Squeamish

  #fantasy #romance #religion " He will never know the stories that live in her marrow and blood .” I picked this novel up earlier in the year when I was quite badly burned from a camping trip and thought, perhaps, this juicy fantasy would distract me from my cracked lips and peeling burned skin. After I lost interest, I picked it up several months later and powered through to completion, and my god, I have a lot of things to say about this novel.                First of all, I adored the world-building. My main interest in all fantasy novels is the world that the novel is set in, how everything is interconnected and related to one another and what their inspirations are. The Wolf and the Woodsmen had Jewish-coded fantasy elements, as well as religions and forms of magic that relate to early Christianity and paganism. The variety of magic was impressive, and inspired me for my own novel, especially with how the different magic was especially tied to the belief of the ethnoreligi

  #historical #war #fate "Destiny is all."  What pushed me to embark on my The Last Kingdom journey (a novel series by Bernard Cornwell), is the TV show based on the books. I had come home, back to the country, for the weekend, and my parents had told me they were halfway through the first season of this TV show 'The Last Kingdom'. Then, they put it on and cued me nonstop asking questions so I would understand what was happening.  Then, I got hooked and began binging it with my parents. The weekend passed and I had nearly finished the second season, and I had to head back to school. Inspired by the television series, I was intrigued by the novels and how Cornwell presented the novel. I was not let down.  The Last Kingdom is a novel series loosely based around the creation of Wessex under the rule of Alfred I, however, it focuses on the main character Uhtred, a Wessex-born Danish-raised warrior who is torn between his love for the Danish people and his identity as a pe

#historical #defyingfate #lgbtqia+  "Are you weaker than Governor Toluchu, simply by virtue of your substance? This monk doesn't think so. Aren't you risking your life right now to bear and raise a child? A woman gambles all of herself, body and future when she marries."  Months before my birthday I requested that, instead of something expensive, I wanted an annotated book that either was previously owned or was bought that my friends thought they would enjoy. My friend and I went shopping together a week or so prior to my birthday and he selected She Who Became the Sun, and when I received the novel, albeit not entirely annotated since they had such a short amount of time, but nonetheless the effort was there. At the start of the novel, my friend wrote 'And so it begins...' and, in my opinion, nothing words it as perfectly as that sentence. She Who Became the Sun will be the start of many. The retelling of stories genre has existed for years before SWBS was p