Today I’m here to wrap-up my progress for the first week/first half of Junior Eurovisionathon. This is kind of a long post so I’m just going to jump in and share my updates and my reviews for this week. Let’s go.
Updates
I thought I had a plan going into this round but it very quickly became apparent that I didn’t. Instead I had two plans that really didn’t cross over—I wanted to read things off my TBR but I also wanted to mark off some countries I hadn’t before. Those didn’t match up often.
That meant that I just started a lot of my reads. Out of the 12 books I had on my list, I started 9 and only finished 3 of them this week. You’ll see the three below but I also started my books for Albania, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ukraine and the UK. I’ll talk about where I am with those at the end of the post.
After posting my TBR, I did switch a couple of books around and I also found some options for countries I hadn’t planned on marking off. With only a week left, I know there’s no way I’ll read everything I set out to, so I took Armenia, Ireland and Spain off my list.
But let’s get into the reviews and then I’ll talk about my plans for this week.
The Girls, Alone: Six Days in Estonia by Bonnie J. Rough
As you can probably guess, this was my book for Estonia and my first read for this round. This is a very short look into Rough travelling through Estonia exploring her family history. It was interesting but it’s a very general overview of Estonia and I don’t feel like I learnt anything more about the country from this. I’ve read two books on Estonia before but they were both Soviet era, so I was excited to see a modern exploration of the country. As I said, it’s a very general overview and there’s only a little explanation about her actual travels. I feel like I’ve learnt more about the marks of Rough’s body than I did about Estonia or even her family history.
In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet
I ended up doing a last minute switch from my TBR and picked this for France. I had such high expectations for this book. I’d read the introduction a few months ago and was really impressed by it but then I’d had to return it to the library. I almost wished I’d left it there because it really went downhill from there for me. For the most part this was a pretty stock standard book on feminism but from a French perspective—it covered things like motherhood, marriage, ageing and etc. All of that was fine, but I’d expect it to lean into the ideas of witches more especially after the introduction gave a pretty good overview of witch-hunts in the early modern period and later but it would just rehash the same things and I’d hoped for more development.
The Letter for the King (The Letter for the King #1) by Tonke Dragt
This was my pick for the Netherlands. I don’t even remember where I heard about this book, all I know is that it’s been on my wishlist since 2015 and I’ve added it to numerous readathon TBRs throughout the years. I’m glad to have finally gotten around to it. For me, this was very middle of the road. I think it has a really interesting start and I really enjoyed the journey that Tiuri takes, but it didn’t blow me away. I found the writing style really difficult for most of the book—it felt very bland to me. There are also so many characters that Tiuri meets along the way that it was impossible to remember everyone—they’d be mentioned again or reappear and I’d have to try really hard to remember who they were. As I said, I really enjoyed the start and I also really liked the ending but some of the stuff in between made for a bit of a boring read.
Where To Next?
Part of the reason I only read three books this week is because I’ve been focusing on The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy which is my book for Ukraine. It’s over 500 pages and a slow read, but I’m 70% through and I should finish it today or tomorrow.
Since there are five others, I’m just going to dot point them and mention the percentage/page I’m on.
- Albania: Free by Lea Ypi, 5%
- Italy: Pompeii by Mary Beard, pg 38
- Germany: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, pg 51
- Poland: Traitor by Amanda McCrina, not yet started
- UK: Square Haunting by Francesca Wade, pg 41
So as you can see, I’m not the far into anything. I think once I’m not spending 95% of my reading time on my Ukraine read that I’ll be able to mark these others off a little quicker. I still don’t really have a plan there, it’ll just be whatever grabs me the most at the time.
And that’s it for this post and for the first week of the readathon. Here’s hoping we can mark off a few good ones next week!
Earl Grey Books 