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Book Review: How to Be a Pirate

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How to Be a Pirate
How to Train Your Dragon #2
by Cressida Cowell
read by David Tennant

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Middle grade fantasy

Hiccup trains to swordfight and Toothless tries to care about more than fish.

It was easier to evaluate the book for itself this time, since we’re much more removed from the world of the movie (not that the first book was all that similar, but it was enough to make it difficult). The book is overall pretty fun, though I spent a lot of the book wondering why we want a hero who is so incredibly bad at everything he’s expected to be good at. I’m not saying he should be immediately good at everything, but I guess I would just like him to have a win now and then, at least more often than he does and earlier in the book than he does. So far, these books entail Hiccup being bad, defeated, mocked, etc. until the climax, when the situation requires something that he does better than anyone else in the tribe (usually related to brains over brawn). But I just wish there could be a little more to encourage him/us before the end. However, I have to admit that the win he does get made me happy.

David Tennant again does a brilliant job narrating, though his voice for one particular character (while great) may have given me reason to mistrust him more than we might have been meant to. I’ll say it again—if you love the movies and are looking for books like that, I don’t necessarily recommend you read these books. But it’s overall a fun, short read, though I’m hoping to see a change in the formula in future books.

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Book Review: Dachshund Through the Snow

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Dachshund Through the Snow
Andy Carpenter #20
by David Rosenfelt
read by Grover Gardner

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Mystery

When reluctant defense attorney Andy Carpenter’s wife Laurie gets caught up in the lives of a family where the husband/dad has been arrested for a cold-case murder, it’s no surprise that Andy ends up with a new client.

Is it weird that I could probably put the same basic synopsis at the front of every one of these reviews and repeat the same opinions on many of them, and yet, I still absolutely love this series? Some are better than average and some are worse than average, but it’s a formulaic series, so it’s difficult to think of anything new to say with each review. For this book, though, I can say that it was nice to have a less complex and widespread mystery. Not that there weren’t still quite a few players behind the scenes that caused me to get lost a little bit, but overall, I’d say this book was on the high side of average for the series. A solid addition to the series. I especially recommend the audiobook, because Grover Gardner’s narration is a huge part of why I never want to stop listening to this series.

This book also births a spin-off series (though it looks like it was a short-lived one), which I’ve known existed but never really known much about. Now I’ll have to be sure to get that a try too!

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September in Review

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I read 15 books last month, only one book less than last month, making it the 2nd-highest for the year, both in books and in page count. I can only chalk it up to spending more time listening to audiobooks lately.

Here are the books I read in September:

songbirds
HP 1 - MinaLima
Very Dangerous
Carpenter 19
Screenshot_20250913-000034_Kindle
HTTYD 1
Boone 1
Uncanny
Mandie 1
Howl
Poirot 19
Forward
Legacy
Far Horizon
5th

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins (4 / 5)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (MinaLima version) by J.K. Rowling (4 / 5)
Very Dangerous Things by Lauren Muñoz (2 / 5)
Bark of Night by David Rosenfelt (4.5 / 5)
The Wedding Bond by Lee Tobin McClain (2 / 5)
How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell (4 / 5)
Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer by John Grisham (4 / 5)
True Life in Uncanny Valley by Deb Caletti (1.5 / 5)
Mandie and the Secret Tunnel by Lois Gladys Leppard (4 / 5)
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (4 / 5)
Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie (3 / 5)
Forward As Always by Olan Rogers & Jake Sidwell (3 / 5)
Legacy by Clifford Riley (4 / 5)
Beyond the Far Horizon by Carolyn Leiloglou (5 / 5)
The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey (2.5 / 5)

This list includes 3 ARCs and 3 re-reads. My favorite book from September was Beyond the Far Horizon. I started 5 series, continued 3 series, and finished 1 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

*This includes 1 series I didn’t reach the end of, but decided not to continue reading, after being at least 2 books into the series.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.

Book Review: The 5th Wave

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The 5th Wave
Book #1
by Rick Yancey
Read by Phoebe Strole & Brandon Espinoza

My rating: 2.5 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi

After the alien mothership appeared, there were 4 waves of disasters that left very few humans alive. Those that are left don’t know who to trust. And they don’t know when the 5th wave might come.

I was there for part 1; I was in it. Cassie is alone, trying to survive the harsh, cold winter, with no idea if any other humans are even left alive or not. In disjointed flashbacks, she tells us the story of the first 4 waves. Then comes part 2, where we switch to another POV: Zombie (just a nickname), who just managed to survive the wave that killed the largest number of humans. The story shifts gears here, as Zombie is living on a base with a lot of other people. He doesn’t seem to know what Cassie knows, though, which is not to trust anyone. I started to get a little confused about who was really good or bad at this point too, but I was still there, still engaged. Then part 3 takes another turn, a short section with a new, more mysterious POV, and the follow-up to that is part 4—back to Cassie. There begins my least-favorite aspect of the entire book: the romance.

