Happy Saturday, everyone!

March is gone! And good riddance, too, because apart from a hilarious crime dinner party I had with some of my friends in Munich and a ton of my highly anticipated TV shows being released in the last few weeks, the month really wasn’t all that great…

In anticipation of April, the weather decided to go crazy, switching from snow to sun to rain to snow every few days, and of course, that caused everybody’s immune systems to go haywire. I worked overtime like nobody’s business to stand in for sick colleagues, and then – Who would’ve thought? – I fell ill as well. And, since idiot-me decided to drag herself to school despite not being completely recovered in order to calm down her panicky sixth- and seventh-graders, who had tons of questions about their upcoming math exams, I’m still not exactly at peak health. Although I at least have a lifetime’s supply of soup and tissues now!

Anyway, you have no idea how relieved I am that it’s finally Easter break, although as I have a paper due right after – this dissertation thing you need to write as part of your teaching degree – it’s probably not going to be all that relaxing. Since one of my closest childhood friends and her boyfriend are coming to visit me from the Netherlands on the 12th, I have about a week to write 60 pages, which means I need to churn out ten pages a day if I also want a day to edit everything, a day to grade my sixth-grade math exams, a day to take the train home to see my family, Easter Sunday off, a day to prepare lessons, and a day to take the train back down south… Yeah, let’s just not think about any of that too carefully… 😭

Instead, let’s talk about books! Readingwise, March wasn’t the worst, I suppose. Although I read less than in February, my average rating is up to 3.0 stars now, which is still terrible, but slightly less terrible than 2.92, at least! You’ve got to look on the bright side of things! I may have started the month with a book I despised, but things only got better from there! It’s progress!!

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The Atlas Paradox (The Atlas #2) by Olivie Blake (1/5 Stars)

Why did I read this when I already hated The Atlas Six, you may ask? That’s a fair question. To say my expectations for The Atlas Paradox were low would already be a massive understatement… However, I can’t deny that I was also slightly curious! Even the 0.001% chance that Olivie Blake might explain all of the unanswered questions she introduced in the first book had me intrigued, and I just couldn’t leave my buddy reader hanging, now could I? Line and I had started this torturous journey together, so if she was reading on, so would I!

However, despite being marketed as “the long-awaited sequel to dark academic sensation The Atlas Six“, with lots of “yearning, backstabbing, betrayal, and chaos”, The Atlas Paradox somehow managed to be even worse than my already rock-bottom expectations. Everything I hated about the first book was a million times more pronounced in this one. There was no plot and no character development. The writing was just as pretentious and ultimately meaningless as in The Atlas Six, making me wonder whether Olivie Blake’s writing process might simply be to look up big words in the dictionary and sprinkle them into her stories, no matter whether they made sense or not. And, of course, to watch popular TV shows and randomly grab elements without understanding them, thinking, “Oh, cool, let’s use that in my book as well!” Like, a multiverse and time travel through a stone circle? You cannot convince me that Olivie Blake didn’t just blatantly steal those ideas from Marvel and Diana Gabaldon! 🙄

Add to that that the very few things that did happen in this book were downright illogical, happened off page, or took place in weird dream realms, and that the characters lost any sense of distinct personality and rivalry, and The Atlas Paradox was one of the most pointless, boring, and nonsensical books I have ever read. I really do not understand what anyone could possibly like about it!

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Die Schulranzenfrau: Aus dem Tagebuch einer jungen Lehrerin by Susi Seidl (3.5/5 Stars)

[This book has not been translated into any other languages; the German title means The Backpack Woman: From the Diary of a Young Teacher]

One of my really close friends gave me this book as a belated birthday present – shoutout to us for managing to meet up three times before accomplishing a successful gift exchange 😎 – and, of course, I immediately started reading it on the train ride home from her place!

Semi-autobiographical, Die Schulranzenfrau provides a possibly slightly exaggerated and satirical look into the life of a teacher trainee at a Bavarian gymnasium, i.e. a German college-track secondary school that students from grades 5 to 13 attend. Detailing the narrator’s struggles with the Ministry of Education, the German school system, strange colleagues, unruly kids, and the pandemic, I found it to be highly relatable and hilarious, and also thoroughly enjoyed the author’s descriptions of my hometown, which is where the school part of her training took place at is located.

