I’m back with another #UltimateBlogTour post with the @WriteReads gang and this time it’s for the fast-paced YA fantasy: The Devil’s Apprentice written by Danish author Kenneth B. Andersen. The blog tour runs until 15 December so don’t forget to check out the other reviews for the first book in this exciting series!
Philip is a good boy, a really good boy, who accidentally gets sent to Hell to become the Devil’s heir. The Devil, Lucifer, is dying and desperately in need of a successor, but there’s been a mistake and Philip is the wrong boy. Philip is terrible at being bad, but Lucifer has no other choice than to begin the difficult task of training him in the ways of evil. Philip gets both friends and enemies in this odd, gloomy underworld—but who can he trust, when he discovers an evil-minded plot against the dark throne?
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 book covers of 2019. Oh my goodness, what a difficult prompt to answer because I don’t know about you but there were a lot of books released this year that had gorgeous, intriguing and eye-catching covers! My post will probably missing a big chunk of great covers because I can’t remember them right now… 😅 HOW DO I CHOOSE?! I’m just gonna keep it simple and stick to a gallery of pictures (and maybe pick more than five… or ten… or…more)?
Yayaya, HAPPY FRIYAY, book lovers and friends 😍We’re back with another First Lines Friday! This is a weekly featurefor 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 areTHE 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:
“The night Marcella died, she made her husband’s favorite dinner. Not because it was a special occasion, but because it wasn’t–spontaneity, people insisted, was the secret to love.”
I stumbled across this post on Loretta’s page (which by the way is awesome and you should defo check it out if you haven’t yet!) several months ago and it looked like so much fun that I couldn’t wait to try it myself. But of course with life, reading, and all the awesome tags out there, I’ve only just now got around to doing it! It involves one of the things that I secretly really love to do on the interwebs: take quizzes! Yes, I’m a quiz-taker-lover! Especially when it’s a book related quiz but also pretty much any rando quiz I come across; you can bet that I’d love to do it, if I haven’t already done it 😂 This tag is then pretty perfect for me! Here’s what Loretta has to say about her tag:
“Now here we are! All of these quizzes tell you who you would be if you were in that specific universe. I tried to stick with the same quiz makers as much as possible for the sake of consistency, but was forced to stray on a few of them. Each fandom title links back to the original quiz I took (at this point you’re like, please for the love of god, stop saying the word quiz), so you all can take them too. So go forth and prosper. May the odds be ever in your favor. MWAHAHAHAHA!!”
With that said… Let’s get to it! First up are THE RULES:
Take all the quizzes down below and record your answers somehow. I decided to just copy the text from each quiz and paste it into my post, but screenshots work too! Whatever floats your goat (Yes goat. I SAID WHAT I SAID).
NO CHEATING. You get one shot to take each quiz my friends. I’m watching you. ∗Suspicious squinty eyes∗
“Who taught Michael Jackson to dance?” “Is that how people really walk on the moon?” “Is it bad to be brown?” “Are white people afraid of brown people?”
Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.
“How brown is too brown?” “Can Indians be racist?” “What does real love between really different people look like?”
Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation—and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.
This is such an important and relevant read for everything that’s happening in today’s society. Perhaps despite the more globalised world we live in, society has become even more fractured and I think one of the greatest examples can be seen with what’s happened and is happening in America (or at least, it’s what I’m constantly bombarded with on my social platforms. I thought Mira Jacob did a great job exploring the experience of immigrants and what it means to be a POC in America in this wonderfully told memoir through (often) tough but heartfelt conversations with her son, friends, and family. Although I’m not a POC living in America, I was still able to relate to some of the experiences that she shared because I did live in the Western hemisphere for several years and I think these experiences are something all POC go through, even if not to the same extreme. That said, I found it a very educational and eye-opening read.
Goodreads: The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae Publish date: 29 October 2019 Publisher: St. Martin’s Press Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Chick Lit, Women’s Fiction Panda Rating:
Ailsa Rae is learning how to live. She’s only a few months past the heart transplant that – just in time – saved her life. Life should be a joyful adventure. But…
Her relationship with her mother is at breaking point. She knows she needs to find her father. She’s missed so much that her friends have left her behind. She’s felt so helpless for so long that she’s let polls on her blog make her decisions for her. And now she barely knows where to start on her own.
And then there’s Lennox. Her best friend and one time lover. He was sick too. He didn’t make it. And now she’s supposed to face all of this without him.
