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February marked the end of my reading slump. I think the release of Onyx Storm took a lot of the girlies out of their reading slumps, and the start of my blog and the Weekend Updates also pushed me to read a book a week in order to have content. So here is a compiled post of reviews of the four books I read this month. (Spoiler alert. You have been warned.)
Book Title: Onyx Storm
Author: Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 527
Started/Ended Date: January 22 – February 8
Total Reading Time: 7 hours 8 minutes
After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons. No more time for uncertainty. Because the battle has truly begun, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and within their ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust.
Now Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every bit of her wit, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves—her dragons, her family, her home, and him.
Even if it means keeping a secret so big, it could destroy everything. They need an army. They need power. They need magic. And they need the one thing only Violet can find—the truth. But a storm is coming…and not everyone can survive its wrath.
Like every other girly in the world, I started reading Onyx Storm the moment it came out. One thing Rebecca Yarros knows how to do is write a killer cliffhanger. When I finished the first book, Fourth Wing, I was in a hotel bar in New Orleans waiting for my Uber to the airport. I read the reveal on the last page and said out loud, “What?!” I looked up as I closed the book and made eye contact with a woman who nodded and smirked at me knowingly. I finished Iron Flame around midnight the night before Onyx Storm came out, so I didn’t have to sit with that cliffhanger for too long before I was able to dive into Onyx Storm.
I am conflicted with Onyx Storm and the whole Fourth Wing series in general. On its own, I loved it. However, because I took a break from Throne of Glass to get into this world, I was comparing it to Sarah J. Maas’ writing style. I am a Sarah J. Maas loyalist, maybe because A Court of Thorns and Roses was the series that introduced me to the world of fantasy, so I feel like I owe her. Or maybe every fantasy I read will pale in comparison because I am comparing it to my first, and I’ll always be chasing that first fantasy series high.
Like many of the girlies on BookTok, I was slightly confused with the onslaught of new characters and places, some even having the same name (I’m looking at you Lewellen the person and also Lewellen the city). It took me longer than usual to finish this book due to the amount of “Wait, what?” *flips back through the pages to re-read*’s I had to do. But when it clicked, it really clicked. And, of course, in true Rebecca Yarros form, the cliffhanger has me frothing at the mouth for the next book. Which apparently she hasn’t even started yet?! *insert gif of Klaus from The Originals screaming “REBEKAH”*
Book Title: The Nightingale
Author: Kristin Hannah
Genre: Historical Fiction
Page Count: 564
Started/Ended Date: February 8 – February 13
Total Reading Time: 9 hours 3 minutes
FRANCE, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says good-bye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaëtan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.
This book was an easy read in terms of length but not in terms of content. This book starts as World War 2 is kicking off and follows two sisters as France is occupied by the Nazis. Both sisters take different approaches to surviving the war and I think this has to do with their initial interactions with the Nazis. For Isabelle, she is immediately thrown into action as she is among a group of civilians who are attacked by Nazi planes and bombs while fleeing Paris. She meets a man in this chaos, whom she teams up with to get to her sister’s home in Carriveau. During this journey, she immediately falls in love with him and decides that she wants to fight however she can.
Vianne, on the other hand, is more under the impression that if she and her daughter just keep their heads down, they will get through the war. Vianne’s first meeting with a Nazi was as he was moving into her home. He showed up at her doorstep and said he now lived there, too. However, he seemed like a respectful man and maybe even nice. He helped Vianne send care packages to her husband who was a prisoner of war, he snuck chocolate and other treats to her and her daughter, he even gave Vianne the heads up to tell her best friend and neighbor, a Jewish woman, that she should attempt to escape with her children because they were sending every Jew to concentration camps.
Isabelle joins a secret resistance group that works to save Allied airmen who have been stranded in Nazi-occupied France by helping them escape through the Pyrenees mountains. Isabelle’s character is based on a real Belgian woman named Andrée de Jongh, who, between 1941 and 1942, personally escorted 118 people to safety. In the book, Isabelle is eventually caught and is sent to a concentration camp. She survives long enough to be rescued but dies shortly after.
Vianne gradually begins to resist in her own way, by taking children from Jewish families, creating new identities for them, and hiding them away either with other French families or at an orphanage. She keeps note of who these children really are and where they are now so that she can reunite the families after the war. Vianne’s story seems to be inspired by Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who is estimated to have saved over 2,500 children.
I really loved this book. I’ve read a lot about the Holocaust and World War II, but I’ve never learned what it was like for those in France or anywhere in Europe. I think I tend to think of World War II Europe being just Nazis and the Jewish people they targeted. But, of course, there were other European civilians who were watching it happen, some just watching and some resisting in various degrees. Of course, this book isn’t a true story, but it is inspired by real events. It opened my eyes to how terrifying and how hard it was to survive. Not even to survive the Nazis but just to survive the winters during war when they didn’t have enough rations for food or clothes to keep warm.
