Top o’ the marnin’ to ye! I’m giving up on that bit right away. I can’t type in a phonetic Irish accent for an entire post. It would be not only annoying but terrible. Anyway, here’s what I read last month.

The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi – This was a Freking Book Club pick and, boy howdy, was it a good one. At its core, it is a mystery novel but the mystery doesn’t even get revealed until the last few chapters. Julia is a book publisher for a small press that wants to publish a series of short stories called The White Murders by Grant McAllister. The book switches between the actual narrative and the short stories that Grant wrote. On top of that, Grant is a math professor who wrote a paper on the mathematical structure of mystery novels, boiling it down to four key elements. Each story represents a part of his “equation”. The actual mystery part took such a back seat that I completely forgot that there was an overarching mystery. Highly recommend. 5/5, 9.5/10.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark by various authors – These are short story adaptations of episodes or story arcs from The Clone Wars TV show. As someone who really struggled to get into it, I really appreciated these. You got the flavor of the show written by established Star Wars authors. It’s perfect for you if you haven’t watched the show or if you want to relive some of your favorite moments. This obviously isn’t all encompassing and there is nothing from Season 7, but I feel it hits the really important story beats. Remember, though, this is written for Junior or YA readers, so it is very simplistic. 4/5, 7/10.

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager – Y’all, I really liked this book. Like, it’s a contender already for best of the year. Maggie has grown up with the specter of a specter over her head in the form of her dad’s book, House of Horrors, a true account of one family’s flight from a very haunted house. The only problem is that Maggie doesn’t remember any of this traumatic event. After her dad dies, she inherits the house that made them rich. Now, she wants to fix it up and find the truth. Was the house really haunted? This book has everything. There are ghosts with names like Mister Shadow and Miss Pennyface. There’s a creepy chandelier. There’s snakes. There’s a wrought iron gate. Everything. I’m going to talk light spoilers here, nothing specific, but more of general ending outlines. So, I thought the book was going to zig in one direction and I was SO proud of myself when it did, in fact, zig. That being said, I was disappointed because it was kind of boring. BUT THEN, it ZAGGED and I audibly gasped. Wow this book is good. END OF SPOILER. The horror elements were really well done and I loved the characters. Highly, highly recommended. 5/5, 10/10.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask by Gabe Durham – This is book #26 in the Boss Fight Books catalog. Boss Fight Books takes you through the development and reception of games throughout the history of gaming. They do big names like this and Shadow of the Colossus, but also cover games like Bible Adventure. This was the first one I read from them and I loved it. This is about the creation and cultural impact of Majora’s Mask, the vastly superior N64 Zelda title (don’t @ me, you know it’s true). There is a lot of really good trivia in this book and, if you are a fan of the series like I am, you’ll love reading about the tight development time, story outlines, and much more. 5/5, 9/10.

This month, I also read Dinosaurs Before Dark by Jenny Laird and Mary Pope Osbourne and All’s Well by Mona Awad.

That’s it for this month. I’m hoping to pick up the pace a bit more on reading this next month, but we shall see how that works out (spoiler alert: It won’t work out).