Month: December 2019

Trophy Life by Lea Geller – #eARC #BookReview

Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

Goodreads: Trophy Life
Publish date: 09 April 2019
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Chick Lit, Women’s Fiction
Panda Rating:

For the last ten years, Agnes Parsons’s biggest challenge has been juggling yoga classes and lunch dates. Her Santa Monica house staff takes care of everything, leaving Agnes to focus on her trophy-wife responsibilities: look perfect, adore her older husband, and wear terribly expensive (if uncomfortable) underwear.

When her husband disappears, leaving Agnes and their infant daughter with no money, no home, and no staff, she is forced to move across the country, where she lands a job teaching at an all-boys boarding school in the Bronx. So long, organic quinoa bowls and sunshine-filled California life. Hello, processed food, pest-infested house, and twelve-year-old-boy humor—all day, every day.

But it’s in this place of second chances (and giant bugs), where Agnes is unexpectedly forced to take care of herself and her daughter, where she finds out the kind of woman she can be. Ultimately, she has to decide if she prefers the woman and mother she has become…or the trophy life she left behind.

This was slow to start and was a little difficult to get into at first but once the story got rolling, I found the ‘light and fluffy’ contemporary I expected. I didn’t find it very surprising or different to anything that I’ve read in women’s fiction before though. For some reason (probably based on the cover) I might have thought the story and characters would be more comedic, but it was still an enjoyable and entertaining enough read.

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#WWWWednesday: 25 December

Dini @ dinipandareads6 Comments

HAPPY TROPICAL CHRISTMAS, FRIENDS! I hope that you have the most beautiful day with your family and friends. May your day be filled with so much love and happiness. Lots of love from the other side of the world!

So it’s time for December’s last WWW Wednesday, a weekly meme hosted by Sam @ Taking On A World of Words, which means I’ll be answering these questions:

  1. What did you read last?
  2. What are you currently reading?
  3. What will you read next?

What did you read last?

Since last Wednesday I managed to read four books! My reviews for these are in the works but see my mini-reviews below:

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#TopTenTuesday: Books I Hope to Find Under My Tree!

Dini @ dinipandareads30 Comments

It’s that time of the week again, friends! We’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: books I hope to find under my tree. My family actually doesn’t celebrate Christmas and neither do we have any kind of Balinese/Indonesian tradition that involves gift exchanges etc. The closest we get to the very festive and jovial mood of Christmas is on New Years Eve. But this year we’re actually planning to do a very small White Elephant round and I’m looking forward to it. I don’t think I’ll be finding any books under “my tree” 😅 but STILL a girl can hope right?! But I also just like to make these lists so here’s what I’d hope to get:

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Goodreads Monday – 23 December

Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

We’re back with another Goodreads Monday, a weekly meme started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. This meme invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you want to! I’ll be using a random number generator to pick my books from my insanely long GR Want-to-read list.

This week’s book is Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage. I believe that this may also be known as “Bad Apple” in some countries or editions. I added this book to my TBR list about a year ago. I can’t remember when I first heard about it but the cover is actually what really caught my eye. It’s simple but there’s something about it that I really like. It’s a mystery, thriller, and I guess part horror and it has 3.63 stars rating on Goodreads.

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Sundays in Bed With… #MyWeeklyWrapUp [35]

Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

Yes, I’m well aware it’s no longer Sunday but wow, this weekend went by so quickly and didn’t feel like a weekend at all… So we’re back with another SundaysMondays in Bed With… meme! This meme dares to ask you what book has been in your bed this morning and is hosted by Midnight Book Girl. Come share what book you’ve been you’ve spent time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!

I spent yesterday stuck in a car for about 9 hours because of roadwork that caused major traffic. Fun times. But that meant I got to spend more time with Sadie. So glad I decided to follow this one on audiobook because the full-cast was really great and helped me build a deeper connection with the characters, which I feel wouldn’t have happened had I only read the book.

A missing girl on a journey of revenge. A Serial―like podcast following the clues she’s left behind. And an ending you won’t be able to stop talking about.

Sadie hasn’t had an easy life. Growing up on her own, she’s been raising her sister Mattie in an isolated small town, trying her best to provide a normal life and keep their heads above water.

But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie’s entire world crumbles. After a somewhat botched police investigation, Sadie is determined to bring her sister’s killer to justice and hits the road following a few meager clues to find him.

When West McCray―a radio personality working on a segment about small, forgotten towns in America―overhears Sadie’s story at a local gas station, he becomes obsessed with finding the missing girl. He starts his own podcast as he tracks Sadie’s journey, trying to figure out what happened, hoping to find her before it’s too late.

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The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton – #BookReview

Dini @ dinipandareads6 Comments

Goodreads: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Historical Fiction
Panda Rating:

“Gosford Park” meets “Groundhog Day” by way of Agatha Christie – the most inventive story you’ll read this year.

Tonight, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed… again.
It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed.

But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden – one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party – can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot.

The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath…

I guess it’s time for my unpopular opinion because this one has received really great ratings on GR. This book was chosen as the January read by the Goodreads group for the 2019 Popsugar Reading Challenge following the prompt: “a book revolving around a puzzle or game”. I was really excited to start reading this, especially for my first reading challenge book of the year; but unfortunately, I think this book just really wasn’t for me.