It was also eye-opening to see how bravery can be defined differently in these situations. For Isabelle, she was risking her life, escorting Allied air-men through the mountains, sending messages for the resistance, and even harboring fugitives from the Nazis. Where as Vianne was brave in doing what she needed to do in order to keep her daughter and other children alive. Isabelle may have been the more flashy hero who, in the end, would posthumously receive an honor for her bravery, but Vianne went through hell and made it possible for her children and other children to survive the war.
Book Title: Tower of Dawn
Author: Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 660
Started/Ended Date: February 13 – February 21
Total Reading Time: 13 hours 1 minute
Chaol Westfall and Nesryn Faliq have arrived in the shining city of Antica to forge an alliance with the Khagan of the Southern Continent, whose vast armies are Erilea’s last hope. But they have also come to Antica for another purpose: to seek healing at the famed Torre Cesme for the wounds Chaol received in Rifthold.
After enduring unspeakable horrors as a child, Yrene Towers has no desire to help the young lord from Adarlan, let alone heal him. Yet she has sworn an oath to assist those in need—and will honor it. But Lord Westfall carries shadows from his own past, and Yrene soon comes to realize they could engulf them both.
In this sweeping parallel novel to the New York Times bestselling Empire of Storms, Chaol, Nesryn, and Yrene will have to draw on every scrap of their resilience if they wish to save their friends. But while they become entangled in the political webs of the khaganate, deep in the shadows of mighty mountains where warriors soar on legendary ruks, long-awaited answers slumber. Answers that might offer their world a chance at survival—or doom them all . . .
I have been working on Throne of Glass for years now at this point. Not due to lack of interest – I loved this series. There were a series of unfortunate events that stalled me from finishing any book and sent me into a reading slump. I was especially procrastinating Tower of Dawn due to the fact that it was focused on Chaol, and I didn’t really like that guy. I contemplated skipping it to get back to Aelin’s timeline. Thank God I didn’t.
This book ended up being one of my favorites in the series. For one, I left actually giving a hoot about Chaol and him actually becoming one of my favorite characters. And I love how everything started coming together in this book. Things from past books where I thought, “Hmm. That could be important. Oh, we’re not focusing on it? Okay, I guess it’s not important,” came back around in Tower of Dawn. It kind of felt like a reward for paying attention earlier in the series. I am always amazed when I’m reading fantasy – not only do these characters and storylines come from someone’s brain, but this entire world would not exist if one person had not thought of it and written it down. But I am even more amazed by authors who can write fantasy series. I mean the planning that that entails! Like, she created a character in the third book who would not come back (and in a big way) until the seventh book. So for those three books in between, she just had a note somewhere saying “Don’t forget about Yrene”? Masterful.
Book Title: Kingdom of Ash
Author: Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 980
Started/Ended Date: February 22 – February 28
Total Reading Time: 17 hours 2 minutes
Aelin Galathynius has vowed to save her people ― but at a tremendous cost. Locked within an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, Aelin must draw upon her fiery will as she endures months of torture. The knowledge that yielding to Maeve will doom those she loves keeps her from breaking, but her resolve is unraveling with each passing day…
With Aelin captured, friends and allies are scattered to different fates. Some bonds will grow even deeper, while others will be severed forever. As destinies weave together at last, all must fight if Erilea is to have any hope of salvation.
Years in the making, Sarah J. Maas’s New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series draws to an explosive conclusion as Aelin fights to save herself―and the promise of a better world.
This was such an intense and action-packed book. Sitting down to write a review of it, I’m realizing how much happened in those 980 pages. We start with Aelin still held captive by Maeve and end with her saving the entire world. As I talked about in Tower of Dawn’s review, I am always amazed by fantasy writers. They literally build worlds in their minds. In Kingdom of Ash, not only did Sarah J. Maas have to create this world, a story worth telling, a system of magic that makes sense, but she also had to write a war, with detailed battle plans. As I was reading through the battles, I was thinking how it would have turned out if I had written it: “The good side fought the bad side for a really long time. There were a lot of sword moves and some magic thrown around. For a little bit, it looked like the bad side would win, but the good guys won.” It would have been a much shorter book.
As enthralled as I was throughout this book, I would still like to sue for emotional damages over the death of Gavriel. I honestly didn’t cry right away because Sarah J. Maas has a habit of bringing her characters to the brink of death, then yanking them back (read as: Aelin in every book). She also has a history of killing off characters and bringing them right back from the dead (read as: everyone in ACOTAR). So, I thought, surely she wouldn’t kill off the purest, most lovable character for no reason. Well, apparently there was a reason: to emotionally destroy me.
I know it makes sense for the series to end here. It honestly wouldn’t be fair to the characters to put them through any more trauma. However, I would read the hell out of a novella of the characters living happily ever after. Tell me Rowan and Aelin have precious little fae babies, or tell me about the house Chaol builds for Yrene. Hell, I’d even take a run-down of how trade relations are going. I feel like these characters have become my friends, and I am just as interested in their happily ever afters as I was interested in their adventures.
And that’s all for February! What did you read in February? Let me know your recommendations in the comments! As previously noted, I have a long, long, TBR but I’m always looking for another book to add to it (read as: a trip to Barnes and Noble).
Making it Megan 
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