 Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name is Jackie, I'm a reader and a writer and somehow it is July. It's even late July now and that means it is Q3. I'm not sure how it happened, but it is time to do an overview of everything I read in Q2. So in Q2 I read 22 books, though I think two of them were short stories so I'm not sure if I should be counting them and the common themes were superheroes and light rom-coms because I use rom-coms to self-soothe, as well as a couple of like narrative non-fiction audiobooks. So before we jump in, this is my second time doing a video like this. The last one took like an hour and a half to film I think and my camera has a lifespan of about 20 minutes before it overheats. So this will be done over multiple clips, it might be done over multiple days and locations, which means outfits will change, backgrounds will change and at a minimum camera angles are going to change. So the first book I read in this quarter was Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain by Richard Roberts I believe. I should really look this up before I start filming. Yes, by Richard Roberts. This is a middle grade superhero slash supervillain book. It is the first of five in a series. I do believe Roberts has other books in the same universe, but I haven't read them. I did read all five of these books in Q2 though. So I'll start with my thoughts on the series and then I'll get into a little bit from each book. So when it comes to the series, I thought this was a lot of fun. It did play on a lot of the different supervillain and superhero tropes, particularly things like dramatic monologues and maniacal laughs, which I just loved. One of the reasons I've been trying to read more superhero fiction is because the book I'm querying at the moment is a superhero YA book. So I just want to familiarize myself with the genre a little bit more. So these books follow Penny, Ray and Claire. At the beginning of the first book, they are 12 years old. At the end of the fourth book, I believe they're 14. I think Penny might have just turned 15 actually. It does not feel like that much time has passed in the books. The second one in particular took place over five days and the others seem to take place anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months. So I think something went wrong with the passage of time here. So these books take place in middle school and Penny and Claire both happen to be the daughters of retired superheroes. So Penny has two superhero parents. Her father has like a power that allows him to understand basically any machine and her mother doesn't actually have any powers, but she is extremely intelligent and she can assess all of the variables in any given situation to predict exactly how it will turn out. So if she's in a fight, she knows exactly when to step and where to move in order to avoid getting hit. She knows exactly the words to say to get someone to back down because she knows all about their personal history and so on. So even though she doesn't technically have powers, she is or was seen as a superhero before retirement. And then Claire, her mother is known as the mix and is known for being very beautiful and sexy and can sort of get anyone to do whatever they want and that's actually her power to sort of like a femme fatale type of power. I guess she can make men fall in love with her and do anything. And she actually used to be a super villain and switched to being a superhero. So we have this sort of universe where there are superheroes and supervillains. You can switch sides and there is like a truce between the two. So they sort of go about their jobs and when they're like when they're in their costume, when they're in their superhero or supervillain identity, they can fight the heroes trying to take down the villains, the villains go and commit crimes, but when they're in their secret identity, they're not allowed to touch each other and they're not allowed to out each other. So superpowers generally come out in adolescence and Penny and Claire are impatient for theirs. And at the beginning of the book, Penny gets her superpowers. She basically has this blackout and when she comes to, she has built a machine called the machine and it appears to be this clockwork mechanical thing that can ingest and recycle any materials it finds and she has no idea how it works. So it turns out her superpower is being a mad scientist and she has these moments of inspiration where suddenly the power takes over, she doesn't really have much memory of what's happening and she comes out the other side and has built something that really makes no sense to anyone on the outside, but everything works. So in book one, her power is revealed and she wants to submit the machine at a science contest, but she ends up getting disqualified because the judges don't believe that she made it. So she's understandably a bit upset about this. In the meantime, one of the other students has brought in some sort of relic from a superhero incident. I can't actually remember what it is off the top of my head and she is getting all of the glory for it and Ray, Penny's friend thinks like that's not fair. Penny did this work and created this thing which is incredible, whereas this other girl's just bringing in some relic because her dad happens to be a hero and she is coasting by based on that. So Ray shows up at the science fair planning to destroy the exhibit with this artifact because he doesn't think it's fair and Penny and Claire go along and try to stop him and then another child superhero who's actually the sidekick of a legitimate adult superhero she's there waiting in the wings. It turns out she is the student who brought in this relic and she left it there to draw in supervillains who might want to steal it. So they fight, everyone gets away, but Penny, Ray and Claire end up being like outed as supervillains almost. So in their secret identities, they become known as the inscrutable machine and Penny's not happy with this because she wants to be a hero. She doesn't want to be a villain. So the first book is basically about them continuing to get into situations which prop up their reputation of villainy even though Penny ultimately wants to be a superhero and there's this really good tension because she's still going to school every day. She has these parents who are connected to the super world. They're very concerned about these children and whether you know Penny might be interacting with the inscrutable machine in real life and Penny's worried about getting found out. So it's just it's really cool to see all of the melodrama of superhero stuff. So you've got the maniacal laughs, you've got the different you know supervillains and their powers and their characters, you've got the missions they go on, the crimes they commit and then you've got Penny going to school and Penny going home every night and trying not to have her parents find out. So off the five books, the first book was the best one. I felt like it was the most relevant to the age group and it balanced the like real life concern of I've got to keep my parents happy with the completely insane superhero and supervillain hijinks. The only criticisms I had of the first book was one the characters did seem to be written a lot older than their age. So as I mentioned earlier they were supposed to be 12 in the first book and yet they really seemed like they were