Floodpath: A Novel Emily B. Martin

The epic fantasy adventure begun in Sunshield races to its thrilling conclusion in this imaginative finale in which the fate of four extraordinary young people—and their nations—will be decided.

When their hopes for ending Moquoia’s brutal system of bondage are crushed, unlikely allies Lark and Veran are forced to flee into the harsh desert. With no weapons or horses, they must make their way to safety across the 50-mile expanse of waterless plains known as the water scrape. It is an odyssey filled with unexpected dangers that challenge even a skilled outlaw like Lark—though the farther they travel, the more she wonders if she even fits the fearsome title of the Sunshield Bandit anymore.

Injured in the coup to overthrow the Moquoian monarchy, Tamsin, accompanied by Iano, retreat to a safe house, where they await the return of Lark and Veran. Determined to uncover the traitor in the court, they devise a plan to confront the new palace ashoki, Kimela.

Imperiled by wilderness and their own tenuous alliances, Lark, Tamsin, and Veran each face massive risks to uncover the truth. But even if they find it, will their combined forces be strong enough to stop the evil infecting their beautiful land . . . and transform it into a fairer society for all? 

Back in 2020 I read the Woodwalker trilogy and Sunshield by Emily B. Martin. I had wanted to finish the Outlaw Road duology but I didn’t want to buy the hardcover and it wasn’t available at my library. 

Fast forward to 2024 and I saw it available on a 2 for 1 Audible sale. I jumped at the chance to finish this series. I had to read some of my notes to refresh my memory. Also, as I listened the events, plot points, political stances, and character relationships came back to me. Floodpath does a good job recapping the events of Sunshield and does not weigh down the story. 

Non-spoiler review: I really loved how the characters developed on their own and in relation to each other. There was some suspense and action. Mistakes were made and lessons learned. The blackmail mystery was solved and everything was wrapped up well. Overall it was a satisfactory conclusion. 

I also enjoyed the narrators’ performances. Each one fit the personality of their character and I found it easy to follow the dialogue. 

Spoilers. Spoilers Spoilers

Top Ten Tuesday May 14: Favorite Book Quotes Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Updates are now at That Artsy Reader Girl

May 14: Favorite Book Quotes (You can pick your favorite quotes from books, or about books! You can set a theme like quotes from books about love, friendship, hope, etc. or you can just share quotes you loved from your recent reads!)

Quotes I loved from my recent reads:

1)  “Go to bed, you’re drunk.” 
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie.

2) “Excuse me, I understand about the bosom, but how could you see the lips if it was dark?”
“The Kiss” by Anton Chekhov.

3) Once you stopped making new memories with people, they became like a book. You could revisit the story, but in the end, it turned out the same.
The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond.

4)  She didn’t know if art had feelings or just the emotions of the people who made it, reflecting out to the viewer. But she did think art liked being seen. It liked people looking at it. No matter how they judged it.
The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond.

5) “My father lives in here.” (Hamlet taps his head.) “I seem him. Hear him. Is that proof?” (Of ghosts.)
(Yorick snorts.) “No, that’s memory.”
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson.

6) “When all this happened I was in Moscow trying to make the Russians laugh. There’s an engagement for you.”
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson.

7) “Talking to yourself. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“I find I get better class of conversation that way.”
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson.

8) “My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it’ll be here well after they walk away from it.

My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective.”
City of Miracles (The Divine Cities No.3) 
by Robert Jackson Bennett.

9) How is it, she wonders, that people are too afraid to be alone with themselves to endure even one —damn car ride through New York City without the distraction of inane entertainment?
The Perfect Mother
by Aimee Molloy.

10) Science is like a glacier: slow and indomitable. But it will get to where it’s going.
City of Blades (The Divine Cities NO.2) 
by Robert Jackson Bennett.

11) “Don’t conflate mistakes with failure. Folk don’t tell legends about people who made no mistakes. Folk tell legends about the people who overcame them.”
Floodpath: A Novel (The Outlaw Road Series) 
by Emily B. Martin.

Top Ten Tuesday April 23: Unread Books on My Shelves I Want to Read Soon Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Updates are now at That Artsy Reader Girl

April 23: Unread Books on My Shelves I Want to Read Soon (Bonus points if you tell us how long it’s been sitting on your shelf waiting for you.)

I don’t know what I am reading soon. I make lists and break lists because I read based on mood. So here is just a list of books that have been waiting for me to read them for a long while. And this list doesn’t even include the audiobooks and ebooks in my library. 

