Alli the Book Giraffe

Hello readers! It’s been a while since I did a wrap up post and it feels amazing to be back at it. I genuinely miss talking about books so much.

I managed to get through 4 books this month and enjoyed pretty much all of them, which I’m happy about. I was so nervous because I know if I read a single book I didn’t like that I’d fall back into a slump.

Check out my How to Get out of a Reading Slump post if you are struggling, too!

Let me know what your favorite book of the month was!

I read most of this book back in March and then just fell into a slump. To be honest, I was really stressed out for a couple months because of school and getting some dental work done and those things are finally starting to calm down, so I’m getting back into it.

Wundersmith is the sequel to Nevermoor. Without spoiling book one, we are following the MC Morrigan while she goes to a magical school. She has to navigate this new magical world along with being out of place compared to everyone else.

Both Beautiful Villain and Charming Devil are both retellings. I thought the whole series centers vampires, but that is not the case.

Book one is a retelling of Great Gatsby where Daisy meets up with her childhood best friend Jay, but something is different that she can’t place. What she doesn’t know is that he now has many secrets, including that he is a vampire.

Book two is a retelling of Picture of Dorian Gray and follows Baz and Dorian. Baz has a power where she can make people immortal with her paintings and Dorian, who was previously painted by one of her ancestors, needs Baz to repaint him to keep him alive.

I did enjoy the lore that we got about the vampires book one. I feel like most authors don’t think about vampire lore. They just rely on vampire lore that everyone already knows.

I did not love all the pop culture references in book one. They weren’t as prominent in book two.

In Charming Devil, I was happy to see that Dorain was bisexual and had previously dated men. Oscar Wilde (the author) was imprisoned during his life for being gay and later died from a sickness he acquired in prison. I just think making the book LGBT honors him on another level.

I kept hearing people gush about Bat Eater, so I had to try it for myself.

Bat Eater follows Cora, who cleans up crime scenes for a living. This takes place in 2021 toward the end of the peak of COVID and because of this, Cora struggles a lot.

Asian women are being murdered in the masses and somewhere near or on their bodies will be a bat or the words BAT EATER.

She also has recently witnessed the death of her sister and she starts to see her ghost, or does she?

It was almost too much for me at times with the gore, but I still managed to enjoy it a lot. The book was super creepy and amazing at telling a story of a woman who may or may not be seeing ghosts.

It also calls out the giant issue of racism in America against Chinese or just Asian people in general during COVID. If you don’t know or don’t remember, there was a (racist) rumor going around that COVID was started from Chinese people eating bats.

The only reason I rated it 4 instead of 5 is that I believe there was a big part of the story that wasn’t resolved. It wasn’t an open ending or anything, it just didn’t resolve it. I sort of get it, there was a lot of different things happening all at once in this story.

I urge you to go check the trigger warnings before reading this one as the MC has OCD and it’s a big part of the story.

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Happy blogging and bookish adventures! 📚🦒✨

This post was created by Allison Wolfe for www.allithebookgiraffe.com and is not permitted to be posted anywhere else.

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