Updates

March Recap 2020

screen shot of a zoom meeting with three attendeesWhat a month . . .

Like so many others I’ve had to transition from going to work five days a week to working from home and it has been an interesting adjustment. If I’m honest, I honestly thought I would be reading more and I have, but it’s mostly news stories and work stuff as at first I overcompensated and then under-compensated as I adjusted, but in general haven’t done a lot of recreational reading. I have spent way too much time on Zoom calls, but at least some have been with friends (right).

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Books

Book 682: Camp Cutlery – Robin Carnilius

If you’re a fan of McTucky Fried High, Carnilius’ hilariously poignant YouTube series about anthropomorphized food surviving high school, you’ll definitely appreciate this one. (If you’re not familiar with McTucky, I included the teaser for Season 1 below.) When they reached out with a review copy of the book, I recognized the name and my response was “definitely!” to reviewing this one.*

Camp Cutlery: A Hunger for Justice picks up not long after the McTucky Fried High series ends and it follows Peanut, a transgender social justice warrior, through their journey at a correctional facility. The biggest challenge by far of reading a work that is a continuation of another work is the pre-set expectations and frankly, no author, can do anything about those. This being said, this story definitely works on most levels, but for me a good portion of the charm was lost from the animated series.

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ARC, Books

Book 681: Lab Partners – Mora Montgomery

What this books needs more than anything, is a good editor: there were continuity errors, there were issues with over description and there were issues with dialogue. And the saddest part is the story and characters were solid enough, but the editing really let it down. [Some of it may have been fixed in the final version of the book, but if it were me I would not have released this to reviewers with these types of errors.]

I requested a copy of this book from NetGalley based on the blurb and the cover.* I mean cute cover, adorable blurb about high school first romance, who wouldn’t want to read it right?

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Books

Book 655: Upside Down – N.R. Walker

Sometimes you just have to eat your own words. I really don’t like reading self-published works. In general, they are not edited (structurally, thematically, copy) appropriately, but then I stumble across a self-published book, like this one, and I am pleasantly surprised.

Don’t get me wrong there were a few copy editing errors—I’m looking at you “Hans Solo”, ouch—but no more than what I’ve found in some big publisher books before (cough ** Mr. Dancy ** cough ** Signett Classics ** cough). And in general, I found this to be well paced and complete. Maybe this is because I found it versus the author reaching out to me? I honestly don’t know.

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ARC, Books

Book 651: Sorted – Jackson Bird

I am always on board for reading anything from LGBTQ+ authors, but particularly nonfiction (memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, etc.). So when the publisher reached out about this one I downloaded it (and somehow actually got to it the week it was published).*

Overall, I really enjoyed this. I mean page one is a J.K. Rowling/Albus Dumbledore quote, of course I was going to enjoy this. I had no idea about Bird’s connection to Harry Potter (or that the Harry Potter Alliance, now known as Fandom Forward even existed)! This being said, I wasn’t totally enamored with the book and didn’t figure out why that was until roughly 80% of the way through the book.

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