Heart Wants Books

Mythology in May

May 3, 2021

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The week is short and full of pages but dear readers, you don’t have to read them all. We hope we’ll both finish American Gods by Neil Gaiman before our Virtual Book Club on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. CST, but will we or won’t we?! You’ll have to sign up here and join us to find out! We are excited to dig into this title with you very soon, and welcome all your spoilers Friday evening!

Sometimes when your reading buddy is inspired by and excited about a reading theme, you turn into Elsa and Let It Go, but also, you’re excited too, just not as excited as she is. This is that month dear readers. We’ve been hinting at it for weeks, and it’s almost here, but first, I want to talk a smidge about what it’s not. Sometimes you have perfect plans and they get disrupted by life (::waves at 2020::), and other times you power through the new opportunities and note them to reconsider later. (Yes, we’re still all about reconsiderations.) The latter is what happened this month. We had a really fun plan for May, including alliteration we considered for March, but decided worked better with May. I feel like this has been in the works since at least January, but Ashley’s memory is better so hopefully she’ll correct me if that’s not right. While we won’t be digging into Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage this month, we do encourage you to check out the resources offered by the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institutes, National Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and more which can be found at asianpacificheritage.gov. If we find a fun reading list of Asian American and Pacific Islander authors, we’ll definitely share them.

But what is the source of Ashley’s excitement? Mythology in May! While we don’t anticipate this being a recurring theme like Jane in January, never say never because there are a wealth of mythologies that could inspire some fantastic books for us all!

Before I was ~~tortured with~~ assigned to read The Odyssey in high school or college (yes, twice I was assigned this…text), I remember doing a unit on Greek and Roman mythology in middle school. I was mystified with the stories and the legends, just as I was by the structures built to honor those deities that have lasted longer than their associated faiths. While that course didn’t include a global perspective of mythology, I’ve discovered some on my own since, and Rick Riordan and Marvel have helped bring some of these larger than life characters to the page and the screen. Riordan has a hand in one of our titles this month, and I’m told there are Norse gods joining us on the pages for Virtual Book Club this week, so it should be an interesting time for all. We do have a couple of titles that are inspired by Greek mythology, but they are a new, feminist take, and the others are inspired by the mythology of other cultures.

Lore by Alexandra Bracken

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia

I do want to point out one author we love who is not included – Madeline Miller. We reviewed Circe last April and also read and loved The Song of Achilles. Are there other titles you wanted to see on our list but didn’t? You know my TBR needs more books, so please leave those titles in the comments!

~Nikki

If I were required by some terrible, god-induced curse to only be able to pick one ‘genre’ to read for the rest of my days Mythology would be it. There’s war and battles, curses and magic, epic journeys and the quiet fortitude of waiting (hello, Penelope!). Additionally, there are so MANY mythological pantheons and legends (Paul Bunyan and John Henry are particularly American) and each of these mythologies keep resurfacing into present culture in a myriad of ways. Even Shakespeare brought the stories of the gods back to life as main characters in his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Hippolyta and Theseus – yes, that Theseus who killed the minotaur! AND the play within that play Pyramus and Thisbe! I don’t think we can be friends if 1999’s The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz doesn’t bring you some sort of nostalgic joy. I have a specific bookshelves dedicated to mythological titles (mostly from the Classics – that’s ancient Greece and Rome) even though I have culled my owned titles to only those I truly love rather than just those I want to use as a reference book. (Here’s looking at you Edith Hamilton’s Mythology…yes also I bought a digital copy for my kindle, don’t @ me.) Plus, where does our human penchant for storytelling begin except from these legends and myths? Mythology is an amalgamation of the best and worst of what it means to be human.

Mythology, depending on the story you’re reading, the author or translation, can be dry he-said she-said or bursting with life and action. Mythology also needs to be reconsidered on a fundamental level, story by story, in order to learn the lessons we need to hear. The story of Medusa for instance? If she was a terrible monster who turned people to stone with one glance, then why was her visage used repeatedly as a symbol of protection, which has manifested itself in the modern evil eye? Yeah, yeah, OK, I know I’m really into her mythos especially since I did name my first fur-baby Medusa after her. It’s not wholly my fault, it’s my trip to Turkey’s fault, and there’s multiple pieces of photographic evidence. This digression aside, I am excited to find out the lessons we need to learn from these cultures and mythologies this month, and learn more about what makes us all human.