1) NYCC 2019
– Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon.
– King of Ashes by Raymond E. Feist
– The Heir of Night by Helen Lowe
– A Plague of Giants by Kevin Hearne
– The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett
-The Nobody People by Bob Proehl

2) NYCC 2018
– Tomorrow War by J.L. Bourne
– The Waking Land by Callie Bates
– The Passage by Justin Cronin
– Green Rider by Kristen Britain
– Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan. 
– Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne. 

3) Book Con 2017
– The Immortals (Olympus Bound 1) by Jordanna Max Brodsky
– Caraval by Stephanie Garber
– The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman 
– Satellite by Nick Lake 
– Nyxia (The Nyxia Triad 1) by Scott Reintgen
– The Breathless by Tara Goedjen
– The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner

4) NYCC 2017
– Age of Myth The Legends of the First Empire 1 by Michael J. Sullivan
– Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
– After On by Rob Reid

5) NYCC 2015
– Hounded, by Kevin Hearne
– Star Wars Tarkin, James Luceno
– The Shadow Revolution: Crown & Key, Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith 
– Admiral, Sean Danker 
– Playing With Fire, Tess Gerritsen –
– The Last Days of Magic, Mark Tompkins 
– Neverminds 1-4, Rich Bernatovech, Jamie Fay

6) Book Con 2015
– Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld
– Illuminae: The Illuminae Files – 01, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
– H2O by Virgina Bergin

7) NYCC 2014
– Silent Echo by Elisa Freilich
– His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik 

8) 128 unlistened audiobooks.

9) 20-30 something ebooks.

Top Ten Tuesday April 16: Characters I’d Like to go on Vacation With

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Updates are now at That Artsy Reader Girl

April 16: Characters I’d Like to go on Vacation With (Pretend you’re going on vacation and can bring 10 of your closest friends with you. Pick your vacation spot and tell us who you’d like to bring! Bonus point if you tell us why. Or maybe you like the idea of traveling in small groups, so plan 10 trips or 5 trips!)

1) France with Edmund Dantes because the Count of Monte Cristo is rich and has connections. 

2) England, France and Prague with Matthew Clairmont because he’s a vampire who lived the history. He can tell me everything. And he is rich so we can travel in style. 

3) Massachusetts with Diana Bishop. I want to see the haunted Bishop house. We can also tour Salem, and I want to go see the Little Women house. 

4) Canada with Anne of Green Gables. With her wild imagination she’d make a good tour guide. She could also teach me how to live off the land so that I could be self-sufficient. 

5) Israel with Jacob and Rachel (The Matzah Ball). I want to see the Holy Land and walk were Jesus walked and see all the sights from the Holy Bible. When I was looking through my read-books-list they were the only characters that it made sense to go with. We can see the Old Testament sights together.  

6) Graceland – Grace and Loralynn from A Thousand Miles to Graceland. I’d love to join their road trip. I’d love to go on a road trip across America in general. But going to Graceland with a true Elvis fanatic seems like the best way to see it. 

7) Italy with the Speranza family (The Patron Saint of Second Chances.) If you want to live like a local in Italy…live with the locals!  

8) Glamping, short for glamour camping, in the Pacific Northwest with Edward and Jacob, not Bella. Actually Carlisle, Emmett, and Alice can come too. They all will protect me from predators because they are predators, and the Cullens are rich and can afford glamping. 

9) Russia with Vasya and Morozko (The Bear and the Nightingale) to tour the palaces and I hope we see some Northern Lights.

10) Hawaii with Maddy and Olly (Everything, Everything) is a great excuse to be a chaperon to those frisky teenagers.

Top Ten Tuesday March 26: Movies/TV Shows That Would Have Made Amazing Books

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Updates are now at That Artsy Reader Girl

March 26: Movies/TV Shows That Would Have Made Amazing Books

1) Battlestar Galactica the Ron Moore version. That would make a great epic science fiction saga.

2) Three’s Company would make a good romantic comedy with lots of tropes. 

3) Alias as a spy thriller.

4) The Wonder Years is a Young Adult Coming of Age story.

5) Reign is comedic, very loosely based historical fiction. 

6) Miss Congeniality is a movie I love and could make a good women’s fiction/mystery book. 

7) What Lies Beneath is a horror thriller to read around Halloween.  

