The Hamilton Book Tag

Hey hi hello friends, and welcome back to my blog!

So when I first started this blog, I would do a lot more than just book reviews and video/reading updates. I would do a lot of book tags on here because I hadn't quite started my booktube channel, and I want to get back to my posts from a year ago, as I have said before. So I went through some of my old posts and found the Hamilton Book Tag.

I love Hamilton pretty much with every fiber of my being. I'm pretty obsessed, to be honest. I know almost all of the lyrics (aside from Guns and Ships, and even then I know most of the rap), and I even have the biography of Alexander Hamilton written by Ron Chernow, which if you didn't know, is the biography that inspired Lin Manuel-Miranda to write the musical in the first place.

A little background on this tag: it was created by the lovely Maureen Keavy on her booktube channel, and it has 17 prompts based on songs from the musical. These won't be in order of the musical, so they're just going to be random songs and the questions that go with it. So, without any further ado, let's get in to it!

*WARNING: THIS TAG WILL CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR CERTAIN BOOKS*

Oh, this one is easy, even putting aside Hogwarts (though that will probably always be my number one). 

I would go to Camp Half-Blood in a heartbeat. I would absolutely love to be a demigod and be friends with Percy and Annabeth and the rest of the gang. I even have an idea of what kind of half-blood I would be. If it were my mom's side, I'd be a daughter of Athena, and if it were my dad's I would be a daughter of Apollo. I love reading and theorizing and learning new things, and I also love archery and poetry and medicine. My only concern would be how long I could survive, since I'm a very clumsy person and I tend to make people mad easily. Oh well, even if I didn't last very long, it'd still be amazing to be part of that world.

Girl power is one of my favorite things to read about in literature. We get too many women written by men for men, who end up being some damsel in distress that always has perfect makeup and hair and somehow huge breasts and hips but tiny waists. It kind of sucks. 

That being said, I have a lot of favorite characters that are underrated. Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter for one. She's unapologetically herself and that's really refreshing to me. She's quirky and odd but also fiercely loyal to her friends and intelligent to boot. She is someone I would always want in my corner.

Zuzanna from the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series by Laini Taylor is another. I would also say Karou, but since she's the main character of the series, I feel like that wouldn't really work. But Zuzanna is feisty and perpetually angry, and she doesn't change her personality in order to be more likeable or anything like that. Not to mention she's insanely talented.

I'm all for ambitious characters (and people) but sometimes it can be a real problem, especially when their wants end up hurting other people.

Eli Cardale/Ever from Vicious by V.E. Schwab is one such character. He has created a mission for himself to rid the world of EOs, or ExtraOrdinaries. He believes that EOs are no longer human and go against the path of God, and so he has taken it upon himself to kill every EO he can find, despite the fact that he's one himself. He definitely doesn't let anyone or anything get in his way.

 I'll be honest, sassy characters are my biggest weakness. Percy Jackson and Harry Potter are two of my favorite characters of all time and that is 87% due to how sassy they are. However, they aren't villains, so I can't use them for this question.

Holland from the Darker Shades of Magic trilogy by V.E. Schwab is probably my favorite sassy villain. I don't know if everyone would categorize him as a villain, but he is in my book. He may be sympathetic but he did a lot of damage.

I've marathoned a lot of book series in my day. The first few that come to mind are The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater, The Wrath and the Dawn duology by Renee Ahdieh, The Shades of Magic trilogy by V.E. Schwab (again), and the Charlotte Holmes series by Brittany Cavallaro. I love all of these series. A lot. A lot a lot. 

I don't typically like books with multiple points of view, because I usually find them difficult to keep track of the timeline and I often mix up the POVs when trying to find a specific quote or scene in the book. 

That being said, I really did enjoy The Diviners by Libba Bray. This was one of the rare exceptions where I was anticipating a POV change because I became super invested in all of the characters. I realize I liked this format for this book because the characters weren't connected with each other until the very end of the book, unlike a lot of other stories that have multiple POVs where it's the same scene just described through different eyes. 

I also really enjoyed The Devouring Gray by Christine Lynn Herman, which you all know due to my review on it last month. I absolutely loved that it followed multiple POVs, because it's a book that has so much going on that having it as a singular POV would've been a disservice to the story. 

Without a doubt, Harry Potter will be read years and years from now. Already there are college classes on it (as well as classes for Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Game of Thrones). I have no reservations in my mind that I will be reading these books to my future children, and my future grandchildren, and so on and so forth. Harry Potter is such an iconic piece of literature and, as J.K. Rowling once said, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

I'm not the biggest fan of romance, but there are a few relationships that I absolutely adore.

I pegged Percy and Annabeth from the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan getting together from the start. I have been a die-hard Percabeth shipper since the first book when no one thought they would end up as a couple. Suck on that, Percabeth haters!

Also, Karou and Akiva from Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. It's a beautiful Romeo and Juliet story but with a happy ending, even if the middle isn't as happy. 