at least 14 but I even go 15, 16 and one of the big reasons for that is because Ray who ends up getting superpowers he sort of becomes really flirty and they talk about him leering at the girls and you know having devilish grins and things. I'm like he's 12. How like how many 12 year olds actually leer? So it just seemed yeah it just didn't quite seem to mesh and then some of the conversation also seemed a bit more mature than children of that age would be having said that they are in like advanced placement classes so you could explain that away by just saying they're more intelligent than your average 12 year old. The other thing that seemed a little bit odd to me which was actually patterned through the books is that there was this sort of really big battle scene in the middle of the book where they stole this artifact and it caused this monster to come out from another dimension and I was reading this thinking oh my god okay so they've gone this artifact and now the book's going to be about how do they like send this monster back from whence it came and that didn't happen it was like this huge scene this huge can of worms that was spilled and then it was never really resolved like the inscrutable the inscrutable machine took the artifact the grown-up superheroes dealt with the monster and it just yeah it seemed a bit odd to have so much time and importance placed on an event that didn't really have much to do with the plot in the long term and I noticed that with the midpoint of a couple of the later books as well where there was this huge battle type of scene that didn't really impact or progress the wider plot and it was almost like we just need a big battle scene in the middle of the book to have a big battle scene. Having said that I still really did enjoy this it was lots of fun so I gave the first book five stars. Book two I think is the weakest of the series it's please don't tell my parents I blew up the moon so Penny Ray and Claire still have their supervillain identities they've sort of gotten in with like the supervillain underworld and spider is like the big bad boss at the supervillain underworld and she has a job for them which is to go into space because she has received like a message through some technology that I won't get into that has transmitted human voices from somewhere near Jupiter. So already this is a very different world because in like the first or second chapter they're building a spaceship they're going out into space and then they're off in space having this adventure and they're gone for like a week I think meeting all of these different people and it was interesting it just lost a lot of the tension that I love so much from the first one because the first one like I said had this back and forth between like normal middle school life and trying to convince her parents that you know she doesn't have as many powers as she does and trying not to raise their suspicions about her being one of the one of the inscrutable machine and then her doing all of her supervillain stuff and building the relationships with all of the other supervillains and so on whereas this you took these characters and completely took them out of that world that was so interesting and just sent them off on a side quest it was almost like um you know all of those series that you read when you're like around that age like Sweet Valley High and Babysitter's Club and Animorphs and so on and there are like the main books which take place in the main world and have like the main plotline happening and then there are like the special edition ones where they go on camp or go on this adventure or there's a mystery that they need to solve which are completely separate to the main universe that's what this felt like it felt like there was a main series and then this was a special edition where they went to Jupiter so like it was fine it was still enjoyable but just not as satisfying as the first book so I gave this one three stars as a result book three is please don't tell my parents I've got henchmen which goes back to what the first book did so well in that you have this tension between the real life of a middle schooler and being a supervillain and in this book they go back to school and a couple of the other students are revealed as having superpowers and this leads to a trend where no one wants to keep their superpower secret anymore they don't want to have like a secret identity in a hero or villain identity they just want to be open with who they are so this then leads to Penny and her friends starting like a superhero club because Penny's starting to build like the second identity as a hero outside of the inscrutable machine supervillain group she's built with Ray and Claire so here we've still got a little bit of the tension with the parents but the real tension is between all of the kids who want to see what Penny can do and want to see what she can invent and want to like challenge her to see who's the strongest so you've got this tension between all of these kids and then Penny and the others trying to hide their supervillain identity at the same time as them occasionally having to go and do supervillain things because they're connected to supervillains now who want their help with stuff so once again we've got that tension that there's this big secret how do we keep it while all of the hijinks are happening so this one worked well back up to four stars book four was please don't tell my parents i have a nemesis and this one was a little bit of a mess because the author could have done like two different things and sort of tried to do both and didn't do either of them well so the first potential nemesis is one of the characters we met on Jupiter who's almost like a younger version of Penny i think she's about two years younger has similar mechanical type of powers and is not on very good terms with Penny after Penny leaves Jupiter because things happened there was this hint that she would come back and in this book she did come back but it didn't end up being that bigger thing like she sort of came back tried to cause trouble Penny went and found her they had a deep and meaningful and then it was over at the same time Penny's coming up with a plan to create a robot Penny who can be the you know bad Penny which is her character in the inscrutable machine so her super villain alias and then good Penny will try to take her down and one that'll mean they get rid of the identity of bad Penny and she can come out to her parents and she plans to come out to her parents saying look this is me all along but i've had this big battle i got rid of bad Penny and now i just want to move forward as a superhero so building this robot is part of like an elaborate plan to come out to her parents but to stop her parents from being that mad at her because looks like it's immediately after Penny has done something heroic so this raises the opportunity for a second nemesis which is that she creates robot Penny and then robot Penny ends up being the nemesis which i think would have been a far stronger book instead what happens is we lost a whole lot of time with this nemesis from Jupiter we create the robot the robot has like a heart of gold so she's really good until like the very end when there's a sudden turn and there are going to be spoilers because book four ends with a cliffhanger that is the premise for book five so if you're interested in reading these please