To be fair, I often don’t like romance in YA books, because they’re too immature for my tastes. But here we have Evan, who is mentioned in the official synopsis but doesn’t appear until 1/3 of the way into the book. Evan is kind of creepy, lurking around outside of doors and disappearing for chunks of time with no explanation. But he’s good-looking, and Cassie has been alone for a while, so…romantic, I guess.

Then part 5 comes. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Cassie has a 5-year-old brother who was taken away by soldiers and whom Cassie is determined to find again. And that’s where we go with part 5. Fortunately, it’s only 25 pages, but having the 5-year-old as a POV character felt like taking a huge left turn. And I’m not really sure it was necessary. From there, we go back and forth between Zombie’s and Cassie’s POVs, as Zombie is turned into a soldier and Cassie makes plans to look for her brother, with Evan acting as an anchor holding her back. Zombie’s parts are generally fine, and serve to propel the reader’s understanding of the world forward more than Cassie’s do from this point on, since she’s mostly just focused on 2 people—Evan and Sammy (her brother). I hated Cassie’s sections (and pretty much Cassie herself) from this point on, because she keeps finding more and more reasons not to trust Evan and yet talks herself out of letting it make a difference. Because she’s falling for him or something? I just didn’t care anymore. And then to make things worse, the romance turned into a potential triangle at the end of the book, in a way that I really didn’t like.

I listened to the audiobook, and the narrators were good, but even there, since there are technically 4 POVs by the end, splitting the extra 2 smaller ones between the narrators of the main characters is a little weird. Plenty of books have both male and female POV characters and use only one narrator, so maybe this one would have been better off with just one. That’s the least of my issues with the book though.

In case it’s not clear, I don’t really recommend this book to anyone. I was telling my 15-year-old daughter about it as I went along (without spoilers), and most of the things that bothered me as I went didn’t concern her. By the end, though, a few of the romance-related things did make her decide not to read it, but that means that other teens, at least, might find more to like here than I did. For me, there ended up being too much focus on romance and not enough on plot.

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Book Review: Forward As Always

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Forward As Always
by Olan Rogers & Jake Sidwell

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Sci-fi

After surviving a malicious fire as a child, Gaius feels compelled to investigate other such fires, even though he’s training as a messenger, not a fighter. Now the fires are occurring more often, and it’s clear that the people behind them are building toward something. What that something might be, though, no one knows.

I really wanted to like this book, and it wasn’t bad overall. But for the most part, I felt like it didn’t live up to its potential. I enjoyed a lot about the setting, in particular the Tempest, deadly storms that come every 3-5 days. It adds a lot of urgency to even the slower parts of the plot, and the way it is incorporated into the plot and the lives of the characters is well done. Overall, a lot of creativity went into this world, even if I was confused by what was going on for a lot of the time. 

Much of the book involves Gaius trying to track down the man that set fire to his home when he was a child, while learning that he’s been kept in the dark about a lot of things, and when he goes on what he hopes is a mission to confront that man, the plot suddenly turns into a zombie story. I was thrown for a loop, even more so because I had no idea how these “zombies” really worked. I felt like I was missing some kind of backstory, and in the end, I don’t think it was ever explained much more than what little is said at the time the plot takes this turn. Then at the end of the book, there’s a large amount of explanation and answers given about the state of the world, but it still didn’t answer all of my questions.

I do not know if my lack of much previous experience with sci-fi of this type meant I was the wrong audience for it, but I do at least feel that the pacing could have been better. And maybe information I wished to have just wasn’t intended to be had by the reader, and that’s certainly the prerogative of the authors. I didn’t dislike the book; it was just a little slow in pacing, and I didn’t feel very satisfied by the ending. But I think that other sci-fi fans that are interested would probably like it more than me, and I would still be interested in reading future books by these authors.

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Book Review: Beyond the Far Horizon

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Beyond the Far Horizon
The Restorationists #3
by Carolyn Leiloglou

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: Christian middle grade fantasy

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain some spoilers for the previous books in the series, starting with Beneath the Swirling Sky.

Ravi may have chosen to side with the Restorationists, but that doesn’t mean he trusts them. All his life, he’s been used and had to look out for himself. So though he’s agreed to help Vincent, Georgia, and Ms. Arte take down the Distortionists, he has a secret escape plan in case things go bad. But the longer he works with them, the more he realizes that he might not want to be on his own anymore.

