Tiny Navajo Reads: Skyward, Vol. 3

Skyward, Vol. 3: Fix the World by Joe Henderson

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*Published August 27, 2019*

The last in the Skyward series, we see what happens when the Willa is able to figure out all that her father wanted her to know and what it means for everyone else in the world. As Willa makes her way to Kansas City, she learns a little more than she planned on.

Willa’s faced terrifying storms, giant man-eating bugs, a deadly rebellion and a whole lot of heartbreak but nothing can prepare her for this. It’s time for Willa to fulfill her father’s last request. Time to fix the world. But a revelation will rock Willa to her core and test her in ways she never imagined possible.

SKYWARD VOL. 3 collects issues 11-15 of the hit ongoing series from writer JOE HENDERSON (showrunner of Netflix’s LUCIFER) and artist LEE GARBETT (LUCIFER, LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD).

I do believe that my review over on Goodreads sums up this last volume really well.

Okay, this series was really good, but it felt like it ended far to quickly and far to easily. I love that Willa figures out what her father wanted her to find in Kansas City, I love that Willa was able to figure out how to save Chicago from the farmers that were coming to take over it. And while I truly love all of these features, everything was really rushed in the fast chapters of this series. So, while an excellent series, the ending wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it could be.

The only thing that I would end is that I truly wished we could have explored the ideas of the Earth losing gravity and what that actually meant for the people and the animals of the world. We got some idea of what it meant for the people in Chicago, and it was somewhat terrifying but also something I would like to experience. Granted, giant bugs are not my forte, but I’d just say in the city. But I would like to see more of the world this story is a part of. What does it mean for the Earth to lose the majority of its gravity?

 

Tiny Navajo Reads: Skyward, Vol. 2

Skyward, Vol. 2: Here There Be Dragonflies by Joe Henderson

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*Published March 5, 2019*

This second volume of Skyward picks up just about right where we left off, with Willa now trying to make her way out of Chicago to try and make her way to Kansas City. Hopefully.

Now a fugitive, Willa leaves Chicago and goes on the run! But when she takes refuge with some low-G farmers, she stumbles into a plot to attack the city. Oh, and on top of all that: giant, man-eating bugs! Maybe we should have led with that.

SKYWARD VOL. 2 collects issues 6-10 of the hit ongoing series from writer JOE HENDERSON (showrunner of Fox’s LUCIFER) and artist LEE GARBETT (LUCIFER, LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD).

Okayokayokay….giant insects!!! It makes sense, but giant insects that wish to eat me! Nopenopenope, get me out of here; I no longer wish to be a part of this world, I resign.

Okay, granted, I don’t think giant insects will ever come back, at least if the gravity doesn’t turn off here on earth, but if it does, I will be staying in the city, I will not be venturing outside of it for any reason. Unfortunately for Willa, she doesn’t have a choice. If she wants to restore gravity to the way it was, then she needs to make her way out of Chicago and try to figure out where it is her father wanted her to go. On her way to wherever she is supposed to be going, the trains stop. The trains aren’t supposed to stop and for good reason. Something which Willa and Edison find out once the doors are pushed open to see if people can figure out how to get the train moving again. INSECTS!!!! Flippin’ giant INSECTS!!!! (as you can probably tell, I have a thing for bugs that are not in their proper realm of tiny and not in my house…)

But it’s here that Willa, and we as her audience, find out more about how the cities are being kept alive now that there are giant insects roaming around the world outside of cities, and how much the cities are and have been relying on farms outside of their skyscraper realms. Only this seems far worse to me as the farms were left on their own to defend against the giant insects, something that no one in the cities really know about due to the isolation that the lessened gravity seems to have naturally enforced.

At the giant farms, a revolution seems to be brewing and it starts with taking back Chicago. By attacking Chicago with said giant bugs. Willa, being the woman that she is, decides that she can’t condone this, nor let it happen, so she does what she can in order to stop it. It convince those that live there that those in the city don’t know what’s going on out there and that there is a different way to go about this.

What I will say about this volume though is that the story seemed a bit more rushed in this volume, like things were moving far to fast to make any logical sense. Not that this is always a bad thing, but there was too much happening for it to be going in the direction it seemed to want you to think it was going. Other than the odd pacing issue, which  may be more my fault that anything, this volume is wonderfully action-packed and I do kind of wish to visit this world where gravity is low enough to fly. Though I could do without the giant bugs. Please no giant bugs!

What aspects of alternative worlds do you enjoy? What do you wish you could experience? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: Top Ten Books with Single-Word Titles

Hi guys! It’s time for another Top Ten Tuesday! TTT was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

And I actually have some time to write a Top Ten Tuesday! Rejoice! Anyway, today’s top for TTT is books with single-word titles. This sounds like such an interesting one, I kind of have to make time in order to talk about it. So, here we go!

Sourdough by Robin Sloan

Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Orleans by Sherri Smith

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

East by Edith Pattou

Taproot by Keezy Young

These are all books that I have read and enjoyed and they all have just a single word for their title. Sometimes this works beautifully, and you know right away what the book is about. Sometimes, it doesn’t and you have to read the book to figure out what exactly the title means. I enjoy it both ways, when the book titles tells me what’s going on as well as when I have to read the book to figure out what the title means in the context of the story. And those that I had to read to know have been some of my absolute favourites!

What are some of your favourite single word titles? Why do they jump out at you? Comment below and let me know! I’m always ready for a new read!

