February Wrap Up | 2021

hey guys it's sam and this is my february wrap up so february was a weird but mostly like uh reading month for me um it could have been better definitely i also felt kind of slumpy i don't think it was the slump's fault for any of this i think some of these books that were bad were actually bad but definitely felt just a little uh through most of the month but that is passing um so i think march has good potential but let's get into the books for february so the first book that i read was city of stairs by robert jackson bennett this is the first book in an adult fantasy series that takes place in this city that used to be ruled by gods and gods kind of made everything happen they made sure people lived really healthy lives a lot of the infrastructure was like literally created by them and years ago the gods were killed by some of the people that weren't from that area that didn't have gods and they used to be the oppressed people end up killing the gods and everything kind of fell apart years ago so there's recently been a murder and one of the people that is involved in the politics over in that sort of conquering but formerly oppressed nation is there to solve the murder of this colleague and everything is unraveling from there the first bit is much more of a like murder mystery story and the second bit is much more of like the gods the magic what does all this mean what's actually going on here and all that does have triggers for body horror and biphobia i read this because i really like robert jackson bennett's other series foundry side and i still do like foundry side more but i am intrigued by this especially the later half of the book and the magic and things like that that were going on it is a very interesting system and the way that the guys are talked about and i just tend to like books with like large pantheons and things like that and every book is going to be following a different character that we met with in this book so that's also kind of fun because we're going to get a lot of different perspectives and things and i find a lot of those other characters very interesting as well i end up giving this 3.75 out of 5 stars and i have done a full review for this so i'll link that on the screen i then read act your age eve brown by talia hibbert this is the third and final book in the brown sisters series their companion series and this follows the youngest sister eve and she has always been kind of like the not the problem child but she can never find like her path in life everyone kind of calls her flaky and she has recently stopped doing her wedding planning business and her family is like we're gonna cut you off because they're from a pretty wealthy family so like we're gonna cut you off and you have to like take care of yourself until you find your own thing and so she ends up going to this town kind of running away afterwards out of shame and discovers this bnb and they are having interviews for a chef and she's like i can cook and she goes this interview and that is where our love interest is he is the owner of the bnb and he is this very like put together kind of emotionally distant uh very like serious guy and he actually has autism that is revealed very quickly and so he is autistic she is also neurodivergent but you don't know at the beginning necessarily what is going on with her and they end up forming this like sort of hate to love romance and this was really cute i really like the brown sisters books i just think they are really cute the thing that i always have to complain about these is that the sex scenes in here are so over the top and random for such like a mainstream book series just like a adult contemporary romance not a lot of like muddy feelings outside and then the sex scenes are like really over the top in my opinion for somebody who doesn't read a lot of like smut erotica anything like that so be prepared for that if you are going to read these but i really like everything else aside from that it's just the sex scenes that really pull me out of the story because they are so much but i really like this series and i think she might be setting up another series that's following some siblings because some siblings of another family were introduced here and i'm like are you setting this up so i'm hoping for that but this book comes out sometime this month i want to say mid to late march so check that out if you like their other bronze sisters books i'm sure you like this one as well then we have king of the rising by case and calendar this is the final book in the islands of blood and storm duology i've done a full review for this i will link that on the screen this does have triggers for slavery rape mass suicide and violent deaths throughout if you want to read the series i really encourage you to watch my review because this is not a series for everyone and i think people should know before going into it what they're getting into because some people will still like this even with the content that it has but some won't and i think that this series was not properly marketed to get to the correct audiences this is following one of the characters that we met in the first book and this is taking place after the uprising that occurred in the first book i mean you kind of it's a spoiler from like the title and this is very dark very grim i wouldn't even call it like grim dark it's just very realistic and we're basically watching a bunch of leaders continuously failing in a very like realistic way but it's just it's just a lot as you could probably tell from the triggers so go and watch that video i end up giving this two out of five stars because not just because of like the brutality of the story i mean i read a lot of brutal things but more so because of the that in combination with the writing and feeling like i wasn't prepared for it with the rest of the story like i feel like you can tell those stories but for me personally i like some warning that's what's coming didn't really feel like i got that so ultimately it wasn't very enjoyable for me but i do still think it could be enjoyable for other people or be like a worthwhile read for others so check out that review if you're interested then i started reading a bunch of hades and persephone retellings and i will leave my vlog on the screen because i did in-depth reviews for all of these on that vlog because i read four hades persephone retellings and did all of my reviews there so i will link that for more in-depth reviews i'm not going to go into very much here first is katura and lore death by martine levitt this is a standalone y a story but it is a little bit uh older y a so it feels a little bit more mature it almost has like a fairy tale-esque feeling to it as well but this is following katura who is in like i wouldn't say like a medieval kind of village setting and she has made a bargain with death lord death uh the personification of death and she has to find her one true love otherwise she is going to get taken by death and as the story kind of tells you know it's kind of like a persephone it says couture and lord death she discovers throughout the story uh that she has this connection to