I am so sad to think about this being the last book in this wonderful, inventive world in which people can enter paintings and travel between them, interacting with the painted people, creatures, and other aspects within, and making changes that aren’t visible but affect the painting’s viewer, for good or for ill. Though I’m not much of an art lover, the author is clearly passionate about paintings, and I really enjoy the inclusion of different paintings and especially the various components within the paintings.

Each of these books spotlights a different teenager with the ability to Travel through paintings, and each one deals with some sort of baggage throughout the story. Vincent’s resulted in a moment that I will never forget. Georgia’s kind of paled in comparison. I felt this book brought back a lot of the sympathy and enjoyment I felt in the first book. I felt for Ravi so much, I just wanted to hug him through most of the story. 

The plot is exciting, and the ending is a satisfying conclusion to the 3-book arc. I didn’t like this book quite as much as the first, but it was still a 5-star read. I recommend this book (and series—and really, you should start at the beginning if you’re interested) to anyone, young or old, interested in fantasy fiction with a Christian worldview.

Thank you to Netgalley and WaterBrook & Multnomah for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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Book Review: Appointment with Death

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Appointment with Death
Hercule Poirot #19
by Agatha Christie
read by Hugh Fraser

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Classic mystery

This was not my favorite Poirot, and I’m not sure I can pinpoint the reasons. It reminded me of some of the earlier books in the series that I didn’t like, in that it felt a little bloated. We’re given a ready-made cast of suspects, which of course made me look more carefully at everyone outside of that group. I’m not sure we’re given enough clues to figure it out for ourselves (though I suppose I can see some hints toward it when looking back). But then we’re sort of jerked around, all the way up through the reveal, with Poirot talking to someone as if they had done it, and then clarifying that it wasn’t them. I remember that happening in past books as well, and I couldn’t tell you who the murderer actually is in those books, because by the time they were revealed, I was a bit weary from explanation. The same thing happened here, and though I can remember the culprit right now, I’ve already had to remind myself that it wasn’t one of the fake-outs on the way to the real one. And yeah, just like one of the characters in this book pointed out, I don’t particularly appreciate Poirot’s hypocrisy in letting the culprit(s) go free in a previous book but insisting on justice in this case. Not that I think he should have let it go here, but that never really felt great about him doing so in the previous instance. I’m also not a fan of the “there’s not enough evidence to convict, so I’ll just get the murderer to kill him/herself” that happens too often in this series. Anyway, all of that combined to keep me from enjoying this book as much as I did previous ones. Though Hugh Fraser’s narration is still great.

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Book Review: Howl’s Moving Castle

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Howl’s Moving Castle
Book #1
by Diana Wynne Jones
read by Jenny Sterlin

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Middle grade fantasy

When Sophie attracts the unwanted attention of a powerful witch and is turned into an old woman, she seeks refuge in the moving castle out in the hills, said to belong to the wizard Howl who eats young women’s souls. Sophie’s not afraid of Howl anymore, because she’s not a young woman anymore. There, she meets an odd cast of characters, including one that claims it can return her to her rightful age.

I did not really know what to expect with this book. I can’t even remember for sure why I decided to read it (I have not seen the movie). I think I saw someone mention that the audiobook is really well done, and I’ve at least heard of the movie, so maybe that’s what did it. Whatever the reason, I found the story whimsical and charming, if a bit meandering and odd. I struggled to follow some of it, especially early on, and especially as it related to Sophie’s sisters and the various peripheral characters that had disappeared for one reason or another. That aspect might have been better if I had been reading, rather than listening. And the derogatory way some people would speak to or about Sophie, just because she’s an old woman (so they think) bothered me, especially when some reveals were made later. I also found myself expecting more of an explanation for a particular portal-fantasy-type aspect that comes up later in the book, but none was given. In fact, I wanted more explanations about multiple plot points than I got.

But even though the previous paragraph might make it seem like I didn’t enjoy the book, I really did. For the sheer pleasure I had while listening, I would have liked to give the book 5 stars, but the above paragraph does compel me to lower it to 4. The characters have depth, and I found myself rooting for all of them, even those that aren’t the most heroic (though certainly not the antagonists). And I think therein lies the major draw for me—I’m a character reader, and I loved these characters, so much so that I was really sad to leave this world when the book ended. Jenny Sterlin, the narrator, also had a lot to do with me becoming completely immersed in the world of this story. She makes the different major characters sound just different enough to help their different personalities come through. She’s the kind of narrator that makes me want to go and find other books she’s narrated, even if they’re books I’d never planned to read or even heard of before.

I can’t tell you whether or not you’d like this book if you’ve seen and liked the movie, but for someone who hasn’t seen the movie, if you’re interested in fantasy in a old-England-type setting, I would recommend this book, whether you’re in the age range it’s meant for (young teen and up, maybe?) or not.