Nikki teased me with a Mythology themed month in December or January when we were doing big planning for this year and I, obviously, was all for it. 100%. No reservations. No reconsiderations. And I would have had a come apart if it got pushed back farther than this month let me just tell you. (Understandably, we really wanted the alliteration to happen so March or May were our options, no shame.) Because of the sheer amount of 1) pantheons and cultures and 2) modern and historical re-tellings in addition to 3) translated primary source material for every culture, we had to make some hard decisions as regards our titles this month, mostly because we can’t do what I wanted to do which was ALL THEMS. I am proud to present this collection of stories and cultures to you this month, and I hope we do justice to the sheer amount of options at our disposal for this theme in future years. ::looks away sheepishly before Nikki turns her to stone::

~Ashley

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Book Review

Sands of Arawiya Duology by Hafsah Faizal

April 29, 2021

“An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time”
― Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn

Today’s book takes us to the Arabian desert of centuries past (plus magic), but next week’s Virtual Book Club title is by an English author who’s lived in the US for nearly 30 years, so maybe it’ll be a blend of the deep history felt by the British and the sense of wonder and exploration of Americans. Join us in reading American Gods to find out and then sign up here to talk with us about it on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. CST.

Dear readers, we picked a lot of pages of books this month, and I’m not sad. I’m two days behind on a tight schedule, but not one bit sad. I was nervous when we decided to read a duology for this week, and more so when I saw the two books were over a thousand pages combined, and readers, IT WAS SO WORTH IT!

What I think I knew about the Sands of Arawiya duology before opening it: loved by readers with great taste (hear: very similar to mine). Maybe I knew more at one time, but that plus covers = sold. Hafsah Faizal’s world building is stellar, her writing is descriptive and lush, and this story is just gorgeous. This is a fantasy hero’s journey, with an ensemble cast, and a side of romance! I promise, we didn’t mean to be all about the heroes, but what a gorgeous coincidence. Last week we shared Ashley Poston’s Among the Beasts and Briars which was a fun, western-feeling story layered with a history of lies, and today we bring you Faizal’s We Hunt the Flame and We Free the Stars which are both full of mystery and adventure inspired by ancient Arabia.

I want to describe the Sands of Arawiya duology, but also I don’t, so here’s just a hint. Magic is gone from the land, and each caliphate has a curse upon it. Zafira, a hunter who feeds her village, is called upon to go search for an item that can restore magic and end the curse. Little does she know, Nasir, the Prince of Death (who is both prince and hashashin) is on a similar mission, and then things quickly become…complex, contemplative, and oh so layered. This story includes topics of trauma, family, both blood and found, accepting people as they are, faults included, gender discrimination, ethnic prejudices, betrayal, and more. There is so much development in our characters, but most of it is from a place of recovering from past trauma, some of which we do see, mostly through recollection and memories, and probably a side of growing up too.

There are so many sentences and phrases I highlighted in Sands of Arawiya, some because they felt like foreshadowing, some because the phrasing was gorgeous, and others because the message is important. Above all else, to me, this is a story of digging deep to find yourself, owning who you are so you can become the person you want to be, and doing so with awareness and integrity. Here are a few of my favorites from both books:

“It doesn’t matter what you are. You are your strength.”
“There was nothing more respectable and dangerous than a woman of confidence.”
“It was as if she had been more to a skin she did not fit within, and only now, in the desolation of the desert, was she allowing herself to take command of it. To mold herself to it.”
“Strength doesn’t come…It must be seized.”
“Resilience flowed through a woman’s veins as fervently as her blood, Umm had always said.”

Last readers, I want to leave you with my usual wrap up comments. I am likely to reread the Sands of Arawiya duology, but it may be a while, because the page count is a commitment, well worth it, but requiring careful planning when one has a posting schedule to maintain. I’m giving the combined titles 4.5 stars and going to round up to 5. They’ve been haunting me in the best way since I started reading them, and I feel like they’re not done with me yet. Of all the gushing I’ve done, are you ready for my favorite part? Ashley’s not! The ending! I know, I usually need more epilogue, but this time, y’all this time, it’s perfect! We Free the Stars (book 2) is 583 pages contained in 114 chapters, and those last dozen or so chapters felt like epilogue and I just soaked it up like a glorious bubble bath!

What book has recently left you thinking about it for days after you’ve finished?

