September was booked and busy. But I did still get a couple books read! And now that I’m looking at them again, they are pretty thick, which is satisfying!

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

I initially had no interest in reading this book. I do occasionally re-read The Hunger Games trilogy, but not often. But then I ended up on Hunger Games TikTok last year which was either planted by the PR team for the upcoming movie of this book, or just happened to be around the same time as the first trailer for the movie. And it got me. And I am so glad that it did.

So this book is a prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy about how the boy Coriolanus Snow became the feared President Snow Katniss knew. It IS SO GOOD. There are enough things that seem to become elements of Katniss’s character in the original series, enough to make it seem, or to make you understand, that he doesn’t just hate her as the Mockingjay, the representation of revolution, but actually her as a person as well because of what she reminds him of.

The world-building is so fantastic, the characters are so well-developed. And I shouldn’t be surprised because what else would we expect from Suzanne Collins, but it is just excellent. I am really looking forward to getting to see the movie hopefully in the near future.

It is the perfect amount of nostalgia for those of us that were teenagers when the original trilogy came out but I think it is interesting enough to appeal to the current generation of teenagers.

Wartime at Bletchley Park by Molly Green.

This would have been a pretty classic book for me a couple years ago. World War Two historical fiction, centering a female story. I really liked this, we follow Dulcie (hate the name, however) who is trying to work as a reporter, but it’s 1930s England so she isn’t having much luck. On the day Germany invades Poland she is busy preparing for her birthday, having a big shop and meeting up with a friend for a movie. However, when the news breaks that the UK as Poland’s ally will come to their defense, the cinemas, and basically everything else shuts and it’s announced that the black outs will start that night. As an aspiring journalist, she decides to go alone to London Bridge to watch the city’s lights go out. There she meets an American “broadcast news journalist” *cough CIA cough* and they have a whirlwind romance over the next couple days before he is deployed to Germany. The problem is that he is called up in the middle of the night (he’s a spy, duh), and they were going to exchange mailing addresses the next day. So now he’s gone and they have no way to keep in touch. Dulcie tries to move on and in that process she completes a crossword puzzle contest in one of the papers. That puzzle leads her to take an aptitude test, that then leads her to working as a code breaker at Bletchley Park.

A year or so goes by when she finally gets a letter from her American, and they rekindle their romance as much as they can when she is at Bletchley and he is in Berlin. And it goes from there, I won’t spoil it any further.

Like I said I really enjoyed this book, however my one thing with it is that it ends focused on the romance, when so much of her story was about her career and how she wanted to be successful in a male-dominated space, and then was! And it just seemed like that part of the story didn’t matter anymore. I would have loved another page, another chapter, talking about how she was continuing her career even now that she got to be in love.

Maybe that’s just the modern woman in me, who knows.

I’ve already finished my first book for October and it was INCREDIBLE. I cannot wait to tell you about it!

What have you been reading?

Laura