Tales from the Circle

  A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher is a compelling fantasy adventure that follows a young 14 year-old girl whose power lies in her ability to magically enhance her baking skills. I found the story to be a page-turner and finished it in just over a day.  The thing that hooked me from the start was the voice of the protagonist Mona. She's got a very compelling personality and I genuinely enjoyed reading from her perspective, even though I don't think I've ever truly enjoyed a first person story before. There's a fun, almost sarcastic kind of humour in the way she describes and comments on the events of her tale that just kept me reading and turning the pages. Her voice was very refreshing and very genuinely the voice of a young person trying to navigate the adult world.  And the author clearly shows through this story that you can write something aimed at a younger audience, something clean, and easy to read that feels "middle-grade" and...

Check out my first post on this topic: How to Make Me Care Part 1: Big Series with Immersive Worlds   in which I explored some series works and tried to pick out the things that made me invested in those worlds and made me read more than one book in the series, eagerly awaiting the next installment if it was not yet out. In this post I want to explore some great stand-alone books that made me care and pulled me in. I think stand-alone books are a little different because you're getting one complete story and the author has less time to show you around the world, but at the same time, thinking back on the stand-alone books I loved they often have extremely rich world-building that rivals long series! It's also interesting to note that this list is much more self-pub focused than my last one. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, for the past few years I've been reading much more self-pub stuff than trad published, and second of all, I think the tendency i...