~Nikki

Hafsah Faizal, dear readers, is a Forbes 30 under 30 class of 2021 honoree. Obviously, or we wouldn’t be discussing her books, she’s a writer, the New York Times bestselling author of the Sands of Arawiya series, We Hunt the Flame and We Free the Stars, and she has a new release coming out in 2022 entitled A Tempest of Tea (an illegal vampire tea room anyone?). Faizal is the founder of IceyDesigns, where she designs websites for authors (and others) and bookish goodies for everyone else – like candles and pins and stickers and stationery, plus more! She lives in Texas with her books and what seems like a computer gaming habit -her bio specifically mentions Assassin’s Creed and Skyrim. She was born in Florida and raised in California and her words have seared my heart and mind.

I finished the books last night when I should have been writing this blog post. They were, as Nikki mentioned, a whopping one thousand sixty four pages that we read in less than two weeks – in addition to other titles and work and life and stuff. That’s a lot of pages, but the writing was poetic and lyrical while the plot was filled with action after action, so reading was NOT a slog (here’s looking at you The Color of Law, a dense read which I finished, sandwiched between these two titles). Reading the Sands of Arawiya was simply a joy. With so much action, I constantly toggled back and forth from my place in the book to the map in the front, it was the only way I could keep everywhere straight, especially during We Free the Stars. With the chance of being a little spoilery (but it’s not because it’s in the marketing copy), Faizal brings a geographically diverse cast together on an adventure in book one then splits them up on differing missions in book two, but keeps them, the zumra, bound together by honor and emotion.

What’s a zumra, you ask? Well, according to the book, it’s a group of people, a gang if you will, bound together with a common goal. Zumra is not the only Arabic word found in the books, there are so many, and it brings so much richness of culture to the story. It makes them more believable. During my interwebz research I found a tweet from Faizal in January 2019 about how some people say the Arabic words distract and others find it meaningful. I found it very meaningful and I am not an Arabic speaker! There was not one word or phrase that was not defined either explicitly or by context clues. I want to make the point, again, that we here at Heart.Wants.Books. read titles by diverse authors and with diverse characters to learn from others’ lived experiences.

I have a total of two pages of handwritten notes from immediately after I finished reading last night and three of them discuss Faizal’s writing. Let’s begin: Readers, sass is my language and Faizal speaks it with eloquence and clarity! The double entendre, the wit, the sarcasm, the banter between characters. It. Is. Glorious. I would read this book again just to experience lines like: “I will take you back to the palace and chain you to your bed” and “I can get on my knees for you, fair gazelle.” ::swoon:: Beyond the spoken, sassy dialogue, the plot is go go go all the time. Even when the zumra has to rest between action parts, Faizal is bringing the reader into their inner lives. We get multiple characters’ inner thoughts and emotional turmoil. Nikki mentioned romance and, hello, welcome to the art of the slow burn when each character’s inner dialogue reads like love poetry and the romantic scenes read like…well… it reads like some books we love over here. There’s nothing more sensual than kissing, amirite? This is appropriately YA and utter perfection.

Like Nikki, I don’t think We Hunt the Flame and We Free the Stars are done with ME yet, so a re-read is probably in my future – maybe if Faizal writes another story set in Arawiya – her website FAQ says never say never! I can’t believe I had this on the hold list since 2019! I’m also giving these books a 4.5 rounded up to 5 star review for not only being an escape of a read, but reminding me of my 2008 trip to Turkey with the descriptions of architecture, geography, décor, and FOOD. (Can you tell I’m hungry?)

What’s the last title that has made you desperately want to plan a trip somewhere, based on wanting to experience either someplace new or the comfort of nostalgia?

~Ashley

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Reading Life Review

Reading Life Review: April 2021

April 26, 2021

As we look back at the titles we read in April, would you like to know what’s not on the list? That would be Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which is the pick for the next Virtual Book Club on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. CST. Oops. We have plans to start it soon, after we finish our current reads, and the title for our May 6 post, (which we are both VERY excited about, and comes highly recommended by one of my local librarians – check back next week to find out what it is), but we plan to finish Gaiman’s book too, and even if we don’t, we’ll be chatting with those who sign up here.

Ashley IN MEDIAS RES

Nikki IN MEDIAS RES

Ashley FIN

*Finished in March

Nikki FIN

Before I dig in, I have an ask dear readers. In honor of Ashley’s reading of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein, as you come across titles of forgotten (or purposefully hidden, whichever) history, please share them with us, be they fictional or not. We are both very interested in learning what we don’t know and realizing what we didn’t before because of our privilege. It is each of our responsibilities to educate ourselves, and we appreciate the sharing of any resources you come across, no further comment needed, but always invited and welcome.