Still, the narrator’s general laissez-faire attitude and clichéd, surface-level depictions also sometimes rubbed me the wrong way. Sure, of course dinosaur-colleagues who refuse to help you out and have no freaking clue how the internet works can be annoying. Of course it isn’t exactly thrilling that the Ministry of Education can randomly move you around to a new school every six months, with – if they’re being generous – a two-week advance warning that you can use to find and rent a new apartment. Of course it isn’t great that the majority of your degree depends on three lessons that are completely detached from any kind of reality. (Like, who the fuck normally takes two extra beamers with them in case the one in the classroom stops working??? )

BUT: In my opinion, Die Schulranzenfrau completely glosses over the part that really makes this job so exhausting – teaching itself. The part where you prepare lessons well past 10 p.m., where you spend entire weekends grading exams, where you lay awake for hours thinking about that student who told you they were scared their parents might punish them if they brought home a bad grade, where you question whether you are really suited for this if 80% of your students couldn’t even solve that one problem on your math test that was exactly like the problems you’ve been doing in class for weeks, or where your ninth-graders continuously blow their noses several lessons straight, in protest against you not allowing them to all use the restroom at the same time during your lesson. The part where you try really, really hard, but still keep being told your work sucks by the supervisors constantly scrutinizing you. The self-doubt is crippling, the work hours insane, but you still keep doing it because you care about the kids and want them to learn something.

Die Schulranzenfrau, however, doesn’t give you the impression that the protagonist cares about the kids at all. Instead, it features a teacher who shows great pride in turning up for class thoroughly unprepared and still hungover from the night before and in doing her best to make it from one break to the next with as little effort as possible. She seems to care more about her salary and putting on a show for her supervisors than actually teaching her students something, which I thought was a very sad and skewed portrayal of teaching.

Nevertheless, though: I loved the humorous tone of the novel and how scathingly this book criticizes parts of the Bavarian school system that I, too, think are thoroughly outdated and sometimes even dehumanizing. I saw many of my own experiences reflected in this, and haven’t cackled this much reading a book in ages. Would definitely recommend, even if you should probably take parts of the novel with a grain of salt!

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Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (3.5/5 Stars)

[I listened to this as an audiobook; the narrator was Aoife McMahon.]

Everyone and their mother is reading and loving Sally Rooney at the moment, so of course, I wanted to be in on it! And since Normal People – the book of hers that sounds most up my alley – seems to be inexplicably unavailable for lending, I decided to start with Beautiful World, Where Are You instead.

Alternating between the stories of two college friends, Eileen and Alice, and their highly philosophical emails to each other, Beautiful World, Where Are You is a novel about figuring out adulthood, about self-doubt, about relationships, about friendship. While Alice, a famous novelist, has moved to the countryside after a major depressive episode, Eileen is back in Dublin, reeling from a breakup. While Alice meets Felix, a warehouse worker, on a not very successful Tinder date, Eileen slips back into flirting with Simon, a close friend she has known since childhood.

On the whole, there were lots of things I liked about Beautiful World, Where Are You. The writing style and a point-of-view that meanders somewhere between third-person omniscient, objective, and limited, drew me in immediately, and I loved how messy and real the characters felt. The book really captures the feeling of being in your late twenties, of being scared of the future, and wondering why your life ended up the way it did. I loved how Eileen, Alice, Simon, and Felix weren’t perfect people, and how they often stood in the way of their own happiness with the decisions they made. And I also really liked the portrayal of mental illness.

That being said, though: At some point, all of the sex scenes in this book seriously started making me roll my eyes. Like, good grief, how freaking long does it take for you do realize that you might have feelings for someone you’re constantly sleeping with?? After a while, it started to get old, and I felt like the sex scenes were only there because Sally Rooney thought they – and the consequent overly philosophical discussions about said sex scenes – would make readers more interested in picking her book up. Who doesn’t love a bit of controversial explicit smut in literary fiction, right? SERIOUSLY, THOUGH: WAS GETTING MORE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHARACTERS’ RELATIONSHIPS INSTEAD TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR??

Final verdict: Although this didn’t exactly knock me off my socks, I enjoyed it, and am definitely open to trying more of Sally Rooney’s books in the future.

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Empire of the Vampire (Empire of the Vampire #1) by Jay Kristoff (3.5/5 Stars)

Lo and behold: After over two years of Naemi saying that she wanted to read Empire of the Vampire, she has finally done so! Let’s just say I saw an English copy at our local bookstore and decided I could no longer wait for my library or Scribd to come through an eternity later… 🙃

The start to Jay Kristoff’s newest fantasy series, Empire of the Vampire takes place in a grim and dark world. Humans are struggling to survive after a cataclysmic event known as Daysdeath blocked out the sun several decades prior, giving vampires a chance to rise to power and slaughter the population indiscriminately. Gabriel de León, a silversaint dedicated to defending realm and church from the creatures of the night, has been fighting for a different world ever since he was a boy. Imprisoned by the very enemy he is sworn to destroy, Gabriel is now the last of his kind, forced to recount his life story to those who took everything from him.

