News

I’m afraid I don’t have much news because I have spent a lot of the past two months reading adult fiction, or not even finishing the YA book I was trying to read. As this is a YA book review blog, I don’t want to review adult books.

My real life is also incredibly busy. We have a new family member, and several of my older family members were hospitalised. I want to say that some of it was serious, but you don’t go to a emergency room unless you need urgent attention. I learned that when I nearly died in 2020 from blood loss, and again when I felt bad for going in to the ER in 2022 for what was essentially a head cold but turned out to be something much more serious and they pumped me full of antibiotics for 5 days.

So yeah. My real life is busy, I’m not getting a bunch of time to read, and when I do, it’s leaning toward adult stuff.

But I did start posting game reviews again. I played these games a while ago, but never got around to writing the reviews. I’ve started again now, and hopefully I can keep up posting one game review a month as well as one or two Musing by Moonlight posts.

Stacking The Shelves is a weekly meme created by Tynga’s Reviews and hosted by Reading Reality.
It’s all about sharing the books we’ve picked up for the week, whether they are bought, borrowed, gifted, galleys, physical or virtual.
Share your shelves and remember to visit Reading Reality to find more great books!

Borrowed

The Archer at Dawn by Swait Teerdhala.

I borrowed this from my local library for about the 4th time.

I DNF’d at page 50. No rating.

I have tried to read this book so many times and I just don’t want to. I can’t bring myself to do it.

In 2020 I was approached by a PR company to review this book, and I agreed on the condition of them sending a mobi file (before mobi was removed and epub became the norm). They did not. They sent me a PDF with a enormous watermark across it that meant I couldn’t actually read the text without struggling, and since no one is paying me for this and it’s supposed to be my hobby that I just happen to review for, I refuse to struggle. If I’m struggling to read, then I’m not immersed in the story.

Please for the love of god don’t provide PDFs with enormous watermarks. If you don’t trust reviewers with a 8 year+ visible history of working with publishers, authors, and review platforms, don’t even approach them.

This was published by Katherine Tegan Books, which I do have a really good track record with, and is one of my trusted publishers that publishers books that appeal to my particular tastes.

I went into this with the best of intentions, but the first book, which I borrowed from my local library, left me lukewarm. I also had to borrow this book from my library as well, because I couldn’t read the PDF review copy provided to me. I have tried to read it at least 4 times, maxing out my library borrowing capacity to do so, over the course of 3 years.

I am finally hanging up my hat and admitting defeat. I love YA fantasy, but nothing in this book interests me. I’m not the right target audience, and the first book didn’t entertain me enough to make me excited to read this one. There was nothing objectively wrong with it, but it just didn’t grab me. There’s nothing the author could have done and it’s a matter of taste, not quality.

I’m really sorry to the author and the PR company. Thanks for trying, but no one could have known in advance how poor a match this really was.