 it feels so dark in our apartment. Hello hello everyone, my name is Laura and this is my channel Laura's Little Library and welcome to my January wrap up. So incredibly enough I read 18 books this January which is not anything close to how I've been reading in the past. Like I, this was an incredible reading month for me. I'm still not completely sure why. I don't know what it was. I just got so much reading done. I will say though I will not be talking about five of the books that I did read this month because they were children's books that was for a work thing. So it's not, they were not books that I picked up for my own enjoyment and because I wanted to actually talk about and read and review it was it was something that was asked of me. So there were five like children's picture books that I read that I won't talk about because I'm not interested in it. Some of them are on my Goodreads. That definitely helped my numbers improve quite a bit but I'll still be talking about 13 books that I read this month that you know and it was a pretty good reading month. It was like an average reading month. I had a couple five stars, a two-star like book I did not enjoy. So yeah okay let's just get into it. I have divided this up by genre and I will have time stands down below if you're interested in a specific genre so let's just get started with the manga that I read. So I read volume three of Spy X Family. I'm holding up volume four because I don't own volume three but I did get it from the library and check it out on my Kindle and read it as an e-book but now I can finally read volume four and I loved it very much. I just I love the series and I love the concept and I feel like each book is so short but something happens in each book that I just like so they tend to be five stars just because I'm very much enjoying this entire series so far like I said I'm only on like the fourth one but yeah I if you are interested in manga I would recommend this it's about a spy who has to form this fake family in order to complete his mission so he ends up fake marrying an assassin he doesn't know that she's an assassin and then they end up adopting a little girl who is able to read people's minds but she's afraid to tell people that she can read their minds because then she'll you know just get rejected and brought back to the orphanage so she knows that her father is spy and her mom's an assassin and she doesn't really know what to do and it's hilarious I'm very much enjoying this so I would very much recommend it and then I read two other volumes these were in the same manga and that is Silver Spoon volume two and volume three I am borrowing these from a friend this is about a city boy who goes to an agricultural high school and he is trying to adjust to that but also figure out what his dream and life is like what he wants to do what are his goals that he wants to accomplish I I like this manga a lot because I know that's going to be me I I'm a city girl who wants to start a homestead so it's kind of fun to see him learning even just the most basic farming things surrounded by people who are experienced farmers so I can very much relate to it it's a cute it's very much a slice of life so there isn't really much of a plot things just kind of happen which normally is not my cup of tea but because I can relate to the character I am enjoying it I don't think these are quite five stars like I love the first one I thought that was a five star but I think it's just kind of mellowed out to be like oh yeah this is an interesting book you know I'm enjoying it but I don't think it's quite a five star read so yeah but I'm gonna keep going with this manga too obviously okay now we can move on to the holiday slash contemporary so basically in this section I I ended up getting a bunch of holiday put books from the library audio books that I had put holds on during the holiday season and they all came in early January because you know that's when everybody finishes them and no one wants to read them anymore I decided to still read them even though it's like well past the holiday season of course so I I read three holiday books and then one other contemporary and I'm just gonna kind of lump them all together so the first one that I read was the matzah ball and this follows a Jewish main character who secretly she writes Christmas romances but she also has a chronic fatigue illness that's not the name of it but it's it's the idea that you know she if she uses a lot of energy then she needs a lot of time to recover and that's not something she advertises to the world she fell in love with a guy at summer camp and then he broke her heart and now he is back and putting on this grand matzah ball and her publishers are pressuring her to write a Hanukkah romance instead of a Christmas romance and she's not super psyched about that which is a bummer but she decides the matzah ball is the perfect opportunity to be inspired to write a Hanukkah romance I liked this book the romance itself it was a little ridiculous I was rooting for the couple but I just thought their attachment to the past was so strong and it kind of got to be a little annoying at times but it definitely had like the trope of like once he finds out it becomes so sweet and it like had such a heartwarming ending that you know is coming but you're happy that that's how it turned out anyway like I thought the characters were pretty okay I thought like it was just kind of a good book overall it was a 3.5 star read like it was slightly better than average but not quite at a four-star level like I liked the writing the characters were okay I loved the concept I cannot speak to the representation at all but other people have