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Top 5 Saturday: Books Made into TV Shows/Movies!

Dini @ dinipandareads8 Comments

It’s time for another Top 5 Saturday, a weekly meme created by Mandy @ Devouring Books and this week’s topic is: books that have been made into TV shows/movies! Technically the topic only covers ‘movies’ but there are more TV adaptations that I can think of and that I’m really keen to check out. I’ve read the book of half of these shows/movies but others I’m still working on… but I’m determined to finish the books before I start watching it. Here’s what I got:

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Friday Favorites: 2019 Releases!

Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

It’s time for another Friday Favorites hosted by Kibby @ Something of the Book! This weekly meme is where you get to share a list of all your favourites based on the list of prompts on Kibby’s page. Sounds fun, right? This week’s prompt is: favorite 2019 releases! Well, here’s another reason I’m really glad that I keep track of my reads through my Goodreads reading challenge, otherwise I would’ve struggled with this one 😂 I think one of the reasons I ended up reading as many 2019 releases as I did this year is because of FOMO. I always see the hype and I get sucked right in and can’t resist. I’ve tried to narrow these down as much as possible and I’ve brought it down to 15 books (it’s hard to narrow down okay?! 😭) and I’ve broken them up into a few categories to make clumping easier: Contemporary, Thrillers/Horror, Fantasy, Romance. Chances are I’m totally forgetting some book or other (even with Goodreads’ help!) but this is what I’ve come up with:

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First Lines Friday – 20 December

Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

Yayaya, HAPPY FRIYAY, book lovers and friends 😍We’re back with another First Lines Friday! This is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Here are THE RULES:

  • Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
  • Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
  • Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“Other people overwhelmed her. Strange, perhaps, for a woman who’d added four beings to the universe of her own reluctant volition, but a fact nonetheless: Marilyn rued the inconvenient presence of bodies, bodies beyond her control, her understanding; bodies beyond her favor.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

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Book Festival Book Tag!

Dini @ dinipandareads20 Comments

I was recently tagged by Siobhan to do the Book Festival Book Tag! It was originally created by the ladies over at Book Princess Reviews, when she became inspired to create a bookish tag after attending Yallfest this year. Sounds like fun, right? Let’s get to it!

THE RULES

.x. pingback to the creator of the tag, @bookprincessreviews .x.
.x. tag the person who tagged you, @siobhansnovelties .x.
.x. find an answer to match each prompt .x.
.x. have fun! .x.

Author Lineup
Name your top three authors that you would like to meet

Hmm this is a bit of a toughie but I think I’m gonna go for: Neil Gaiman, V.E. Schwab and Taylor Jenkins Reid! But there are really so many, even smaller authors

The Official Schedule
How do you determine what books you’re going to read next? 

I’m a slave to my moods! It’s particularly tough because 90% of the time I’m not even really sure what mood I’m in 😅 What happens then is I take a good, long stare at my bookshelves and see what title jumps out at me. Or I’ll start reading the first few lines/paragraphs/pages of some books and see which one hooks me in. It’s completely random!

ARC Drops
What ARC would you wait hours in line for? 

I would give so much to get my hands on an ARC (or even an eARC) of The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang or Wild at Heart by K.A. Tucker. It would be a total dream to receive an ARC of either of these (a dream because I know it’ll never happen for me lol)! But really, I’m at high risk of swooning like a fool if I could get my hands on Quan’s story 😂

The Swag!
What bookish merch/pre-order incentives/etc. is your favorite?

I’m a sucker for pretty much any book merch? I went through a phase where I was obsessed with bookish candles! I love book sleeves too. I also really enjoy special excerpts or deleted scenes or extra stories — like what Jay Kristoff did with Darkdawn and what he and Kaufman did with Memento when Aurora Rising released! So precious 😍

The Panels
What topic would you love to see some of your favorite authors talk about?

I’ve loved reading about more diverse characters this year, especially about Asian-American or “Westernized Asians”. Their struggles with their cultural identity and growing up in two “different” worlds (the home and the outside) is something that I’ve 100% related to, so it would be amazing to hear some of these authors talk about this issue. It would also be great to hear some authors discuss mental health in books, not only for YA and/or adult, but also for those “inbetweeners” (like the 30s people even though yes, I know 30s is adult…ish lol).

Yallfest, Yallwest, Bookcon/BookExpo, YALC, Etc.
What book festival/con would you go to if you had the choice?

To attend any kind of book festival I’d have to travel all the way across the world. But I’ve recently really been toying with the idea of going to Bookcon in New York either in 2020 or 2021. Luckily for me, one of my close Dutch colleagues just moved to New York and she’s a bit of a reader too, so it’d be nice to go together!
(Then I’d take advantage of being on that side of the world and visit a few famous nationwide bookstores 😉)

Ah, a short, sweet, simple and fun tag! Just what I was in the mood for 😊

I TAG…

It’s okay if you don’t like tags or don’t feel like doing this one. No pressure at all! Also, even if you’re not tagged and want to do it, consider yourself officially tagged! Don’t forget to link back so I can see your answers 😉

Jess | Mere | Emer | Joanna | | YOU!