 

Tiny Navajo Reads: Thursday Three Recommended to Me

Thursday Threes: Books Recommended to Me

Hello again guys! I know that I missed last Thursday, but I’m learning to have posts ready the day before if I’m working a morning shift! Anyway, today we’re going to be talking about three books that have been recently recommended to me thanks to my fellow librarians! Which means they are extremely good books for me to read!

The Book of M by Peng Shepherd – recently recommended to me by my friend/coworker Megan who has an excellent taste in books and this one just sounds like it would be amazing anyway!

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson – while I have already read this book, but it was recommended to me by Clovis. I have talked about the books Clovis has recommended to me before, most the Fables series.

Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living among them, longs to be a pilot. When she discovers the wreckage of an ancient ship, she realizes this dream might be possible—assuming she can repair the ship, navigate flight school, and (perhaps most importantly) persuade the strange machine to help her. Because this ship, uniquely, appears to have a soul.

Ship of Theseus by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst – this was recommended to me by a manager at the library who found out that I like books that have been written in and that this was a book that dealt with this aspect of reading specifically. This is one that I’m excited to read!

One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire.

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.

The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

Have you had any recommendations lately? Who were they from and did you take them? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: December Wrap-Up

Wow, I’m a bit behind on this particular post, but that is okay! We can mess up here at Tiny Navajo Reads, especially myself! So, for the month of December, I read 22 books. Yeah, that may seem like a lot, but a lot of it was a single manga series of about 15 volumes. So, anyone who has read manga knows that these are really quick reads and they are awesome! And that is also why I was able to read so many books this month.

The books I read this month: The Bookshop Book, The Girl in the Tower, The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances, Library Wars: Love & War, Vol. 1 – 15, Fruits Basket, Collector’s Edition, Vol. 1, Our Bloody Pearl, and Skyward. 

I’ll also do a year wrap-up here, for how many books I read in all of 2018 as well. Those of you who are on Goodreads, you know that they challenge you each year to read a certain number of books. Last year, I set my goal/challenge of 120 books. I beat my goal by 45 books for a total of 165 books read last year. All of that reading, it was a good year for me. Reading is my escape from the world and I love seeing how much I was able to escape. And I found so many new characters and new worlds and new points of view.

So, what was your Goodreads goal for last year? Did you make it? What is your goal for this year? What do you plan on reading to accomplish your goal? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: Skyward

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

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*Published November 6, 2018*

Thank you again to Clovis, my awesome Sanderson-loving coworker, who brought this fully to my attention. The main reason I read this one is that he wanted me to kind of vet it for him. I was planning on reading it anyway, just not as soon as I did, which was as soon as our library’s copy came in. He even held it behind the desk for me so that I could be the first person to check it out. And while not a part of the Cosmere, as far as I can tell, this is still a spectacular young adult book about space and learning about yourself.

Spensa’s world has been under attack for hundreds of years. An alien race called the Krell leads onslaught after onslaught from the sky in a never-ending campaign to destroy humankind. Humanity’s only defense is to take to their ships and combat the Krell. Pilots are the heroes of what’s left of the human race.

Becoming a pilot has always been Spensa’s dream. Since she was a little girl, she has imagined soaring above the earth and proving her bravery. But her fate is intertwined with that of her father–a pilot himself who was killed years ago when he abruptly deserted his team, leaving Spensa’s chances of attending Flight School at slim to none.

No one will let Spensa forget what her father did, but she is determined to fly. And the Krell just made that a possibility. They’ve doubled their fleet, which will make Spensa’s world twice as deadly . . . but just might take her skyward.

I loved this new world that Brandon Sanderson has brought! A colony of humans trapped on a planet, beneath the surface where they must struggle to grow larger than a few hundred in one settlement. But for Spensa, this is a world that suffocates her. She wants to fly, be a pilot, like her father before her. We also see her father’s death has intertwined into her own fate and it causes Spensa to not only feel tension at the mention of her father but doubts about herself as well.

I love that we can see Spensa and her flight grow together and become more than what anyone thought they could be. With this being a war though, and a war fought in space, Spensa and her flight experience loss. A loss that they have never had to deal with before and one that teaches them they cannot take their lives for granted. We also see Spensa confront the death of her father in a way that she was not able to before, especially when she finds out more about his death. We see her rage not only at the world, but at herself, the Flight Academy, and her father. We also see her learn to control that rage and do what she does best, which is fly!

What are some of your favorite reasons to read? Do you read every book of a particular author? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: Top Ten Winter Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books to Read in the Winter

Hi all! Today is a Top Ten Tuesday and today we’re going to be talking about my top ten books to read during the winter. For me, since this is the first winter in a couple of years that I don’t have school, I don’t have an actual winter break. But, I do like resting on winter days, grey days, where I can snuggle into fuzzy blankets and just read. Especially when I’m not feeling well, which is one of those days. So, I have my blankets ready, I just need my books:

Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya

Library Wars by Kiiro Yumi

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

The Girl Who Heard Dragons by Anne McCaffrey

Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan

The Librarian by Christy Sloat

Ash and Quill by Rachel Caine

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Beauty Beside Me: Stories of My Grandmother’s Skirts/Shimá Sání Bitł’aakał Noot’ishígíí Nizhónígo Nidaashch’ąą’go Baa Hane’ by  Seraphine G. Yazzie

These are books that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time so I will be trying to work my way through them, especially that last one, Beauty Beside Me. I’ve had it for a while from Native American History Month as I was working on a display for my library and I TRULY need to read it and return it! So, that book first and then try and make my way through the rest of the list.

What books are your winter reads? Are they comfy and cozy, or the long-forgotten members of your TBR list? Comment below and let me know!