Month-in-Review: April 2020 At the Grimoire Reliquary

April was a great month for the blog in terms of views, my best to date! I had over seven hundred views which, granted, is what anyone who is anyone gets in a microsecond – but I’m well-pleased with it. What do I owe that to?

I Experienced A New World With The Girl and the Stars by Mark Lawrence

Mark Lawrence shared and retweeted my review of his latest release a bunch of times, and that seems to have done the trick! I appreciate the eyeballs – The Girl and the Stars is one of those fantasy books that awakened in me a sense of wonder and excitement. Its protagonist, Yaz, is a survivor and a fighter, and a decent human being faced with enormous hardship.

You can read the proper review here.

I Found True Joy with Giant Days Volumes 01 and 02

Ah Esther. Esther, Esther, Esther. It’s so rare that I find a fictional character who I can crush on because of how bloody similar I am to them. But I have found you, Esther, and nothing will tear us apart!

Giant Days by John Allison is comedic slice-of-life gold. The heroes are the trio of friends, Esther, Daisy and Susan, whose University adventures make for some of the funniest, most adorable everyday adventures I’ve come across in recent memory. I’ve spoken about the first volume at length here, and about the second one here. Both are so frickin’ goooooooood!!!

A Whole Bunch of Star Wars Nonsense

Well, to be fair, I have my work cut out for me, having written a post whose sole reason for existing is to remind me that I’ve got plenty of stuff to catch up on. The catching up has begun with the two volumes of Star Wars: Rebels’ Kanan. I should warn you: The Last Apprentice is better than First Blood. Just by a little, but it’s noticeable enough.

I Inspected the Mysteries of the Ancient Greeks in my Essay on Medea!

Vengeance, Bloody Vengeance…In Medea, the tragic could not be of a more personal nature. This is a tale of a woman scorned, a wife betrayed by the father of her children, for whom she’s spilled the blood of countrymen and kin alike. Medea, child of king Aeëtes of Colchis and granddaughter of Circe, grew up in the territory of present-day Georgia. The easternmost shores of the Black Sea were, to the Hellenistic people, a “wild place” (Paul Roche, Introduction to Medea). Though she bears the blood of the sun god Helios, she is foreign to the inner world of Ancient Greece.

To read the whole essay, click here.

Last but not least…