8) Pushing Daisies is a fantasy mystery romance

9) Parks and Recreation is women’s fiction where the characters break the 4th wall. 

10) Steel Magnolias. Even though it was a play first, a play is not a novel and this would really make women laugh and cry and laugh again.

To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang

She has power over death. He has power over her. When two enemies strike a dangerous bargain, will they end a war . . . or ignite one?

Heroes die, cowards live. Daughter of a conquered world, Ruying hates the invaders who descended from the heavens long before she was born and defeated the magic of her people with technologies unlike anything her world had ever seen.

Blessed by Death, born with the ability to pull the life right out of mortal bodies, Ruying shouldn’t have to fear these foreign invaders, but she does. Especially because she wants to keep herself and her family safe.

When Ruying’s Gift is discovered by an enemy prince, he offers her an impossible deal: If she becomes his private assassin and eliminates his political rivals—whose deaths he swears would be for the good of both their worlds and would protect her people from further brutalization—her family will never starve or suffer harm again. But to accept this bargain, she must use the powers she has always feared, powers that will shave years off her own existence.

Can Ruying trust this prince, whose promises of a better world make her heart ache and whose smiles make her pulse beat faster? Are the evils of this agreement really in the service of a much greater good? Or will she betray her entire nation by protecting those she loves the most?

I got this ARC from taking a quiz at Penguin Random House Booth at New York Comic Con.  

In the opening letter to the reader from executive editor, Anne Lesley Groell, and from Molly X. Chang’s author’s note, it sounded promising.

Due to a very lacking public school system in the U.S.A., I was never taught about the Russian and Japanese occupation of Manchuria. I also have never heard of Unit 731. It sounds like a part of history that should get more attention, and although this was a fantasy loosely based on those events, I was interested. 

Immediately from Chapter One I felt something was off. It was an info dump with a lot of telling and very little showing.

For some strange reason the villains (the colonizers) are called Romans. So Rome has colonized the world of Pangu. So right off the bat I’m thrown off. I’m picturing centurions and chariots. In my opinion in a fantasy realm you have to divorce yourself from any earthly proper names. Make up new words (but also make sure they are easy to pronounce.) 

The dialogue is not how people talk to one another. Ruying and Baihu were childhood friends yet their conversation was an info dump about their past. Since they were childhood friends they would already know that about each other. 

So after I was struggling to read the first few chapters I went to Goodreads to read reviews. The first few at the top were 1 star reviews. So I read them to see if they were having the same issues as I was. They were…and then some. Once I learned how problematic the story becomes I decided to DNF at page 22. Life on earth is too short to spend on books that don’t grab me. 

What a shame though because the cover art is gorgeous. Another book with a beautiful cover and a disappointing story.

When I went to rate and review the book on Goodreads I found they are not allowing it for now. What I gathered from internet chatter is the author is doxing people who gave the book 1 star. I have no idea if that is true or not. Take that with a grain of salt.

I feel Molly should have wrote something more like what Ruta Sepetys writes. Historical fiction about parts of history that are not told and in danger of being lost. 

Since this book was not for me I left it in a Little Free Library today. Maybe it will bring someone else joy.

The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond

A magically gifted con artist must gather her estranged mother’s old crew for a once-in-a-lifetime heist, from the New York Times bestselling author of Stranger Suspicious Minds.

Dani Poissant is the daughter and former accomplice of the world’s most famous art thief, as well as being an expert forger in her own right. The secret to their success? A little thing called magic, kept rigorously secret from the non-magical world. Dani’s mother possesses the power of persuasion, able to bend people to her will, whereas Dani has the ability to make any forgery she undertakes feel like the genuine article.

At seventeen, concerned about the corrupting influence of her mother’s shadowy partner, Archer, Dani impulsively sold her mother out to the FBI—an act she has always regretted. Ten years later, Archer seeks her out, asking her to steal a particular painting for him, since her mother’s still in jail. In return, he will reconcile her with her mother and reunite her with her mother’s old gang—including her former best friend, Mia, and Elliott, the love of her life.

The problem is, it’s a nearly impossible job—even with the magical talents of the people she once considered family backing her up. The painting is in the never-before-viewed private collection of deceased billionaire William Hackworth—otherwise known as the Fortress of Art. It’s a job that needs a year to plan, and Dani has just over one week. Worse, she’s not exactly gotten a warm welcome from her former colleagues—especially not from Elliott, who has grown from a weedy teen to a smoking-hot adult. And then there is the biggest puzzle of why Archer wants her to steal a portrait of himself, which clearly dates from the 1890s, instead of the much more valuable works by Vermeer or Rothko. Who is her mother’s partner, really, and what does he want?

