Three for the Month (August 2020)

Steph P. Bianchini August 9, 2020 3 Comments

August is going unbelievably fast, in between school reopening (yes, in Scotland we start next week) and Frozen Wavelets’ open submission window. But I’m still plan to finish my three books of the month as planned. And here they are:

1. Dark Ages by Pierce Brown. No, I haven’t skipped Iron Gold, which is the first instalment of Brown’s second trilogy. I have just cheated a little bit in July and actually downloaded it on Audible so that I could listen to it while otherwise busy with travelling etc. So now I’m ready for the second (and to date the latest) novel, which, as the whole new trilogy, is set ten years after the Rising.

Here’s the blurb: “Cast out of the very Republic he founded, with half his fleet destroyed, he wages a rogue war on Mercury. Outnumbered and outgunned, is he still the hero who broke the chains? Or will he become the very evil he fought to destroy? In his darkening shadow, a new hero rises. Lysander au Lune, the displaced heir to the old empire, has returned to bridge the divide between the Golds of the Rim and Core. If united, their combined might may prove fatal to the fledging Republic. 
On Luna, the embattled Sovereign of the Republic, Virginia au Augustus, fights to preserve her precious demokracy and her exiled husband. But one may cost her the other, and her son is not yet returned. Abducted by enemy agents, Pax au Augustus must trust in a Gray thief, Ephraim, for his salvation.  Far across the void, Lyria, a Red refugee accused of treason, makes a desperate bid for freedom with the help of two unlikely new allies. Fear dims the hopes of the Rising, and as power is seized, lost, and reclaimed, the worlds spin on and on toward a new Dark Age.” A lot has been written about the follow up of Brown’s explosive first three books. Don’t listen to the critics: the second trilogy is different, it’s less YA for sure, but it’s good. Better, gorydamn good.

2. Divergent by Veronica Roth. If it seems I’m trying to fill in the gap with the recent speculative YA offer out now, it is because it’s true (and I have my reasons for it). I’m almost done with the first instalment, and while I’m less enthusiastic about it compared to, say, Red Rising, I found it still quite readable.

“For sixteen-year-old Tris, the world changes in a heartbeat when she is forced to make a terrible choice. Turning her back on her family, Tris ventures out, alone, determined to find out where she truly belongs. Shocked by the brutality of her new life, Tris can trust no one. And yet she is drawn to a boy who seems to both threaten and protect her. The hardest choices may yet lie ahead….” While many details push the suspension of disbelief hard, the overall setting is interesting enough to keep you going. The strength here lies elsewhere, in the characters and the way they interact. Many of them are also endearing, which it’s always a plus.

3. Crusaders: An Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands by Dan Jones. I have already read —and written here— a lot about that fundamental and (in)famous part of Middle Ages history.

This is a quite recent non-fiction book about them, and in a way offers a fairly modern perspective to something quite difficult to understand with modern eyes. I don’t necessarily agree with many of the conclusions drawn by Jones, but I can’t deny the book reads in certain pages like a novel, which is definitively good for a history book full of names and battles and characters. “Dan Jones, best-selling chronicler of the Middle Ages, turns his attention to the history of the Crusades – the sequence of religious wars fought between the late eleventh century and late medieval periods, in which armies from European Christian states attempted to wrest the Holy Land from Islamic rule, and which have left an enduring imprint on relations between the Muslim world and the West.From the preaching of the First Crusade by Pope Urban II in 1095 to the loss of the last crusader outpost in the Levant in 1302-03, and from the taking of Jerusalem from the Fatimids in 1099 to the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, Crusaders tells a tale soaked in Islamic, Christian and Jewish blood, peopled by extraordinary characters, and characterised by both low ambition and high principle. Dan Jones is a master of popular narrative history, with the priceless ability to write page-turning narrative history underpinned by authoritative scholarship. Never before has the era of the Crusades been depicted in such bright and striking colours, or their story told with such gusto.” Worth giving a go.

What are reading this summer? Let me know!