been able to of in other videos I've seen and they said it's pretty good and it seemed good to me but like I said that holds zero weight I thought it was just an above slightly above average like solid good book and a good one to read earlier in December when it's actually Hanukkah time then I read the holiday swap and this was a four-star read I think I very much enjoyed it was a perfect no can I let go of the fact that it wasn't perfect yes because it was great so the holiday swap follows twin sisters one is a judge slash host of a beaking show and one runs the family bakery and the one hosting a TV show has an accident she gets hit in the head and she loses her sense of smell and taste which are very important and also a very scary but she can't let anybody know that she has lost this because she is up for a promotion of being in a new show and so she decides to propose to her sister to do a twin swap she'll go home and manage the bakery while her sister can go and finish the TV show for her and it's a dual perspective like we go back and forth between the sisters because the sister at home has her own drama of like breaking up with someone with her boy her long-term boyfriend and just like it's a small town setting to it's you know small wintery there was quite a bit of a lack of communication and plot convenience in the book which bothered me only a little it didn't bother me as much as it normally does so that was kind of annoying I feel like there were some issues that could have been solved in a better way rather than just it got Saul really like the main issue I had with it I thought it was another like really good solid book like for a Christmas romance it was good for it not trying to be anything more than just a fun holiday read it was good I personally loved all the baking I will always love baking in books well maybe not always but I love books with baking so that really helped it for me the love interests for both of them I liked both of the love interest it took me to it took me time to grow on one of them because I just expected it to not work I have a different love interest but I immensely appreciated that it was it was a better love interest because there were like two options one who I hated one while liked and the one that I liked ended up being the final one which was amazing so I really grew to like that romance versus the other one it was like an instant like yep approved I like them so I love the love interest I love the baking such a sweet ending the ending was kind of drawn out a little bit for my taste but everything that happened I was happy about and was like glad I knew so I think it could have been shorter again but it was okay so yeah that was a solid like four out of five star book for me I read a holly jolly Diwali by Sonya lolly and this was a three out of five star bordering on a 2.5 I the idea the concept of the book sounded amazing but it wasn't executed in the way that I expected and it ended up being below my expectations so it is about this woman 28 year old woman who does not have a life partner and she's kind of struggling with that in her family is kind of struggling with that and so at the same time like she asked like two people two or three people what Diwali was and they each kind of just have their own answer and then that was the end of it like I wish there was more exploration into the holiday like if you're gonna bring up the main character being interested in the holiday I want a better answer and I would think she wants a better answer than that also like if she's going back to like learn and be with family she did a terrible job of that another thing that bothered me about this main character was that she was 28 years old but she acted like a 17 year old like she read to me like a teenager someone who was dumb and irresponsible and petty rather than like a grown adult who is trying to figure out her life and that was very annoying to me because I wasn't sure is this like it didn't read like an adult romance but I felt like it was supposed to like it just seemed so confused like there was no adult material in it like it just it was just so confused and then the whole romance like the love I did not like the love interest I felt like there was little to no chemistry between our main character and the love interest and the chemistry that was there was just like bad I just felt like all their interactions were just weird and didn't have any like positive results or results that made me feel for the characters or that they were falling in love and it kind of suffered from telling not showing because I like I said the chemistry just was not there and nothing happened to make me think that these characters were falling in love other than the main character saying I want to see him again I'm not in love because it's just the fling but I want to see him again and I'm like no of course you're not in love but it's also not like oh I just I had a hard time with the romance which was the main point of the book I just ran into some technical issues I don't remember what I was at other than complaining about a Holly Jolly Diwali so I'm just gonna go ahead and move on the last contemporary book that I read was not a holiday romance and that was Tokyo Ever After this is by Niko Jean it is a library book so I'm very glad that I finished it this January because it's due in February but I have a whole reading blog dedicated to this it was an impromptu reading blog so it's not like the cleanest or the most aesthetic it's the raw like oh my gosh I read this and I cried I laughed I enjoyed and I died so this was a five-star raid for me I absolutely adored it I loved our main character I loved the setting I loved