February started off with a bang and 2 five-star reads, which was awesome and unexpected! Both of these were nonfiction reads, and I read them right at the same time, which was also very unusual for me; unfortunately, after that, I did have a bunch of mediocre, middling-type reads that were only OK, before I wrapped up the month with a few better reads.

Here are my stats:

Number of books read: 9

#readmyowndamnbooks: 6

Audiobooks: 2

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America, edited by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding (5 stars) – YES. This is the type of nonfiction that makes me love nonfiction. This collection was powerful and full of diverse voices discussing the 2016 election, its aftermath, and how we can resist the coming issues.

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (5 stars) – This book does a very thorough job of exploring what happened during the 2016 election. It’s also a collection of Hillary’s meditations on various issues and topics and a discussion of her life and background. I found it extremely powerful and teared up at several points, particularly the ending. I wish so much that she could have been our president.

A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball (4 stars) – a weird, short, dialogue-heavy novel with sparse prose and a strange premise. A man, referred to only as the “claimant,” wakes up with no memories and must be re-taught even the most basic parts of life by a woman referred to as the “examiner.” I enjoyed the oddness and the slow reveals about what’s going on.

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein (3.5 stars) – I’m picky about short story collections and the prose in this one was nothing to write home about; I also felt like all of the main characters were basically the same middle-aged dude. However, the science fiction concepts were really interesting and the different tech advances and their impacts on humans very well thought-out. Creative, but I wasn’t blown away.

The Dark and Other Love Stories by Deborah Willis (3 stars) – So, unfortunately this one ended up being a bit of a disappointment for me. It’s not a bad book by any means, but I think that the title being “The Dark and Other Love Stories” makes you think that you’re getting, well, dark love stories. And I wouldn’t classify these stories as dark so much as sad. They left me feeling sad and kind of disappointed, for the most part. I wasn’t that impressed by the writing and I was hoping for deeper meanings that just weren’t there. To be fair, the short stories I read are mainly magical realism, whereas this collection is realistic fiction, so the style isn’t what I’m used to. I will say that I really loved the story “Girlfriend on Mars,” which for me was by far the strongest story of the bunch. Most of the others just didn’t nearly measure up.

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda (3 stars) – Unfortunately, this one was a disappointment for me. I greatly preferred Megan Miranda’s other adult thriller, All the Missing Girls. I still enjoyed her writing style in this book, but the plot twists for me were just not very good; things weren’t explored and also didn’t make a ton of sense.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (3 stars) – this is the first book in a YA UF/PNR series that I found at a library book sale for $1 and thought I would give a try. (It also fits into Fae-bruary, a readathon to read fae-related books in the month of Feb, which I hadn’t planned on participating in, but was just a nice coincidence) And I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t say it was amazing. The writing is pretty good, and I liked that the Fae in this world are very cruel, which is my preferred version of Fae, but the book definitely had a lot of issues. There are 5 books in this series and I do think that I will try to read them all based on this one, but I’m not necessarily expecting anything earth-shattering, and this isn’t a new favorite series or anything.

Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr (3 stars) – this was the second book in the Wicked Lovely series, and unfortunately it had a lot of the same issues of the first book. It also got a lot darker in tone, and I did enjoy it, but I opted not to continue with the series afterwards.

My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows (3 stars) – Meh. I used to read a ton of historical fiction about the Tudor period, so it was interesting to see an alternate take on familiar historical figures, and I did like the twist about prejudice against animal shapeshifters replacing the religious conflicts of the era. Overall, however, this just kept getting too silly for me and it lacked any depth.

And here are the books I bought in Feb: