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Respectfully, Ireland is the best country on the planet

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You, a necromancer, were always fond of your skeleton minions. Even going as far as to make each one a personalized name tag. Then you were cut down by those blasted heroes, only to one day reopen your eyes and see an Elder Lich looming over you with a very faded name tag.

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Between These Bones by Freya Sharp

I wish I could have liked this more. While I sympathize with the author, the poetry was not very good initially and then got cheesy. There is probably an audience for this; I am just not part of that, it seems.

Thank you, NetGalley and Harbor Lane Books, LLC., for the chance to read and review this!

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Dragon Den by Kriss Dean

Thank you, NetGalley and Yggdrasil Press, for the chance to read and review Dragon Den by Kriss Dean.

Dragons are in vogue these days, or at least, post-Fourth Wing; I'm starting to see them more and more often, which could just be because of the algorithms involved.

Dragon Den is How to Train Your Dragon meets Fast and Furious, although sometimes I wonder if How To Train Your Dragon is just thrown into these things to help trick the algorithm into marketing the book for you. What it does have in common with HTTYD is that the characters are young, learning about dragons, and the main character is a dumb dude, trying to make his dad proud, and in love with a high-achieving woman.

But that last similarity might also be the book's downfall.

Fourth Wing worked because it was told from a female POV. The book itself wasn't well written; it was a fast read that you had to avoid reading too closely (the same way one watches a trashy TV show), and it had good smut told from the female POV. Regarding writing quality, Dragon Den may be in the same place, but by making the main character a dude who tells the smut from his perspective, you make it weird for female readers who are, let's face it, the primary audience for this book. You really have to force yourself to read the first few chapters; as a NetGalley reviewer, I might do that, but most people will give it up. He's also such a dumb dude. So dumb.

That being said, the plot itself is interesting, especially how it progresses at the end. There are plot holes, like how the adults are that dumb and how quickly the dude gets his dragon, but I'm willing to overlook that, given that this does seem to be the author's first book.

Blurb:

A fast-paced, action-packed romantic urban fantasy inspired by The Fast and the Furious, perfect for adult fans of How to Train Your Dragon.

Markus Fredriksen, the First of His Name, more titles to come, always dreamed of breaking a Black Clubtail and becoming a dragon rider. He fails to break any dragon at all, marking the end of his tenure at Dragild Military Academy.

The commandant unexpectedly offers him a broken dragon, but with a caveat: Markus must infiltrate the clan running the Dragon Den, suspected of hijacking semi-trucks carrying precious obsidian.

He jumps at the opportunity to salvage his dreams. He has no idea what he’s in for, but the clan leader’s daughter is about to become his biggest distraction.

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“If speaking kindly to plants can help them grow, just imagine what speaking kindly to humans can do.”

— Unknown

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We pass by a spot that looks like a stop on the motorway and I should be homesick and restless but I feel like that girl is long gone and the love laid to rest

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I saw this in Publika in Kuala Lumpur

The ads are real

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The Book of Conjurations by Irizelma Robles

Description:

The Book of Conjurations, Irizelma Robles’s fourth poetry collection, transforms poet, reader and language through its conjurations. Among these pages, we find all forms of material existence transmuted. Barbwire, rain, soul, sugarcane, scream are all raw materials for alchemy, or poetry.

Drawing from the periodic table, precious and semi-precious stones, minerals, rocks, the elements, flora and fauna from Puerto Rico, the Caribbean and Latin America, and her memories, Robles creates an alternate cosmogony that neither rejects nor unquestioningly accepts Western medical discourse, nor offers up one of many parallel traditions and bodies of knowledge. These poems are written to conjure another life out of this one, a way forward despite and with the poet’s neurodivergence, sadness, depression, and anxiety. Irizelma imagines herself as the poet-alchemist in order to conjure another self in that poetic voice, one that not only survived these hospitalizations, but that found metaphor, imagen, and poetic figure in the basest of elements. It is also a voice that found gold to be as useless as it was for all who sought it, a tool of power that ultimately became dead weight in her search for a way out.

Review:

Thank you NetGalley and Sundial House for the chance to read and review this book.

