CBR17 Book 60: "Can't Escape Love" by Alyssa Cole

Page count: 192 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR17 Pie Challenge: Inclusion

CBR17 Bingo: Borrow (read through Libby, since I don't actually own the book)

Regina "Reggie" Hobbs is working hard to make her nerdy website, Girls with Glasses, a success, and prove to her over-protective parents that she's perfectly capable of taking care of herself, even if she's in a wheelchair. She loves the work, she loves her very capable team, but lately, she's been struggling with insomnia, and the only thing that seems to soothe her to sleep is the voice of a puzzle podcaster, Gustave Nguyen, she used to follow, but he no longer podcasts, and the archive of his episodes has been deleted. So Reggie goes to the unusual step of contacting him, asking if he could make some recordings for her, to help her sleep.

Gustave "Gus" Nguyen is autistic and often has trouble with social interactions, especially with women. He remembers Reggie from chats they used to have on his live streams, but doesn't want to give a virtual stranger voice recordings that he would no longer have any control over. He sympathises with her plight, however, and offers to call her if she has trouble sleeping, to talk to her until she falls asleep. Thus begins their friendship, and soon it becomes clear that while Gus can help Reggie with her insomnia, Reggie can help Gus succeed in completing an escape room he's working on. He's been contracted to design an escape room based on a very popular romance anime for Anime Con, and he knows absolutely nothing about the anime, nor does he see what is so fascinating to others about it. 

Reggie, on the other hand, is a superfan and offers to help him understand the show and the characters in return for his nighttime phone calls. Once they discover that they both live fairly close to each other in Queens, they can meet up in person, and it doesn't take long for their friendship to develop into something more. 

Both Reggie and Gus have some personal issues to resolve before they can fully commit to a relationship, but since both feel more comfortable with each other than apart, and help complement each other's skills beautifully, there is never any doubt that they will find a HEA, without too much conflict.

While I've read all the full novels in the Reluctant Royals series, I have yet to complete all the novellas, and with this fitting into a number of my reading challenges this summer, it felt like a good quick read to choose. There are several mentions of Reggie's twin sister Portia in this, the heroine of A Duke by Default, a book that still makes me annoyed every time I think of it. Naledi, the heroine of A Princess in Theory also has a cameo. Even though it's part of an ongoing series, this novella would mostly work fine on its own. There are some issues with Reggie's parents and her sister that are not entirely resolved (that happens in Portia's book). But it's not anything that would ruin anyone's reading experience if this was the first book of Cole's they picked up.

The inclusion of neurodiverse characters has become quite common in romance now, but back in 2019, when this book came out, I think it was more unusual. Considering this also has a heroine who is mostly wheelchair-bound (she can stand for short periods of time, but lost the use of her legs after viral meningitis when she was younger), this book crosses off a lot of squares on a diversity bingo board. It therefore felt like a good choice for the "Inclusion" pie slice of the CBR Pie Challenge. It also works as "borrowed" as I got it through my library app Libby, and don't actually own the book. 

Judging a book by its cover: Cole usually has really good covers for her books, with cover models that actually look close to how they're described in the story. It's not often you see people in wheelchairs on romance covers. 

Crossposted by Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 25: "Thank You for Listening" by Julia Whelan

Page count: 400 pages

Audio book length: 11 hrs 15 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Sewanee (pronounced Swanie, several characters call her Swan) Chester was a child actress on a popular sitcom, but a serious injury while filming her big break as an adult led to her losing an eye and becoming permanently scarred, so now she makes her living as an audiobook narrator. While it may not be as glamorous as acting, she's very good at it and has won several awards. Early in her career, she also narrated romance novels, but now her cynicism makes it too hard for her to believe in Happily Ever Afters, and so she's retired the pseudonym she used to narrate that genre with. 

Normally, Sewanee doesn't go to big conventions, but her boss Mark, is unable to make the Vegas Book Convention and sends her instead. It also gives her a chance to hang out with her best friend, Adaku, who is still an actress and a rising star in Hollywood. Adaku has just been given a very lucrative job offer, and wants Sewanee to come stay in her swanky, all-expenses-paid suite so they can properly celebrate. However, Adaku has to fly to LA to meet with a movie producer, leaving Sewanee alone in a bar, nursing her drink and trying to drown her disappointment, both at not being able to spend more time with her friend, but also because of the way her life has turned out. Her evening looks up as a handsome stranger, Nick, approaches her and insists on buying her a drink. Since his flight is due to leave in a few hours, they are only supposed to have a brief window together, but a freak snowstorm strands him in Vegas for the night, and he and Sewanee spend it together. 

