. Character development? So solid. Starting off, everyone is pretty heavily stereotyping each other, but it's clear from the jump that there's so much we aren't seeing below the surface, and I loved the way those deeper parts of each character came out as things progressed. It was done so naturally, it never felt forced, and the way the characters bonded as more was revealed about them felt very real. I thought it was so well done, letting things unfold together the way they did.

And finally, the inhuman faces appearing in the woods...MY GOD. Psychological warfare, seriously. Things that make the reader question reality is such a tricky line to tow (toe? Fuck, I don't know.). I'm sure some people love being so thoroughly gaslit by the media they're consuming that they have no idea what's up and what's down anymore, but that's not my thing. I do enjoy not being sure what's real and what isn't, but it often goes way too far for me to enjoy. This book?

Truly, just the right amount of questioning reality for me without putting me off of the story. It was enough to keep me on the edge of my seat and make it impossible to put the book down because I had to get to the bottom of things, but not enough for me to give up and decide I didn't care what was happening because it was all too obfuscated. If I didn't keep my nails cut super short for climbing, I would have been biting them off through at least the last half of the book. Masterfully written.

2024 Readcap

Yeah, I've used that portmanteau before, I know. It's stupid, but I like it.

Outside of Read Harder, I really only had a few reading goals. The first, which isn't really a hard and fast thing, was to read at least 100 books. Final count? 111. How very Bilbo of me.

First book of the year, The Mirrorwood by Deva Fagan. Last book, For She is Wrath by Emily Varga. I didn't review For She is Wrath, but it's a reimagining of The Count of Monte Cristo, in a Pakistan-inspired world, and it was pretty good! I also reread seventeen books - bet you can guess a few, and I'm rereading one of them again now - and I DNFed two books, which is a huge victory for me.

My last reading goal was to prioritize reading the books I bought this year and be more intentional with which books I purchased. I think I did pretty well with being intentional - most of the books I bought were for Read Harder, my book club, or were from my monthly book subscription boxes. This year, I'm going to try to use the library more for Read Harder challenges, or pick books from my TBR backlog. And speaking of my TBR backlog, it did not grow this year because I finished ALL the books I bought in 2024! So proud of myself.

Now, what should my 2025 goals be? I've got a monthly mystery read from my TBR shelf thanks to my sister, so I'll be reading those (knocked January's out on the 1st - #SoFat #SoBrave by Nicole Byer, SO good!), and my sister and I are also making Very Hungry Caterpillar scarves with different colors for each genre we read. Those aren't really goals, they're more...fun book-related things...so, what else should I throw into the mix? Read 112 books? Reread 25 books? Read one non-fiction book a month?

The world is my oyster.