skip ahead until the time i put on the screen so the plan is for robot Penny and human Penny to have a standoff which they do they have a fight and afterwards they go back to the lab and robot Penny ends up trapping human Penny into this machine where she can like basically transfer their souls or their minds if you like so robot Penny's mind will be in human Penny human Penny's mind will be in robot Penny the reason she's doing it like this is because robot Penny is a really good person she is a much better much more moral person than human Penny and she thinks that because Penny's power is so powerful she should be the one in charge of it rather than human Penny so she does this switch but unfortunately something goes wrong so the machine goes on Penny wakes up she is in the robot body but what happens is the original Penny who is in the robot who we're going to call heart of gold because she had a heart made out of literal gold heart of gold did not transfer across to the human Penny instead what's left in the human Penny appears to just be Penny's powers which want to do really destructive things like they keep wanting to make bombs and things which is something that Penny's been trying to hold back so book four ends with human Penny who might not be perfect but has some moral compass is trapped in a robot body while Penny's powers are sort of running free and rampant in her human body now this is a really interesting premise when I started book four I was like okay I'll just finish this one and I won't continue and I got to the end of that I went okay I need to find out what happens in book five because this is so cool unfortunately book five changed what was happening so we have this promise where you know the Penny's body just had her powers and they were now unleashed and could do whatever they want because Penny's moral compass wasn't holding the back and then we had Penny is stuck in a robot body but no one's going to believe her because her human body is walking around so what happens in book five is Penny is in the robot body she obviously wants to get back to her human body and is strategizing how to do that what went wrong is that it's no longer just the powers in Penny's human body it's like another copy of Penny like it still has all of her memories she still has like all of the feelings and relationships with everyone in Penny's life so it's almost like just another clone of Penny which is what the original robot was so we could have had something really interesting where you know this power runs rampant we have this super villain like we have a legitimate super villain now to take down which I think would have been an interesting story and instead we end up with this thing where it's like okay we're both Penny we both legitimately deserve to be the one owning this body so we're going to fight and whoever wins wins and we'll leave it at that and it's like that story is fine as well I think it could have been done better but I felt really let down because that's not what we were promised at the end of book four and the entire time I was reading it I was like well yeah this is fine like the story's the story's fine it's it's a good story but it's not the story I was told I was getting so that really pissed me off so ultimately these books were a lot of fun they're really fast to read if you're interested I definitely recommend book one which was the strongest that was my five star one books two and five I gave three stars and then three and four I gave four stars each the next book I read was the bird in the blade by megan bannon which was beautiful like oh I and it makes me wish I had filmed this immediately after reading it because I remember the impression I had when I finished it and how moved I was and a little bit depressed as well like you know when you love a book so much and you're sad to leave it and like as a writer that's also compounded because you're like oh I could never write anything like that so I remember this impression but it's harder to remember specifics because I read this you know over three months ago now but the bird in the blade is set in the Mongolian Empire and I can't remember the exact date range but it's when the Empire is split between different Khans I think there are four different Khans the main character is Jinghua who's a slave from a neighboring kingdom and she is working in the palace of one of the Khans who is a man with three sons who are the princes they find out about a threat someone's trying to invade their land I believe and the three sons go off leading the army to defeat this threat and sometime later the youngest son Kalaf comes back and the entire army has been destroyed and he's just come back to save his father and escape before they come and seize the palace and so the book follows Kalaf his father and Jinghua who are on the run together Jinghua went on the run with them thinking she might be able to make her way back home if she travels with them for a time but as they travel together she starts to fall for Kalaf at the same time the great Khan has a daughter no sons so she is going to be heir to the throne I guess I don't know if there's different terminology for Khans the problem is she doesn't want to marry any of the princes so what she does is every time a prince comes seeking her hand in marriage she gives them the task of solving riddles and not one of the princes has managed to solve the first riddle and when they fail they are brutally executed now Kalaf hears about this he is very intelligent he's very well educated and he believes he has a shot to solve these riddles and if he does it means he and his father and Jinghua will all be safe Jinghua obviously doesn't want him to do this because she's falling for him so she doesn't want him marrying someone else even though that might be objectively best for them and their well-being because it's not like they've started a new life or anything they are actively on the run and trying not to get caught and executed so again this book was beautiful it was wonderfully written I had such a clear sense of place when I was reading it such um there were such interesting character dynamics between both the father and son dynamic as well as how they interacted with this slave girl who is more than what she seems but neither of them know that at the time even though Kalaf suspects it and I think one of the things that really struck me was how this romance was built up and I don't even think they kiss like there's one scene where she imagines kissing him I believe she imagines kissing him she imagines pushing him against the wall and what it would be like but I don't think it actually happens throughout the entire book and yet they develop this entire relationship even though it's never consummated in any way and I thought it was just masterfully done so this was a five star read for me highly recommended though I was feeling a bit depressed after it finished the next book I read was a river of royal blood by Amanda Joy it's a YA fantasy and it's set in a world where queens rule and in each generation the princesses need to kill their sisters in order to take the throne so sort of hunger games battle royale to become queen there is also magic in this universe so part of the battles between the princesses is using their magic to kill the others the main character is Eva or Eva and she has blood and marrow magic and this is very rare no one