On the one hand, The Book of Conjurations is certainly interesting. It's not often that you can see metals used in poetry like this. However, I wonder if the translation is missing something? After a while, the poetry starts to blur together, even when certain pieces are very good.

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Lemony Snicket's Advice on Writing a Nice Thank-You Note

1. Do not start with the thank you.

2. Start with any other sentence. If you first say, “Thank you for the nice sweater,” you can’t imagine what to write next. Say, “It was so wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day.”

3. Then you’re done.

I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes.

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Oaths by F.S. Yousaf - Book Review

Description:

The poems within Oaths contain a promise made to oneself for a better future. Read with all the hope you can muster. A stunning and emotional follow-up to 2022’s Serenity, poet F.S. Yousaf continues his exploration of the self along the journey into adulthood in Oaths. This earnest collection picks up where Serenity left off, speaking to young readers who may be struggling with finding purpose in life and feeling hopeless in the face of recession, war, and division. Yousaf doesn’t offer answers, but a welcoming hand and a warm embrace to remind us all that we are not alone on the journey toward hope, love, and a life of meaning.

Review:

"My body moves like a tree on a breezeless summer day."

Oaths is not the first book I've read by F.S. Yousaf; the other was Sincerely which I ended up not being able to get through. I think this work shows massive improvement by the author and I'm interested to see how the next one will turn out.

Thank you NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for the chance to read and review this book.

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Book Review: Metamorphose by Kayla Stone

Thank you NetGalley and Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op for the chance to read and review Metamorphose by Kayla Stone.

Metamorphose has an interesting concept. a butterfly moves through a place believing it's horrifically ugly and unworthy of attention or love, Its belief in it's own unworthiness leads it to join the flames to be beautiful for some time, but afterwards realises that the brief moment of beauty cost far more than it was worth when it loses its wings and the ability to follow the sun.

This is meant to be a commentary on beauty and how women are taught to chase it at the cost of their own sanity and selves even when they are, objectively speaking, beautiful. After all, who amongst us can look at a butterfly and think it's ugly; and yet this one was willing to set itself on fire. The butterfly's own internal voice seems incredibly masculine in its obsession with beauty, think Du Bois double consciousness, but with women looking at their bodies through the male gaze.

That being said, this is not going to be my favourite read. While the concept is an interesting one the language was a bit strange and I was a bit bored. I personally feel anyone using the word ochre has issues. That, however, is an entirely personal problem and other readers who prefer a gothic style may actually really appreciate this.

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When I was in middle school, I tried to learn how to crochet. I knew how to knit already, so I figured ‘how hard could it be’ and used my Christmas money on a brand new set of aluminum hooks and a how-to book.

To say it was difficult was an understatement. I spent hours pouring over my book, begging to gain some inkling of understanding from what felt like incomprehensible runes. My reward? One lopsided trapezoid of lumpy fabric and a resolve to never pick up a crochet hook again.

And so life went on, I finished middle school and high school without giving crochet so much as a second glance. In college, I read about how crochet couldn’t be replicated by a machine, it was unique in a way that knitting and many other fiber arts weren’t.

For Christmas last year, my girlfriend gave me what I now consider to be my most prized possession: a crocheted plush of my favorite pokemon. I raved over her skills and, since she never learned how to knit, we decided to have a yarn date at some point and teach each other our respective skills.

We never did get around to that yarn date. She passed a few months after our declaration, leaving me to inherit what was left of her yarn.

Nearly a decade after my initial attempt, I got ready for the toughest battle of my life. My weapons? One skein of yarn, a YouTube video, and a crochet hook that I had somehow never gotten rid of.

I slowly made my way through the video, redoing my work a couple times until I was satisfied with my product: a small, slightly misshapen rectangle.

I looked at my pristinely-made pokemon plush with hope for the first time in months and thought to myself, ‘maybe crocheting isn’t the hardest thing in the world, maybe you were just 12.’

Maybe this isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Maybe I’m just 21.

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hey man I found a piece of your soul stuck in the text messages of old friends you don’t speak to anymore. do you want it back