Calendar Girls: March 2020

Hey all, Dani here.

Welcome back to another very early post for me. Same as with last month, this post is going live while I’m deep asleep, but I want to make sure that all of the participants in Calendar Girls can link to my post as soon as possible, so why not have this post go up at midnight my time? I’m so glad to be involved with Calendar Girls; I feel like my relationships in the online book community have been grown and strengthened by this blog event, and that my blog has developed far more than I imagined because of it as well.

Anyway, it is the first Monday of the Month and that means it is once again time for a Calendar Girls post.

Calendar Girls is a monthly blog event that was started by Flavia and Melanie, but is now being hosted by Katie and Adrienne. They are all wonderful ladies, and you should check out their lovely blogs. Okay, so Katie and Adrienne needed to take a brief hiatus for a few months, so for right now Flavia and myself are temporarily hosting Calendar Girls until our fearless leaders are ready to step back in.

Honestly Calendar Girls is a group effort and I feel like we have become a pretty good group of friends, so it makes sense that we can share in the responsibilities and pick up any slack should it happen. I’m happy to do my part to help keep this tradition going. So if you link back to Flavia and me, we can keep track of all the book picks and posts each month. Thanks, everyone!

First, more about the Calendar Girls. It is designed to ignite bookish discussions among readers, and was inspired by the 1961 Neil Sedaka song, Calendar Girl.

Just like the song, each month has a different theme. Each blogger picks their favorite book from the theme, and on the first Monday of the month reveals their pick in a Calendar Girls post. Make sure to post back to the hostess’s post, and both Katie and Adrienne will make a master list for the month. The master lists allow everyone to see the other Calendar Girls’ picks and to pop on over to their blogs. Thus, we all get to chat about books and even make some new friends!

Oh, and you don’t have to identify as female to join the Calendar Girls. We welcome readers of all types. So if this sounds like fun for you, join us in all of the fun bookish conversations.

Finally, the March theme is…

St. Patrick’s Day

Book with Favorite Mythical Creature

So, I’m very excited about this theme, but of course the issue is that I read a lot of books with magical and mythical beasts and creatures and beings, so it makes it a bit more difficult for me to choose my candidates, let alone my pick.

Technically I guess I should first talk about what I believe qualifies as a mythical creature. I’m not talking about vampires, werewolves, or witches today, because those seem more paranormal to me. Though I don’t blame anyone for including any of them, because they do feature in a number of myths, legends, and folklore. So they are perfectly valid creatures to choose. Even beings such as elves and dwarves and halflings feel as if they are mythical creatures. However, for me the mythical creatures I want to consider for today’s post are things like leprechauns or dragons, fae or merfolk.

Obviously this makes things a bit difficult for me, because I do read a whole lot of fantasy, and also I am fond of books with a focus on mythology and folklore, so there are so many books I could definitely consider for this.

Wow…okay. I’m actually fairly certain that I have missed out on so many possibilities for this one. I sort of put off prepping this post until a few hours before it went live, and my fiance was already asleep so I didn’t want to have all of the bedroom lights on as I sorted through my bookcases. These are just the ones that I could pull off my already uploaded WordPress media. Many of these stories feature so many different creatures: dragons and phoenixes and djinn and kelpies and sirens and half-orcs and satyrs…the list goes on and on.

I’m going to be completely honest…my favorite creature changes depending on my moods and the stories I take in, so what I list as my favorite now might have been something I didn’t care about much last year, and it might be replaced by something else in a couple months.

I love these mythical magical stories, and the beings contained within them. Plus choosing one favorite has always been difficult for me. I usually can at least rattle on about a small handful of favorites (books, movies, TV shows, manga, specific characters, D&D races/classes, etc) for quite some time.

But for the purposes of today’s post, I’m going to pick a creature that has been high on my list of fascination for several months now. There have been a few stories with this particular being out in the past couple of years, and it happens to be the race I am playing in a Pathfinder game with my friends (though they all–aside from Damian–believe that I am merely a common human). I’m really enjoying the trickery and deception that is inherent in this creature, and it has been fun to very subtly lean on those traits without making it fully obvious what I really am.

What creature am I talking about?

Well that would be the kitsune, a tricky cunning and shapeshifting fox-creature. In some mythos they are akin to demons, but in others they are kin to the fae. A kitsune is a master of illusion, and the stronger the kitsune, the more tails they have, up to nine tails. Also, random side note–Vulpix/Ninetails are a couple of my favorite Pokemon.

Naturally, this means that my book choice for this month is Shadow of the Fox by Julie Kagawa, though the sequel Soul of the Sword is also fantastic. I was recently selected to be part of the blog tour for the upcoming release of the concluding novel, Night of the Dragon, so I am so excited to start reading this.

All right, that about wraps up my post, but I’ll be back later to add in the links to the rest of the Calendar Girls posts, and I’ll also be back this afternoon with my regularly scheduled manga review, so see you soon with more bookish content.

Other Calendar Girls Picks and Posts

Flavia @ Flavia the Bibliophile – A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas

Dani (that’s me) @ MousaiBooks – Shadow of the Fox by Julie Kagawa

Ashley @ Inside My Minds – The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Lindsey @ Lindsey Reads – Red Winter by Annette Marie

Katie @ Never Not Reading – His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

Adrienne @ Darque Dreamer Reads – Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon

More added soon.