What I'm Reading Vol. 129.

What I'm reading. Rainbow book photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Hello my darlings,

Happy June!! Can you believe 2205 is half over? I certainly can’t.

Speaking of time flying, Mr. DitL and I just celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary!! Here are some wedding photos from our original day 10 years ago. I may have been just a baby, but I still had incredible taste in jewelry then ( if I do say so myself).

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To celebrate our decade of marriage, Mr. DitL and I ran off to the Cayman Islands for an incredible week of relaxation by turquoise water and impossibly soft sand. We also had a celebrity sighting at our hotel…look who else was posting IGs in front of those distinctive yellow striped umbrellas!! He walked right by us at check-in and we freaked out internally but played it cool on the outside.

All in all, our 10 year anniversary adventure was perfect and I want to do it again immediately.

Speaking of love, I want to take a minute to wish all my LGBTQIA+ jewelry lovers a very happy and safe Pride Month! I hope that you always know how enthusiastically welcome you are here at Diamonds in the Library. Love is love, trans women are women, and bigotry sucks.

xoxo,
Becky

What I’m reading

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner: Bookshop.org | Amazon

This is the first in a new fantasy series and it was so good! Haunting, visceral, and enthralling, Godkiller is set in a kingdom where gods are outlawed and Godkillers like main character Kissen make their living hunting down and destroying any new small gods that pop up or lingering older ones that have been in hiding.

Kissen is an incredibly badass woman with a knack for killing things that are nearly invulnerable, which is why she’s so surprised when she finds herself joining forces with a very unusual child who has a specific god-related problem. Soon they meet a baker/ex-soldier with a royal connection and the three of them join forces on a dangerous journey.

This description is vague because my favorite parts of this book would be too spoilery, but if you like good fantasy, put this one on your library hold list now and you’ll thank me later.

The Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne: Bookshop.org | Amazon

We’re discussing the series as a whole because these books have a major problem at the beginning that the author solves as the series progresses.

The Iron Druid Chronicles follow of Atticus, the last Druid on Earth. In this world, any god or mythical creature that people believe in is real. Atticus is on speaking terms with gods from many belief systems, battles with fairies, is friends with elementals, and has magic that allows him to have lengthy telepathic conversations with his dog and sidekick, Oberon.

The author has an absurd, dry, sarcastic sense of humor that I enjoy and I find his writing witty and clever. He also has an ENORMOUS problem with oversexualizing female characters. When Atticus meets a goddess, she’s always supernaturally attractive, scantily clad, and interested in having sex with him. When he battles witches, they’re wearing black leather and each have enchantments on specific body parts to mesmerize and distract men. I don’t think he interacts with a woman without thinking about her sexually for the first three books.

This gets ickiest when Atticus (2,000 years old) takes on a woman in her 20’s as his apprentice. Thankfully, he tells her that they can’t act on their attraction because the teacher/student bond is sacred and sticks to that conviction. But there’s only one book where this gets super uncomfortable before the author’s writing noticeably changes.

I don’t know if Hearne figured out the problem himself, or got bad reviews, or if someone sat him down and talked to him about feminism, but he actually does turn things around. The hypersexualized descriptions stop, the female characters become complex and powerful, and the apprentice becomes a main character who narrates many chapters from her perspective.

But what really redeems it for me (VAGUE SPOILER ALERT) is that Atticus faces specific, violent consequences in the final book because of the way he treated women at the beginning. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a series that turned around such a problematic element so completely and actually punished the character responsible within the world of the story.

I enjoyed this series and I think they’re worth a read if they’re your type of book, but please note the CW for oversexualizing of female characters and extreme religious irreverence. If you’re not okay with jokes about religion, do not read these books.

Want to see more fiction I’m loving? Click here.