The more Dani learns, the more she understands she may be in way over her head—and that there is far more at stake in this job than she ever realized.

This was one of the books my sister got from NYCC at the Penguin Random House Booth when she took a quiz. She read it first and then she gave it to me. It is an ARC and I have not compared it with the final print. The book was released February 13, 2024.

I’ll go into the reasons I liked it. However, there are issues with it that I’ll explain with spoilers below. 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Top Ten Tuesday March 19: Books on my Spring 2024 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Updates are now at That Artsy Reader Girl

March 19: Books on my Spring 2024 TBR

1) Macbeth: A NovelBy: A. J. Hartley, David Hewson; Narrated by: Alan Cumming.
On Audible.

2) To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang.
An ARC from NYCC 2023. 

3) The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu.
A signed copy from NYCC 2023.

4) The Love of My Afterlife by Kirsty Greenwood.
My sister won this from a Goodreads giveaway. She read it and then gave it to me.

I’m going to stop here. I usually change my mind and read or listen based on mood. So there’s no point in going all the way to 10.

I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story by Anthony Daniels

Discover the incredible untold story of one of Star Wars’ most iconic characters, C-3PO, told by the man who knows
him best.

“Did you hear that? They’ve shut down the main reactor! We’ll be destroyed for sure. This is madness.”

These words were the very first to be spoken in any Star Wars movie, and they were spoken by a droid: C-3PO.
With his gleaming golden body and good-intentioned (yet worrisome) personality, C-3PO was there at the very beginning. Of course, C-3PO wasn’t actually a robot, or some amazing early animatronic creation – he was actually a man named Anthony Daniels.

Now, for the very first time, Anthony Daniels will tell C-3PO’s story in its entirety, from seeing the first concept images to the early stages of the final film in the Skywalker saga, Star Wars: Episode IX, and in the process, will also tell his own. This includes his encounters with movie legends such as Sir Alec Guinness, what it was like working closely with George Lucas, and the friendships he formed with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and others. But being encased in a solid shell for countless hours also involved hardships, pain, and in some cases real physical danger.

In I am C-3PO: The Inside Story, Daniels candidly relays his humorous, unvarnished, and extraordinary story as the man inside the machine, providing fresh new insights for even the most die-hard of Star Wars fans.

Top Ten Tuesday March 12: Books I’m Worried I Might Not Love as Much the Second Time Around

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Updates are now at That Artsy Reader Girl

March 12: Books I’m Worried I Might Not Love as Much the Second Time Around (I love re-reading, but there are some books that hit so perfectly and I loved so much that I worry reading them again wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe the books I read when I was younger wouldn’t be favorites anymore. Or maybe some books just don’t age well?)

1) The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare 
I was going through my books a while back to decide what to give away to make room for new books. I sold/donated the 6 Mortal Instruments books I had. It wasn’t that I was worried that I wouldn’t enjoy it if I read them again, it was that I felt I had moved on. I have not kept up with the new sequel series, The Dark Artifices, nor have I felt a desire too. I also have not watched TV series and have not felt a desire too. I did keep The Infernal Devices trilogy only because I enjoyed them more and the covers are so pretty, but I don’t see myself reading them again. 

2) Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I feel like this is one of those books that once the twist is revealed and you go in knowing what it is, it’s not that trilling of a mystery anymore. The hype is gone. 

3) Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. 
This is one of those series where my interest waned in the books. I never read Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined and I was so disappointed in Midnight Sun. I mean – just read my review of Midnight Sun because it explains a lot. Also, this is one of the few times I ended up liking the movies more. If the movie is on TV I like to watch, but I don’t think I’ll be rereading this saga again. It was meant for a certain time in my life that is now a part of my past.  

4) Every Day and  Another Day by David Levithan. I was rereading my reviews to refresh my memory. I thought about rereading them someday (haha, pun!) before reading the sequel Someday but I am worried that it wouldn’t be the same. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll find out.  

5) Alive and Alight by Scott Sigler. I have yet to finish this trilogy. I tried reading Alone once and couldn’t get into it and thought to try again at another moment in time. So that makes me worried I wouldn’t like the first two either if I reread them. I sometime wonder if I should just unload them all or give Alone one more go and if it fails again give them all away.