Okay, it has taken me most of the year, but I have finally gotten a bingo on my 2025 Book Bingo card. Well, to be honest, I got a bingo last month and have since gotten a second one, but it took me a while to write up these reviews. The next lot should be done soon.

If you want to know all the details of my 2025 Book Bingo Challenge, check out my Book Bingo page HERE. It’s not too late to grab a card and play along.

This is a bingo I made with the central free square, but I’m going to say its free as in ‘free choice book’ rather than just a ‘free point’, so we’ll still have five reviews. Enjoy.

Challenge: Written by Terry Pratchett

Book: Hogfather – Terry Pratchett

Rating: 5/5

This is the 20th Discworld book, and my first time reading anything by Terry Pratchett. It turned out to be the perfect place to jump into this world. I went out and got a lot more of his books immediately after finishing Hogfather.

This is just such a fun, funny, and sweet book. Its about Death pretending to be the Hogfather (Discworld Santa Claus) because some assassins found a way to kill the Hogfather, but the belief from the kids is still needed. We switch between a whole cast of characters, a lot of whom I now know are from other Discworld stories, but I wasn’t lost at all by not knowing more about these call backs, and there were no chapters where I felt bored. Death himself is a returning character, and even without the background from previous books I loved him so much here. Whether he’s trying to be Hogfather around kids or going off and fixing certain Christmas tropes, Death stole the show here.

I love this book so much. I like the humor, I like the heartwarming messages it has, I like the worldbuilding and magic/belief system, and I like how clever the mystery behind the Hogfather’s murder and its consequences is. Highly recommended to everyone.

Challenge: Told by a Villain POV

Book: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Suzanne Collins

Rating: 4/5

This was my first time interacting with the Hunger Games franchise in years, and this book, despite possibly being the weakest in the series, is still a very good welcome back. I’m going to assume most readers are somewhat familiar with the series, but if not the TL;DR is that a dystopian society controls the population by making kids fight in a death game, and it is amazing.

I feel Ballad was more raw and brutal than the original trilogy. It is set 64 years before the start of The Hunger Games, and focuses on the 10th Hunger Games, and things are very different this early on. The tributes aren’t treated like celebrities. They are locked in the monkey enclosure at the zoo, starved, and those that lash out are killed and have their bodies dragged around the city. The Capital is also not as decadent as it is by the time of the 74th Hunger Games, with damage from the war still visible, and the citizens still having fresh memories of the bombings, starvation, and other horrors they went through during the war. This book does a great job of showing us how Panam and the Hunger Games became what we saw in the original trilogy.

We also see how the series villain President Snow comes to be. This story is told from his POV, and we see all his struggles, watch him chase his goals, and also see how much he has bought into the lie that he is superior and deserves better. Snow gets so many opportunities to grow, adjust his beliefs, and learn to value other people. But those just aren’t the choices he ends up making. For most of the book, Snow’s success is tied up with District 12 tribute Lucy Gray’s fate, so even though he is a piece of shit, you root for him because you want Lucy Gray to win. (Shoutout to Youtuber Ian Gubeli for summing up so well how Collins makes us so invested in Snow’s journey because of Lucy Gray. I’d been struggling to understand how I felt about well, the way I connected with Snow, but watching his video made it click.)

This book and the movie get slammed a bit for the second part of the story that takes place in District 12 after the games end. I didn’t hate that end part; it did a good job of expanding the world, of showing Snow’s decent into villain territory, and it had some iconic scenes. But it feels off pacing wise, and with Snow going from what Lucy Gray needs to survive to her biggest threat, it gets harder to connect with him. That last bit is okay though, because this is a story about how going along with the dehumanization efforts of an oppressive regime does in fact strip away your own humanity. I think it’s right that such a story is uncomfortable, and that it leaves readers not getting everything they want.

Challenge: Free Square

Book: Sunrise on the Reaping – Suzanne Collins

Rating: 5/5

Centre square is a Free Square, but to make this a five book review I’m still going to pick a book to fill it, and since we’re talking about The Hunger Games series, let’s keep that discussion going with Sunrise on the Reaping.

I thought I knew exactly what to expect from a novel about Haymitch’s games, since we saw how they ended in Catching Fire. I was wrong. Haymitch’s games were very different to what we saw in Catching Fire, and Collins uses those differences to say a lot about the power of changing narratives, both with regular old censorship and just by telling the story a certain way. I’m not going to go into too much detail with this one, because discovering what really happened during the 50th Hunger Games is such a huge part of this story.

Sunrise on the Reaping has everything good about a Hunger Games book, and still has new things to say about dystopias. It also has the right amount of fanservice, though is it really fanservice when all the cameos from characters in Catching Fire or Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes makes perfect sense?

The way you really know that this book is a five star read, is that it made me cry. First time I have actually full on cried my eyes out in a hunger games book.

Challenge: Has Immortality

Book: A Court of Mist and Fury – Sarah J. Maas

Rating: 4.5

One of the romantasy staples that I always turned my nose up at until a friend convinced me to read them. This is the second book in the very popular Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Mass. I’ve enjoyed both books in the series so far. They’re exciting stories with steamy sex scenes. The first book was a good balance between the high stakes fae trials and the romance, but I felt it missed out on some chances to flesh out the world. In A Court of Mist and Fury, we get to finally see more of the world, and the lack of seeing the wider world in the first book becomes a plot point and a source of character development.

As well as expanding the world, Mist and Fury takes the series in a new way by dropping a really big bomb early on in the book that I feel is a bit much to drop on someone who hasn’t read the first book. It’s something that changes up the romance elements of the story, examining some of the issues with the romance from book 1 and allowing Maas to play with new romance tropes. I must admit though, I think that the fact that I took a long break between the two books makes the twist work a lot better for me, as forgetting some details makes it easier to accept it.

I enjoyed the series, and I plan to continue it, but I’m not in a hurry to do so.

Challenge: Short Fiction Magazine

Book: Dirty Magick Magazine Jan 2025 – C.D. Brown

Rating: 3.5/5

Dirty Magick Magazine is a new, I guess a semi-prozine, created by C.D. Brown. It publishes urban fantasy, swords and sorcery, and gothic horror with a somewhat ‘hardboiled’ flavour. This particular issue focuses more on the horror, with Mark Mitchell’s story “Another Roll, Mr…?” and Laura J. Campbell’s Skeleton Flowers both being on the creepier side of urban fantasy. The other story, June 2020 Human World Orientation Meeting on the other hand is a humorous piece about Loki hosting a zoom meeting to tell supernatural creatures how to live in the human world.

This is probably one of the weaker issues of Dirty Magick I’ve read. I liked the May issue more, and not just because my story was in there. The other two stories, Emmylou Kotzé’s A Tale of Two Killers and Vanessa MacLellan’s Malcolm’s Dirty Jobs were both really enjoyable fantasy adventures.

But I’m not talking about the May 2025 issue, or even Dirty Magick as a whole. Taken in isolation, the best I can say about Dirty Magick Jan 2025 is that it is alright, and good value for money. The three stories were good, but they haven’t ended up being very memorable. To be fair though, horror/darker short stories don’t tend to click with me a lot of the time, so the fact that I did like Campbell and Mitchell’s stories is fairly high praise from me. If you like stories that lean more towards horror, or want a more gritty, hard-boiled, noirish fantasy experience, definitely check out Dirty Magick.

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Those are the books from my first bingo of the year, and I’ll be back soon with more reviews. At the time of writing, I have filled twelve squares on my card, so I’m half way there. Wish me luck completing the card.

~ Jayde