These are all the fiction books I finished in January. It was a bit of a mixed month with a few five star reads but also some disappointments.
Queen of Shadows
Author: Sarah J. Maas
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This book is the fifth (or fourth depending on how you count The Assassin’s Blade) book in the Throne of Glass series. This series made my top books of 2023, and this one did not disappoint. There’s not too much I can say about this one without spoiling the rest of the series, but this wrapped up several of the storylines that were opened in the previous book—Heir of Fire—and deepened our understanding of existing villains.
Every book in this series cements my love for it more. Even though some books are less action-packed than others, I feel like Sarah J. Maas always gives us a good balance. If we don’t have a big, epic plot in one book, there are new characters to watch grow and fall in love with, and it builds the tension to the next instalment.
Daughter of the Siren Queen
Author: Tricia Levenseller
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
This is the sequel to Daughter of the Pirate King. In the previous book, the heroine, Alosa was tasked with finding something for her father. In this one, we learn that her father has lied to her about the nature and whereabouts of her mother, who Alosa ventures off to find in defiance of the pirate king.
It was a cute story, and it settles the unresolved threads that held over from the second book. It’s YA, and the characters are pirates at the age of 17-18, so there’s a certain willing suspension of disbelief. I think this is something I would have really loved when I was the age of the target market, and I’m very much past that now. There is a third book in this series that follows a different character, but I think the first two can be read as a duology, so I don’t really have an urge to pick up the next one.
The City of Stardust
Author: Georgia Summers
Rating: ⭐️⭐️.5
This was the January Adult Fairyloot pick, though I think I would have picked this up on my own, but I’m sad to say it was disappointing. This book follows Violet Everly, a young woman whose family is cursed. Every generation, a woman called Penelope comes and takes one of the family members never to be seen again. The story unfolds as Violet sets out to break the curse.
The book had an interesting premise: it involved a secretive, magical city in another dimension, Fidelis, and the writing was beautiful and conjured lush imagery. But unfortunately the characters (particularly Violet and her love interest, Aleksander) were just bland. After her journey to break the curse begins, we get a very big time jump, and the plot oscillates between boring and confusing.
What was even more disappointing is it seemed to be building to some sort of grand finale. During the book there are several versions of a sort of fairy tale as to why Fidelis broke off from the world of which it was originally a part. I like storylines that play with legends and “truth” as a theme, but this didn’t seem like it had been thought through. When we get to the part where all is revealed, it’s still not clear what the villain was doing and why she was terrorising everyone, which just leads to an unsatisfying ending. Additionally, the character arcs seemed rushed and unnatural, their growth forced for the sake of the plot.
The book had a few things going for it including technically good writing and interesting premise, but the execution of the story fell flat, and the good parts couldn’t make up for the bad ones.
Check & Mate
Author: Ali Hazelwood
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This is Ali Hazelwood’s YA debut, and like all of her other books, I ate this one up. It follows a young woman, Mallory, who was a chess prodigy as a young girl but stopped playing in her early teenage years because of a family upset and finds herself swept back into the world of chess when her friend convinces her to join a charity tournament and she ends up beating the world champion.
I’ve observed in the past that Ali Hazelwood’s books (particularly her books following women in STEM) become repetitive, though I don’t mind that as long as I don’t read them back to back. I’m glad to say, this one broke the predictability trend (in that the twist at the end was not the same as all of the other ones in her previous series).
The book concentrates for the most part on Mallory’s character arc, and overall I found it to be a cute, fun, absorbing read. What I also always love about the love interests in Hazelwood’s books is how they are so clearly infatuated with the FMC’s mind, and this aspect came across really strongly in this book.
Even though this is YA, the main characters are all eighteen or over and I didn’t find that the characters read so young as to be unappealing to my old lady sensibilities. Hazelwood managed to convey a realistic sense of maturity given the character backgrounds without them reading either too old or too young. The tone was pretty similar to her other novels, and this was all around a delightful read.
A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting
Author: Sophie Irwin
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
This regency book follows Kitty, the oldest of five sisters whose parents have just passed away and left them with a lot of debt and the threat of having to sell their house to pay it off and split up the family. In order to solve her troubles, as all young women do in regency books, Kitty sets off to London to find a rich husband. She identifies one and almost secures a proposal when her prospective fiancé’s older brother, Lord Radcliffe, swoops in and puts a stop to it.
I very much enjoyed the character arcs of both Kitty and her love interest, (obviously Lord Radcliffe). Her motivations are to secure a future for herself and her sisters using pretty much the only card she has to play which is becoming the wife of a rich man, while his are to protect his brother and act in the capacity of head of his family for his mother and two younger siblings.
This is very much a hate to love, but unlike some other regency romances, this doesn’t start with contrived hatred. So often, similar books employ a ridiculous motivation for the hate part of this trope that usually stems from sexual attraction that one or both of the characters (usually the man) finds abhorrent because he doesn’t want to be tied down (the horror!), which so often seems artificial. Lord Radcliffe doesn’t want her to trap his brother in a marriage in which she doesn’t love him, and she thinks he’s being a snob because her parents weren’t wealthy and she wasn’t ever part of London society. There are definitely some parts of this that give me Pride and Prejudice vibes.
That being said, the middle part of this book did seem to sag a bit. While the character development and the relationship between the characters was really good, the other part of the plot, which involved Kitty attempting to woo a string of suitors into proposing was a bit repetitive and dragged until the last quarter.
Ultimately, the characters and their motivations were very well developed, and I enjoyed the relationship building between them, but the plot fell a bit flat in the middle, which impacted the reading experience.
The Kat Bite 