Sewanee's beloved grandmother has Alzheimer's, and the nursing home she is in is expensive, so when Sewanee is offered a frankly staggering amount of money to return to romance narration, unearthing her old pseudonym, she doesn't really have much choice but to accept. The fact that she gets to work with probably the sexiest and most mysterious male narrator in the business, Brock McNight, doesn't hurt either. The two of them gradually strike up a friendship via e-mails and messages, but even with the undeniable chemistry she seems to have with Brock, Sewanee can't quite get Nick out of her head. Of course, she has no contact details for the man, and told him her name was Alice and that she was a book editor, so he would have no way of tracking her down either, should he so want to. 

Sewanee has a choice to make when it turns out Brock is coming to LA for a weekend. She agrees to meet him for dinner - never suspecting what strange plot twists life has in store for her.

This is Julia Whelan's second novel, but to anyone who listens to audiobooks, she's much more famous for her narration. According to her website, she has performed in over 600 audiobooks, and the New Yorker called her the "Adele of audiobooks". You are sure to have heard her voice at some point. While there are several similarities between Sewanee and the author (who is a famous audiobook narrator who also used to act on a popular TV show when she was younger), Whelan is very clear in her author's note that this is in no way autobiographical, it's just another example of write what you know. I did discover that in the aftermath of writing and publishing this, Whelan actually wrote a version of the romance novel that she has Sewanee and Brock narrating, so fans of the novel can actually hear the whole thing, should they so wish. 

Sewanee's motivation for taking the new narration job is that her grandmother has dementia, is starting to deteriorate and needs to be moved into the full-time care ward at her care home. This costs considerably more money, and Sewanee's father isn't inclined to help, as he thinks she could be moved to a cheaper home. My mother passed away two years ago. She had Lewy Body dementia, and as she deteriorated, she was no longer able to live by herself anymore and had to be moved into a closed dementia ward, where she could have 24-hour care. Sewanee's grandmother seems to really love the care home she's in, which is why Sewanee is so determined to let her stay, despite the costs, but my Mum was miserable and kept asking us to take her home, which we obviously couldn't, cause she kept getting hurt or wandering off and getting lost when she wasn't monitored. So reading the parts of this book that dealt with Sewanee's grandmother's worsening condition was really hard, and even writing this paragraph is harder going than I was expecting. 

Even with this subplot, I really enjoyed this book. Julia Whelan obviously knows a lot about audiobook narration, and it was nice to get a glimpse behind the scenes, so to speak. Romance novels where the heroine doesn't have female friends seem really strange to me, so a good and close friendship is always a plus. 

Having really enjoyed this, I think I will also check out Whelan's debut novel, My Oxford Year. 

Judging a book by its cover: A romance cover not featuring people is unusual, but I like it. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 66: "Fourth Wing" by Rebecca Yarros

Page count: 561 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR16 Bingo: Smash (romantasy - I want it on record that I hate this term, by the way)

Since this has been a huge success and had lots of attention on the TikToks and the like, I'm not even sure if I need to give much of a plot summary, but here goes:

All her life, Violet Sorrengail has wanted to become a Scribe, like her father. However, her mother, a commanding general of the army of Navarre (the fictional country this is set in) will not accept that any child of hers become anything but a dragon rider. Violet's older sister is a dragon rider, Violet's older brother was a dragon rider (until he tragically died), and so Violet also has to join the most insanely dangerous quadrant of the Basgiath war college, even though she's only had about six months since her mother ordered her to change her mind, and she's disabled to boot, so weaker and much more breakable than most of the ruthless candidates surrounding her. 

Violet survives the perilous first task (apparently more than sixty people died before even getting into the college - is that really a good way to run a school?) and now has to stay alive in a literally lethally competitive environment. The lucky first years who survive, may be lucky enough to bond with a dragon and be granted exciting magical powers as a result. Violet has to use all her cunning and guile to survive among her more vicious peers, and there are a lot of people who want her dead, including the imposing Xaden Riorson, son of the man her mother personally executed after a failed rebellion. He and a number of other young family members of rebels are at the school because enrolling (and most likely being killed) was the only option given to them to ensure their survival. 

