Rachel Kovaciny's Blog, page 43

"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" by J. K. Rowling

So, it took me like six weeks to read this one.  Not because it's more difficult (it's not) or longer (it is) than the previous three, but because... I was dragging it out as long as I could, to be honest.  This is the last one that's super fun, before the badness and the madness descends.  This is the last full book where (spoiler alert?!?) my favorite character is alive through the whole thing.  

I do really enjoy this book, which is part of why I lingered over it.  I suspect I'll read the last...

"Kilmeny of the Orchard" by L. M. Montgomery

This is not one of Montgomery's best.  Still, it's winsome and pleasant, so it's not like I'm sad I read it.  I just... expect more from Montgomery.

Really, it feels like someone's first novel.  The one where they're just stretching their writing muscles to see if they can sustain a novel-length story or not.  And I feel like this might have been better off as one of her short stories, to be honest.  Like there's not really enough story here, so she kind of adds a lot of pretty filler to make it ...

"Finale" by Stephanie Garber

Well, I finished the trilogy.  This last book was approximately 400 pages of "this keeps getting worse and worse and worse," 10 pages of "maybe this will be okay," 1 page of "this is superb and I adore it and I'm going to read this page three times in a row," and 50 pages of "whew."  Now you know.

I did like Tella better by the end of this last book.  About as much I liked Scarlett to begin with, actually.  So that was cool.  Dante is still my favorite, though, even after all of this.  

I will say...

"Land of Hills and Valleys" by Elisabeth Grace Foley

I have read quite a few of Foley's books over the last ten years or so, and I think she has truly come into her own with this book.  It has a seemingly effortless flow that only comes with a great deal of work.  In fact, it swept me off to Wyoming with such ease I'm still a little breathless. 

In the midst of the Great Depression, Lena Campbell inherits a ranch when her grandfather dies.  She never met him, she never visited his ranch, and she's not even sure he was aware she existed because her ...

"The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the West" by Christopher Corbett

[image error] I didn't realize when I got this that it was going to be straight-up nonfiction.  I thought it was going to be one of those books that tells a true story like a novel, what I call "biographical novels."  But it's not.  Instead of telling only the story of one Chinese woman who came to America, it uses her story as a focal point around which to tell the larger story of all Chinese immigration to the Old West.  Which I completely dug, once I understood the book's goal.

Corbett focuses on the life o...

"Legendary" by Stephanie Garber

I almost never like the middle story in trilogies.  Like, basically never.  It's almost invariably my least-favorite part of a trilogy.  And Legendary is no exception.

I do think this book suffered because I loved Caraval so much (gushy review here), and then I dived straight into this book after finishing that one... only to stop reading after a few chapters because I just... wasn't loving this book.  And then I'd started it again, only to set it aside again.  

Now, I wanted to love it.  I was ex...

Winners of the S&S Giveaway!

Here we go!  The winners for the five Austen-related prizes are as follows:

Prize 1 (candle): Becky

Prize 2 (lip balm): Roxann

Prize 3 (sticker sheet): Kendra

Prize 4 (bookmarks & portrait sticker): EF Buckles

Prize 5 (bookmarks & bookstack sticker): Ivy Miranda

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Congratulations to all five of you!  I will be emailing you each to ask for mailing addresses later this morning.  

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the read-along -- whether you commented on every post, only one or two, or even j...

"Elizabeth and her German Garden" by Elizabeth von Arnim

I loved this book!  Oh, it was so refreshing and fun.  I am well on my way to being a firm fan of Elizabeth von Arnim -- in fact, I have bought a couple more of her books already.  I love how she makes me laugh!

This is really a journal in which she talks about her efforts to create the perfect garden in the home she shares with her German husband and their children.  Her garden is her retreat, her pet project, and her creative oasis for several years.  She has grand plans for it, but her series ...

"Caraval" by Stephanie Garber

Um.  Wow.  So, yeah.  I binge-read Caraval.  Four hundred pages in two days.  While also teaching my kids, cooking meals, etc.  I can't remember the last time I read a new-to-me straight-up fantasy book that I liked this much.  Probably, The Graveyard Book  by Neil Gaiman was the last time I just fell into a fantasy world and didn't want to come out.
(MILD SPOILERS follow, basically just about whether or not some characters survive to the end of the book.)

As usual, it wasn't the fantasy world that...

Sense and Sensibility GIVEAWAY!

We did it!  We read Sense and Sensibility together, and I had so much fun digging deeply into the text with you.  To celebrate, I'm giving away five Jane Austen-esque prizes:

Prize 1: "The Air is Full of Spices" candle I bought from Northanger Soapworks.  This is one of my absolute favorite candles -- it smells like oranges and spices, and the name comes from a line of Col. Brandon's in the 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility, where he describes what India is like for Margaret Dashwood.

Pri...