The Rest Of My January Reading

It's book week here on the blog. I'll have two book review posts for you this week and this is the first one. These are the books I read in the last half of January. As you can tell, I fell into the Rebecca Yarros trilogy hype!

 

I actually thought this book was fairly clever. It's a thriller with some mystery but it didn't take the twists and turns I was expecting. I've read a lot of this genre so I'm always pleasantly surprised when a novel manages to... surprise... me!

I've really enjoyed all the Jennifer Chiaverini books I've read thus far and this one was no exception. I didn't know about the Canary girls (women who worked with TNT during World War I and turned (temporarily) yellow), I didn't know about the women's football (soccer!) league, and I really enjoyed this story. It reminded me (slightly) of a fictional version of The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. I really enjoy books about the world wars where I learn something I hadn't known before, and this one checked all the boxes.

This was Book 2 in Nora Roberts' latest trilogy and I thought it was okay. It advanced the story line. I do appreciate that this trilogy is somewhat different from others of hers as I feel like sometimes she just rewrites a story she's told before.

I honestly thought Onyx Storm was the last book in this series so I re-read both of these books in preparation for its release. Spoiler alert: I was wrong. It is not the last book. Anyways, both of these books are still just as good the second time around. Also, I made it about one-third of the way through Onyx Storm and then my friends died and I couldn't read any violence for awhile. Thus, I haven't picked it up again since January 26th.

I really wanted to love this book but I didn't. It wasn't just that I read it "off season," as it were. I didn't love how the main character, although a Jew, was obsessed with Christmas. I feel like Jews can have their holidays without envying (and trying to emulate) Christian ones. (I recognize I am not Jewish, but I feel like a book about being Jewish should stand on its own without "Christmas envy" being a big theme.)

 

I thought this book about two British speed cyclists was so interesting. It talks about the paths two women take as they pursue gold at the Olympics. This book was both very interesting and heartbreaking and I highly recommend it.

So those were the books I read in the last half of January. If you want to see the books I read in the first half of January, you can see those here. Have you read any of these books? Do you agree or disagree with my review of them?

January 2025: 15

2025 total: 15