Violet does make friends, and surprising everyone, survives long enough to get a chance at bonding a dragon. Once that ordeal is over (and she's once again nearly killed), it becomes impossible for her to avoid Xaden any longer, since their dragons are mated, and that means that if something happens to either of them, the other one dies because of the bond bestowed by their dragons. So that's fun. Of course, Xaden might hate her mum, but he is undeniably very hot. Despite having every reason for wanting her dead and having lots of opportunities to get her killed, Xaden instead seems amused by Violet, even sparring with her and challenging her - it's all very confusing.

There is danger facing the borders of Navarre, and fewer dragon riders every year to deal with it. It becomes clear during Violet's first year at Basgiath that the country's leadership are hiding things and downplaying the seriousness of the attacks on border villages. Will Violet survive her first year at war college only to find herself thrust into an actual war?

For quite a while, I was usure about reading Fourth Wing because of all the hype on TikTok. Colleen Hoover is beloved on BookTok, and what little I tried of one of her books quickly made it clear that those books are not for me. So I was a bit sceptical. Then my friend Ashley read it last year and made this fun video about the experience. Generally, if Ashley likes a book, I will too (there are exceptions, but they are usually hard sci-fi or horror books).

While I don't think Rebecca Yarros and her dragon romantasy has gotten lots of readers hooked, even the ones who don't tend to read speculative fiction, I don't think she's anywhere near Twilight-levels of popularity and obsession. Because I myself was deeply hooked on the Twilight saga back in the day, and you still can't entirely convince me that the pages of those books weren't laced with crack, removing all critical faculties of the reader and making them impossible to put down. 

Did Fourth Wing hook me as powerfully? No, but I can absolutely see why it's become so popular. I also see why it's been widely criticised, because there are aspects of the world building that just do not make a lick of sense. Violet is a better heroine than Bella Swan, mainly because she has some agency, and the plot doesn't just happen to her. But she's also clearly extra super speshul and manages things no one seems to have done before - for why? Who knows? The plot requires it to be that way. Of course there is a love triangle, because these books seem to always have to have one. There's Violet, our plucky heroine, there's Dain, her childhood best friend, who has pretty thoroughly friend-zoned her their entire life, but now seems convinced (despite repeated proof of the opposite) that Violet is too fragile and weak to survive to become a dragon rider, and keeps wanting to smuggle her into the Scribe's quarter. No points for guessing who candidate number three is - if there is a dark, brooding, probably dangerous dude, who your entire surviving family has warned you to stay away from, that's clearly going to be the one guy who's bones you really want to jump. Xaden also gets major points for never underestimating Violet, and instead of coddling her, encourages her to get better, stronger and sneakier. 

While Twilight is YA and Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon who's all about no hanky-panky before marriage  (and let's not forget, if you do have sex, you'll get immediately pregnant with a lifeforce-sucking parasite and literally die giving birth to it), Fourth Wing is aimed at a somewhat older audience, and by the time Violet makes up her mind about which third of the love triangle she prefers (I'm sure you couldn't possibly guess who she picks), there are some pretty graphic sex scenes. Encindiary, one might say. As someone who read a whole lot of smut as a teenager, I don't see a problem with YA readers reading these (or Sarah J Maas or a bunch of other books that seem to be shelved in the YA sections of bookstores despite dealing with much heavier themes). But some people might be shocked, so fair warning. 

As well as having a central premise that just does not make sense Seriously, why kill off most of your promising young people - some of them before they've even made it INTO the school? If your country is fighting a decades-long war, you are going to want as many able-bodied fighters as possible. So only the best can become dragon riders? Fair enough, but why do pretty much all challenges have to be succeed or die? Why not have the ones who fail challenges moved to one of the other three sections of the war college, possibly to start at the bottom, but at least given a chance to be a valuable member of the fighting force. It's quite clear that once the first-years bond with a dragon and start trying to ride on them, a whole bunch of them die anyway. Why kill off  the majority of them before they get to that point and natural selection apparently kicks in? It's maddening, people!

This is my real life bookclub's pick for November, and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion. I hope a whole bunch of people show up, and I suspect there will be many spirited opinions. I'm also glad I waited long enough to read this that third and final book in the series is just around the corner. It's being released in January, so I think I'll wait for December to read book 2 (which I have heard is extremely slow-going in the first half, but gets better towards the end). I'm also glad I liked it because my friend Des took my book to a convention and got it signed and personalised by Rebecca Yarros, so it would suck if I hated it. 

Judging a book by its cover: Despite this book only coming out in 2023, it already seems to have a huge amount of alternate covers, most of them in black and gold. While the hardback is golden with black patterns, I prefer my paperback in matte black, with the pattern in gold and white. Much prettier. 

Crossposted on Cannonballl Read

CBR16 Book 46: "Kong Krøbling" (Crippled) by Trine J. Cederløf

Page count: 145 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo: Disability rep

Disclaimer! The author is a friend of mine, but I paid for my own copy of the book and my opinions are my own. (Hope she'll still be speaking to me after she reads this).

In the fairy tale kingdom of The Blue Mountains, the king and queen try for many years, but the queen fails to have any living children. She encounters a witch who calls herself the Queen of Bees, who offers her a solution to her difficulties. Giving her a seed, which she must water with her tears, a plant will grow, with two flowers - one will give her a boy, the other a girl. The king and queen are desperate, so the queen eats both, and nine months later, two boys are born. The first is small and misshapen, with eyes in two different colours. The second baby is perfectly formed. The staff are worried when the firstborn, the heir, is born with physical disabilities, but the royal couple are equally delighted with both their boys. They name the eldest Vincent and his twin Niklas.

The twins grow up being treated exactly the same, and are pretty much inseperable. Vincent has to use a wheelchair, but excels in the lessons their tutor assigns them. His brother, who is handsome and healthy, struggles with understanding all the reading they are assigned. He manages to teach Vincent to swim and ride, because these are abilities important for a prince to know. Vincent helps Niklas realise that he's by no means stupid, he just has reading difficulties, so Vincent sums up their lessons to him with visual aids and helps him do his written homework. It takes their parents and tutor years to figure out their scheming, but once they do, the conclusion is that Niklas has dyslexia, and their parents realise the princes are probably old enough to go to school with other children, which means the boys start to make friends. Vincent is the more introverted and bookish one, Niklas is extroverted and excels at anything physical. Once they get older, Vincent goes to university, while Niklas joins the royal guard.

Then their mother announces that they are old enough to get married. Both princes need wives and heirs, and so they need to visit with princesses from nearby kingdoms to see whether they suit. While Vincent is well-loved and popular in his own kingdom, his visible disablilities create difficulties once the queen starts matchmaking. It turns out his perfect match is closer to home than he realised. 

This story is a retelling of a very well-known Danish fairytale called King Lindworm. Growing up, I loved mythology and folklore, and have read fairy stories from a lot of different countries. The story seemed vaguely familiar to me, but having read a summary of the original, this is not really a story that's very popular in Norway or Sweden. It also means that this book introduced me to a new (and kind of weird) fairytale, as well as a very entertaining middle grade book.

While this is aimed at a younger audience, as all the best books for children, it doesn't underestimate them or talk down to them. A number of serious issues are touched upon, such as infertility (this led to a very interesting discussion during our book club chat about this book), physical disabilities and dyslexia. At no point are the boys bullied or mistreated in their own kingdom by teachers or peers. The twins have a really close relationship, and while it's mentioned that they fight a lot as children, they always present a united front against others. Without Niklas, Vincent would not have challenged himself physically, and would have been much more limited by his disabilites. Without Vincent, Niklas would have convinced himself he was stupid and useless, and good only for grunt work. There are also several examples of openly queer characters, so while this is set in a sort of vagely 18th Century time period, there is no discrimination or prejudice (in The Blue Mountains, at least). 

While I try to challenge myself to read in Swedish a couple of times a year, so I don't forget how to, this is the first time in a very long time I had to read a whole book in Danish. To non-Scandinavians, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish would not appear to be very different from one another, and the most commonly used form of written Norwegian is directly derived from Danish. A lot of the language is therefore not that challenging, but every so often, there will be a word or expression in Danish that means something entirely different in Norwegian, and it took me out of the story for a moment. Thankfully, the book has a fun and engaging plot which moves at a nice pace, and once I actually set down and concentrated, it didn't take me long to finish the book.

