Potts Point Preserve – Harpswell, ME

Crescent Beach State Park – Cape Elizabeth, ME

Knitting Notes

This is the Heidi sweater, by Katya Frankel. I’m making it in Quince and Co Whimbrel, in what I think is the Bowsprit colorway. I got this yarn in a seconds sales, and I found out why while winding it. Skein number one had a cut in it, and skein number two was so tangled I had to wind into a ball before I could then wind it again with the ballwinder. The yarn’s still good, but I wouldn’t want to have paid full price for that experience.

Diamond Fire – Ilona Andrews

This is a nice bridge story between Nevada and Catalina’s portions of the Hidden Legacy series. It’s wedding themed, which is actually delightful. Catalina ends up being engaged by Nevada’s future mother in law to find a family heirloom that was stolen just before the wedding. Catalina’s only eighteen at this point, but she steps up, and you can totally see why the reigns of the series (and the head of the family role) gets handed to her.

Wildfire – Ilona Andrews

This book starts out with Rogan’s ex coming to him for help after her husband goes missing – no one else seems to be concerned, but Nevada and Rogan agree to take the case. What follows ends up being way bigger than you could have imagined, and leads to a pretty satisfying conclusion to Nevada’s part of the story.

Since I accidently started this series midway through, with Catalina’s story, I enjoyed seeing where their grandmother (Victoria Tremaine) came into the action, and a better understanding of exactly why and how the family ended up going through the trials to establish themselves as a magical house. Love this series (let’s be honest, I don’t think these authors could ever let me down.)

Knitting Notes

Got rid of a couple more sock yarns – this is the last of the Sundara Sock Water Studies and the Quince Finch in Bird’s Egg. (I really needed to be able to put a downward trend into my yarn tracking. I’ll be able to do some much bigger deductions once I push through a couple projects, but that’s going to take some time. Baby steps, I guess.)

Ink Witch – Lindsey Sparks

This was an interesting set up – we have race of immortals that the ancient Egyptian gods ended up being based on. Kat is a more recent vintage, but her family includes some really ancient powers. She’s in retirement – having previously been an assassin for the Neheret Senate. Her power lies in ink, so she’s running a tattoo parlor and reading tarot cards on the side. (I really like the changeable tarot deck – creepy!)

The disappearance of her half brother pulls her back into the immortal world – Neheret, as well as some human children, are disappearing. At this point, I’m still interested enough in the world building that I’d consider another book in the series, but I’m not quite sold on Kat as a protagonist. I get that she’s not supposed to be all good, but she got a little too dark in a way I can’t quite pin why I don’t like. We’ll see if the world building overrides that.

Grey Sister – Mark Lawrence

I really appreciated the notes at the beginning of the book that went over the highlights of what to keep in mind if you’d read Red Sister a while in the past. And I particularly appreciated that the author specifically called out that Keot did not appear in the first book, because having Nona have a ride along devil who would talk to her and occasionally try to influence her actions definitely would have confused the heck out of me if I hadn’t known he was new to this book.

I enjoyed seeing how much Nona and her friends have grown since the first book, and also how they have to deal with the wider world, now that they’re closer to actually being Sisters.

One thing that remains true in this book as well as the last is that we have a couple scenes of Nona when she’s older, and is a full sister, so you know she survives the book. But man, the author is really good at making you unsure how the heck he’s going to pull that off. The last part of this book was tense! I’m definitely interested to see how the story ends.

Knitting Notes

Pattern: Cellarium by Rachel Illsley
Yarn: Swans Island Ikat Collection Watercolors in the Indigo/Teal colorway
Needles: Size 2 circs and 3 circs and DPNs

The cables in this pattern kicked my butt at first, for no really good reason.    Once I was able to visual what they were supposed to do, I was fine, but I did have one rather dicey rip down back to the ribbing edge that I am SO glad I managed to make work.     Overall, great pattern – I really enjoyed it once I got into a rhythm.