Now, about my reading life during the month of April. It’s been mostly blog titles and shifter romance novels. If you’ve read a shifter romance, then the Blackstone Mountain series is pretty much what you expect, except it’s about different types of shifters living together in a town, and out in the open, which is different from titles I’ve read in the past. There are all the alpha male issues I’ve come to expect, and all the females fighting against those and proving that partnerships are the best way to operate a relationship. I definitely have issues with the titles for the books about females from Blackstone. We are all people, and if we don’t have “He-Bears” then I’m not interested in using the term “She-Bear” and the same goes for other animals. (See also what in the world is there a genre called “women’s fiction”?! Riddikulus!) I’ve been trying to consider these titles and if there are other pieces that are demeaning to women about them, and I haven’t come up with anything. I hope it’s just a titling issue, but it’s an issue for me none the less, and perhaps more so because it feels lazy considering the way the females in the titles fight to prove their strength, and demonstrate they’re usually more capable than the males.

The only other book I read this month that wasn’t for posting purposes was Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want from Sex–and How to Get it by Marty Klein, which Ashley recommended to me way back in Feburary 2019. Just as it says in the marketing copy, this is not tricks and techniques, but it’s about how we think about sex. This book tackles issues like normalcy, which have come up recently in an author fan group I’m a part of on social media. (Aside: Dear readers, if you are not following your favorite authors on social media and in their – hopefully official – fan groups, please consider it. The fan groups of the Bluewater Billionaires authors might be the shining light to my social media stream, other than you of course.) It also talks about the different aspects of sexual intelligence – mind, heart, and body, as well as why and how to reset expectations. The author is a sex therapist and it reads like that. If you’re interested in digging into the mindsets of sex, I highly suggest this title! It’s short, at 261 pages, interesting, and very accessible.

What fun titles did you read this month that surprised you in some way?

~Nikki

I make no secret that my day job is a badass Realtor, and the month of April is Fair Housing Month for National Association of Realtors. I took a course on Friday called “At Home With Diversity” and of course I read The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein to double up with my education. Seeing the way neighborhoods are currently segregated and knowing that both federal and local governments caused these inequities to BIPOC is important to know so that we can, as Rothstein says, find remedies for this terrible, systemic issue. So, I second Nikki’s ask to receive all the titles and educational resources.

In addition to my diversity education, I am in the middle of reading a very thorough and easy to digest book about the home buying process. I will probably be recommending First-Time Home Buyer: The Complete Playbook to Avoiding Rookie Mistakes by Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen to all of my first-time buyer clients in the future so that we may have the same vocabulary to discuss their needs, wants, and the home buying process. It is proving to be an excellent resource to corroborate my specific market knowledge.

This month is going to end up having an equal number of titles as February, 10, which is the smallest number of titles I have completed in a month this year. It still means I’m 13 books ahead of schedule for the year and I’m not even a little sad about that. Because some of my nonfiction reading has been dense and I’ve done multiple online classes this month, I’ve been enjoying some TV and movie time in the evenings rather than more reading on a screen. I’ve started ~~watching~~ binging Schitt’s Creek on Netflix and let’s just say that I am Here.For.It. I’m still in season one so don’t spoil things, but it’s funny and I love it. Should have listened to my in-laws sooner, eh?

How do you balance your media consumption between books, movies, and TV?

~Ashley

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Book Review

Among the Beasts and Briars by Ashley Poston

April 22, 2021

Ashley here unlike usual where Nikki takes over the request for you to join us for Virtual Book Club. I figure I should speak from my experience and tell you that yes, even Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is a surprising, weird, and twisted hero’s tale. (It’s a re-read for me! But, I’ve forgotten the plot points – it’s been over 10 years! – so it’s gonna be a new adventure, too.) So, join us, at Virtual Book Club on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. Central Time and let us know by registering here!

Oh readers, I feel like this is a week of reconsiderations. We didn’t do this on purpose, but what better idea to follow Knox McCoy’s All Things Reconsidered, than a hero’s journey that requires a lot of reconsidering to return home. Among the Beasts and Briars by Ashley Poston is the tale of that journey. I’ve read and raved about her Once Upon a Con romance series, so when her new, stand alone fantasy novel came out, I was ready!

Among the Beasts and Briars opens with Cerys, the royal gardner’s daughter, getting ready for the coronation. The king has passed away and now his daughter, Cerys’s best friend, is about to be crowned queen of Aloriya. She’s preparing in the flower shop, playing with her somewhat domesticated fox, and looking forward to a brighter future, even though she’s just seen a shadow in the cursed woods. As we follow Cerys throughout her day, we start to get glimpses of the tragedies of the past, and what the curse means for life in the Village-in-the-Valley. Like you do in a hero’s journey, bad things happen, and Cerys must go on an adventure in an attempt to save the day. I don’t want to tell you more about the plot, but I do want to say, I adored the ending, and even the epilogue, which dear readers, was enough!