To me, the opening difficulty with infertility obviously affected me greatly. Among the topics we discussed about this book is how many stories in myth and folklore involve parents who struggle to concieve or have living children, and how common infertility difficulties are, yet very rarely talked about. My little boy is the result of several long gruelling years of IVF treatment, and I feel very lucky to never have suffered a miscarriage during my many years of trying. If medical science wasn't advanced enough, would I have made a deal with a mysterious old woman in the hopes of having a baby? I suspect I would. 

Because this is the first book in a planned series, the author already has several other books in development, all focusing on different kingdoms in this fictional world. We get a glimpse of some of the neighbouring kingdoms, and one of our major complaints when discussing the book with the author was the lack of a map. The book should absolutely have included a map at the beginning (so Trine sat down and drew one for us during the meeting). Having heard her talk about her ideas for future books, and some of her influences for the various kingdoms and peoples, I cannot wait to get my hands on more of her stories.

So why only four stars? I wanted more! This story was great, but I wanted more time with these engaging characters, and I would especially have liked to know more about the Queen of Bees. 

Judging a book by its cover: I really love the simplicity of this cover, with the wheelchair which plays such an important part of the plot (and Vincent's life) front and centre. The various shades of blue are also lovely, no doubt picked because the book takes place in the fictional country of The Blue Mountains. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR15 Book 65: "A Curse So Dark and Lonely" by Brigid Kemmerer

Page count: 504 pages

Rating: 4 stars

A very long time ago, Prince Rhen, the crown prince of Emberfall, made a very foolish mistake and slept with the wrong woman. He's been paying for said mistake for centuries. Forced to relive the autumn of his eighteenth year over and over, he has to get a woman to fall in love with him in a few months, or he turns into a murderous beast and slaughters anyone he can find. If the curse remains unbroken, the season resets and Rhen is back on the day of his eighteenth birthday, starting the "game" once more.

The only one who survives his beastly rampages is Grey, the captain of his royal guard, who has to go into the mortal world for an hour at the start of every season to find a new woman to bring back to Emberfall, in the hopes of breaking the curse. 

Harper's mother is dying of cancer, and her father gambled away most of their money and abandoned his family, so now Harper's brother has to work as an enforcer for the people their dad owed money to. She's acting as a lookout for him while he's reluctantly threatening someone on behalf of his "employers" when she sees what appears to be a guy trying to kidnap a woman in an alley. Acting before she can think clearly, Harper jumps the guy to stop him and ends up in a magical land, trapped with Rhen and Grey. Apart from the two taciturn young men, the castle is completely empty. There are musical instruments that magically play, any food that is eaten magically reappears the next morning. Parker does her best to try to escape and discovers that the people who are living in the rest of Emberfall are suffering, believing that the royal family has abandoned them and trying their best to survive in the face of foreign invaders or the constant threat of the monster hanging over them.

The wicked sorceress who cursed Rhen in the first place has decided that this is his final chance at breaking the curse. If he doesn't find true love by the end of the season, he will remain a vicious monster and she will take over what is left of Emberfall. From Harper's clear dislike of him, Rhen is pretty sure that he's doomed, and tells Harper the truth (up to a point, he can't really bring himself to confess to being the monster that murdered the entire royal family and most of the surrounding villagers), figuring they might as well be honest with one another in the few months he has left.

Harper is not going to let the people around the castle starve or go defenseless. She demands that Rhen and Grey help her distribute some of the frankly staggering amounts of food around the castle, that just keeps magically replenishing every morning. She also makes Rhen understand that while he's rightfully depressed about the whole curse thing, he can't let Emberfall be invaded by a foreign power either. While scheming to try to trick the neighbouring ruler from giving up their invasion attempts, Rhen and Harper spend a whole lot of time together, but will it make Harper fall in love with Rhen before he turns into a monster one final time and all is lost?

This is the first of a trilogy, and the story is pretty much Beauty and the Beast meets Groundhog Day, except instead of Bill Murray learning to play the piano or carve ice sculptures, our hero is a mass murderer who has to live with the knowledge that as a monster he murdered not just the king and queen and his sisters, but all the people in the palace and a terrifying number of people in the areas surrounding the castle. In the many years since the curse began, Rhen and Grey have come up with plans to get the monster away from populated areas until the season resets, but while the prince and his loyal guard wake up healed and physically not a day older than they were when the curse set in, no one else who died can be brought back. That's going to mess anyone up, really.