death as a concept and has always sort of loved death and been very comfortable with it and that is the whole sort of premise of the story so i really enjoyed this one out of all of them that i read in my vlog i go over as far as like the hades persephone elements sort of like the hades type character even though this is not an actual hades and persephone retelling it's inspired by so kind of how i feel about the hades characters how i feel about persephone characters how i feel about the underworld setting if we have one things like that so if you again want more in-depth information that is where to go and check that out but i gave this one 4 out of 5 stars i then read a deal with the elf king by elise kova this is another inspired by i would say this is a blend of beauty and the beast and hades of persephone taking place in like an elf kingdom with that kind of magic and this is a for y a i really don't know if it's y a or adult because the main character is like 19 i want to say kind of new adult i guess and this is taking place in a fantasy companion series so these books are all going to take place in the same world but not following the same characters in the story there is a human queen taken every time the last human queen dies to be the wife of the elf king we find out very early on that there's always a new elf king as well so it's not just like one dude who's thousands of years old it's they're all just like it's the title of the elf king and they basically have to balance magic so the human queen ends up having like really cool nature magic and he has like death slash like an other kind of magic and i just really like that balance i enjoyed the elements of both like beauty and the beast and haze and persephone here and it was ultimately like a pretty fun world i gave it 3.75 stars because it wasn't perfect there were some threads that weren't really tied up as well as they probably could have been in my opinion and there was just some things that like didn't quite hit the mark for me but ultimately i i did enjoy this as a hazel stephanie inspired story and i do plan on reading more books set in this world i think she's probably going to end up doing sort of like retellings inspired bys within this world and i will read those as well so far i think they might be pretty interesting and there was the hades persephone break funny enough because this also has to do with greek mythology and that was for lore by alexander bracken i've talked about this a lot in number of different places so i'm not going to go into it much here this is a standalone why a urban fantasy story in which every seven years greek gods are reincarnated kind of as mortals and killed off by different hunter families and laura is our main character who is in a family that has been basically wiped out and she gets pulled back into that by her best friend that she thought was dead and everything is kind of going from there oh and another greek god is also like teaming up with her as well i talked about this a number of places we have our household book club discussion of this book and i have done a review and a gripe of this this has triggers for rape pedophilia cancer and gore and this was one of the worst books that i've read in a very long time this story was flat the characters were flat all of them very one-dimensional the villains were incredibly one-dimensional and i left this book feeling like what was the point again i've talked about this so much that i don't want to go into it right now i just don't even have the energy but this was so disappointing on so many levels and i will encourage you to watch my review if you want more of my thoughts on all of the reasons why but this was bad and this was bad and my final haze persephone retelling i read was a touch of darkness by scarlet saint claire this is an actual habeas persephone retelling so it does feature hades and persephone as characters this is taking place in a modern day new athens where the gods are running like nightclubs and their celebrities and things and our persephone character is very traditional he's persephone myth where she's very sheltered by her mother and she's trying to get away from that and she ends up going to haiti's nightclub accidentally gets in a bargain with him and has to spend some time in the underworld and everything goes from there there are trigger warnings in here for sexual harassment not done by hades done by another character like i said my vlog is going to have more details about this but this one was ultimately pretty disappointing it was just not written very well our persephone character was more annoying than the kind of character that i really like that's like strong stubborn and can be kind of impulsive but is still really powerful and is still like pretty wise didn't really have that element i didn't love the haters character but i would say he's better than the persephone and i did like the underworld setting but not as much as other ones that i've read ultimately this was way more smutty than i thought it was going to be as well and the smut was not well done because it didn't make sense for where the characters were in their like relationship and the story just felt like the author wanted to write a lot of sex scenes and i'm like why though like everything had to lead to sex even if it didn't quite make sense that it was leading to sex so that was just a little bit much for me and this is like a four book possibly more than that series of just hades and persephone and i'm not continuing past this you can read it as a standalone but i can't imagine like the amount of miscommunication and things too just like not good so i end up giving this two out of five stars and as i mentioned in my vlog for the hayes persephone books i don't tend to get along well with like direct retellings where they are hades and persephone because i feel like it's regurgitating the same story over and over and over again so i might be taking a step back from these fully but i do plan on also doing a tier ranking video of all the haze and persephone books that i've read thus far so for those of you that have been asking for that for a while it is coming sometime in the next like month or two and i'm going to be mentioning this in an upcoming unhaul but i plan on doing little unhauls at the end of all of my wrap ups if i plan on unhauling a book that i've read so for this month i'm going to unhaul king of the rising lore and i think a touch of darkness but that is it for all the books i read in february like i said like a mixed month like the beginning wasn't bad and then it kind of like tanked a bit so yeah i'm hoping that my next few months of reading are way better to make up for this so comment down below and let me know if you've read any of these books and what you've thought of them thank you all for watching and i'll see you love you guys soon [Music] bye you

Channel: Thoughts on Tomes

Views: 8,113

Rating: 4.9815383 out of 5

Keywords: booktube, book, review, goodreads, book haul, thoughts on tomes, thoughtsontomes, february wrap up, february reading wrap up, 2021

Id: WC2jSMEZicw

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021