the writing I loved how the narration so it was first person but our characters narration style was just so true to her character and it was a lot of fun to read from and I think that was probably my favorite thing about this book so this is basically the princess Diaries but with Japan and it's it's still different from the princess Diaries like it's it's the same concept of young girl doesn't know who her father is finds out figures out he is the prince of Japan and then goes to Japan to like become a princess kind of learn what she needs to do and who she needs to be still very different from the princess Diaries in many ways and I just absolutely loved this for what it was I loved every scene I I liked the romance probably wasn't my most favorite romance of all time but I liked it enough that like it still maintained a five-star rating from me like I just I love this so if you want more of my thoughts you can go ahead I'll like link the reading blog sometime around now if you want to watch that box it was a lot of fun for me it was interesting I read this so quickly next I'm going to move on to historical fiction I finished two historical fiction books this month and I am so incredibly proud of myself so and here's why because the first one is Anna of queef I had the cover to this and I took it off because I didn't like it very much and then I lost it I think it may have gotten thrown away I know I would never thrown away but I have moved twice since I started reading this book so it it most likely got lost or thrown away in a move but it is Anna of Cleave the Princess and the Portrait and this is by Allison Weir so this it's a little bit of a chunky book it legit took me two years to finish like I started this January 18th of 2020 and I finished it January like 25 or something of this year 2022 it legit took me two years to read this book so what had happened was when when it was 2020 I decided that I was going to read a different genre each month of the year of 2020 to kind of explore my reading tastes a little bit better January was historical fiction I read every book that month except this one I started in the last week of January but because I was in college and it's a thick one I just didn't finish it so I forced myself to put it down because February was romance and etc and so forth and then when that year ended I did try to pick this up last summer but I had a really hard time getting back into it because I had gotten about halfway through the book and I had hit a lull in the book like it like everything slowed down it got super political and it was just too much for me so I the pacing of this book was all over the place the first half was definitely better than the second half because so much happened in the first half and then the second half was like divorce until the ending where she died so this follows Henry the 8th's fourth wife Anna from cleave hey I had a really hard time picking this book up again it's just slow it was thick it was long it was slow it was hard there were some time jumps in here that just messed with my mind like it it was just not the most well organized like I think the writing itself was fine it just wasn't organized and I couldn't always keep up with the politics which for the most part was okay because I could still get the gist of this is bad this is good but in terms of like how many people there were it just it just didn't happen and I didn't really care and that was such a big component of this book I also I liked Anna most of the time so I actually ended up giving this like a three stars uh like it was fine it was a solid book definitely not my favorite but it's not completely the books fault like obviously I mentioned a lot of problems but there's also like the whole political thing is because of personal preference and not something uh to be taken away from the book itself the last book that I read in January was a historical fiction and that was luck of the titanic and this is by Stacy Lee again it's a library book I fully checked this out with the library saying oh I I'd seen that book I'd be interested in reading it but I did not expect to actually read it this month but then I found myself with time and so I read it this is a obviously it's a titanic story it follows a Chinese English main character she and her brother are acrobats and they get on the titanic she wants to move to America as an acrobat and her brother is actually going to Cuba uh to find work he is not interested in being an acrobat and there were a lot of things happening in this book I dabble back and forth between three stars and four stars I think personal preference three star but the book probably deserves four stars there was just a lot going on in this book and it was just a lot to keep up with because she is pretending to be someone she used to work for who is in first class but she switches back and forth between pretending to be mrs slone so that you know she can actually get on the ship but also going down to third class where her brother and the other Chinese passengers are and like going back and forth and then sometimes she dresses up as a boy in order to be an acrobat versus dressing up as a first-class woman and then on top of that she meets this other person who's making her like do and wear certain things and there was just so much going on and then there was a romance plot thrown into it and I did not like the romance at all I felt there was no chemistry I didn't like the love interest it made no sense the ending uh I mean obviously it's a titanic story so we all know the ending but even after the events of the titanic sinking I didn't like the ending it was confusing and it was abrupt it was just not