I successfully made it through finals week with minimal emotional damage! The last bit of school was full of tests, projects, track-team-related events, and sneezing (I had a cold the whole time). Luckily, I am now about a week into my summer vacation and relaxing at home. Hooray!

I definitely neglecting reading and blog stuff while focused on school, however. So to save time I’m catching up on a few reviews by posting them all at once! Two of these books I absolutely loved, and one of them I just really wanted to talk about, so I couldn’t just not write reviews! Read on for my first triple review…

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries

I read this fantastic fantasy for the first time when it originally came out, but I definitely need to catch up before I try the rest of the series. I’m so glad I did this reread, because this was such a fun way to start my spring. I love lore-accurate faeries, and I love overcomplicating fantasy elements through the lens of academia even more. One of my favorite things in fantasy is when the POV character is an academic and thinks hard about every fantastical thing they encounter. Emily Wilde is just that character, with a brilliant mind and a lovable voice to match. If you love Holly Black fae lore or an aged-up Spiderwick Chronicles vibe, you’ll love the Emily Wilde series. Not to mention the sweet no-spice romance it features! The faeries in this book were my favorite kind: tricky, ancient, and almost scary – more like monsters than the pretty Tinkerbell types. Luckily, Emily had that humble competency that I love to see in a main character, and handled each faerie-related problem that came her way with nothing but her wits and secretive partner/love interest, Bambleby.

Swordcatcher

I’ve pretty much only seen reviews where people really loved this or really hated it. I understand why – Swordcatcher has a huge world to introduce and a lot of info to dump in one book, and I fear our generation is losing the attention span that allowed authors like Tolkien to pull that feat off. I loved the way Clare did it though! I live for long descriptions and rich world building systems. The political intrigue, sheer awesomeness of the main characters, and complex relationships hooked me right from the start. The book just has this epic vibe to it, like you can tell you’re getting into something huge. Lin, Conor, and Kel are such interesting characters and I can’t wait to see what trouble they get into next. It’s definitely a slower book, more focused on politics than action. There’s also some pretty sketchy content to watch out for. None of the characters have many qualms about the darker dealings that go on in cities – they often partake in drugs and alcohol and even spend casually spend time at a brothel in one of the first scenes. It isn’t seen as romantic and there’s actually not a lot of romance throughout the book, but I would still suggest skipping this one if you’re trying to stay away from spice, violence, or coarse language.

The Lady’s Mine

I was hesitant to try Francine Rivers again after The Atonement Child, but this honestly seemed cute and I liked the play on words in the title (the main character inherits a mine, and it’s a romance). I’m happy to say I quite enjoyed this one. If you can forgive the cringy elements, this western romance is entertaining – but not for the reasons one would normally read a romance. No, what I was most interested in was the main character Kathryn and how awesome she was. This young woman is forced out by her family and moves West to figure out to do with her uncle’s property, which she inherited. Upon arriving, she immediately gets to work on fixing up her uncle’s newspaper, then fixing up his mine, and finally fixing up the whole town. She’s capable, smart, and never backs down even when every single man in the town tries to get her to stop. That was what I loved so much about the book – Kathryn has a strong, unshakeable faith in God, but she doesn’t waver in her convictions that woman should be treated biblically and not as if their only purpose is to be mothers or prostitutes. She also has a very kind heart, doing her best to help all manner of people from downtrodden miners to women working in the local brothel. The romance was very much a subplot for me – and I thought the “enemies to lovers” thing was pretty forced because they didn’t have much of a reason to dislike one another. Rivers’ style worked much better for this lighter-toned book than it did for The Atonement Child, she definitely “redeemed” herself with this one (Francine Rivers fans iykyk hehe).