His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie book review

 

His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie book review

His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie  So first up i have thorn by intisar khanani. And this is a fantasy book that is also apparently a fairy tale retelling of this fairy tale called the goose girl, which i have literally never heard of before. 

So i will not be talking at all about like the retelling aspect of it because i've never heard of this fairy tale before. 

I also don't really know anything about fairy tales beyond the ones that were made into disney movies. 

But as a young adult fantasy book, i really enjoyed it. However i also need to say that i'm the type of person who really enjoys young adult fantasy books that are like super slow-moving and like nothing really happens for a lot of the book and stuff like that. 

So i recognize now after reading a bunch of different young adult fantasy books that my preferences in young adult fantasy very often don't align with other people. 

So in this book you are following this character named princess alyrra who is obviously a princess. But she is part of this family that is really cruel to her. She is abused by her brother, like physically abused, and her mother basically like dismisses her. She's seen as kind of like worthless. 

But then she becomes betrothed to this prince from another kingdom. There's a lot that happens even before like she leaves her home, but i won't get into like all of those nitty-gritty details. 

But basically she is sent along with this girl who is not a fan of hers — for reasons that again i'm not going to get into because i don't want to just talk about all of the plot details. 

But she is basically on her way on this carriage ride and this girl who is supposed to be like her lady-in-waiting sort of idea doesn't like her at all and basically decides to give her over to this witch. 

And this is a witch who wants to take down the prince and his family. And so what the witch ends up doing is basically causing the lady in waiting and princess alyrra to switch bodies. 

This is not great for princess alyrra, partially because you know now she's switched bodies with this person but also because like she doesn't want the prince and this royal family to be in danger or anything like that. But at the same time now that she's not a princess anymore, she kind of has this freedom that she's never had before in her life. 

And a part of her wonders whether or not she actually should do anything about this whole body switching situation because she might actually prefer not being a princess anymore. 

So like i said, i really enjoyed this book, partially because it is, again, a very slow-moving book but that means there is a lot of character development that happens in the story. You learn a lot about princess alyrra and her life growing up and what her family's like. 

And you also see the impacts that like trauma and abuse can have on a person and how they interact with other people and things like that and how they depend or don't depend on other people and all of this sort of stuff, which i thought was like very well handled overall. 

There is like a little bit of a romantic plot in this story because again princess alyrra is betrothed to this prince but obviously like that becomes more complicated with this whole body switching situation. 

But i think that all of the romantic stuff is handled really, really well and like honestly touched me a little bit. It also has like a darker side to it, which is again something else that i really enjoy in my young adult fantasy books. 

There are a handful of characters who die over the course of this book and there were a couple of them that like legitimately made me cry. 

But i also think that like if you're someone who is going into this book wanting certain things like action and romance and all of that stuff in your young adult fantasy, you're not gonna enjoy this book at all. 

This is really like a quiet slow-moving very internal book that is happening here. Even the magic itself is like very minor. A lot of the chapters are spent just following princess alyrra as she's like walking around doing very mundane tasks like taking care of the geese and like scooping horse dung. 

Like it could not get more mundane than this but i was like so enraptured by this book because i found princess alyrra and her whole situation to be so intriguing, and also just like very relatable to me as a human being. 

Because like, to me, i would like never want to be royalty and like would 100 percent prefer being the goose girl forever. Princess alyrra basically like weighing out her options and like finding like things like friends and people she can depend on is like really beautiful and really moving to me. 

But also like confronting the fact that she has this sort of like life that she's born into and this role that she's supposed to uphold and all this stuff and her debating about whether or not she should bother with any of it at all and all this stuff i found to be really, really great. 

Honestly i like finished this book and i like really wish the second book was already out but it's fine. I will happily wait for it. So if you are someone who also enjoys really slow moving fantasy books, then i very much recommend thorn to you. And then the other book that i read is vera kelly is not a mystery. This is the follow-up to who is vera kelly, i think that's the name of the book. 

I read that book i think earlier this year, maybe late last year and i like that book. It is basically like a literary mystery book. The first book is a literary espionage book. And in the second book you are following vera kelly as she has basically left the CIA. She found herself in a kind of precarious situation at the end of the first book and now she has found herself back in the united states. 

Through a series of events, she basically ends up becoming a private investigator and she gets hired to find this boy who is originally from the dominican republic. Him and his parents, potentially, have come over to the united states and the person who like hires vera kelly is his aunt and uncle. 

There's a lot of like political upheaval happening in the dominican republic during this time period and so they basically said that like this boy and his family are very like well known and are potentially under threat. 

And so they want to hire vera kelly to find this boy because he was like staying with someone else who passed away and then he was taken into the foster system and now they can't find him anymore. 

So vera kelly gets hired to basically look into what exactly happened to this boy. But obviously things are not quite what they seem. Yeah so like i said, i really enjoyed this book too. 

I honestly enjoyed this one significantly better than the first book. The first book i think had like pacing issues. And i think that just in general I'm not an espionage type of gal, so like those types of books are never really going to book i fell in love with. 

And so now that like vera kelly has become more like a private investigator, totally into it. The other thing that i really like, this is a historical mystery. The books take place in the 1960s and vera kelly herself is queer and it deals with like what it's like being queer during this time period. 

The very beginning of the book talks about vera kelly, she's like basically getting broken up with over the phone while she's at work. She's working at this news station and her conversation gets overheard and she gets fired because she's queer. 

And there's also scenes where like bars that she goes to get raided by the police and all this stuff and basically like having to hide who you are and all of that stuff. Like all of that is discussed really, really well in this book, i think even better than in the first book. 

But there's also just like really great discussions in general about like how vera kelly basically hides a significant portion of herself from everyone around her and things like that. 

And also i just really enjoyed the mystery that this story gets involved with. There is like a little bit where vera kelly goes somewhere outside of new york, i won't say more than that, where i was just like, eh, not into this part quite as much because it reminded me i think too much of the first book. 

But otherwise i was really, really into this book. So yeah, i enjoyed this book a lot more than the first book. I think that Rosalie Knecht is really developing like her own writing style and really developing vera kelly well as a character. And so this is definitely going to be a series that i continue on with. 

So yeah, if you were someone who was like maybe on the fence with the first vera kelly book, i definitely think you should give the second one a try because i definitely think it's significantly stronger than the first book was. So again, that book is very kelly is not a mystery. 

So yeah that's everything i have for this week. Very quick video because i only have two books to talk about. I don't have any sort of like preview as to what i'm currently reading because i have been doing the whole picking up a book, putting down the book after a couple of chapters a bunch this week. 

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