Tales from the Circle

Reading the afterword of this book cemented a realization that I had already made a while ago: I love to read Ursula K. LeGuin, but I mostly love reading her non-fiction essays/thoughts about writing more than her actual fiction. ( Check out my review of The Disposessed here. ) That afterword, where she explains what she was thinking when she wrote the book and discusses the ideas behind it, was much more interesting to me than the actual book. I respect what she was trying to do with this book and I found myself enjoying small sections of her writing, but overall the distant tone in which this book was written kind of hindered from engaging with all these great ideas in a meaningful way.  In a coming of age story like this that was supposed to be about the main character understanding himself it really would have helped to get to know his thoughts first-hand, but LeGuin never really tells us what he's thinking. Instead, she tells us the names of all kinds of Islands and towns and ...

  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...