#WWWWednesday: 09 December

Hello, hello and welcome back to another episode of 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?

Since last week I managed to finish three books:

Love thy Neighbor (Roommate Romps #2) by Teagan Hunter ★★★★☆
The second book in Hunter’s latest romcom series was everything that I loved about her Texting series. I loved Caroline and Cooper’s best-friendship and their romance was swoontastic! Their connection as friends was undeniable but their chemistry WAS ABSOLUTE FIRE! 🔥🥵 Review coming soon.

The Bitterwine Oath by Hannah West ★★★★☆
You know I’m The Ultimate Chicken™️ so I can’t believe I read this, but at the same time I’m so glad I stepped out of my comfort zone! West has written an extremely chilling atmosphere in this story involving witches, magic, spirits and demons. There’s a touch of romance that I actually enjoyed, but the “supernatural girl gang” vibes won me over! Check out my review.

Read More »

#TopTenTuesday: Christmas Romances for the Holidays!

So, we’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Holiday/Seasonal Freebie (holiday books/covers/titles, wintry reads, snow on cover, cool color covers, takes place in cold settings, cozy scenes on cover, etc.), so I’ve gone for Christmas Romances that I hope to be reading!

Since it’s a holiday/seasonal freebie today, I was debating whether to do a post on the books I want to read before the end of 2020, but I thought it’d end up being not very festive, so I decided to share ten Christmas romances that I’d like to read at some point this month (but also maybe even in January). I’m quite new to seasonal romances but I went a bit wild last year looking at all the gorgeous Christmas covers, and ended up snagging a fair few for 99p on Kindle! I can’t remember what many of these are about but just looking at them gives me those cosy and comforting feels. As with many holiday themed things, I find that sometimes holiday romances can get a little cheesy, but y’know what? We’re here for the cheesy feel-good vibes, especially when so much has been a hot mess this year!

Read More »

#5OnMyTBR: Small Towns…

Hello Mondays, welcome back to #5OnMyTBR, a meme created by the wonderful E @ The Local Bee Hunter’s Nook. This bookish meme gets us to dig even further into our TBRs by simply posting about five books on our TBR! You can learn more about it here or in the post announcing it. You can find the full list of prompts (past and future) at the end of this post!

This week’s prompt is: Small Town.

Read More »

Goodreads Monday – Daughter of the Burning City by Amanda Foody

Welcome back to Goodreads Monday! It’s been a very hot minute since I did one but I figured I might as well get back into it! This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners and it 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.*

*Sorry if a book has been featured twice! I need to make better note of which ones I’ve done already!

This week’s featured book is Daughter of the Burning City by Amanda Foody. This is a YA fantasy and mystery that was published in 2017 and has a 3.71 rating on Goodreads with almost 1.5k reviews.

Read More »

Sundays in Bed With… #MyWeeklyWrapUp

We’re back with another Sundays 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 spent time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!

Well, we basically know that I’ve been “reading” Spellbreaker for quite a while now but since I finished my previous read last night, I decided to pick this up and give it my full attention, so this Sunday I’ll be tucking into bed with it! I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time focusing on this story because I am enjoying what I’m reading but I keep getting distracted while I’m reading and it’s starting to frustrate me 😂 I feel like I need to slap some focus into my head! Haha

The orphaned Elsie Camden learned as a girl that there were two kinds of wizards in the world: those who pay for the power to cast spells and those, like her, born with the ability to break them. But as an unlicensed magic user, her gift is a crime. Commissioned by an underground group known as the Cowls, Elsie uses her spellbreaking to push back against the aristocrats and help the common man. She always did love the tale of Robin Hood.

Elite magic user Bacchus Kelsey is one elusive spell away from his mastership when he catches Elsie breaking an enchantment. To protect her secret, Elsie strikes a bargain. She’ll help Bacchus fix unruly spells around his estate if he doesn’t turn her in. Working together, Elsie’s trust in—and fondness for—the handsome stranger grows. So does her trepidation about the rise in the murders of wizards and the theft of the spellbooks their bodies leave behind.

For a rogue spellbreaker like Elsie, there’s so much to learn about her powers, her family, the intriguing Bacchus, and the untold dangers shadowing every step of a journey she’s destined to complete. But will she uncover the mystery before it’s too late to save everything she loves?