has had this type of magic for hundreds of years so the problem is that she has this type of magic that's known for being very powerful very destructive but no one can teach her how to use it the book starts about two months before her 18th birthday when she will become eligible for the crown and she will need to start fighting her older sister to the death her older sister has like a glamour type of power so she can make people bend to her will so the premise of this book is really good like we've got this girl who in theory has strong powers but no idea how to use them and time is running out because she needs to go into this battle to the death so that was great unfortunately while i really liked the premise there were a number of things i didn't like about this book the main one being the love triangle because it's YA fantasy so we need to have a love triangle basically i didn't find either of the love interest particularly compelling i also didn't feel like the emotional connection between them was built very well it was literally just Eva sort of mentally noticing that someone was good-looking and therefore because she noticed they were good-looking she must be attracted to them and that's not unique to this book i think a lot of authors do this they assume acknowledging someone's attractiveness equals attraction and i don't think that's true it's definitely not true for me like i can notice that someone is objectively good-looking but that's like seeing a beautiful painting on the wall or listening to a beautiful piece of music or reading a book like the bird and the blade but just because i've seen or interacted with all of these works of art these things of beauty does not mean i want to bang them like similarly if i'm in a bar it's not like you know i've got this sort of attractiveness meter that's going beep beep beep beep beep and then finds the most attractive person at the bar goes must bang it's like no you see someone and go oh yeah that's a good-looking person but i don't know maybe some people work like that and they see like good-looking go must have but for me it's always been you know you need to get to know someone and you need to have some sort of connection with them that goes beyond what they physically look like and i don't think that was built up in this book like when i think of you know the most delicious romances i've read it's because there's chemistry in their back and forth and the dialogue where they sort of have this flirty teasing going on or they touch and you know sparks fly or they make eye contact and it goes for a bit longer than necessary and suddenly it's like oh hello like this this person's noticing me and i'm noticing them back and there weren't really any of those moments in this book it was just commenting on how good-looking the guys were so that annoyed me the other thing that annoyed me was that one of the love interests is sort of like a fairy who's been alive for hundreds of years so he ends up teaching either how to use her powers because he's been around long enough to know the last person who had these powers in the setup for this arrangement he said the only way i can do it is sort of if we create this psychic connection so i can use your powers through you and he sort of warns her that this is dangerous because you know we'll be connected in every way i'll be able to feel your emotions and feel what's going on in your body and so on and that is again a really interesting idea that's something where it's like oh that like do i want to sort of let someone else potentially inhabit my body and my mind and my emotions and i thought that is a big commitment especially for someone you've just met even if like it's a case of life or death in a couple of months time but she didn't really seem to register like the main character so like yep that's fine let's just go into it and i didn't feel like this is something that could have been built up as a really big decision and really big commitment and there was a missed opportunity there and then afterwards they supposedly had this connection where they were tethered to each other but it wasn't really present unless it was necessary for the plot so unless even needed to call on the guy or you know he needed to find her it wasn't really there whereas the way it was built up implied that it would be this inescapable bond so that wasn't done so well having said that there were things that were done well i again i think the premise was really good i think there was some nice flashbacks with her and her sister showing like how the relationship changed as they learned that they would need to kill each other i think there's this inner world that amanda joy describes that either goes to when she tries to access her powers and i think that was captured beautifully but ultimately i got to the end of this book and i was left wanting i did see another reviewer on goodreads who said it moved so quickly that there wasn't time to feel like any weight or emotional connection or attachment to what was happening so that potentially could have been what was wrong and maybe if a little bit more time had been taken the connections with the two different love interests would have been developed a bit more we could have seen more of the dynamic with eve and her sister now with even her mother now but we missed all of that so ultimately i just gave this three stars the next book i read was reverie by ryan laskala and i loved this like it was it was one of those books where i was reading it on my kindle and almost every page every couple of pages i was highlighting something because it was just written so well or the observation was just so spot on so i highly recommend this book it follows kane who is a high school student and at the beginning of the book we know he's been in some sort of accident so apparently he crashed his parents car there was like a fire and an abandoned building and an explosion and he was found in nearby river with burns around his head and he has no memory of what happened so the book starts a few weeks after this incident when he is going back to school and he's trying to piece together what happened and he starts finding clues where he notices things about certain people at school and realizes there's a connection between them but doesn't know what it is because none of them are talking to him so he's trying to learn more about these people and what's happening when he falls into what's called a reverie which is sort of like a waking dream so basically someone's having a dream and the people in their life start populating all of the roles and there are only a handful of people who are actually lucid in this experience and he is one of them the others are the people that he's noticed that he thinks is connected to in some way and their job is to let the story play out until they can unravel the dream and let everyone go back to real life and if they get in the way of the story that's when things start to go wrong so if it's you know some underworld hellscape and they get in the way of the hero doing their thing or the sacrifice being made then the monster will come out and attack them and people could die in this experience people could get hurt so he is lucid in this reverie that happens and realizes the other people he's been trying to connect with are also lucid and this leads him down a path to discover that he and these people were like a group and they