Guys, it’s face it: I’m a sucker for fantasy books with the “character telling his origin story” trope. I loved it in The Realm of the Elderlings, I loved it in The King Killer Chronicles, and I loved it here. There’s just something so profoundly interesting about a person looking back on their life with more perspective than they had back then! I had so much fun piecing together Gabriel’s past and, although I wouldn’t necessarily say I liked him, I thought he was a fascinating character in an even more fascinating world. There was so much lore to unpack here, so many gritty and gruesome details, that I was probably more interested in the world-building than any other part of the book!

Which was, simultaneously, also my biggest issue. While I liked the world, the plot and characters didn’t manage to draw me in to a similar degree. Usually, I have nothing against 700-page fantasy tomes, but in this case, I really don’t think this needed to be as long as it was. I felt bored during considerable stretches. Not much happened, but everything that did was drawn out FOREVER. Rather than getting to explore the side characters in more depth, we got the same sort of attack scenes and conversations over and over again, and, quite frankly, probably about 20% of this book was dedicated to Jay Kristoff showing off his curse word vocabulary and vast repertoire of genitalia-involving insults. Like, I don’t mind cursing – Heck, I do it myself on this blog! – but in Empire of the Vampire, it felt like the cursing wasn’t so much a natural part of who the characters were as the author’s petty attempt to send his sincerest “FUCK YOU” to all of the people who had complained about the language in his previous books. Seriously, every third sentence was something like “‘Poets are wankers’, Gabriel sighed. ‘And minstrels are just poets who’re allowed to strum themselves in public.'” (p. 288). No matter what the topic of conversation was, Jay Kristoff had to find some way of including a dick reference just for the sake of it, and, after a while, it really started to get on my nerves!

My overall opinion? This is not a new favorite, but I’m interested enough in the world and all of the open questions that I’ll probably read the sequel.

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Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (4.5/5 Stars)

[Original Swedish title: Folk med ångest; I read the English translation by Neil Smith]

I don’t know why I didn’t read this sooner! It’s not like I didn’t already know I loved Fredrik Backman’s way of storytelling, having read and adored My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry years ago…

(Seriously, it was so long ago that I didn’t even have this blog yet. My Backman neglect has been going on for years now… 😅)

Anyway, Anxious People takes place in a small Swedish town, after a bank robber stormed an apartment viewing just before New Year’s Day and took the prospective buyers hostage. As two policeman, a father and son, try to solve the crime, we jump back and forth between their investigation, the hostage situation, and the hostage’s lives prior to the viewing, slowly piecing together a puzzle where nothing is quite like it seems at first.

All in all, I ADORED this. Although it might sound like crime fiction, Anxious People actually isn’t really about a mystery at all. Rather, it’s about people. It’s about people who are worried that they aren’t good enough, it’s about people who are scared of disappointing their loved ones, it’s about people struggling with demons from their past. It’s emotional, it’s sad, but it’s oh so cozy and hopeful at the same time. And it’s funny. I must’ve looked like a maniac while reading this because my facial expressions morphed from “almost sobbing” to “grinning idiotically” within matters of seconds, multiple times.

My only (very minor) complaint is that, sometimes, I felt like the ridiculousness of the plot was almost too over the top. I can’t explain it very well, but it was like the humor distracted from the validity of the rather serious emotions some of the characters were experiencing?

Still, I would highly recommend this one!

(And also the Netflix series, which I binge watched immediately after finishing the book 😇 I might even like it more, honestly, except for the fact that they got rid of Nadia. I loved Nadia and her therapist/patient relationship with Zarah! 😭 Still, the series overall is excellent. I definitely intend to revisit it in the future, when I will hopefully be able to understand it without having to switch on the English subtitles. I thought maybe, seeing that I had already read the book, my Swedish would be good enough to at least get the gist, but not a chance, unfortunately… )

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Love & Other Words by Christina Lauren (3/5 Stars)

Christina Lauren’s books are some of my favorites to turn to when I’m in the mood for something quick, relaxing, and cute. So, with just a handful of days left until Easter break, Love & Other Words sounded exactly like what I needed to keep my spirits up!

