November Wrap Up + Meeting Sarah J. Maas

I'm here again with another Wrap Up - I know everyone says this, but really this year is moving way too fast.  I don't know what's going on with time.  There's no TBR this month because lets face it - I never stick to them.  I'll have a post up in the next week or so about just how well my Spring TBR went, so I guess I'll discuss that further then!

1.  Sweet Damage by Rebecca James (4 stars, review)

2.  Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas (3 stars)

3.  The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle (4.5 stars, review)

4.  Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas (4.5 stars)

5.  Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (DNF)

6.  Denton Little's Deathdate by Lance Rubin (2 stars)

This month I didn't read that many books, but I'm blaming that on Heir of Fire and Queen of Shadows which are considerably hefty.  As you can see, I enjoyed Queen of Shadows much more than Heir of Fire.  I found HoF to be slow paced, and I also cared about every character's perspective except Celaena's... which is obviously not good since she's the main character.  It read a little like a filler novel for me.  The exception to all that was the last 100 pages which were intense and fantastic - I wish the whole novel had had that much going on.  As for Queen of Shadows, I posted a tiny little review on Goodreads, which I will attempt to embed here:

Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finished this in the early hours of this morning!
This rating should be nearer to 4.5, but however much I loved it, there were still various minor things that I had issues with.

Here's a list of them:(view spoiler)[
- I'm still not really feeling Rowan as a character, but he's not too bad
- I feel like Aedion got really lost in the second half of the book. Sometimes it's like he wasn't there at all.
- I hated reading the bits with Rowan and Aedion arguing
- Sometimes Aelin acted really weird and over the top
- And to do with that, sometime the interaction between Aelin, Aedion and Rowan seemed a bit forced
- To be honest, I could have done without the romance aspect. Seriously I was so happy that in Heir of Fire, it was shown that Aelin could just be friends with a guy. But unfortunately this book totally took that away.
(hide spoiler)]

I loved the pacing in this one and (view spoiler)[ thank goodness that Dorian is okay, my poor baby (hide spoiler)] !
Definitely my favourite Throne of Glass book so far!

View all my reviews

There's no major spoilers in the first spoiler tag for Queen of Shadows only, but there is in the second one.

Now's also a pretty good time to say... I met Sarah J. Maas this month!  I didn't make it in time to book a ticket for her first event in Melbourne, but I went on the waiting list and luckily she was able to make time for a second event - and I got to go!  She only talked for about half an hour, answering questions that had been sent in ahead of time.  She was so much funnier than I was expecting, and she was worried that we would read too much into some of her answers (and I definitely am guilty of doing that).  Eventually my group was called to line up for signing, and I got Queen of Shadows, Crown of Midnight and A Court of Thorns and Roses signed.  Unfortunately I didn't get a photo, as they were trying to move through everyone quickly and the lady taking photos couldn't figure out how to take a picture with my phone :(  It was overall a nice experience, but it involved a lot of waiting!

I put down Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children at about 150 pages in.  It was just taking way too long to get to the point and the narrator was boring and mean and ungrateful.  Almost everyone loves this book, so I was sad to put it down but I just decided that I had other things to read.  Unfortunately, Denton Little's Deathdate wasn't much better for me, but I'll hopefully have a review of that up soon so I won't say anymore.

So overall my month wasn't too bad, considering I have two new favourite books!  Let me know how your month went!