Best and Worst of 2021

I thought I would take the time to work out my top best and worst reads for the year. I got through a fair number of reads, but I'm not going to tax myself too much. I'll just do the top 5 of each. With that said, these are in no particular order, just in what came to mind. Let us begin...

Best

- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab - I enjoyed the way it was written and how long it took for Addie to figure out the reason why the young man could remember her. I got this one from Book of the Month and I am so glad I did. It was good. 

- The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner - I loved it. The dual timeline was something else. I found the way we were told what the people in the modern era believed versus what actually happened. I felt bad for Caroline and what caused her to end up alone in London in the first place, but the story itself was brilliant. I am definitely going to look into more books in the future by Sarah Penner. 

- Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff - I bought this on a whim during a spike in my Voltron obsession. I remember that. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it nearly as much as I did. It was brilliant. You just get tossed right into the middle of things. I believe we start with them discovering Aurora in the midst of a battle. Nothing gets better from there. We follow them through one harrowing event after another from being trapped with what I can only imagine as like some big feral dinosaur looking thing to having to outmaneuver a political opponent. It was great. I've been keeping my eye out for the sequels. 

- She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan - This was one of the few books I preordered this year. I love Disney's Mulan and this is like a retelling of the original ballad. We follow an unnamed young girl as she takes on the life of her deceased brother and tries to live up to his destiny of greatness. She refused to be nothing, so she took the greatness for herself. It was wonderfully written and full of intrigue. 

- Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu - I had been waiting for this book for a long time and it did not disappoint. Stumbled across the live action adaptation by accident (and watched it all the way through). When I heard there was a novel it was based on, I was quite upset to discover it was only in Chinese. I was one of the people rallying for an English edition so I could read it. Oh my is it so different from the live. It's pretty well in line with the donghua though (not sure about the radio program, as I've never seen it). I love how Wei Wuxian is both a genius and the dumbest one in the room at the same time. I am looking forward to the rest of the volumes. 

Worst

- All the Stars and Teeth by Adalyn Grace - Over the course of this not very grueling journey, they barely learn anything and seemed almost surprised when the villain beats them soundly. They literally had no training and were squaring off with someone who had spent more than a decade preparing. In a real world situation, the four would probably have died quite quickly. Not one of them had military training. What made them think they stood even half a chance? It reads like a debut novel of someone who had never read that genre before in their life. 

- American Witches by Susan Fair - I....yeah. The tagline of this is that it's a broomstick tour through four centuries. It is not. It is through ~2 centuries with a smattering of 1999 thrown in. Susan Fair talks almost exclusively about the 1600s and 1800s. I was expecting there to be something about modern witchcraft, or the witchcraft revival of the 1950s. No. She literally just babbles for a while about the Salem witches and then talks about her interview with a mayor about a movie? It was not what I thought I was going to get nor was it what I wanted. The tone was way too sarcastic. Clearly Ms. Fair is just making fun of what was perceived as witchcraft in colonial America.

- Sweet Dreams by [someone or other] - Not even remotely what I had been expecting. According to the synopsis, we are getting this cute story about a little girl who is afraid to sleep because she doesn't want to miss out on what happens when she is not there, so her mother tells her fantastical stories about things she could dream about. We are then to follow the little girl as she dreams. Nope. We get 10 pages of text and 13 pages of illustrations, which the art gives us more of the story than the text did. I can't even remember what culture we are meant to be shown (according author, it's the Mayan/mestizo culture).

- Tales of Pennsylvania by Thomas White - This could have just been done better. Some of the tales were very very short. Like one or two sentences at best, meaning they weren't tales so much as a passed along rumor. I also would have liked if they had done more eastern Pennsylvania things. There seemed to be a lot more for southwestern Pennsylvania than any other part. I liked that it was a bunch of tales set here where I live, but I mean, come on. I'm sure there are many many more tales you could have used from across the entire state to balance it out more. 

- The Girl Who Leapt Through Time by Yasutaka Tsutsui - I think this is a novelization of a manga series? In which case that explains much. The plot seemed to moved just far too quickly for it to make any nature of sense. We go from barely being friends with some teen that we know well, to being in love with an eleven-year-old boy in the course of what feels like five minutes. Never mind the fact that the teenager and the eleven-year-old are the same person. I didn't care for the plot...or what was meant to be a plot that just kind of didn't work.