In this dual-timeline contemporary romance novel, we follow Macy Lea Sorenson, a young woman who unexpectedly runs into her childhood best friend after they haven’t spoken in over a decade. Apart from her dad, who single-handedly raised Macy after her mother died, Elliot used to be Macy’s entire world. Until one fateful night that both Macy and Elliot deeply regret…

Overall, I’m a bit torn on how I feel about this book. One the one hand, I flew through it. The beginning immediately had me engaged – I mean, a vacation home? Two nerdy preteens bonding over reading in a closet? Sign me up! – and the premise of two childhood friends reconnecting and falling in love delivered exactly the cuteness I’d wanted.

However, there were also parts of Love & Other Words that were extremely annoying, to say the least:

1. A relationship that starts off promising quickly turns into the characters having no connection other than sex and constantly tearing their clothes off in the weirdest places. Like, do you really have to do the deed in your father’s living room when he’s due back from grocery shopping any minute? Or in the middle of a wedding ceremony?? The second-hand embarrassment was real!
2. The entire plot is based on one of the dumbest and most predictable cases of miscommunication I have ever encountered, and, even more frustratingly, all it takes to resolve an issue that was so major it stopped two self-proclaimed soulmates from speaking for over ten years is one sobbed explanation. An explanation that is immediately brushed aside for more sex. I was not a fan.
3. The attempt to make the main character less bland by giving her a mixed cultural heritage – Danish and Latin American – felt extremely mediocre. Apart from name-dropped foods, Christmas candles, and Macy’s dad constantly calling her “min lille blomst” – @Line: Do Danish parents really do this or is this as awkward as I think it is? – there really wasn’t much there!

Still, I did really like the mix of cuteness and seriousness and was rooting for Macy and Elliot throughout the story. So I guess Love & Other Words is enjoyable enough despite its flaws? 🤷‍♀️

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Due to me getting very distracted by Daisy Jones & The Six, Carnival Row, Star Trek: Picard, Shadow & Bone, and Anxious People and spending a significant chunk of the month trying to stop everything around me from spinning and my throat from spewing up lots of slime and blood, I wasn’t all that present around the blogosphere this past month. I read more of your posts than I responded to – You try typing a comment when it looks like the letters are dancing around the page! 🥴 – but it still wasn’t all that many. However, out of the posts I did read, these were some of my favorites!

• Sumedha @ The Wordy Habitat and Sophia @ Bookwyrming Thoughts both did a deep dive into their 2022 blogging stats, which I found to be incredibly interesting! 📊
• Suhani @ Random Reader’s Rambles wrote a wonderfully long review of R.F. Kuang’s Babel! 🎓
• Abby @ Beyond the Read went full-on Poppy War-nerd and gave us a detailed analysis of Rin and Kitay’s friendship! Although I have my issues with how the Poppy War trilogy concluded, Rin and Kitay’s bond was never one of them, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this! 🔥
• Nefeli @ BiblioNebula returned to the blogosphere – Which in and of itself was enough to get me thoroughly overexcited! 🥳 – but then she also gave us so many wonderful posts at once! Such as her brutally honest Shadow & Bone review!
• Line @ First Line Reader discussed unlikeable main characters as well as some of her least favorite book tropes. My takeaway: We (mostly) agree on the unlikeable characters but not on the tropes! 😂
• Sophie @ Me & Ink wrote a really thorough guide to creating and fleshing out characters! Writers out there – this post is a gold mine of good advice! 🖋️
• Malka @ Paper Procrastinators asked herself if reading a lot of romance made her a romance expert and gave personalized romance recommendations to anyone who wanted them! 💞
• Riddhi @ Whispering Stories published a poetry collection, World of Words!!! 📜
• Liv @ The Devine Writes wrote The. Best. Essay, Ever. Seriously, go read it. It’s about Sarah J. Maas’s ACOTAR series and how Rhys is a terrible person, and I nearly died laughing because of it! 😎
• Lesserleaf @ Lesser Leaves reviewed The Penderwicks! (And some other children’s books, too. But let’s face it – what got me excited here was seeing someone else love The Penderwicks!) 🥰
• Janette @ Wicked Witch’s Blog celebrated her two-year blogiversary by doing the Reader Confessions Book Tag! 🎉
• Jan @ Inkspun Tales reviewed the Rain Wild Chronicles, and all of her thoughts are so hilariously relatable! 🐉

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So yeah, that brings us to the end of this wrap-up! If you’ve read any of the books featured here, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you have any recommendations that might help me save my average rating, I’m all ears as well! Please, I desperately need help!!

(Also, just a heads up: Since I have a 60-page paper to write within the next two weeks, it is basically guaranteed highly probable that I won’t post again until mid-April… Nope, this is not an April Fool’s joke 🥺 Sorry!! )