book reviews – Lost in the Story

An Enchantment of Ravens – book review

Published on December 9, 2020December 9, 2020 by Arabella3 Comments

It’s getting close to the end of the year and the completion of the Goodreads challenge, something I’m behind on at the moment. This means that these past few weeks have been full of speed reading (or as close to speed reading as a dyslexic student with an eye watering number of essays due can). One of the books I got my hands on to try to make up on my book count was An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Roderson.

An Enchantment of Ravens is a fantasy book that follows Isobel, a young master painter who has a particularly dangerous set of clients: the fair folk. In a world where craft is highly valued by fair folk and everything is paid for by enchantments, Isobel developed a sharp mind and polite mask that didn’t upset the fair folk she painted. Things take a turn for the worst when she paints her first royal fair one, Rook the autumn prince. After she painted him with human emotion endangering both the prince and herself, they travel to the autumn lands for Isobel to face trial for her crime. The book follows them as they form an alliance to survive, prompting forbidden emotions that endanger them even more.

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Why I’m learning to write negative book reviews

Published on November 4, 2020October 22, 2020 by Arabella3 Comments

Leaving negative reviews of books has become a tad of a controversial topic in the book community. There’s been a fair amount of discourse over if anyone really benefits from them and if it’s morally OK for people to be writing them in the first place. Once you’ve gotten past that debate you then come to the question of what is even classes as a negative review? Is three stars a negative review, but three and a half a positive one? Very quickly you can find yourself overwhelmed with a lot of people with a whole bunch of strong opinions.

In all my years of blogging I’ve never published a negative review on my blog (I class a review of under three stars to be negative). Goodreads yes, but here on Lost in the Story no. My reasoning behind it was why waste time reviewing a book I didn’t enjoy? Why spend all that time going through the book a second time making notes when I didn’t enjoy it? I also had the opinion that there was enough negativity in the world, and I didn’t want to be adding to that. All of that combined with the fact I tend to dnf books I don’t enjoy meant I never really had to face these problems.

However, I wouldn’t be writing this post if my thoughts on the matter hadn’t changed to some degree. Over the past few months, I’ve been doing some thinking and I want to break down for you why I’m now learning to write negative reviews of books.

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Five books I loved, but never reviewed

Published on October 28, 2020October 28, 2020 by Arabella1 Comment

Despite this blog heavily revolving around book reviews, I don’t review every single book I read. Sometimes there’s simply not enough hours in the day, other times life decided to throw a curve ball and other times I’m not sure you guys will be all that interested. There are so many reasons I don’t get the chance to review every single book I get my hands on and, for the most part, I’m okay with that. However, when I come across a book I thoroughly enjoyed, but didn’t get around to sharing, I do feel a tad guilty. I know authors put hours upon hours into their books so if I enjoy it, I want to share it with people in the hopes that someone else might get the chance to appreciate it too. So today I’m going to quickly share with you five books I loved but sadly never got around to reviewing. I really hope you can find a book in this list you enjoy as much as I did.

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2020 reading challenge – mid-year check in

Published on July 1, 2020June 29, 2020 by Arabella3 Comments

Well we’re past the half way point of 2020. Congratulations, it’s been quite a year so far.

Like many book lovers I decided to take part in the Goodreads reading challenge. It’s the first year I’ve ever participated with the challenge, I’m slightly ashamed to say that until December, Goodreads wasn’t even on my radar (not sure how I managed to miss it).

I set myself the goal to read 20 books this year. I fully understand that this may seen low for a book blogger and to start off with I was pretty ashamed about it. I’ve seen many bloggers who have 50-70 books as their goal, and then there’s me with a measly 20. However, over the year I’ve began to lessen some of the insecurity of it. At the end of the day I’m dyslexic and have Irlens… I can’t exactly read fast.

Anyway, with us past the mid year mark now is a good time to reflect on how I’d doing reading and if I’m on track.

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