It’s been a few years since I’ve done this tag so I figured why not give it another go! See the original tag post HERE!
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
Quicksilver by Callie Hart
Katabasis by R.F. Kaung
Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree
Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
“Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, October. The wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she out to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the Cartesian severance spell to revise without pee breaks, Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the Eight Courts of Hell.”
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I. So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song–complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
Because this book was written from June’s point of view it kind of gave me You vibes. Like she very much is Joe Goldberg but in the literary world. The ways in which this woman thread the various justifications around and around in her mind until she actually thought what she did was ok was intense to read. I was constantly on the edge of my seat wondering when and how she was going to be exposed and I was so thoroughly invested that I had to put the book down for a few days.
I liked the flashbacks to early on in June and Athena’s friendship and how their tenuous bond was established. Why Athena still chose to keep June around and why that prompted June in taking the manuscript in the first place. I feel like she thought she deserved and earned it after being used by Athena. The way that this one lie just spirals and how June feels so vindicated with all this success and after her initial failure.
Even though this was a pretty short-ish book there were some pretty heavy topics and themes woven throughout this book that without the help of the audiobook would of been a slog to get through. Worth it though I feel because the way the plot wraps up was shocking and unfortunately highly realistic and just makes you question a lot of the publishing industry as a whole.
⭐️4/5 stars This book was wild!
Hello friends it’s time for another WWW Wednesday update:
Zero Days by Ruth Ware
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
A Good Day to Pie by Misha Popp
Hello friends it’s time for another WWW Wednesday update:
Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Amy Leigh Reads 