Poston writes a gorgeous, fantastical tale in Among the Beasts and Briars, but her passion for people, empathy, and the opportunity for growth shine through her characters. Near the end she writes “There were no perfect kingdoms without cost, and there were no stories that were completely true-or completely false.” I adore how this title includes a sort of prologue of the creation story of Aloriya, explaining the legend all its people know from their younger days, and, more importantly, the follow up line “It is a lie.” Much like the history of our own nation, there are truths to it, but they aren’t complete. Many of those stories conveniently forget the lives sacrificed (at best) to bring about this nation we want to think of as great. And honestly, it is great, but in the midst of living in our experimental country, we forget that it is still just that, an experiment, because it is still too young to be considered anything else, even at almost 250 years old. And we still have much to learn from the truths of our past, because first we need to acknowledge them, as a group, before we truly learn from them.

I know we keep saying to read the acknowledgements, with good reason. Near the end of the acknowledgements for Among the Beasts and Briars, Poston thanks two individuals “both for telling me this story is worthy and for never giving up on me when I felt like giving up on myself. Get yourself friends who will look your depression in the eye and tell it, ‘Not today.’ ” Oh readers, your stories are worthy, and even on the days you feel as though you’re woodcursed and it shows, you can’t give up. I was acting like it some earlier, overthinking (yes still) several things, and I just had to stop talking because what was coming out was not good. I powered through, I knocked a few easy wins off my to do list to build momentum, and now I’m feeling much better. It doesn’t hurt that a chocolate milkshake is soon to be mine. Don’t let the hard days win.

~Nikki

Ashley Poston is the author of six books, and from what I can tell, a plethora of fanfiction – some of which, she admits, can be found on the internet. Nikki has repeatedly suggested that I read Poston’s Once Upon a Con YA Romance series. After finishing Among the Beasts and Briars – a solid 4 star read for me, those three titles, Geekerella, The Princess and the Fangirl, and Bookish and the Beast, along with her Heart of Iron and Soul of Stars YA sci-fi duology, will be jumping up the TBR as soon as I can find some time. Perhaps this summer, if once fully vaccinated I get to take an actual vacation-like trip and turn the world and its expectations off for a while. Which, it seems, is what Poston is doing in her writing career this year. On 2 December2020 she posted this blog article that states she’s taking 2021 off from public bookish life to breathe and prep to jump into 2022 with new projects and renewed vigor. Her six books in four years have appeared on best of lists in Teen Vogue, Seventeen, Buzzfeed, and our perennial favorite, the Good Reads Choice Awards, among others. Most notably, Heart of Iron was named on 2019’s Rainbow List. Poston lives in South Carolina with her cat and plays D&D when not writing, or reading fanfic. We’ll be ready for her next project, for sure.

Among the Beasts and Briars was just what I needed in my reading life when I read it last week. I have been reading some work-heavy non-fiction books in addition to our blog titles this month. The few days it took me to read the story of Cerys, the daughter of Aloriya’s royal gardener and her journey through the cursed wildwood to save her friends and her kingdom, was the escape I needed to be refreshed in my mental space. Sometimes I don’t think I discuss enough about what the fiction I read allows me to do, which is give my brain the ability to shut off from the constant change of the real estate market and the needs of clients, and life in general to reconnect with imagination. Even if it’s the author’s imagination and not my own. It’s the breathing space to just allow myself to be. That’s what we do in this bookish life, readers, we find ourselves in the books we read, even if it’s a classically told fairy tale. I could sense some of the ‘revealing’ plot points from the very beginning of the story, but I was not turned off from the story or the characters, and there were still several surprises that were not what I had anticipated.

This is a tale of self-worth. Of not only finding it within oneself but of having people around you that see you as worthy or even more worthy than you see yourself, too. As is said of Cerys near the end of the story: “She doesn’t need a hero…she needs people who believe that she can be the hero.” Sometimes we can not see our own capabilities because we’re bogged down in our own inner muck. We need friends and family who can pull you up and out of a hole then push you higher. I have Nikki, like I said on Monday, and you should get you one of thems. (But preferably not mine, because between the males and girl that live in her house PLUS me, she’s busy All.The.Time. Sorry not sorry.)

~Ashley

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