Emerjas

Bank: $75

Cards in hand: cat, robot, scottie dog

6/28/20 Roll 11:

15. Read a book with a tree (or trees) on the cover, or that is set in a mountain community.

Book: TBD

6/27/20 Roll 10:

Just Visiting

Book:  368 pages, so $3.00 to the bail fund

So when something really horrible happened in Ollie's life, who did he turn to? Not his parents who have failed to give him proper emotional support at every opportunity in this book. No, he ran straight into the arms of his love interest who had been treating him horribly the entire book. And right after Ollie had finally decided that he deserved to be treated better. Unfortunately, his support system was not great, so his choices for people to turn to were very limited.

I think the best parent in Ollie's life is his aunt. She listened to him about his relationship problems and then got him to see that things weren't about him. Ollie was mad at the guy he liked, Will, for ignoring him after finding out Ollie's family had ended up staying in the area instead of going back to California like Will had thought. The thing was, when Will learned this, he also found out at the same time that Ollie had told multiple girls at their school that Will wasn’t straight when Will isn't out to anyone and understandably freaked out about this. Will had told Ollie he wasn't out to his family and, when he talked to Ollie later after calming down, explained that he's afraid his family will cut him off if they find out he's not straight. So Will was worrying about his survival. Ollie's aunt kindly reminded Ollie that not everyone had accepting families like Ollie did and he couldn't force someone to be ready to come out on his timetable.

As for Ollie's bio parents, well... Ollie tried to go to his mom for relationship advice. In response to a serious question, she sang "Let It Be" by the Beatles from start to finish and expected Ollie to listen to the whole thing. And that was her only answer. Ollie made a mental note to never try going to her for relationship advice again.

There's only been a single appearance of the dad and it was not good. He came in at about 40%. It was in the middle of the night and the aunt had to go to the hospital suddenly, so the parents were going to drop Ollie off at their house to watch his cousins while all the adults wen to the hospital. He came in Ollie's room and started screaming at him over nothing and eventually started cursing. He continued screaming over nothing until they left in separate cars. I understand this was a stressful situation, and you're not going to be at your best, but that doesn't make it right to take it out on someone else, especially your kid. It's even worse with Ollie's narration about it. We learn the cursing was a new thing that the dad had never done before, but Ollie said there's no point talking to him when he's like that, suggesting the screaming happened often enough that Ollie knew what to expect and how he needed to act around him to get through it. I've not seen any other scenes with the dad, so I don't have any other scenes to compare. This was all the author gave me - the dad screaming at the son a lot in a single, short scene and the implication that this happened regularly.

So my one impression of the dad was that horrible scene, and the mom has had a few scenes that I feel were supposed to come across as funny or quirky, but mostly made me sad for Ollie.

I'm a big fan of Drake's way of dealing with a man who intentionally underpaid him for his work when he was hired to build him a barn.

The man is apparently well-known for cheating contractors out of money, but I bet he'll think twice about doing that after this.

I'm doing romances today. One contemporary YA and one historical. I have yet to meet the love interest in Only Mostly Devastated, so I don't know how that romance will go, but I've met the two main characters in Rebel and I love them both.

I just met Drake's family, and I love them already. Especially his mother. She meets Valinda, sees she's in distress, and immediately offers assistance. Drake and his sister-in-law had similar responses earlier in the book, although their assistance came in quite a different form. They're all great. I hope there's a lot more of the whole family.

Oh, I would not get along with Ollie's mom.

After their unexpected move across the country, Ollie gets his first chance to do a group video chat with his friends back home. His mom has him do it in the dining room so he can prepare the vegetables for dinner while he talks to them, which he has no problem doing. However, his entire family, including his mom, keeps interrupting him while he's talking to his friends until they give up after just a few minutes because his friends can't hear him speak. Naturally, he's upset about this. He still continues to help prepare dinner, but is quiet while he does so. His mom doesn't like that and comes over and tells him he needs to practice mindfulness and think of all the things he's grateful for. It's at this point Ollie's narration tells us that his mom believes that people need to be "happy and satisfied and positive" or else bad things will happen to you.

Let the boy experience his emotions! Being upset is a perfectly natural experience! People can't be happy all the time. It's especially frustrating when she's part of the reason he's upset.

