March 2019 Favourites

Hey! I know I just did my February favourites a couple weeks ago, but I thought I would get a good start for this month and get it done early. So here it is, my favourites for March of this year.

 

In no particular order,

1. Infinite Dark, Vol. 1 by Ryan Cady, Andrea Mutti & K. Michael Russell

The universe ended, but humanity survived. And for years, the passengers and crew of the vessel Orpheus found the endless void between realities to be a surprisingly peaceful home.

Then they found a body; bloodied, brutalized, and surrounded by inscrutable runes. As Security Director Deva Karrell investigates the Orpheus’ first murder, she’ll come face to face with a horror from beyond the confines of time itself…

Collects INFINITE DARK #1-4

 

2. Shifting Horizons (The Denounced Series #2) by S.J. Sherwood

In a future divided into Secular and Non-Secular Quadrants, a crime punishable by death is to cross Quandrants and become a Dedounced.

Pod Fifteen has escaped Ilse’s cruel regime only to fall intothe hands of a strange Nomadic Tribe. Their charismatic leader, Omar, begins to fill Ned’s mind with ideas about his destiny. A possible future that puts the Pod’s hard-fought friendships to the test, cuts loyalties to the bone and further exposes character flaws. Nobody is sure who they can trust and what they should do next, but Ned is convinced he must travel home if he has any chance of fulfilling his truth and changing the course of history.

 

3. The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project by Lenore Appelhans

Riley lives in TropeTown, where everyone plays stock roles in novels. Riley, a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, is sent to group therapy after going off-script. Riley knows that breaking the rules again could get him terminated, yet he feels there must be more to life than recycling the same clichés for readers’ entertainment. Then he meets Zelda, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Geek Chic subtype), and falls head over heels in love. Zelda’s in therapy too, along with several other Manic Pixies. But TropeTown has a dark secret, and if Riley and his fellow Manic Pixies don’t get to the bottom of it, they may all be terminated.

 

 

4. Beautiful Bad by Annie Ward 

In the most explosive and twisted psychological thriller since The Woman in the Window, a beautiful marriage turns beautifully bad.

Things that make me scared: When Charlie cries. Hospitals and lakes. When Ian drinks vodka in the basement. ISIS. When Ian gets angry… That something is really, really wrong with me.

Maddie and Ian’s romance began with a chance encounter at a party overseas; he was serving in the British army and she was a travel writer visiting her best friend, Jo. Now almost two decades later, married with a beautiful son, Charlie, they are living the perfect suburban life in Middle America. But when a camping accident leaves Maddie badly scarred, she begins attending writing therapy, where she gradually reveals her fears about Ian’s PTSD; her concerns for the safety of their young son, Charlie; and the couple’s tangled and tumultuous past with Jo.

From the Balkans to England, Iraq to Manhattan, and finally to an ordinary family home in Kansas, sixteen years of love and fear, adventure and suspicion culminate in The Day of the Killing, when a frantic 911 call summons the police to the scene of a shocking crime.

 

and last but not least,

5. War Flower: My Life after Iraq by Brooke King

Brooke King has been asked over and over what it’s like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. The answers people seek lie in the graphic details of war—the sex, death, violence, and reality of it all as she experienced it. In her riveting memoir War Flower, King breaks her silence and reveals the truth about her experience as a soldier in Iraq. Find out what happens when the sex turns into secret affairs, the violence is turned up to eleven, and how King’s feelings for a country she knew nothing about as a nineteen-year-old become more disturbing to her as a thirty-year-old mother writing it all down before her memories fade into oblivion.

The story of a girl who went to war and returned home a woman, War Flower gathers the enduring remembrances of a soldier coming to grips with post-traumatic stress disorder. As King recalls her time in Iraq, she reflects on what violence does to a woman and how the psychic wounds of combat are unwittingly passed down from mother to children. War Flower is ultimately a profound meditation on what it means to have been a woman in a war zone and an unsettling exposé on war and its lingering aftershocks. For veterans such as King, the toughest lesson of service is that in the mind, some wars never end—even after you come home.

 

And that’s it! Another month of books have come and gone, and I can’t wait to see what my favourites are this month. Have you read any of these books? What do you think of them even if you haven’t? Let me know below!

The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project by Lenore Appelhans Review

The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project by Lenore Appelhans 5/5 Stars 272 Pages Published March 5th 2019 by Carolrhoda Lab

Where do I even begin with this book? I know it’s early in the year, but this has to be one of my favourite’s that I’ve read this year. It has a good message, it’s completely unique, I loved the characters, and I just felt so good reading it that I spread it out as long as I could, which is something that I don’t often do.

 

Tropetown is a town where fictional cliché and stereotypical characters live when they’re not working in the stories, different from where the main characters live, and a lot different than where the readers live. Following the last remaining Manic Pixie Dream Boy in town, Riley, it shows his life in first person as he goes through the hardest part of this short life so far, first beginning group therapy and then facing retirement because of what he is. I was immediately interested in his character, not because of his stereotype fully, but because he’s such a thoughtful person, and he really tries hard to carve out his own life, to be different and to make himself happy. And I think that’s something that I really needed to learn from someone else. Riley is that someone else.

 

After accidentally bumping into a girl named Zelda, another Manic Pixie but a Dream Girl, he knows she’s someone he wants in his life. Though she does send mixed signals, she’s most of what he thinks aout, and even more once he realizes that they’re in the same Manic Pixie Group Therapy. The characters in the therapy group really grow together, and I loved (almost) every one.

 

I think that this book is really about finding yourself within your stereotype, not being ashamed of it, but making it your own completely. I loved how good this book made me feel, even at the low points, because even though the world and the characters were fictional, they were really relatable and easy to love. The way they acted and the people they were seems like something to strive for, and I would love to take bits of their personality and add it into my own. My favourite character, of course, is Riley for all of those reasons.

 

Overall, I know I loved this book because of how long I stretched out reading it for. Even though I have so many books that I need to read, I made this last all weekend, and I wish there was more I could know about it. It’s something I just need for my bookshelf, and I know it’s something that I would read again. No matter what kind of books you read, I think that you should check this one out.

 

The book is available here, and here’s a link to the author’s Twitter.

Thanks for reading!