were the ones who kept the reveries on track and then unraveled them when it was time so that's sort of a setup in the world and he is trying to figure out his past and what he's forgotten and how he relates to all these people and how he works with them at the same time he's been assigned like a psychologist by the police to find out what happened with the car crash and the explosion and someone who's gone missing and it turns out this person is not a psychologist provided by the police but is someone who wants something from Cain so on one hand he's trying to rebuild these relationships with people who's known from the past but doesn't quite remember how and on the other hand he's making notes and finding clues and trying to investigate things for this mysterious figure who we don't really know who they are so really really good book well written great observations unlike anything i've read potentially ever but definitely recently so highly recommended i gave it five stars next we have deathless divide by justina ireland and this is actually the second book in a duology which is set in post civil war america so 19th century america but there are zombies and basically black girls are sent to these finishing slash combat schools and the idea is that they will learn the skills required to kill zombies and also act as ladies and waiting for other wealthy women they will sort of be their companions who keeps them safe so book one is the introduction to this world and learning that the zombie plague is far worse than they thought and that there are these townships that have been set up as sort of utopias where the hogs can't get in and it turns out they're not as full proof as originally thought book two picks up after the main cast of characters has escaped from summerland which was supposed to be one of these utopian towns that fell to a hoard right at the end of the last book sorry for the spoilers and it follows them as they make their way to a new town now these books are interesting because the writing style is good it's easy to read i quite like the characters and the dynamics the world is fun but i never felt any urgency when i was reading it and it was the same thing with the first book like i read them i finished them i enjoyed them but both of them took me like the first one i think took me several weeks to read this one took me months to read like i'd started it right at the beginning of the year and only finished it in april or may and the reason is because like i didn't feel like i needed to read it's like oh yeah i could pick it up but there was no sense of urgency and i'm not sure why i think one of the things with the second book is that there is a shift at the midway point there's sort of a big thing that happens right at the halfway point and then we pick up with the characters six months later and i think that's always a very hard thing to do well because you stop the story in the middle and when you get started again it's almost a different story and you lose the momentum that he had earlier on which i do think was the case here i don't think it was completely detrimental to the experience of reading because i didn't feel like there was as much urgency beforehand but i do definitely think that was one of the reasons why it took longer for me to read having said that even though it did take a long time it was interesting i do enjoy the characters i do feel like they're very believable so there are two point of view characters in the second book jane and kate jane is very angry and has a lot of pain and is taking it out on anyone she can she ends up becoming like a bounty hunter and really loves to um torture the men she brings in and then you've got kate who's a black girl but light enough to be white passing and it's really interesting to see her like in a conflict about that because she um could pass and her life would be easier she did pass but she doesn't want to and there are some times when she does just for the sake of expediency because it will make things easier for her and the people she's traveling with but she really struggles every time she needs to do it and um just doesn't really get a chance to be herself so much because she's so bound by duty so they are two really good characters again it just wasn't that forward momentum that i associate with ya so i enjoyed enough to give it four stars but it's probably not something i'll pick up again for some time just because it did take me a really long time to get through it next we have heist society by alicata this is actually a reread i first read it in november 2019 when i was writing powerless because if you watched my nano-rimo vlogs back then you'll know that around the midpoint of the book i decided it was going to be a heist book so i needed to start reading some ya heists and fell very deeply in love with alicata so heist society follows catarina bishop who is a 16 year old girl and has been brought up in a family of thieves so her parents are both thieves her uncles her grandfathers and so on and she has been taking part in their comms and their heists from a very young age like acting as a distraction from when she was five years old the book starts when she has tried to leave her life as a thief behind and she's attending a prestigious boarding school in an attempt to make a new life and in the first scene that someone has taken the headmaster's car and put it on top of the fountain in the front courtyard of the school and they've got like the water coming out of the headlights or something like that it's really elaborate prank and everyone thinks it's her but it wasn't her someone has set her up and when she goes in to make her case they show her video footage of someone who is not her but is clearly disguised as her and has taken her student pass so they kick her out of school for this prank and when she leaves someone is waiting to pick her up hail who is like a friend of the family whose last name is hail we never find out his first name and who has a thing for catarina but nothing has happened yet and he says her family needs her it turns out her father is being suspected of a crime he didn't commit of stealing five masterworks from a man we're not really sure what he does but it implies his like involved in organized crime in some way he's very dangerous and if he doesn't get his artwork back he like he will kill cat's father probably the whole family he won't be happy unfortunately it turns out her father didn't actually steal the artwork so they don't have any leads on where it could be so this book follows them first trying to figure out like who stole these paintings and how and where they might be and then trying to get them back so lots of fun like oceans 11 in high school it's awesome five stars very fast read definitely read it if that sounds interesting to you next up we have lesser known monsters which is one of those books that started really well but ran out of steam so lesser known monsters follows oscar who is a nurse and in the first scene of the book he's on his shift in hospital and a little girl has been brought in and she has like horrific injuries she's been sliced open and is covered in bandages and I believe one of the other doctors needs to do some tests on her so he just goes into the room to keep her company later one of the other doctors comes in and the girl is terrified like she shrinks back into her blanket and can't breathe and when