Senior year without any of my friends? At a totally unfamiliar school, with teachers who didn't know me, right when grades actually started to matter?

Senior year being the time when your grades finally start to matter is certainly a new one for me.

I decided to go with this for BL-opoly since it was the one sci-fi book I currently had checked out from the library. Very first page tells how the apocalypse came about: First a comet appeared in the sky that caused all that saw it to go blind. Then a virus from the comet started wiping out the population and turning the dead into zombies. Then the survivors decided to build an AI to help survive, but it decided to save the planet by nuclear fire. Then aliens invaded. But they ended up fleeing when natural disasters kept wreaking havoc on the planet. And that's how the apocalypse went down.

I like how, instead of going with just one reason for the apocalypse, the author threw in all the reasons. I just kept laughing when it continued to escalate and then aliens suddenly appeared and just as suddenly decided they didn't want the planet after all since it was such a disaster.

I read 22 books last month with an average score of 3.61. 5 were graphic novels and 11 were YA. My most-read genres were contemporary, romance, fantasy, and mystery.

My favorite book was definitely All The Bad Apples - Moïra Fowley-Doyle. My least favorite was Date Me, Bryson Keller - Kevin van Whye. Very easy to choose this month.

I knocked out some more books on my 2020 Reading Plans list. I'm now at 20/38. My most and least favorite books of this month were included on that list. Luckily, it was only one of the ones I read from this list that didn't work for me this month.

5 Stars

4 Stars

3.5 Stars

3 Stars

2.5 Stars

2 Stars

Books by author gender:

• Male: 4
• Female: 17
• Non-binary: 1
• Female/Male Mix: 0

Books by format:

• Physical: 9
• Audio: 13

And after the one scene over halfway through the book where Alfred suddenly introduced his husband who had never been mentioned before, the husband disappeared again with no explanation and was never mentioned again. In the one scene he was in, he had one bubble of dialogue where he spoke two sentences. I don't know why Alfred and his husband don't live together or why the guy has zero interaction with Bruce, his nephew, even though Alfred is Bruce's legal guardian. I feel like he existed solely so the author could say her Alfred was gay and then once that was accomplished, he was no longer needed, so he was forgotten.

So this version has Alfred as Bruce's uncle instead of butler. That was an interesting change that I didn't mind, although I didn't like the fact that right after Bruce's parents died, Alfred shipped him off to boarding school. The book started with Bruce's return from boarding school, so we've seen multiple scenes of Alfred and Bruce living together now.

So imagine my surprise when we suddenly learn over halfway through that Alfred is married. Where has his husband been living all this time? Because it's not been in the same house as them. And where was he that he didn't visit his nephew who was suddenly hospitalized for almost a day earlier in the book? Bruce's dead parents and Selina's dead mother have been mentioned more than Alfred's very-much-alive spouse (that I had no clue existed until he appeared on page) even though Alfred and Bruce live together and Alfred has gotten multiple scenes. It just seems weird.

So a kid has been kidnapped from the high school and the principal is the one questioning potential witnesses instead of the police who are assigned to the case? I know the GCPD is typically corrupt, but do the cops there not even pretend to do their jobs in this universe?

I can't do it. This book has no quotation marks for dialogue and has already had quite a bit of dialogue in the short amount I've read. I have no desire to spend the entire book trying to sort out which parts are being spoken and which parts aren't when this all could have been solved with proper punctuation. Reading an extended conversation that had non-dialogue bits thrown in throughout it was frustrating. The lack of quotation marks is just incredibly distracting. The only way I could do this is if I did it on audio so I didn't have to look at the text.

The more I read about US history, the more amazed I am at how many children pretending to be adults there were in the government. Reading about these grown men behaving so childishly would be laughable if they didn't have the power they did so that their actions didn't carry so many consequences for everyone else.

And of course, even when things change, they really don't seem to change that much when you really start looking. The introduction even goes into some of the parallels including the fact that a recent congressman would threaten other congressman with knives with no repercussions apparently, so we're not even past the violence part. And we're certainly not past the bullying in the government, unfortunately.

I'll definitely be reading some lighter books this weekend.