Happy Friday, all!  The fact that I nearly forgot it was Friday– and time for my reading round-up!– tells you everything you need to know about this week.

On the bright side, it was a wonderful reading week, starting with Naomi Novik’s third and (I presume?) final book in the Scholomance series, The Golden Enclaves, which was basically a master class on how to successfully end a series while keeping things fresh.  For anyone who hasn’t read them yet, I’ve heard them called dark Harry Potter (because they revolve around a magical academy where the goal is to stay alive and most students don’t), but they’re really so much more than that, with incredibly complex world building.  I very much wish I could read them all again for the first time.

After that, it was back to my Halloween reading line-up, with Emma Seckel’s The Wild Hunt, set in the aftermath of World War II, on a small Scottish island plagued by an outbreak of vicious crows, who may or may not be the souls of the lost dead.  It’s really as much an exploration of the impact of the war on the lives of the villagers as it is a ghost story.

And, of course, October wouldn’t be October without Simone St. James.  I went back to her very first book, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, in which a young woman desperate for work takes a job as assistant to a ghost hunter, in that haunted aftermath of World War I, and finds far more than she reckoned with, including a vengeful ghost on a quest for justice.  You’d think on a fourth or fifth re-read, I’d eventually grow bored with it, but I love it just as much as I did the first time (even though I know who dunnit.)

What have you been reading this week?