But her new heart is a bold heart. She just needs to learn to listen to it…
The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae was a heartwarming (no pun intended) story about health, family, friendship, love, grief and quite simply ‘adulting’. Ailsa was born with a heart condition which meant that for most of her life she was too ill to really live. She wasn’t completely unexperienced and sheltered although she missed out on a lot of the ‘normal things’ that kids, teenagers and young adults experienced because her heart and body simply couldn’t handle it. She started to blog about her ‘blue heart’ and what her life was like as she waited for a transplant, until she finally gets the new heart she has literally been waiting for her whole life. It’s not a fast paced read and while there’s a lot of changes that happen, it’s not a larger-than-life miracle story either. It’s set in Edinburgh and as you might know by now it’s one of my favourite places! The author really made the city come to life and I could practically feel myself navigating the streets alongside Ailsa and it was such a wonderful feeling!
Nobody visits Eerie-on-Sea in the winter. Especially not when darkness falls and the wind howls around Maw Rocks and the wreck of the battleship Leviathan, where even now some swear they have seen the unctuous malamander creep…
Herbert Lemon, Lost-and-Founder at the Grand Nautilus Hotel, knows that returning lost things to their rightful owners is not easy – especially when the lost thing is not a thing at all, but a girl. No one knows what happened to Violet Parma’s parents twelve years ago, and when she engages Herbie to help her find them, the pair discover that their disappearance might have something to do with the legendary sea-monster, the Malamander. Eerie-on-Sea has always been a mysteriously chilling place, where strange stories seem to wash up. And it just got stranger…
What a delightful and fantastical read! I haven’t read MG books in a very long time, this might be my second this year, but I’d seen this all over the blogosphere and not only did the cover capture my eye, but the story sounded great too. I’m so glad that I decided to pick this up because it was such a fun read! It’s full of atmosphere, mystery, friendship, danger and perhaps just a little dash of magic–enough at least to make you wonder what’s real or not.
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: holiday reads. BUT since I haven’t really read books to go with the season, I’ve decided to just post my December Possibility Pile! This post might seem repetitive if you’ve read this post and this post already but I’m going to focus on 10 books that I really want to read before the year is out! Obviously, I want to read a lot more than these ten before 2019 is over, but I’m going to do my best to at least see these ones through. By now you know I’m a mood reader so this is going to be tough (maybe) but I’m hoping that December will see me doing these unread books a solid by getting them off the never ending TBR! This isn’t even including the books that I want to read for Task 3 of the #Triwizardathon either but I don’t know what I’ll be reading for that yet!
Wowow, it’s a question I’ve been asking myself repeatedly but seriously, where did November go?! Pretty sure that I blinked twice and the month was already over. Actually, these last few months have all been speeding by and I can’t believe that we’re now almost done with the teens of the 2000s and moving into our 20s! Insanity. So it’s time for another monthly wrap up and I gotta say, November was a weird month. I don’t know if it’s because the days passed so quickly but despite (what felt like) having a book in hand 98% of the time, this was the month that I also read the least. It might also have to do with the fact that my mood for romance has all but disappeared and I used to binge romance the most! I managed to read 12 books in November and for the most part, many of them were just okay…
I participated in #NonfictionNovember this month and as you can see from my read list, I didn’t do a very good job of it! I only managed to read two NF books, although I enjoyed both very much and one of them was my favorite read this month (Stranger Beside Me). I have a lot more NF on my list that I’d obviously like to get to and I’m hoping to read at least one or two more before the year ends. That said, I’m quite pleased that I even managed to read two because NF always takes me longer to get through… Also, two is more NF than I usually read in a year so… Yay? 🤷🏻♀️
I’m also quite chuffed that I managed to read two more of my eARCs this month and I’m slowly creeping closer to my 100% goal (and when I say slowly I really do mean… s-l-o-w-l-y! But slow progress is better than no progress, amirite?! 😂)! I wrote more reviews for my reads this month than before, but I still have tons to catch up on and I also didn’t end up posting any reviews from previous months either. Oops! Oh well, there’s always time to catch up… 😬
This month I also randomly decided to join in on the #Triwizardathon and it has been lots of fun! I’m on Team Durmstrang and at the start of Task 2, Durmstrang was in the lead! There’s one last task this December, starting next week, so I should probably start thinking about what to read but I’m pretty excited for the final! I think half of the books I’ve read this month were because of my participation in this readathon. I’m usually pretty bad at sticking to set TBRs and yes, I have replaced one or two books that I set out to read with something else, but for the most part I’m quite proud that I’ve managed to stick to the others. Go me!
I mentioned it briefly at the end of last month’s wrap up that I was thinking of doing a revamp on my blog look and I’ve finally done it. I changed my theme and made some new graphics, which are amateurish but I think overall, I’m quite pleased with how my blog looks. I don’t know if I’m enjoying this theme 100% yet, but I do like the new graphics that I made–especially the new blog headers! I think I’ve definitely brought more colour to my blog now! What do you all think of it? Or maybe you didn’t even notice or don’t care? (That’s totally fine too! Lol)
I hope you all had a great November! I’m sure that most of us have tons of books that we’d like to read before the year is out, so HAPPY DECEMBER READING, friends!
dinipandareads 