Mini Book Reviews #1: Girls Made of Snow and Glass, A Man Called Ove, Brain on Fire

✨ Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust (Fantasy, YA, Fairy Tales)

Summary: Girls is advertised as a feminist retelling of Snow White, which immediately grabbed my attention – I’m a sucker for fairy tale retellings! The main characters are Lynet (Snow White) and Mina (the Evil Queen), and the book alternates between the two to tell their stories. It has everything I love in a good fantasy novel – magic, castles, royalty, lush descriptions, badass ladies. I wasn’t able to put it down until finishing it, and although it was a library book, I’ll likely purchase it at some point so I can reread it!

✨ A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman  (Fiction, Contemporary, Tearjerker)

Summary: This was a book recommended to me by various people, and I’m so glad they did! It tells the story of a man called Ove (clever titling, eh?) who is about as old and as ornery as they come. He’s a grumpy old man, and a majority of the book is spent listening to his grumpy old man thoughts – which sounds pretty awful, but is actually incredibly endearing. You start to see the sweet man beneath the grump – a man who has lived long enough to experience deep love, and even deeper loss. I will admit that it took me a little to get fully sucked in, but once I did, I didn’t look back – and I even shed a few tears along the way. I’d recommend this to anyone especially who has experience with ornery (but gold hearted) grandparents – it’s both heartbreaking and heartwarming, in the best of both ways.

✨ Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan (Non-fiction, Autobiography, Illness)

Summary: I’ve been trying to branch out a bit more from my normal fiction theme, and so I picked this up on a whim from Target one afternoon while shopping back in March. I hadn’t heard anything about it, but the premise of a young women with an extremely rare disease that took a terrifying month to be diagnosed pulled at me. The story is written with total honesty, even at some parts that I’m sure the author may have preferred to gloss over the details. The different symptoms and troubles that she encountered – from the physical ailments to being doubted by doctors and even labeled as “violent and psychotic” – are written about and explained with an openness that makes the incredible journey feel like it happened to a friend, and I felt myself getting more and more emotionally involved the longer Susannah remained undiagnosed. I saw that this recently got made into a movie and is on Netflix, and while I haven’t seen it yet, I definitely plan to! If anyone else has, let me know what you thought. 🙂