This week I reviewed:
- Here Lie the Secrets
- Pony on the Twelfth Floor
- A Piglet Named Mercy
- Leroy Ninker Saddles Up
- Stella Endicott and the Anything-Is-Possible Poem
I loved Kate DiCamillo’s Three Rancheros series but until this week I hadn’t read any other books she’s written. I was fortunate enough to secure an ARC of Stella Endicott and the Anything-Is-Possible Poem, the fifth book of the Tales from Deckawoo Drive series, from NetGalley. I had planned on reading all of the other books in the series, as well as the Mercy Watson series, in the lead up to the release of Stella Endicott. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to source these in time. Hopefully I’ll find copies in the not too distant future.
Bookish Highlight of the Week: One of the reasons I started this blog was because I kept seeing blog tours for books I loved and wished I could be a part of them. Yesterday I participated in my very first blog tour and it was so much fun! I was given the opportunity to interview Tara Gilboy, the author of the Unwritten series, about Rewritten, which was released in April 2020. If you missed it yesterday, you can find my interview here.
Word of the Week: hleów-feðer, which means “shelter-feather”, but is used figuratively in some Old English literature to refer to a protecting arm put around someone.
Until next time, happy reading!
Kindle Black Hole of Good Intentions
The definitive, dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research.
April 25, 1986, in Chernobyl, was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.
Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles – at the time equivalent to $18 billion – Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies.
The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told – until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.
“A haunting story that reimagines the consequences of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”
After the tempest, after the reunion, after her father drowned his books, Miranda was meant to enter a brave new world. Naples awaited her, and Ferdinand, and a throne. Instead she finds herself in Milan, in her father’s castle, surrounded by hostile servants who treat her like a ghost. Whispers cling to her like spiderwebs, whispers that carry her dead mother’s name. And though he promised to give away his power, Milan is once again contorting around Prospero’s dark arts. With only Dorothea, her sole companion and confidant to aid her, Miranda must cut through the mystery and find the truth about her father, her mother, and herself.
Years ago, Old Earth sent forth sisters and brothers into the vast dark of the prodigal colonies armed only with crucifixes and iron faith. Now, the sisters of the Order of Saint Rita are on an interstellar mission of mercy aboard Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, a living, breathing ship which seems determined to develop a will of its own.
When the order receives a distress call from a newly-formed colony, the sisters discover that the bodies and souls in their care – and that of the galactic diaspora – are in danger. And not from void beyond, but from the nascent Central Governance and the Church itself.
Since leaving his homeland, the earthbound demigod Demane has been labeled a sorcerer. With his ancestors’ artifacts in hand, the Sorcerer follows the Captain, a beautiful man with song for a voice and hair that drinks the sunlight.
The two of them are the descendants of the gods who abandoned the Earth for Heaven, and they will need all the gifts those divine ancestors left to them to keep their caravan brothers alive.
The one safe road between the northern oasis and southern kingdom is stalked by a necromantic terror. Demane may have to master his wild powers and trade humanity for godhood if he is to keep his brothers and his beloved captain alive.
Schizanthus Nerd 