Oh, this is hard. There are so many memorable fight scenes I can choose from! But I can only pick one. That's so frustrating. 

I think I'll go with a classic here and pick the final duel between Voldemort and Harry in The Deathly Hallows. I like this one the best because it really shows the character development of Harry, and it also shows all of the different approaches to ending a war; the political reasoning as well as the physical fighting. And it's just so poetic to me that Voldemort was killed by his own spell. Like, damn.

I'm very vocal in my reading preferences. I usually don't have any "secret" books that I love, and I feel like most of the common guilty pleasure reads out there (Twilight, TMI, SJM books, etc) I don't enjoy. 

So, I don't know if one would consider this a guilty pleasure read, but I still adore the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull. I first read this series when I was in third grade, and I was so obsessed with it that I actually went to all the book signings Brandon Mill had in my area and begged my mom to get me all of the books. I've met him a handful of times now and all of my books by him are signed and personalized. Even though they are a middle grade series that definitely reads like a middle grade series, I still like to pick them up every once in a while because I love them that much. 

I tend to not wish for more books in a series after the whole Blood of Olympus thing that came with Rick Riordan stretching out Percy Jackson's story, but there is one series, or rather duology, that I seriously wish had another book. 

The Monsters of Verity duology by Victoria/V.E. Schwab absolutely destroyed me when I read it, and when it ended I could not believe that that was the end. Like, okay, the story was wrapped up very nicely with a tight little bow and everything, but I am in serious denial that Kate is dead and August is basically all alone now. There's still a war going on between the monsters and the humans, not to mention whatever was happening in Prosperity when Kate left to go back to Verity. There's just so much more that can be explored!

BrOTPs are awesome. I'm all for a good brOTP. My mind automatically goes to Scott and Stiles in Teen Wolf, but since this is a book tag and not a TV tag, I will choose a different dynamic duo.

Gansey and Ronan in The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater are definitely one of my favorite brOTPs. Truthfully I like all four of the Raven Boys together, but I really love how Ronan brings out the more competitive and rebellious side of Gansey, because I sometimes forget that he's a kid, and Ronan helps me remember that. 

Listen, I hardly am ever the first one to read a book. The only auto-buy authors on my shelf are Rick Riordan, V.E. Schwab, and Maggie Stiefvater (though I suppose you could also put Laini Taylor and Madeline Miller in there as well). So most of my books I read I get from recommendations from other booktubers, from videos sometimes made years ago. I tend to read backlist titles way more that new releases.

But one book that I am ridiculously late to reading, mostly because it's a children's book that apparently everyone in my generation grew up with, is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I read this for the first time last summer. Once I did, I couldn't believe that I had never read it as a kid before. I even called my mom and demanded why it was never in our house when I was growing up. The reason I read it is because I watched the Netflix adaptation of it and I was so emotionally compromised that I immediately needed to read the source material. If you are like me and never got to experience The Little Prince growing up, I highly recommend you pick it up now.

Obviously this particular question will contain severe spoilers.

This is really a no-brainer for me. Jason Grace deserved more, dammit!

If you don't already know, Rick Riordan decided to kill off Jason Grace in the third Trials of Apollo book, The Burning Maze. Now, Jason was never one of my favorite characters. I didn't like a lot of his traits and didn't always agree with his decisions. I think I disliked him as much as I did because everyone acted like he was more than Percy's match, but Percy was clearly more powerful than Jason could ever hope to be. But he was only seventeen! He had a good life ahead of him and Rick Riordan just threw all that away. I'm still angry and it's been almost a year since the book came out. RIP Jason Grace.

Okay, I know I'm going to be in the minority here when I say that I was destoyed by Owen's reveal in The Archived by Victoria Schwab.

I really loved Mac and Owen together even though I knew he was a History and they couldn't possibly stay together. I liked Wes a little, but he was nowhere near Owen's level. And then Owen had to go and reveal he was evil and try and kill Mac and Wesley and ahhhh okay I'm done. But in all seriousness, I don't think I had ever felt so betrayed than I did right at that moment. 

PS. I am now Mac and Wes trash and will forever be sad that a third book isn't happening. I completely understand why, but still. Sad face.

I'm pretty good at predicting plot twists, former question above notwithstanding. But listen, could anyone have predicted the end of The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson? And I'm not talking about Vin releasing the thing in the Well and it ending up being evil, but rather when Elend becomes  a Mistborn after almost dying. 

Actually there were two plot twists in this book that surprised me. Elend becoming Mistborn, and Ore-Seur revealing that he was actually Ten-Soon and that the real Ore-Seur was killed very early on in the story and he was a spy for Vin and Elend's enemy the entire time. That hurt my heart for sure. 

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Okay, and that is the Hamilton Book Tag! I had a lot of fun thinking up these answers, and I hope that you guys enjoyed this kind of post. Feel free to do this tag and say I tagged you if you want! 

Until next time!