he leaves oscar turns to the girl and she's like that was the bad man who hurt me and it turns out the man the doctor is someone who oscar has been on a date with in the past and has this ongoing romantic interest with and potential flirtation but we're not sure if it's one sided or not so oscar is torn what's happened to this girl is really horrific he doesn't want to believe the guy he's interested in has done anything but he can't put his mind at ease so he and a couple of his friends go to investigate and end up in this world of like ghosts and monsters and creatures trying to overtake London so I think this started really well like that first scene with the little girl really got me this mystery around whether or not it was the love interest was really compelling and then um we got thrown into this new world and got a whole lot of information and it was interesting but I feel like it took a while to get started because we started with this one premise which was the girl and the mystery around this guy then we meet up with this guy and start going on a quest to get more information and it almost felt like once we met up with this guy it was a different story and it's not like the new story was bad it was just we'd sort of had this set up and got started and then we got started again and then what happened was by the time we got to the sort of climactic final scene and battle it didn't feel as earned like it's sort of just happened and we had threads from previous characters coming back but we hadn't spent any time with those characters so there wasn't that much significance so this is something when it started I thought it was going to be a five star read and by the time I got to the end it was just a three star read the next book I read was brightly burning by Alexa Dunn. Alexa Dunn is obviously a far bigger author-tuber than me you might have seen a lot of her videos on querying and writing and so on so she has some really good content. Unfortunately I didn't think much of this book so brightly burning is a retelling of Jane Eyre but in space and the first observation I have about this is that it didn't really do anything with the Jane Eyre story other than putting it in space and I don't know about you but if I'm going into a retelling like I want it to be adding something above and beyond what the original story had otherwise I'll just go and read the original story so this story follows Stella who is a tutor and a space station basically all of humanity is living in space stations above the earth because the earth has been uninhabitable for about 200 years now and she gets a job to be a tutor on a private ship called the Rochester and the plot progresses like Jane Eyre so there's a Mr Rochester character who she starts building a friendship with there's the child she's taking care of there are unexplained noises and things happening in the middle of the night and no one will tell her what's going on so there's the Bertha Mason locked in the attic type character you know at the beginning I didn't mind it it wasn't doing anything special but you know I was happy to go along for the ride and was enjoying the relationship developing and then I think around the 60 percent mark so after Stella discovered the big secret and decided to leave the Rochester I feel like it lost its way a little bit and I think this is because this is when it stopped being able to follow Jane Eyre as well so at this point in Jane Eyre Jane goes out wandering and she's taken in by some people who turn out to be her long lost cousins and she almost starts this new life and is basically offered another option for her life and that makes her realize that she wants to be with Mr Rochester so she has this sort of side quest and then comes back and in brightly burning so she discovered the big secret goes back to the original ship where she'd been living tries to warn everyone about the big thing that's going to happen tries to spread the word to the government and to be honest the twist the big secret was a pretty good one I do feel like that is the one area where she innovated a bit but it just wasn't that interesting to read it's like yes we're sending emails back and forth and we're on the ship and all in all I found the book very underwhelming so I ended up giving it two stars and the reason I've given it two rather than three is because the three star reads while in the end I might have found it unsatisfying there were generally parts of them that like I quite admired or enjoyed whereas this like the entire thing was very mere there wasn't anything that stood out to me that I went oh yeah that was really cool the way that was done so yeah two stars from me after this I then went into a bit of a romcom binge so the first book was the Spanish love deception which is like the plot of a hallmark romance movie I guess where the woman needs to go to a family wedding in Spain and her ex is going to be there and she's worried everyone's going to judge her for being alone so she enlists a guy from the office to pretend to be her date and of course they end up falling for each other this was fine I gave it three stars I wouldn't read it again but yeah it was fine the next two books were related romance books so you know how like romances sort of come in series but they're independent stories they just happen to share characters so it's like one sister finds someone in one book and the next is to find someone in the next book so it's that sort of thing so they're the two it happened in Nashville books by Sarah Adams I actually rated these both four stars I don't remember either of them though so I read these on the 22nd and 23rd of May so one day each clearly they were a quick read clearly I enjoyed them enough to give them four stars but now it's been like almost two months and I have no idea what either of them were about and this is even after reading like the descriptions to try and refresh my memory so clearly enjoyable enough to get four stars but not that memorable in the long term after this I read the chance of the lifetime books by Kate Claiborne so the setup of this is that there are three friends who go in together on a lottery ticket and actually win and like the prologue shows them winning and they each say what they want and like in their head they really want something else so like one of them wants to buy a house and in her head she's going what she really wants is home another one wants adventure but what she really wants is forgiveness and another one she says she wants an education what she really wants is freedom these books were really good so each book follows one of the friends obviously they meet a love interest and what I thought was done well about these books is that sometimes you have romances where both the characters in the romance they're sort of complete and happy and already satisfied with life and then they meet the other person and then they continue being complete and happy and satisfied with life but just with someone and that's fine but there's something more special that happens when you have a relationship where the two people together force the other one to grow so the first one the female character she wanted home she bought this big house it's the first time she's been settled since she was a kid because she and her brother had a father who gambled a lot so they were moving around very frequently so she's bought her house she's establishing