my cup of tea however the book the writing of this book was beautiful there was it was so visual lots of similes and just like you know it wasn't quite poetry but it had poetic elements to it and I I very much enjoyed it I thought the writing was beautiful I kind of liked our main character like the acrobat aspect was cool I appreciate that this is a story that has not been told like the titanic is a story that's been told before but the chinese immigrants is a story that has not been told before so I appreciate it's that new voice but this also reminds me that I just need to stop reading titanic stories I need to stop reading stories I know we're going to be tragic so now on to our last section fantasy and this is also the biggest section I believe so the first book that I finished was seasons of chaos by Ella Cosimano it's the second book after seasons of the storm it's a duology I own them but not the second one but the second one is the one that I finished and so the one I'll be talking about this 3.5 stars kind of I think on Goodreads I may have marked it as four because I still really enjoyed the idea of the book it's a very hard concept to explain so it's the idea that the seasons are humans but there are like multiple humans per season so you can have like multiple winters summers falls autumn springs whatever um and they there is an institute and they're all planted throughout the world and they have to kill each other in order to change the season that's the premise of the first book I won't tell you the premise of the second book because it's a duology and I don't want to spoil it I will say the villain in the second book I wish he was a more attractive villain and I don't mean like he wasn't cute I mean like he just wasn't a good villain I wasn't rooting for the heroes to beat him but I wasn't rooting for him to do well either like like he was just he was not a villain that I loved to hate nor hated to love he was just kind of there and I was a little disappointed in him the romance which this is like this is a like fantasy romance kind of but I just feel like that we were missing just a little bit more of the romance I think there could have been like more romance more chemistry and I feel like because of the start of the romance it just wasn't what I was hoping it would be like I definitely it felt like one of those romance that could just be a classic timeless tale but it just never got there for me there did seem to be quite a few like twist turns and like plot points some of them are kind of predictable but I had a hard time with the loyalty and lack of with the characters like I feel like none of the characters had any loyalty to anyone and that was just like oh everyone's just spineless and it's not fun to read with characters like that I will say though I think I enjoyed this book more than the first one the first one I think was the three stars this one I think was slightly better I don't know if it was really enough to bring it to a four star or just be a 3.5 but I did enjoy the second one so if you read the first one and enjoyed it enough the second one is definitely worth a read do I kind of wish that they had ended the first one a little bit better and then just not had a second one yes but I'm not mad at the second one in itself then finally read siege and storm by Lee Bardugo I read shadow and bone way back in high school and now I finally picked this up and I hated this it was a two-star read I hated Mal I hated Alina I hated Mal and Alina the Darkling just didn't do anything the first half the book was fine the second half literally nothing happened and it was the most annoying thing like it felt like it felt like this series or this trilogy really should have just been a duology or this should have been half the size like I don't really like series where the big first book tiny second book big third book but literally half of this book could have been cut out and so you either could have combined it with the first or the second because like the main event the main point of this second book happened very early in this book and then I felt like she just kind of was like well we can't go into the plot of the third book yet because that's the third book so I guess we're just gonna keep going until it's a solid book and it just mm it irked me so much I admit I liked Prince Nikolai I thought he was a somewhat interesting character like he and himself is not a unique character but there were unique elements to him which I appreciated so the first half of the book Alina just like beats up on herself and then at the very end she remembers oh yeah I'm not maker and that has good qualities and then the book ends so I just felt like there was little character growth with her like she just kind of didn't do anything until the book ended and there was a big event that I was hoping would happen it did happen I'm happy but again that could have been brought up so much more forward than a bigger event made the book more interesting obviously I'm still gonna pick up the third book because I need to finish the trilogy I'm just glad I got this done before the second season comes out but if I can finish the third one before the second season then maybe I can actually read Six of Crows which I haven't read yet like I've seen the first season so I know the spoilers for Six of Crows but like whatever I still want to read it so I think this was my worst read in the month it's my two star gosh it drove me nuts it just it drove me insane moving on I read Beneath the Sugar Sky by Shownan McGuire it is the third book in the Waiver Children series I only own the first two books but now I really want to buy the third one the one I just read and