This year has been very good to me, reading and book wise. One of the best things has been finding a new favorite author!! Not only that, but an author who has a RIDICULOUS amount of books published already. Sooo many more books to read and look forward to! Seanan McGuire has very very quickly become one of my top five favorite authors.

First encounters:

I read Middlegame in late April, right before it was released. At the time, this was her most recent novel. I am like…still blown away by how fucking GOOD this book is. You can read my full review of it here, but like, it’s probably my favorite read of 2019. I don’t think anything else really comes close. It was so dark and complex and mind blowing, and everything I could possibly want in a book. Middlegame blends science and magic and mystery, and tackles subjects like isolation due to others being unable to understand you, suicide attempts, greed, and attaining the ultimate power. The best part though is that it’s really about a sibling relationship at it’s core, and that drives the novel. It’s brilliant and you all must read it!

If you’ve been reading my posts until now, then you might know I love the Red Rising series (by Pierce Brown). If you didn’t know or are new to the blog then here it is: I LOVE THE RED RISING SERIES!!!! It’s an epic science fiction series that is about a dystopian society that has class hierarchies described by color, with Golds being the top of society. Each color has a type of job that they’re allowed to do, and everything is very restrictive – you can’t marry outside your class (each color is genetically modified, some with special enhancements but also so that you can’t conceive children outside of your own color). Anyway it’s brilliant and brutal and gut-wrenching and you all gotta read it.

The fifth book in the series was released at the end of July, and Pierce went on tour to promote it. I am lucky to live close to New York City, so I was able to attend his even there on the 7th at the Barnes and Noble Union Square.

I wanted to share with you my experience of the event and meeting Pierce! I’ve included a lot of the stuff I could remember from Pierce’s discussion and Q&A session which will hopefully those of you who wanted to see him but couldn’t will enjoy 🙂 Sorry in advance, this is kind of a long one! But it’s worth it 🙂

P.S. There may be slight spoilers for the original trilogy + Iron Gold! But most of it is pretty tame.

Have you discovered any new favorite authors recently? I HAVE. Thanks to @xcrini (on Instagram; also here on Twitter), recommending her books all the time, I finally read and fell in love with Katrina Leno. It actually messed up my February wrap up, because I read both Summer of Salt and Everything All at Once on the last day of February after I had already published my wrap up, oops. They were just THAT GOOD that I had to read them both in one sitting. And like, look at those covers?!??! THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL.

When was the last time you discovered a new author whose work you ended up loving? It happened with Cranesong by Rona Wang for us and we are thrilled to share this book with you and tell you why we loved it.

We were fortunate enough to get advance copies of the eBook and were also able to interview Rona. Thank you to Half Mystic Press for coordinating this interview! To give you an idea about Cranesong, see what others are saying:

Praise for Cranesong

“The stories in Cranesong are the stories I’ve been waiting to read my entire life. They are the girlhood secrets, untranslatable sorrows, and quiet violences that often surround us but never quite catch our attention until they’re told by a writer like Rona Wang, whose words will uplift you just as much as they will shatter you.”

—Erin O’Malley, 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow and editor of The Ellis Review

“Captivating and ghostly, Cranesong disarms like no other. These stories are unapologetic about what it means to be Asian American and hurting, following different adolescents as they navigate the reclamation that comes with learning to be and become. Cranesong glitters and gleams, showcasing what Rona Wang does best: capturing the world in all its minute and wonderfully bizarre truths.”

—Margaret Zhang, editor-in-chief of Glass Kite Anthology, poetry and fiction published in SOFTBLOW, DIALOGIST, and Gigantic Sequins

Have you ever been to an author signing event? I know that unfortunately authors can’t make it to every city, and can’t make it to every country. One of my wishes if I had infinite money would be to send authors to places they don’t usually get to go! Anyway, I live about halfway between Philadelphia and New York City, so I’m lucky enough to have access to many author events.

This past Tuesday (January 29th) I was able to attend the Leigh Bardugo’s launch event for King of Scars! This is the first book of her duology about Nikolai, a character originally from her Grisha trilogy. Since a lot of people can’t go to these author events, I thought I’d talk a bit about about what it was like, share what she talked about, and just talk about the whole day in general!