her home and then she meets this guy who he is a recruiter he wants to nab her because when if he manages to get her to work face company his company has said he and his colleague can leave they can don't need to worry about the non-compete clause and they can start their own recruiting firm so she is very happy settled she wants to stay settled he wants her to move because he has these plans for his own business and both of them have to reflect on what they really want and for her it's realizing that home isn't a place it's the people and for him it's learning that maybe relationships are more important than they're search for success and both of them grow through the journey and they grow together and it creates a really compelling relationship and I'd still classify them as rom-coms because even though they're not as light they're definitely not like dramas but they're they're a bit deeper and more meaningful and that's the case with all three books so the next one one of the women used to be a lawyer and she quit her job after winning the lotto and when she was a lawyer I think she worked for an insurance company and they basically screwed their clients out of getting the money they deserve so her book starts with her writing like a list of people she needs to go and ask for forgiveness from and basically make amends to from her former life so she goes to one person to make amends and it turns out this man is the brother of a man who died from I'm not sure what like a medical condition or medical complication and the firm like did not cover the amount that was needed but they were also quite disrespectful and hold through the process and she was directly involved in the process so she goes to him to apologize he has this settlement money from his brother's death and wants to put it to good use oh the brother was an at drug addict that's right and um he died due to the addiction I can't remember if it was an od or complications from it so the brother he has a settlement money and he wants to spend that to create like a rehabilitation center to sort of make his brother's death worth it so they both sort of have this pain and together they're able to get past it so all three of these books were like surprisingly deep and very well done so four stars all around so after my trip down romcom lane I then went back into superhero land and I started reading chris tollbean's tales of a post break world series so this series takes place in a world where in the mid 20th century there was an event known as the break this was when someone we're not sure who I think they call them dr nowhere had a dream where he saw various people having superpowers and the next morning everyone woke up and a bunch of people had superpowers so it's set in what used to be the united states but now it's divvied up between a lot of different super villains except for this area which was the former california which is run by superheroes and they sort of go off and try to improve things in the badlands which I believe are like an unclaimed area so the main character's name is damien and he has the power to see dead people specifically he can see the ghost of his mother who was killed by his father when damien was five years old now people with this power necromancy are known as crows and they like a hundred percent of the time become villains not heroes so basically if you know someone who's showing these sorts of powers you don't want to be around them because who knows what they might do I think the way he explains it is either they see dead people because they're crazy or they go crazy because they see dead people so at the beginning of the book we see damien I think he's 18 years old he's living in an orphanage and his main goal in life is not to go crazy because he doesn't want to go on a killing rampage a man called mr gray comes to the orphanage and picks him up and says he's been selected to go to this superhero academy and damien's like okay that's a bit weird because crows aren't really that popular but whatever if it's going to help prevent me from going insane I'm in for it so the book follows his journey at this like superhero academy where book one is year one book two is year two and book three is coming out later this year which will be the third and final year so we get to see him going to classes and trying to learn how to use his powers which he doesn't have much luck with because obviously no one knows how necromancy works there's no one on the faculty who has the same powers as him so a lot of it's him trying to use his powers and not getting anywhere and then he starts seeing more and more dead people and starts worrying about going crazy so there's his personal journey with figuring out his powers and how to use them but then there's also the journey with the other students who basically all hate him on site because he's a crow crows go crazy and kill a lot of people so this book was so much fun lots of swearing cross language so if that bothers you maybe steer clear of this series but um it i'm trying to think of how to describe it it was sort of gritty and realistic but also humorous at the same time very dark comedy i think the take of having like someone with superpowers who's discriminated against that's not new like look at x-men but having someone with superpowers who's discriminated against by the other supers i think that was unusual especially in this university setting so without giving any spoilers for the end of book one book two is year two it's um more of the same so he does get some measure of control um he is back at school obviously the coursework changes because they're progressed in their studies so there are new challenges with the new coursework and tasks and projects they need to complete they need to start working as teams or like superhero squads in year two so that's really interesting to see the relationships develop between characters who weren't friendly at all in the previous year however we also start to see hints that something bigger is going on and there might be ulterior motives for why damien was taken to the superhero academy in the first place and there might be more powerful people on the outside who are keen to make use of his gifts so book two ends in a really interesting place and i can't wait for book three aside from the main novels in the series which are see these bones and red right hand there are three short stories and i did read two of them as part of my q2 reading which were the storm in her smile and the stars that sing the storm in her smile follows one of the characters who we meet at the beginning of book one she she introduces herself to damien as your highness and all we know about her is she has a very sexy figure she is in all black leather and wears a motorcycle helmet with a smiley face on the front of it and we discover later in the book that she's actually one of the people on the villain's most wanted list so why she was the one who had to deliver damien from the testing center to school like that's already raising mystery if this is like why is this villain working with superheroes so this story was interesting we get a little bit more insight into her um into her powers we get to see her tackling an assignment we get to learn a bit more about her moral compass because one of the things she says at the beginning is that you know she doesn't really can see herself as a villain but superheroes are very