Harper has cerebral palsy, and has had to go through a number of painful operations to fix her legs. She still walks with a limp, but refuses to let her illness define her. When the sorceress offers to magically heal her leg, Harper angrily responds that she's not broken. She hates that she's unable to do more to help her brother and mother, and it's her courage and sense of justice that makes her attack Grey when she sees him trying to bring another woman back to Emberfall, resulting in herself ending up trapped there instead. She's clearly nothing like any of the other women who have been brought there before and makes several escape attempts before realising that she might be better off working with Grey and Rhen, rather than against them. Once she sees how much the vengeful sorceress keeps torturing the prince and Grey, she reluctantly decides to make the best of a bad situation.

This is a very violent fairy tale retelling and I liked that it didn't pull its punches. The people outside of the palace do not have the seasons resetting, and while Rhen and Grey seem to have lived for centuries, only about five years or so have passed outside of the castle grounds. The common people of Emberfall have pretty much lost all hope, believing the royal family has fled and left them to manage on their own, against the raging monster and now an invading force from another country. Rhen isn't really sure how in the world he's going to be able to help his subjects, considering the rest of the royal family didn't flee, they were brutally murdered by the monster, as were all the other inhabitants of the castle, including the royal guard. There isn't really anyone to fight the enemy soldiers, but thanks to a rather farfetched scheme concocted by Harper, Rhen, and Grey, they're going to try anyway.

I'll be very interested in seeing where this series goes, considering the end of this one. There are some interesting new challenges set up and even if I didn't already own the whole trilogy, I would probably keep reading, just because Kemmerer did something a bit different with her story. 

Judging a book by its cover: On my paperback edition of this book, the title is in a shimmery silver (as is the back cover of the book) and I like the dark and slightly spooky look of the thorns and the woods. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR15 Book 49: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

Page count: 482 pages

Audio book length: 13hrs 52 mins

Rating: 4 stars

CBR15 Bingo: North America

I've been hearing about this book since it came out. So many people I know on the internet and whose opinions I trust have read, reviewed and absolutely loved it. So I feel bad only rating it four stars, but for all that that the story and the characters appealed to me, there was something that kept making me prioritise other things over listening more to the audio book, and I never really fully emotionally connected with this one.

There are so many reviews out there of this book already, so I don't want to spend too much time on the plot. Sam and Sadie become best friends playing video games in a hospital while Sam is recovering from an awful car accident, which leaves him permanently crippled, while Sadie's sister is being treated for cancer. Because of an unwise decision of Sadie's, they drift apart, only to meet again as college students at Harvard. They immediately reconnect and decide to start designing a video game together. Aided by Sam's charming and rich roommate Marx, the three become a force to be reconned with in the video game world.

We learn about Sam and Sadie from flashbacks and flash-forwards. Both are fiercely loyal and love each other deeply, but are also easily hurt, terrible at communicating with one another, and stubborn enough that through the years, a lot of misunderstandings which could have been solved by SIMPLE conversations keep them from being there fully for one another. Marx is the person who tries to mediate between them and also keep their personality quirks from completely ruining any chance they have of success.

For all that I spent a lot of time wanting to smack either Sam, Sadie, or both of them on the back of the head and shout at them to stop being so self-centred, and maybe talk to the other about what actually bothered them, they also felt like real people to me. Marx was clearly the character I loved the most, and without him in the narrative, I'm not sure I would have continued past the first third or so of the novel. 

I've never been a big gamer, myself, but grew up watching my brothers play console games and have spent a lot of the last 23 years watching my husband play games as well. You don't need to know or care anything about video games to read this book, although I suspect reading about the designing and programming of games might add an extra level of enjoyment for those who know about these things. I like learning new things while reading fiction, and the insight into graphics engines and the like was fascinating to me. 

I don't love this book passionately as so many of my fellow Cannonball reviewers, but it made me feel a full range of emotions and at one point made me ugly cry and I will happily recommend it to others because it's a very well-written book. It also made me miss my best friend a lot, because reading about close friendships inevitably does just that. 

Judging a book by its cover: I love the paperback cover, with its bright rainbow colours, contrasting the almost black-and-white feel of the iconic image of Hokusai's Great Wave. The image drew me to first pick up the book and that's the job of cover design. So well, done art department. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.