After taking eight months to get my first Book Bingo, the 2nd one is ready right away. Hopefully the rest of the card fills up quickly. For now though, let’s get to the best part of the Book Bingo challenge; talking about the books I’ve read.

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.

Challenge: Translated From Russian

Book: Monday Starts of Saturday – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Rating: 5/5

I did a full review of this book along with the Strugatsky’s more famous Roadside Picnic earlier this year. You can read the full review of both books HERE.

Not going to go into too much detail again. This book is about a computer engineer in Soviet Russia being recruited to an institution that researches magic, and it is absolutely bonkers. Even though I wasn’t familiar with all the Russian fairytales being referenced and a lot of the Soviet Union satire went over my head, I still got a lot out of this story. There were talking cats and fish, Merlin working in a Soviet research institution, some cool time travel stuff, and of course workaholics with annoying co-workers and a strange boss.

Again, I don’t want to repeat myself, so go check out my Reviewing the Strugatsky’s post for more details. I just want you all to know that this forgotten little book is a lot of fun.

Challenge: Been Adapted Into a Movie

Book: Redwall – Brian Jacques

Rating: 5/5

I listened to the audiobook of Redwall while on a roadtrip with my husband, so the fact I got to enjoy it with someone close to me while on an adventure will up my enjoyment of the story, but it still earns it’s 5 star rating. This book is aimed at younger readers, so in some places it feels a bit simplistic, but it is still engaging and entertaining for adults too.

This story follows the peaceful mice of Redwall Abbey as a force of pure, unreasonable evil in the form of Cluny the Scourge and his rat army threatens them. They work together with other woodland creatures to defend their home, whilst Cluny rules as a tyrant, killing his own soldiers. Even though the creatures of Redwall Abbey are undeniably the ‘good buys’ in this book, they are not immune from questionable actions that are called out, even if they were necessary. I would have liked to see the characters talk a bit more about the price of defending their home, but this is overall a book that promotes the value of a peaceful life.

I found the protagonist Matthias a bit of a Mary Sue (Marty Stu? Mouse Stu?) but for the inended age and the tone of the book that was fine. He got so many cool moments, and he prevails not just by finding an awesome weapon, but by befriending a range of other creatures. I loved the supporting cast of this story. Especially Constance the Badger and Jess Squirrel. Which brings up the fact that female characters are handled very well here. Jess is a mother with a young baby and a husband, but it is her not her husband that gets to be brave and join the fight. Even when you get a more typically feminine character like Cornflower, who is Matthias’s love interest and spends her time providing food and morale support to the other characters, that contribution is still treated as essential.

Redwall is a classic for a reason, and well worth reading no matter how old you are.

And yes, there was a Redwall movie. It was made by abridging the animated TV series. It still counts.

Challenge: Afrofuturism

Book: After the Flare – Deji Bryce Olukotun

Rating: 3.5/5

This is the kind of book I wouldn’t have heard about if I wasn’t looking for Afrofuturist books for this challenge, but I’m glad I found it. I has a lot of fun worldbuilding elements, and does the ‘ancient civilization had contact with aliens and we forgot about it’ trope really well.

This is a story that explores a world where a solar flare has knocked out a lot of digital and electrical infrastructure around the world, with the exception of places near the equator such as Nigeria. The flare also stranded an astronaut on the International Space Station, so the Nigerians, with help from India, build a space program almost from scratch to come to the rescue.

I liked this book, and I liked the vibe and the aesthetic a lot. This future, post-destruction Kano Nigeria went all in on biotech. There are cool gecko phones and spider spy-drones along with African markets and Nollywood, and also an honest look at some of the corruption and poverty that impacts Nigeria. Also, the terrorist group Boko Haram is on the move, and has made threats to the space program. Unfortunately, whilst this book does a lot of things I liked, I just waned more from the ‘save the astronaut whilst the terrorists are closing in’ plot of this book. The mystery about the ancient aliens was cool – and the tribeswoman we explored this with was probably my favourite character – but it felt like a side-story that had taken over.

All in all, this is a good book that feels like classic SF in a modern African setting. Despite my issues with it, I enjoyed it.

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.

Last time I talked about this book, I mentioned that I wanted to continue the series. Since then though I have heard that the main relationship goes somewhere that may be a bit much for me. I’ll do a bit more research before deciding if I want to go on.

Challenge: Title Starts With ‘P’

Book: Penric and the Bandit – Lois McMaster Bujold

Rating: 5/5

This is the 13th book chronologically in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series. I think this is one of the easier ones to read as a standalone, since it doesn’t directly connect to any other plotlines and has Penric and Desdemona away from their family and normal work. Still, reading this novella would be more enjoyable with the background provided by the previous books.

In this story, Sorcerer Penric is travelling to an abandoned temple of some sort in the hope of finding rare books. Along the way he meets a bandit who takes him as a week, gullible man and hatches a scheme to swindle him and leave him for dead. Of course, being a sorcerer means Penric has a powerful demon called Desdemona in his head, providing him with powerful magic and extra perception. They are onto the Bandit’s schemes rather quickly, and eventually our bandit comes to realise that his intended patsy is actually one of the most dangerous people in the world.

This is just a really fun fantasy adventure, with characters that you easily connect with and an excellent magic system. Penric and the Bandit has everything I love about this series, and proves to be one of the most action-packed entries in the series. I wouldn’t recommend it as the best entry point to the series, but it is possible to read on it’s own, and the Penric and Desdemona series is a must read.

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These were a great lot of books, some of which I was encouraged to read (or to read sooner) because of this bingo card. Now I’m more determined than ever to finish this challenge.

~ Jayde