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Book Review: Mandie and the Secret Tunnel

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Mandie and the Secret Tunnel
Book #1
by Lois Gladys Leppard

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Children’s Christian historical fiction

For complete transparency, I’ll say up front that I read a lot of this series when I was a kid/pre-teen, and I read some of them to my now-teen daughter when she was younger. Nostalgia will hugely affect my reviews for this series, and I have no plans to try to be objective.

Written in the 80s and set in 1900, the book begins with the death of 12-year-old Mandie’s father. Her mother clearly has no love for her and sends her away to work for an equally unkind family that needs help taking care of a baby. But through Uncle Ned, an old friend of her father’s and a Cherokee, Mandie learns of her father’s brother, who she’d never known existed, and with Uncle Ned’s help sets out to find a better life with her uncle (her real uncle, because “Uncle” Ned isn’t really her uncle).

This introduction to Mandie and her heritage is charming. There’s a mystery involving the will of a relative of Mandie’s, and it’s not exactly a deep mystery, but for the age group, I think it’s intriguing enough. Uncle Ned is a comforting presence for both Mandie and me, to be honest, as I seem to recall a feeling that when he’s involved, everything is going to be okay. I’m not a huge fan of Polly, a new friend of Mandie’s in this book, but overall, this is the kind of book where the good people are really good and the bad people are quite (sometimes over-the-top) bad. Not that they’re all villains, but their personalities are pretty sour.

I can’t pretend that this book holds up really well for me as an adult—Mandie’s friend Joe is domineering, and it’s super awkward when Joe and Polly meet and are attracted to each other (these kids are all 12-14, don’t forget). The Christianity presented in this book is shallow at best, maybe even somewhat works-based, which I couldn’t possibly have realized was incorrect as a kid. The preacher who talks at her dad’s funeral and visits her later only scares Mandie, rather than helping her through her difficult time. It’s unfortunate that Mandie doesn’t believe God cares about her until things end up working out well in the end, which is not a great message for kids.

My daughter read the entire series (which is more than I’ve read, but I plan to rectify that) when she was around 10 years old and loved them. Even now, at 15, she remembers them fondly and is planning to re-read them again some time soon. If that isn’t an endorsement, I don’t know what is.

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Book Review: Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer

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Kid Lawyer
Theodore Boone #1
by John Grisham
read by Richard Thomas


My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Middle grade fiction

Thirteen-year-old Theodore Boone’s parents are both lawyers, which gives him unique insight into the law system in his small town. He spends a lot of time at the courthouse and dreams of being a great trial lawyer someday. When his small town is rocked by a murder, he hates that he has to miss the trial to attend school. Then a classmate brings him some unknown evidence about the murder case, and Theo isn’t sure what to do with the info.

For the most part, this book was absolutely great and I really enjoyed it, though there are some things that I feel could have been done better. I really liked the trial side of the story. It reminded me a lot of David Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter series, which I also enjoy. I also liked Theo as a character and the relationship he’s built with various people at the courthouse. And there were a few moments that made me chuckle, especially early in the book. I was listening to the audiobook, and my 15-year-old daughter was nearby when I first started it, and she heard enough at the beginning (including those humorous moments) to decide to add it to her TBR as well. Another thing I appreciated is that Theo realizes the point when he’s in over his head and needs to consider taking what he knows to an adult. The way that all played out, too, I thought was pretty good.

I wish the story had gone a different direction than it did, though. I kept expecting even just a small twist in the plot by the end, but it never happened—maybe in an attempt to be more realistic than thrilling. And it certainly did seem realistic, but maybe throwing in a little more excitement would be good too. I also noted that the narrator (Theo) basically says near the beginning of the book that he doesn’t think of girls romantically at his age, yet he certainly is attracted to one of the women who works at the courthouse, and then there’s the girl in school that he thinks could become his girlfriend…so I guess all he really means is that he doesn’t think of that one girl at the beginning of the book romantically. Either way, it seemed like an unnecessary overall addition to a book with a 13-year-old protagonist.

I happened on this book when I was looking for something quick to listen to while waiting for some holds to come through, and the synopsis sounded interesting. If I had taken the time to read reviews first and see the 3.8 average rating right now on Goodreads, I probably would have passed, but I’m really glad I just dove in, because overall, I really enjoyed it and plan to keep going with the series. Richard Thomas does a great job with the narration, too. Overall, I’d say whether or not a teenager will be interested in this book will depend on what kind of fiction they like—if fast-paced action is important, this probably won’t suit them. If they’re interested in realistic fiction about crime and law and trials, this could be fascinating for them.

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