No book review today, unfortunately, the last few days have been more chaotic than I was expecting. But next week I’ll be reviewing The Crown’s Fate, the sequel to The Crown’s Game, a duology about Russian enchanters serving the Tsar. Spoiler: The Crown’s Game was absolutely amazing, and so far, Fate is turning out to be a worthy successor!

I have signed up for The 11th annual Canadian Book Challenge! I’m really excited to expand my reading outside of my normal comfort zone (urban fantasy, high fantasy, etc) and try to read more multiculturally. I’ve been researching books by First Nations authors, but the hard part seems to be finding books my library actually has! It’s supposed to be 13 Canadian books (set in Canada/about Canada/written by Canadians) in the next year. (Canada Day to Canada Day.) So if all goes well, one of my book reviews each month should be about a Canadian book!

In other news, my husband and I helped a friend vend at Anthrocon in Pittsburgh last weekend, and that was an extraordinary amount of fun! I got a little bit of reading time in the hotel room while she was at parties, but I spent the largest amount of my weekend selling leather masks to people. She had a record weekend, so it was pretty awesome. All of the hotels and restaurants near the conference center go all out for the Con – our hotel keys have original art of a derpy-looking unicorn! I got a couple of chances to walk around the vendor room, and there were a couple of small publishing houses there, but (and this makes perfect sense, it’s Anthrocon, after all) they catered exclusively to Anthro writing. I thought about picking up a book anyway, but I just didn’t see anything that called to me. I don’t mind fantasy whose world involves anthro animals – I loved Redwall, after all – but all of the blurbs felt much more like “this book is about anthropomorphic animals doing stuff because they’re anthropomorphic” than “they just happen to be humanoid animals doing things.” It’s a small distinction, I suppose. And for the main audience at the Con, not an important one. (I’m obviously not the target audience.)

I have a lot of interesting books heading my way in my local library system, including a biography of Jon Stewart (of The Daily Show fame), a memoir by an abortion doctor, and a retelling of Captain Hook’s origin story. Exciting things to come!