January and Feburary Reads and Exorcisms in my School Board Meetings (Yes, that's actually happening)

So uh... plot twist?

I lost my job in January, but I kinda saw it coming. I realized my best bet would be to start my own private practice and a lot of my time's been swallowed up with that, working a second job to make ends meet and... flooding disaster in my house.

This Is Fine Flood GIFfrom This Is Fine GIFs

Fun times. At least I've gotten to read some cool books and meet some really awesome people! Let's get into it.

So, like I said, I lost the job I was working overtime to learn and perform in. Literally, working overtime. I realized that this was not the right place for me, no matter how hard I worked at it. I repeat this often in relationships, but I'm recognizing this more and more often, I'm growing. I give too much and it ends up biting me in the butt, and I'm trying to recognize when I'm trying too hard and it's not working. I don't like mixing my professional life with my book life, but inevitably, the two shall meet. You can find my therapy website if you google search, I swear...

Well, in January, we had some flooding upstairs which translated into soaking the insulation in the ceilings and the insulation having to be torn out IN THE COLDEST MONTHS OF THE YEAR in our climate. Our couches and living room furniture had to be removed, and it's been a long few months. On the day I'm writing this (March 10th), we're finally getting the insulation and drywall replaced! Wee! I've been sitting on my bed everyday to do work and read. The only TV is in my mother's room, so I've been effectively limited in being able to watch TV at all. Which lets me read more...

We also got to finally adopt two beautiful tuxedo cats! If you follow my personal instagram, you've probably seen them. Their names are Maggie and Mabel. They were taken from a feral cat colony about 3 years ago as kittens, but they were so friendly, they ended up adopting them out instead of TNR-ing them. My friend who had them has become allergic to them and she wanted to find a good, loving home she trusted, and that was around the time Manny died. They resemble Norwegian Forest cats, but they are very petite, so I'm sure that's not what they are. Maggie is the more social and dominant one, but Mabel, since she stopped hiding, has become the big love bug who likes to snuggle. We worried about them getting into the open drywall, and Mabel found a good hiding spot in the attic when the door was accidentally left open. But we managed to close it off, much to Mabel's anxiety. I am in love with them.

I also started a temperature blanket, and it's been fun to make it as Mother Nature dictates the average temperature.

I got to go to a Books and Beads Bash to fundraise for the Rutherford County Library Alliance. Unfortunately, we have some people in my hometown who think it's okay to remove books from circulation in our libraries, people who don't trust the extensive education and expertise of librarians. I have strong feelings about it (they get pretty intense, tbh, so I'm trying to contain them here), but I'm so glad I went. A lot of people justify it with "How stupid to be concerned, I will literally BUY a teen a kindle copy of these books! Who cares if they take it off the shelves! Y'all are overreacting!" (yes, this has been said to me by the people justifying the bookbans, sadly). We got to see an ACLU speaker who spoke about how to counteract it, and we had a cute Mardi Gras party. I'm going to start attending the school board meetings to help the protest and crochet my temperature blanket while the book banners are doing exorcisms and being theatrical (yes, that's actually happening, I wish I were joking, the book banners started performing exorcisms at a school board meeting, like something you'd expect to see on the Daily Show). We all know that never once in history of mankind have the good guys banned books. I hate that Schmatzis are showing their butts in Murfreesboro (par for the course, let's be honest), but here we are. Sigh. Support and donate if you can.

As for reading, I have tried for a long time to not support big corporate giant book retailers when buying new books, so I will be linking to my favorite independent bookstore in the Nashville area, Parnassus Books, owned by Pulitzer Prize Nominee author Anne Patchett. It's a beautiful store with a fun environment, but I don't live close to it. Luckily, there are some fun, smaller stores closer to me that offer used books. I might be able to get them to carry HOME one day, too! I don't feel that Amazon or Barnes & Nobles cares that much about book banning, but these independent stores do, so this is why I support them.

I got to attend several book signings, the most famous author I met was Libba Bray, the OG of fantasy and historical YA! She was so easy to connect to and absolutely lovely! I got her new book, Under the Same Stars, which could be a sequel but isn't officially, to the Diviners series. I also got to see the book signings of Sasha Peyton Smith for the Rose Bargain and Unlock the Dark, Sasa Hawk's debut novel. Reviews should be coming for all three of these books next month! I have lots of pictures on my writing profile on Instagram of these events, and I met so many cool people at these, too! Some are published authors, whom I will be spotlighting and reviewing my monthly reviews. I love the book signing events at Parnassus! 😊

Too much talky. Anyoo, here we go, what you came for...

I got to read a friend's manuscript for a sequel to their debut novel, and I really enjoyed it! I can't spill the beans on who it was and what the title of the book is just yet, but it's coming out this fall. I really hope they ask me to give a cover blurb!

I finished Glow in the Plated Prisoner Series #4 by Raven Kennedy.We start the book with Auren just recognizing how strong her abilities are, but she can’t control them. Most of this book explores Slade‘s backstory and Auren learning her abilities. The Fae world has been disconnected from Orea for centuries, and you start to learn how how the Faith abilities are still showing up. Queen Melina is still that love to hate her kind of queen and she makes some really dumb choices in this book out of her own pride. I literally saw it coming. There is a good amount of spice in this book, just as a warning, there’s also torture just as a trigger warning.  4/5 stars 

The Broken Witch (The Coven Elemental Magic #4 by Chandelle LaVaun) 

Fun little book I've been listening to while driving. The Coven is a group of magical teens who get to go to a school of witchcraft, and they reflect the deck of Tarot cards. This one has them trying to save a member of their Coven from demon possession by Samhain, or they lose him forever. 4/5 stars.

