Who knew that all I needed was a quiet afternoon to finally get through these last few reviews for Eurovisionathon? It’s honestly such a weight off my back to finally have these all done so I can move onto catching up with the rest of my reviews for the year.
The Balkan Express by Slavenka Drakulic
Read for: Serbia 🇷🇸 Marked Off Before: ✖️
I discovered Slavenka Drakulic last year when I read her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. She’s a Croatian author who writes primarily essays—both of the collections I’ve read have been talking about living in Yugoslavia during the Soviet era with this one then going into the Croatian-Serbian conflict as well. Drakulic is really easy to read—her essays are usually a few pages and they usually focus on her personal experiences or the experiences of people close to her. I always feel like I learn a lot from my essay collections, but in a way that I’m learning the human side of these historical events rather than the sorts of things you might find in a history book. I really recommend giving Drakulic a try if you’re interested in learning more about Croatian in particular, or that area of Europe more generally.
His Grace, The Duke (Second Stars #2) by Emily Rath
Read for: The UK 🇬🇧 Marked Off Before: ✅
I decided to use His Grace, The Duke to mark off the UK this year as something fun to read. Beautiful Things, the first book in this duopoly, was one of my favourite books of last year so I had high hopes for this one. Honestly, this was fine. I do really love the characters in this series and I was glad to see them get their happy endings (or what was coming to them for some of the side characters). But on the whole, I was kind of bored of this one. The plot and the excitement kind of fizzled out towards the end and it just became gratuitous smut scenes back to back. Look I’m here for the smut, but this was honestly too much and I just felt like I was reading the same stuff without any purpose. I think if this had cut 2-3 smut scenes towards the end, it would’ve been nearly perfect for me.
Drown the Sea (Dying Gods #1) by Elisha Kemp
Read for: Greece 🇬🇷 Marked Off Before: ✅
After finishing His Grace, The Duke, I had time to squeeze in one more book before the readathon ended and I decided to go with Drown the Sea. This is set in Santorini but it’s also a time travel reverse-harem in Ancient Greece. I absolutely loved it. The start was a little bumpy but as soon as we got to the time travel, I was completely sold on the story. I read it so quickly because I just had to know what happened next. The story moves quickly, but there’s already some interesting developments and it is a five book series so there’s so many places this could go yet. This is definitely in the running to be one of my favourite books of the year.
Earl Grey Books 