First book in a series where many of the aristocracy are trolls, others are human, and lots of people do magic. Loved the romance, enjoyed another character’s ambition, but it felt a little weird when the two plotlines merged.
This book was a LOT. It’s the first in a series (didn’t know that when I started it), and I cannot WAIT for the next one. It was a little hard to follow, not because it didn’t grab my attention (because boy did it), but because there are a lot of characters and a lot of factions, and I wasn’t clear on all of them until the very end. It was only published four months ago, so I have NO idea when book 2 will come out, and I’m sure I will need a refresher by then. I am for sure going to read his debut novel (The Lesson) while I’m waiting.
We got ridiculous amounts of snow this past Saturday. It snowed steadily for, I don’t know, 18-20 hours, and we got over a foot of snow in the flat parts of the yard AFTER all the wind. Jack kept asking to go outside during the storm, and we kept trying to explain that blizzard-level winds were making it too dangerous to be outside. Toddlers, man.
It’s been really cold, so the snow was light and powdery. Not good for snowballs or forts or snowmen, but great for falling and rolling around (and easier to shovel). Jack LOVES it. For two days we’ve been running around the yard pretending to be transformers and climbing mountains.
Then finally, on the third day after the storm, it warmed up enough to make the snow packable. Jack and I spent a delightful afternoon making snowballs and pretending they were people or eggs (never a snowball). Rather, I sat on my butt in the snow making a pile of snowballs. Jack picked up each snowball and either rescued the person from the natural disaster that had befallen it (the disaster varied), buried the penguin egg in the snow to keep it safe from hatching, sat on the penguin egg so it would hatch, or gave me the egg-for-eating so I could make a snow cake.
My favorite was when he’d take an egg to a spot to bury it, put it down so he could dig a hole, and then lose it (or step on it) in the messy snow surrounding him. “Where’s my egg?”
It’s warming up to the 40s tomorrow and for the next few days, with rain in a couple of days, so we have maybe one more day to really play in the snow. Gotta take advantage.