I loved it I rated it five stars this book focused on the confectionery world and that is the world that is my world I am a baker and I love that this book is like it's a non-logic but there is still a pattern to it which is something that I like and I could just oh my gosh to be in a world of all baked goods and to just sit there and bake all day and like not be burned when you stick your hands in the oven like oh my gosh I love it so much so what's interesting about this series is that the first one was kind of like a murder mystery the second one was like a slice of life and this third one was an adventure story and I enjoyed it that plot like I just I loved the good old-fashioned adventure story I loved how it was done I love that we got to see not just one world but actually two and both worlds that we had met characters who had gone there so they're not like completely new but at the same time shana maguire did a great job introducing these new worlds to us like it was explained well without being over explained it was so much fun I thought the perspective the character that we followed was a very interesting choice but I loved it I thought it was such a risky thing to do but it was done really well like it was just so creative and so pure I cannot help but love this book especially since because this is the book that I relate to the most in terms of the world so it's going to be interesting reading the rest of the book in the series because I know I'm most likely gonna love them but this might they're like I've rated all three books five stars so far but this is like my top five star purely because it's me I feel seen I feel comforted I feel warmed the final book that I read this January was Vicious Spirits and this is by cat show this is the second book in a duology I believe it's the Gumiho duology the first book was called Wicked Fox this book was interesting I gave it 2.5 out of five stars maybe three like it was so close I think maybe it was more of a three star it was not nearly as bad as Siege and Storm which now that I think about it might get down to a one star really the first half of the book is what I did anyway this book so I'm gonna try and explain it it's based off of Korean mythology it follows the nine-tailed fox and like I said this is the second book in the duology so I don't want to give too much away because these are all spoiler free reviews probably except for Siege and Storm just because it's such a popular book anyway the in the second book you you don't follow the same main character like it's dual perspective but in the other two characters which I thought could have been done better because here's the thing I liked their romance I liked how they came together I liked the characters I just felt like we were missing the main couple like I still feel like they're the side characters even though they're the ones telling the story because all the drama was still about the first character so about me young I had such a hard time because I loved Junu and Solmin I liked the love story between Junu and Solmin and I liked that it was brought forward but I felt like they just took away so much from Jihoon and me young like because especially the book is still very much me young's story but it's no longer being told through her or by her so it just felt weird like I just feel like it was out of balance and that and that was just I had a hard time with that and that was the whole book long this book also suffered from said so-and-so and so-and-so said like whenever there was a conversation with people I it always stuck out to me that was like blah blah said so-and-so so-and-so said blah said so-and-so like it just used said and the names so many times that it actively annoyed me and I stopped paying attention to what the characters were saying and just kept being like oh my word the author's still doing said blah blah blah said blah blah blah and it it's I couldn't do it I was very frustrated by it like it was the weirdest thing for that to be so bothersome but it was just so repetitive I couldn't handle it and it was an audiobook too so I was just like oh my word move on already I felt like the book overall was a bit slow and the other issue I had is that I felt like we would start the plot point and then like the author like changed her mind or something and just kind of dropped it said nope that didn't work try something else and it just felt like nothing got completed like it didn't feel like plot twists or failing and trying something else it just it just didn't flow at all it just kind of like oh here's an idea and never mind oh here's an idea and never mind we'll go with something else and it just it was so jerky and it didn't work very well for me it was again I had a hard time with that I think it was a good idea it just wasn't executed well I still very much appreciate the found family I think we missed an entire character whatever so yeah I just had a hard time with the characters the point of view and the plot which I'm a plot driven reader so that does mean a lot to me those are all the books that I read this January thank you so much for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe down below I post videos on Sundays and Wednesdays and I've got a lot of fun content coming up so also I have other bookish social medias linked down below feel free to follow me I will follow you back and we can chat get recommendations from each other have all the fun otherwise feel free to comment down below what was your favorite or least favorite book that you read in January just one for some of the books you read recently I would love to hear from you but until I see you all in the next video I wish you happy reading