The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan

The slog has hit OWWR Pod, everyone. I will say one thing about The Path of Daggers, it was shorter than the other books! I also got where Jordan was writing from. He was trying to set us up for the next few books. He was hitting different stakes for each character, moving them so in the next few books they would know where to go. I think I missed Mat most of all in this book, and was supremely disappointed with how Jordan is using Egwene and Perrin, which is to say not at all.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I wrote an entire essay on this book that you can read here. Needless to say, I greatly enjoyed this novel. There are necromancers, space, a mystery and a half! What isn’t there to like about Gideon, our hard on the outside, soft on the inside lesbian who just wants to be a warrior and is trying to deal with her trauma internally. I cannot wait to read Harrow the Ninth, and pushed it up on the TBR for the month!

The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Another book I wrote an entire essay on! These posts may be more fun for you to read Laura’s than mine! But I have had so much fun with most my reads this month. The Mountains Sing is no different. A family enduring various wars and occupations in Viet Nam, this is a stunning novel on loss, trauma, and love. Highly recommend!

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

I should never start an Emily Henry novel after 7 p.m. ever again. Because I know I will stay up until 1 a.m. to finish. This has happened twice now. We follow Poppy, an influencer who travels and stays on amazing vacations, and her best friend Alex, a studious person who loves plans and has lived in their hometown for the majority of his life. They haven’t spoken in two years but Poppy is trying to salvage their relationship, inviting him on a vacation trip they usually took annually. We see their relationship now v. then, and are guessing what exactly happened. I really enjoyed this book! While I’m not a huge friendship romance, this book definitely works on all the romantic comedy levels, and I love Henry as an author. Poppy is a bit more boring for me, almost a self-insert, but definitely good for a quick, fun read.

Winter’s Heart by Robert Jordan

While I do not love that Robert Jordan made his FIRST BOOK WITHOUT AN ARTICLE (why can’t this be A Winter’s Heart??), I actually really liked this book! Although the first half is rough and I didn’t really care about the stakes of the various character’s I’ve been with for so long, the second half is where everything fell into place in such a lovely way!! I enjoyed Mat’s storyline and Rand’s! I also love that Jordan finally shook up who was with whom for a change. I was getting a bit meh on some of the characters being together for so long. I hope he keeps this up and keeps moving through the plot. Can’t wait to finish book 10 and be done with the ever discussed slog.

Skye Falling by Mia McKenzie

This book was so darn cute! We follow Skye, a woman who doesn’t have many ties to her hometown of Philadelphia, but spends her time avoiding her brother and mother when she’s in town for a week or two from her successful business planning trips for Black travelers in various countries. That is until she meets a little girl who is biologically from one of Skye’s eggs. What follows is a lesson in love, finding romance, and finally accepting your backstory and who you are. McKenzie does a stunning job making you feel for this cast of characters. I loved learning more and more. It was also a fun book that had stakes and consequences. It didn’t shy away from anything to paint the prettiest of pictures. But it did do a stunning job of letting us see a woman we could root for, even if she has a Peter Pan complex and doesn’t always see the world clearly. I loved this as an end to my October reads!