Well...nothing like squeezing this to the end of the month, eh? Life has been ridiculous around here the last few weeks, so unfortunately the blog took a backseat. Between farm animals and ridiculous amounts of spring snow, I'm ready to run away under the cover of night.
I need a nice, quiet vacation somewhere warm, but not warm enough to necessitate a swim suit. Why no swim suit, you ask? Well...at nearing 7 months pregnant, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't fit in anything that resembled a suit and would instead be relegated to looking like a ridiculous blimp encased in some form of strained spandex.
Anyway...back to the matter at hand. Since I have managed to put things off for FAR too long, I'm combining two posts into one. This means that today is the day, my friends. Before the post is out, we will have a winner in our pockets.
Let's do this!
Four fantastic competitors. You can't go wrong reading any of these. But hey...we all know how this has to shake out. Three of them will...inevitably, have to go. Ready to start ripping off band-aids?
Left Bracket
I have to admit that after the first couple of rounds, I found myself really rooting for Slade House just because of the fact that it is such an anomaly for me given my usual reading repertoire. And it really did hold out quite well. When it came to this round though, I just couldn't justify letting it continue. Sad, but true. The Weight of Feathers was just too good to let it go by the wayside. I'm just a sucker for a cute and somewhat romantic YA fantasy, I suppose. My regards to Slade House...David Mitchell really did put together a good book...but The Weight of Feathers moves into the Top Two.
Right Bracket
Now...before we get into this match-up, I have to own up to a bit of a boo boo last time. I managed to claim in the writing that Miss Peregrine was the winner of the bracket, when the graphic clearly showed that Hollow City was moving on to the Final Four. Oops. That's the first time that I've managed to actually publish a duking-it-out mistake. I had contemplated the match-up for too long and let the winner go back in forth in my head. So close was the decision, that I ultimately forgot what I had decided and managed to basically announce both books as the winner in the same post. Dunce. I have since gone back and rectified the post with an edit. They were both good books, but Hollow City was really supposed to be the winner. So...with that cleared up...let's move forward.
Here we find Ransom Riggs facing off against himself yet again. Two fantastic books and a great series. Oh...and this time I'll actually announce the correct winner.
I will admit that Hollow City was a fantastic second book in a trilogy. And to see a second book in a series top out over either the first or the finale is hard to find. In fact, I can only think of two series wherein my favorite book was somewhere in the middle of the books...A Ring of Endless Light (book 4 in Madeleine L'Engle's Austin Family Chronicles) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (book 3 in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series). So I have to already be impressed that it took out Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. (Even if I did go and screw up its victory.)
But, alas...it's not meant to be again. In this case, I can't ignore the fantastic finale of the trilogy. Library of Souls was a gripper from beginning. I stayed up well into the night in order to finish it. It was one of those cases where I couldn't read it fast enough, but I didn't want it to end. Library of Souls was the undeniable clear winner of this face off.
And then there were two.
The Top Two...
It was a super staunch match-up, but those who have been paying attention likely already know the winner. This tends to be how things go when it really gets down to the nitty gritty. Individual brackets leading up to this moment may have been hotly contested and difficult to decide, but there typically tends to be one book each year that just stands out above the rest and emerges as the likely winner somewhere around the Sweet Sixteen.
This year was really no different. As I went through the bracket, there was no denying it. By the Elite Eight, I knew who was going to win one side of the bracket and would likely come out on top of all of the rest.
Let's admit it, he did have a bit of an unfair advantage. Having THREE books make it to the Elite Eight would give anyone a dang good chance of taking it all. And so he came through as the clear winner. With his finale in the Miss Peregrine trilogy, Ransom Riggs's Library of Souls is officially my 2017 Book of the Year!
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