Putting review posts like this together always takes me forever, and this one was clearly no exceptions. For context, Eurovisionathon ended back in May and here I am, just getting around to posting half of my reviews now more than halfway through July. Better late than never, right?
The Last Goddess by Katerina Tuckova
Read for: Czechia 🇨🇿 Marked Off Before: ✖️
This is easily one of the most confusing books I’ve ever read. It was really interesting at the start, but the further I got, the more lost I felt. There’s a lot of jumping around in the timeline of this story and so I had a hard time following the actual events of the story. Even as I’m writing this review, I still don’t understand what the order of things was. I don’t know if this was just me—I’ve been struggling to focus on things for a while now and maybe it was just a case of that, but I think it was probably meant to be a little confusing to fit with the whole researching into some pretty dark historical periods like WWII, the witch hunts in Europe and etc. Honestly, I still don’t know what to think about it.
The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945) by Suzanne Césaire
Read for: France 🇫🇷 Marked Off Before: ✅
Continuing with things that I don’t really know what to think of. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately about Suzanne Césaire for a project that I’ll hopefully be able to talk about one day soon. Anyway, this is the only collection (I think?) of her Tropiques essays translated into English so it was obviously on my list. This book is basically 80% other people’s work with then the very few essays of Césaire’s making up the rest. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really care about the writing of the others and I could’ve done without some of it. My favourite part of this entire book was actually the poem by Ina Césaire, Suzanne’s eldest daughter, at the end—I learnt more about the kind of woman and writer Suzanne was from that than I did from the introductions or anything. In conclusion, both Suzanne and Ina Césaire were incredible and I want more of just them.
The Fiancé Dilemma by Elena Armas
Read for: Spain 🇪🇸 Marked Off Before: ✅
This one was a buddy read with Helen, my favourite person to buddy read with and the creator and host of Eurovisionathon. Helen sent me this for Christmas last year with the plan of buddy reading it together, and then we ended up deciding to do that during the readathon. This was a rough read, to be quite honest. At the start, both Helen and I were really struggling to get into it, especially as we realised that this was a companion to a book neither of us had read. I really wasn’t feeling the romance, the characters or the storyline and it wasn’t until about halfway through that I started to enjoy it. That sort of middle third was fun—it was really quick to read and I was finally caring about the characters. Unfortunately, that didn’t last and by the last 100 or so pages, I was back to being bored out of mind and kind of hating everything. For me, I think it could’ve been fixed with some better pacing and just a more enjoyable ending.
Slaying the Shadow Prince by Helen Scheuerer
Read for: Australia 🇦🇺 Marked Off Before: ✅
The great thing about Australia being in Eurovision is that I can use it as an excuse to read some fun romantasy by local authors to give myself a bit of a break from everything else. Slaying the Shadow Prince was my choice for this year and it was a good one. This is part of a companion series called Mortal Enemies to Monster Lovers which is four books of unrelated stories by different authors, but it also serves as a prequel to Scheuerer’s Legends of Thezmarr series. I haven’t read any of the books by other authors, but I have read the first book in the Legends of Thezmarr series and I really enjoyed it. It did take a little bit of enjoyment out of this book for me because some of the things that should’ve been little hints and teasers into the series I’d already read about in that first book. If you’re considering picking this up, I definitely recommend reading it as a prequel as its intended rather than reading the series first.
Earl Grey Books 