Gold in the Plated Prisoner Series #5 by Raven Kennedy. So we start off this book and Auren and Slade are our separated. Slade is so hot in this one, for sure! We get to explore more of the Fae realm, Annwyn, and we meet some really interesting Fae characters. One character I hated by began to absolutely love by the end of this novel was Queen Melina because she grew so much in this book. I just wanna make Slade Ravinger my book boyfriend by the end of this and he is definitely in his villain era, and basically gets revenge on anybody who ever hurt Auren. And the third kingdom‘s queen, Kaila, she is absolutely evil and I hated her, but I understood why she did what she did. Auren really steps into her abilities and has some of the most badass scenes. We find out about Saira Turley, the first human to cross the bridge into Annwyn, who her married with royalty and became queen, and how the last of her line was unalived 20 years ago, or so we think. I heard the line once that a hero will give up true love for the world, but a villain will give up the world for true love, and I think that describes Slade the best, and why he’s not a hero, he’s an antihero. While he does a lot of villainous things and he thinks of himself as the villain, he’s not really, just a man, or a male character who’s in love. I think most women would want a love like Slade. I rank this as the best book in the series, so I’d give it 5/5 stars. 

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati (for a book club I'm in): I overall found this book to really humanize the myth of Clytemnestra, sister to Helen of Troy. The stories were ones I had heard growing up with a Greek mother. Clytemnestra started off in the story being a young woman in Ancient Sparta doing what all noble women of the time did: get married, have a baby. But, her father (and her mother) were so sick and twisted, they had her husband and baby unalived so that she could be forced to marry Aegamemnon. And her revenge on Aegamemnon took a long time. I can't imagine living through what she did. Apparently, there was one more marriage after that second one that wasn't included in the book. If you look up the Clytemnestra tale, it's quite tragic, as are most Greek myths. I gave this one 5 stars for it's genre. My romantasy book club was taking a departure from our usual, so this was kind of an odd one for us.

The Empress in the Towerfall Series by Kristin Cast, #1:  You might member Kristin Cast from the YA House of Night series she co-wrote with her mom, PC Cast. She started this series as a romantasy, and I was really excited because it includes romance and tarot, how fun, right? I enjoyed this read. It was much more organic and character-driven. I can see where Kristin Cast was coming from, and how being a strong woman means confidence, not being mean and tough. The focus was less on the plot for me and instead how the characters connected. Hannah is a young woman who has a lot of problems standing up for herself and tries to rely on self-help books and new-age treatments. She gets a magical tarot card that’s the Empress, and she gets cast into a different realm and finds herself in the Kingdom of Pentacles. It’s in a lot chaos due to the King’s recent death. Hannah falls in with a sexy soldier named Kane, and they go about infiltrating the castle with royal intrigue. I like how Hannah came into her own without being all RAWR in your face. It was a believable change. The only character I felt a little one-dimensional was Ivy. I’d like a BFF like Marion, too. 4 out of 5 stars! I'm not sure if the next book in the series coming out this year is going to be a companion novel or a sequel with the same characters and a new storyline, though.

Goldfinch by Raven Kennedy in the Plated Prisoner Series #6. Auren and Slade are still separated at the start, but we see Auren be a total badass for her people again. There were a few twists and turns and character deaths I don’t want to spoil, and I hated losing them, and the hard part of writing a review for the last book in the series is not spoiling it. Wren and Shea could have been used in this book, I wish we could have seen them get parents that loved and adored them. And while Malina’s storyline wasn’t what I would have written, but let’s be clear, I haven’t written a 6-book series, so I have no room to criticize. While I didn’t love the ending 100%, but I liked it enough for this to be a good review and to give this a recommendation for reading. I think it’s one of those things about being a writer of a giant series like this, you’re never going to write it to please everyone and everyone’s going to have opinions on it, favorite characters, different outcomes we’d like to see. I think that’s where a fandom and fan creation comes in, like fanart, fanfiction, fancasts, cosplay, fan skits and videos, etc, come in. I think Raven Kennedy did a great job with this series and it’s ending, even if there were things I would have done differently. So I have no hate towards her, just understanding how taxing and difficult it is to be creative and write such an enormous story. This is an HEA, though. After saying all this, I give it 4/5 stars for the book.

I finished the Plated Prisoner Series and it was great. A very long series. All six of the books were between 400-600 pages each, and finding time to sit down with my kindle and finish it was not easy! I gave the series 4.5 stars overall. My favorite book in the series was Gold, the 5th book, because we saw so much character growth, and let's be real here, Slade Ravinger is pretty hot. I'm reviewing these on my TikTok (@elenimcnugget) and I copy it over to my Instragram (@eleniwriting). I also am trying to start a YouTube Channel, your follow would mean the world to me!  I'd love to hear your views and thoughts on my reading list, like if you read it, would you read it, is it in your wheelhouse?