BookOwl

  4.5/5 stars   *Spoiler alert!* I am not sure how The Poppy War didn’t win the Goodreads Choice Awards in 2018 in the category of fantasy or debut author. The first entry in the Sino-Japanese War inspired fantasy blew me away.   “Well, fuck the heavenly order of things. If getting married to a gross old man was her preordained role on this earth, then Rin was determined to rewrite it.”   Our protagonist, Rin, won me over quickly with her determination and persistence. (Notice how I say protagonist and not hero .) A dark-skinned peasant girl from the southern provinces of Nikan is slated to be married off by her criminal adopted parents and will do anything to change her fate. Her only hope of getting out of her home village is taking the prestigious national exam and testing into the tuition-free military academy of Sinegard .   Rin studies to the point of self-harm. But she passes the exam and tests into Sinegard , where she is thrown into a brutal academy to...

  “Knowledge, to light the path for humankind,” I said at last. “And this”—patting my rifle — “ to protect humankind when we lose that path.”   I emerge from my writing hiatus with a review for an awesome historical fiction title by Kate Quinn. Diamond Eye is a fictionalized account of a Soviet librarian turned sniper in World War II, Mila Pavlichenko . This fictionalized view of Pavlichenko’s life hews very close to the historical record, with a few twists to suit the narrative style of a novel. I can’t remember the last time I tore through a book so quickly!   Ukrainian-born, Mila had a son when she was barely fifteen years old. The father, Alexei, abandoned them early on. (Spoilers, Alexei really sucks.) So, Mila dedicates herself to her library studies in the hopes of securing steady employment for her and her son to live on. Early in the story, we see her earnestly trying to secure a divorce from her absentee husband.   She figures that it wouldn’t hurt to ...

4/5 stars    *Spoiler alert!*   Mobility was one of those books that’s brutally honest and doesn’t let go of that. Featuring a heroine that was complicated and gray, it tells one woman’s story of her upbringing in a diplomatic family in locations around the world and the consequences of her life choices as a privileged white woman on the world around her. Particularly as it concerns the climate crisis.   “We don’t think in economic cycles, we don’t think in election cycles … in this [oil] industry, we think in earth time. Geologic time. There’s no short-term problem we can’t wait out.”   In 1998, Bunny (real name Elizabeth) Glenn is a teenager celebrating Fourth of July with abandon. Her father, a diplomat, is posted in Azerbaijan, where readers get to see the greed at work after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, greed in particular by American and other Western companies looking at snatching up oil resources. Bunny doesn’t know much about the world...