 down the next stress reels. I am Kim. This is Dustin Milt and Velikor and this is my slightly late January 2019 wrap-up video. Since posting my last video I've had the usual trouble of starting eight books and finishing none. But I did get five in the bank before, you know, all that started. So here are those. First up was Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Yes, that Alison Bechdel. It's a haunting nonlinear graphic memoir about a girl and her dad. Alison is the adult narrator. She's looking back on her childhood, figuring out her queerness and psychoanalyzing her father who was a deeply, deeply repressed homosexual man with a thing for young guys. Really young guys. It's really good. The narration is a little disjointed, so it's meant to set you on edge. But I want to know who in their right mind looked at this depressing book and was like, you know what this needs to be? A Broadway musical. Who did that? It's an excellent musical. So like they were right. Wow. Anyway, so after that deep dive, I wanted something a little lighter. So I went with A Company of Swans by Ava Ibbotson. This one follows a young girl named Harriet who sees beauty everywhere in the world. She has a thirst for knowledge and a dedication to the art of ballet. But she is being raised in a house by her father and a maiden aunt who believe that a young woman's place is to be determined by her owners. I mean parents. So she runs away like any sane person would and joins the court of ballet to help carry the Swan Lake to the Amazon. There she meets the elusive Rom Verney, an English aristocrat living in self-imposed exile. And thus their love story begins. I just adore books about the ballet, especially ones that capture the essence of dance without the dry technical descriptions of dance. Also all of Ava Ibbotson's books have this irrepressible wit to them, which is probably why three of my books this month are by her. Speaking of, I then read The Secret Countess by Ava Ibbotson. Now this book also has another title. It's called The Countess Below Stairs. I thought they were completely different books when I started it. I was wrong. Yeah, I ended up finishing it anyway, even though I just read it last year. Not super recently, but still like kind of recently. And I still love it. It's still beautiful. I'm still hilarious. Essentially, the family of a young Russian Countess loses everything when the revolution comes, and they have to flee to England. There, our heroine Anna gets work as a maid. She's determined that no one will find out about her past, but she's really rather terrible at hiding it. The new heir of the estate that she works at is bringing home his intended bride. And she's not a very nice person. She is beautiful and outwardly kind, but her actions belie a deeply rooted belief in eugenics as the household and its tenants fall in love with the gently bred housemaid Anna. And beneath all of this is a beautiful love story between two people who believe that everyone is fundamentally equal. And the best way to get where you're going is through hard work. And that the other one is pretty. After that, I picked up my copy of The Weekend King by Holly Black, which is a Trixie sequel to a Trixie book. If you haven't read The Cool Prince, you might want to skip ahead a bit because this series is going to be a wild ride. Jude has made the power move of the Eon, tricking the awful, but malleable Prince Cardin into being crowned High King so that the next heir, her little brother Oak, can have a normal childhood. And so that she can be the power behind the throne. The problem with this is that no one knows she's the power behind the throne. Jude plays her game so well that even her father, a would-be kingmaker himself, doesn't realize how deep she's in. She holds the High King under her sway. But as war brews with Queen of the Undersea and with her court of shadows whispering treachery in her ear, Jude must find a new way to hold the power that's within her grasp. It's a page turner. I highly recommend it. Oh, hey, look, our last book of the month is by Ava Ibbotson again. Who could have expected that? The Star of Kazan is about our Kazan, Kazan. I think it's Kazan. Sounds more Russian. But it's about a young girl named Anika who was abandoned in a church as an infant. And she was taken in by the cook and the housekeeper of a trio of professors who live in Vienna. She's hard-working, imaginative, kind-hearted, and she can do anything she puts her mind to. At 12, Anika befriends the old aunt of one of her neighbors. She takes care of the woman as she passes and listens to her stories as her relations won't do. Unbeknownst to Anika, the old woman has revised her will to send her a trunk of mementos from her days in theater. Unbeknownst to the old aunt, the trunk of mementos contains several incredibly valuable pieces of jewelry that she believed merely glass. But between the solicitors collecting the trunk and delivering it to the little girl, Anika's long-lost mother sweeps in out of blue and whisks her away to her beautiful, if dilapidated, country estate. This is a tale of family and friendship and love, and it is incredibly sweet, and I like it a lot. And that's it. That's my five books this month. What did you read this month? And what are you starting next? Come let me know in comments. Aviento!