The Boy Next Door, Meg Cabot
Told in a series of e-mails, I read The Boy Next Door in one day. I couldn’t put down. It’s been a long time since I had read a book where I just wanted to site and binge it all at once.
Telling the traditional boy meets girl, boy lies to girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl learns the truth, they get together in the end formula, this book is funny, light, and even though you know in the end they’ll end up together, it is a romance after all, you keep wanting to read and find out what happens.
I have loved Meg Cabot since I first started reading The Princess Diaries over a decade ago. She does not disappoint with this book. Even though everything is told through the confines of e-mail exchanges, you still get to know and love all the characters in the book.
The Call of the Wild
February’s book club pick was Call of the Wild. I had remembered vaguely reading this while I was in middle school, but I also couldn’t remember if we had read this or White Fang. It was this.
This was very difficult to get through at first. The writing is full of dry, complex language, and is told through the perspective of the dog. My friends recommended listening to the audiobook. I had it done in two days.
This book, while it was easier to listen to than read, was still hard to listen to. As long as you go into it only attaching yourself to Buck, you’ll be fine. While it was interesting to listen to the dog adapt from a spoiled house dog to a fully wild dog, the descriptions of the violence was really off putting.
The Last Wish
So, after I read Blood of Elves last month, I learned The Last Wish is technically the first book in The Witcher series. And I can see why.
The Last Wish introduces Geralt and explains who The Witcher is, along with giving us many adventures (it’s a collection of short stories) to get to know him in. If you have watched the Netflix series, this book is pretty much all of the Geralt portions.
The fun part of this book is noticing that each story is basically a popular fairy tale retelling. I had fun figuring out each story and which fairy tale it was tied to.
The best part of this book was getting to know Geralt better, and really seeing his personality show through, since he was barely in Blood of Elves. And if you’ve only watched the show on Netflix, you’ll be surprised by how funny and verbose he is.
Stephanie Caffrey, Author 