April was a month. We were literally doing shorts one day, and then scraping the ice and snow off our cars the next. It was a wild time. For my book-reading too. I feel like my choices were all over the place. I got a bunch more of my Kate Daniels holds in through Libby, so those took priority, and I also got a great stack of physical book requests in at my library. My last class ended, so my free time ramped up, but I tried to balance out books and dramas, so it might not seem like much more as far as this post goes.
Urban Fantasy
Pearl City is the final book in the Phoenix Hoard trilogy by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle. I love this series a lot. I have read and re-read the first two books multiple times. I especially love the audio versions as read by the excellent Natalie Naudus. This final installment of the series really hits the ground running with a lot of intensity. Unfortunately for the storytelling, that intensity comes at the expense of some of the softer storytelling of the first two books. There is less time spent with friends and family that doesn’t involve blood and violence. This book has great action, but doesn’t really have the heart of the first two books. I also struggle with the romantic plot of this final installment. I won’t say it came out of nowhere, because we have seen the character before, but the previous books set up someone else as the romantic lead in a way that made this finale a bit confusing. I think that Vee and Bebelle really excel at creating interesting characters and unique worlds, but their romantic arcs could use a little work. This series has a love triangle in the background that never quite gets the reader where they need to be for how it ends up. Is it bad? No. But I didn’t immediately re-read this one like I did with the others.
Fists and Fangs is the fourth and final installment of the Seattle Slayers series by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle. I have been waiting for a while to get my hands on this book so I could finish off the series. The writing duo recently released this series as a single volume and I think that makes a lot of sense. This book has some really exciting fight scenes in it, but it reads like the final arc of a book rather than its own story. While the first 3 books stand on their own very solidly, this one has no story of its own other than the romance between Roxy and her vampire suitor. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, I don’t find romance to be a strong suite of the authors’ writing. It is a fine wrap-up to Roxy’s story, but it didn’t grab me the way the other volumes did.
Manga
The Failure at God School is the first volume in a series set in a modern world where people with unique powers can train to become gods and work at community shrines. The main character is a girl who has no apparent power, but who garners the attention of an extremely powerful god when she rescues a lost child. She is given admission into the school for future gods where students learn how to hone and harness their unique abilities. I am curious to see where they go with this story. There appears to be a romantic set-up, and it is obvious that our girl has a power that just doesn’t register somehow. I look forward to reading more.
A Vampire in the Bathhouse is a delightfully fun slice of life story about a vampire who comes to work and live in a family-run bathhouse. There is a flirtation between the vampire and the older brother who helps run the bathhouse. The book stands alone with several individual stories about life in the bathhouse and its surrounding community. The artwork is beautiful and a little sexy since it IS set in a bathhouse and the vampire needs either blood or sex in order to anchor his magic to our realm. I had a lot of fun reading this book and would love to see it become a series.
That’s it for this month. It’s not all I’ve been reading. I’ve read a bunch of absolute bangers this past month (and some total garbage), but this is it for the Asian Authors. I will give a quick shout out to the book Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove which is coming out in June. It is so wild and fun! Definitely put it on your list if you like sci-fi, horror, and the good kind of AI.
