January 2020 Wrap Up

I started a new thing where I cannot read books not on my TBR. This is a trial run and is likely to fail, but hey, let's see what we can do with it, right? Anyway, I had 18 books on my January TBR list and of them I have read 4 book(s). 

#1: A Bookshop in Berlin by Françoise Frenkel

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel--a Jewish woman from Poland--fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin's first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Françoise's dream finally shatters on Kristallnacht in November 1938, as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed. La Maison du Livre is miraculously spared, but fear of persecution eventually forces Françoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris. When the city is bombed, she seeks refuge across southern France, witnessing countless horrors: children torn from their parents, mothers throwing themselves under buses. Secreted away from one safe house to the next, Françoise survives at the heroic hands of strangers risking their lives to protect her. Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered nearly sixty years later in an attic, A Bookshop in Berlin is a remarkable story of survival and resilience, of human cruelty and human spirit. In the tradition of Suite Française and The Nazi Officer's Wife, this book is the tale of a fearless woman whose lust for life and literature refuses to leave her, even in her darkest hours.


This was my Jolabokaflod gift from a very good friend of mine. 4/5 stars. I really liked it. This memoir follows a woman on her harrowing journey to freedom from the Germans. I just wish we had learned more about her husband, who seemingly disappeared at the beginning of the memoir and is never seen or heard from again.

#2: The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro

Jamie Watson and Charlotte Holmes are looking for a winter-break reprieve after a fall semester that almost got them killed. But Charlotte isn’t the only Holmes with secrets, and the mood at her family’s Sussex estate is palpably tense. On top of everything else, Holmes and Watson could be becoming more than friends—but still, the darkness in Charlotte’s past is a wall between them. A distraction arises soon enough, because Charlotte’s beloved uncle Leander goes missing from the estate—after being oddly private about his latest assignment in a German art forgery ring. The game is afoot once again, and Charlotte is single-minded in her pursuit. Their first stop? Berlin. Their first contact? August Moriarty (formerly Charlotte’s obsession, currently believed by most to be dead), whose powerful family has been ripping off famous paintings for the last hundred years. But as they follow the gritty underground scene in Berlin to glittering art houses in Prague, Holmes and Watson begin to realize that this is a much more complicated case than a disappearance. Much more dangerous, too. What they learn might change everything they know about their families, themselves, and each other.

This suffered from mild second-book-syndrome, but it wasn't that bad. I liked that even I couldn't figure out some of the plot points which is something that I do rather often. If I can figure out the mystery before the detective (or detective-in-training in Holmes's case), then I am not happy with the story. This one actually didn't do that to me. I liked the mystery of it. I did figure out a few things before they did, but to me they seemed almost painfully obvious. I gave this a 3/5, and plan to continue the series.


#3: Emperor of the Eight Islands by Lian Hearn 

An ambitious warlord leaves his nephew for dead and seizes his lands. A stubborn father forces his younger son to surrender his wife to his older brother. A mysterious woman seeks five fathers for her children. A powerful priest meddles in the succession to the Lotus Throne. These are the threads of an intricate tapestry in which the laws of destiny play out against a backdrop of wild forest, elegant court, and savage battlefield. Set in a mythical medieval Japan inhabited by warriors and assassins, ghosts and guardian spirits, Emperor of the Eight Islands by Lian Hearn is a brilliantly imagined novel, full of drama and intrigue - and it is just the beginning of an enthralling, epic adventure: The Tale of Shikanoko.

Read this as part of a readathon, and it was interesting. We don't get much of the uncle/nephew dynamic except for about ten to fifteen pages in the beginning and ten to fifteen pages in the end where they are running away. Other than that it was a decent read about a more rural Japan that people don't often talk about. The smaller villages and towns that are near an Imperial city that are affected by political intrigue. I do have the next volume in this series and if I like it, I will look for the other two. I wasn't impressed much by Shikanoko. He just seemed to allow life to happen to him, he never took much stand in what was going on until the end where he just walked out. It was strange. The book sort of just...stopped...like the other Asian (mostly Chinese and Japanese) books I've read do if they are in a series. Hopefully I like the next one.


#4: Brimstone by Justine Rosenberg

Sariel, a fugitive slave, is running from the desert mines, and from an Empire that is hungry for a new and mysterious metal that the alchemists call brimstone. In a moment of mercy and lust, Ava Sandrino, herself a knight fallen from grace, shelters Sariel from his pursuers, and in the light of the moon, he speaks to her of a door. It is a gate that opens into a world that lies beyond the Northern Dark, over the edge of their farthest horizon. There, paupers rub shoulders with princes, and there are riches to be had by those with the will to seize them. Swayed by Sariel's tales of strange oceans and distant stars, and tired of a past that holds her down, Ava joins him on the trek to the kingdom where souls are remade. Together, they must cross a borderland that is the domain of magicians, the humans that serve them, and the One O’clock King: a faceless despot who guards the crossroads of worlds.

It was good. 4/5 stars because while I enjoyed a ton of it, I'm not sure that we needed the sex scene or to be told about Ava's previous dalliances with members of the Guard, random opium addicts, that sort of thing. They didn't add much more to the story beyond us knowing that in the House of Tong, she would be deemed an unfavorable. I hear there are to be more in this series and I am looking forward to them. I got this book in return for a review from NetGalley. I did quite enjoy it.