black and white in their moralizing so she doesn't really fit into the black and white which means she must be bad while i gave the two novels five stars each this one i gave four stars just because you know it was nice but i didn't feel like it added that much to the universe but if you're like me waiting for book three to come out and craving it does help scratch the itch a little the other short story i read is the stars that sing and this actually takes place in new baltimore which is one of the like states that's being run by someone with powers and i really really liked this one because it has really no connection to the main story at all it's like completely different side the country completely different world even though it's all the post break america universe and just seeing how a different state came to be and comparing that to what we know about california and how that's evolved was really interesting and also seeing a person in charge who originally worked to get rid of supervillains and create a more sustainable state that was good for everyone seeing the lengths he went to to maintain that power and control really interesting a bit creepy so this one was five stars after this i then read empire of pain as an audio book this is a narrative nonfiction book which tells the story of the sakla dynasty who created the drug oxycontin which is believed to have propelled the opioid crisis in the us and this was really interesting it went all the way back to like the depression era and when the saklas first emigrated to the us and then covered the stories of three sons so oh artha and the other two i don't remember the other two and showed how they built the family's wealth and built their dynasties and what's interesting is there are these two branches so there's the artha sakla branch which very into art collecting created vellium but wasn't really involved in the business with oxycontin in fact after he died his children lost their share in the business so it's interesting because we follow the branch of artha's family for the first part because he's the one who sort of he was the oldest son he led the way he built the wealth he started building the connections but then all of the controversy the next part follows the other branch which might not sound like it would work but it worked really well one of the things i found most interesting about this was when we got to the rise of oxycontin and we found out about like basically the lies they were telling themselves within the organization saying this is a good drug it's helped so many people it's relieving pain for so many people allowing them to live their best lives but completely denying the addictive aspects of it when you hear the interviews with the people from the sakla family like obviously you don't know if they're telling the truth or not but it almost sounds like they convinced themselves that this drug wasn't a problem and that you know it's only abused by a small number of people who are addicts anyway like it's not abused by most people when that was found not to be the case one of the things also that made me so mad is this whole once they started getting in legal trouble about the addictive qualities they reformulated the drug so it had like a sort of gummy bear coating so it's harder to smash up and snort or inject and what they said was they didn't release that new version until the patient for the original version was almost up for expiry so basically they were almost at the end of their monopoly on this first version of the drug and that's when they decided to introduce a new one which claiming that this would address the addictiveness problem but really so they could get this new patent and have this extended period of profitability so it's like no if you really cared about the addiction this could have been done 10 years ago and potentially could have avoided the opioid crisis because more people wouldn't have gotten addicted to this thing earlier and wouldn't have been able to abuse this thing earlier so um really interesting story if you want to feel good about humanity may don't read it but yeah very well told and um very illuminating the next one was another narrative nonfiction and also an audio book it was No One Would Listen by Harry Markopoulos and this is the story about the Bernie Madoff scandal and how Harry Markopoulos uh who was like a quant on Wall Street he saw that it was a Ponzi scheme like in 1999 I think so more than a decade before he was finally taken down he had gone to the SEC and made a report saying this is all the things you need to look for to take this guy down and they ignored it and he ended up making three separate submissions and every time it was ignored it got lost in the bureaucracy they said that the evidence wasn't compelling so this was another interesting story about just how much can go wrong when people aren't taking action and it's very very gratifying at the end to see like the SEC getting their comeuppance when I was looking at the reviews on Goodreads after reading this I did see a few people complaining about the level of repetition and the writing skills which they said weren't very good this isn't something I noticed listening to the audio book version but maybe it's different if you're reading it in any case for me it was a five star read and then the final book I read this quarter was Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds so this book is written entirely in poetry so that makes it a very fast read but it's also just a really interesting compelling style so I highly recommend checking it out it's about a boy whose brother was shot dead the day before and one of the things he says at the beginning is there are these rules you need to follow and one of them is if you know someone in your family is shot you go and kill the person who killed them so the book starts with him reaching into his brother's drawer to get out the gun he knows he holds there and he goes to the elevator to write it down to go and kill the person he thinks killed his brother and when he's in the elevator on every floor someone gets on and it turns out it goes from his past so like his dead uncle gets on the elevator a childhood friend who was killed in front of him gets on the elevator eventually his brother does and all of them are making him reflect on his life and relationships and the veracity of these rules and making him question whether he's doing the right thing so I thought it was so well done I was going to give it five stars until the very end and then I got to the end and we don't know what he is going to do like we don't know if he's going to still go and kill this guy or if he's not if he's going to put the gun back and I like closure I don't like things being left open so I ended up giving four stars because of that but it really should have been five stars that was just a personal thing so that's another one I highly recommend so that is everything I read in q2 if you are still here thank you for sticking through the video if you like this please give me a big thumbs up and I would love to hear what's the best thing you've read recently in the comments because I'm always looking for new things and I think one of the best ways to find new things that are outside your comfort zone is getting recommendations from other people so please let me know below like subscribe hit the notification bell and I will see you next time bye