What are you currently reading?

Read More »

Blog Tour Review: The Bitterwine Oath by Hannah West

Today is my stop on the TBR & Beyond Tours for The Bitterwine Oath by Hannah West. Special thanks to Holiday House and the author for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Be sure to click on the banner above to check out the rest of the amazing bloggers on tour!

Goodreads: The Bitterwine Oath
Publication Date: 01 December 2020
Genre: Young Adult Mystery
Panda Rating:

Every fifty years, a cult claims twelve men to murder in a small Texas town. Can one girl end the cycle of violence – and save the boy who broke her heart?

San Solano, Texas is a quaint town known for its charm, hospitality, and history of murder. Twice now, twelve men have been brutally killed, and no one knows who did it. A shadowy witch? A copy-cat killer? Or a man-hating murderess? Eighteen-year-old Natalie Colter is sure that the rumors about her great-great-grandmother’s cult of wronged women are just gossip, but that doesn’t stop the true crime writers and dark tourism bloggers from capitalizing on the town’s reputation. It’s an urban legend that’s hard to ignore, and it gets harder when Nat learns that the sisterhood is real, and magical. And they want her to join.

The more Nat learns of the Wardens’ supernatural history, the more she wonders about the real culprits behind the town’s ritualistic murders. Are the Wardens protecting San Solano from even darker forces? As the anniversary of the murders draws near, the town grows restless. Residents start getting “claimed” as this year’s planned victims, including Levi Langford, the boy whose kiss haunted Nat for a year.

Nat knows that no one is safe. Can she and the sisterhood stop the true evil from claiming their town?

BUY NOW: Amazon (US) | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indigo | Indiebound

Read More »

Top 5 Saturday: Apocalyptic Books

Welcome back to another Top 5 Saturday! Just in case you don’t know Top 5 Saturday is a weekly meme created by Mandy @ Devouring Books and it’s where we list the top five books (they can be books on your TBR, favourite books, books you loved/hated) based on the week’s topic. You can see the upcoming schedule at the end of my post 🙂 This week’s topic is actually: apocalyptic books.

Well, I guess it’s about time I did a prompt for (post-)apocalyptic books this year, huh? I’m actually surprised I haven’t done one yet 🤔 Though in all honesty I can’t recall for sure right now because I’m operating on like 10% battery 😅 But I digress! All save one of these titles have been on my TBR for a while now and I did have plans to read either one or two of them this year but I haven’t been in the right mood for them (unsurprisingly). I do usually really enjoy post-apocalytpic stories though, so I’m hoping to get to these at some point in the hopefully not too distant future! So, on that note, here are the books I’m keen to read:

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

Read More »

First Lines Friday – 04 December

Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, 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:

Let me be clear: I never intended to raise my brother from his grave, though he may claim otherwise. If there’s anything I’ve learned from him in the years since, it’s that the dead hide truths as well as the living.

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Read More »

November 2020 Monthly Wrap Up!

Can you believe it’s already December? I’m a little shook at how quickly November seemed to zoom right by me and that I can’t recall reading much of anything at all last month!

Work in November was been overwhelmingly busy with projects ending, people leaving, and new things to start sorting for next year as my organisation goes through a merger. Having to prepare communications for the region and projects, as well as representing Southeast Asia in our global works council (similar to a union), on top of finding time to blog and read, really stretched me quite thin! To say that everything seemed to be overflowing might be a bit of an understatement and part of me is even glad to see that we’re in the last month of 2020 now because I’m truly running low on steam 😂

But it hasn’t been all bad! It has been an incredible month for book mail and I’ve received many of the special editions that I ordered earlier in the year. I haven’t spent much on regular book buying in 2020, but I’m 100% positive I made up for all that with the many special editions that I purchased. I really kissed that money goodbye, friends 😂

Now… ON TO THE “FUN” STUFF!

In November, I read 15 books! **Okay, I just totally surprised myself with that count because I expected to see that I only managed to read five books or something because that’s really what this month has felt like 😂 LOL I didn’t have any five star reads or DNFs and the majority this month were 4 stars. If you can’t tell I went on a bit of a historical romance binge and the light reads were exactly what I needed! The books were a good mix of blog tour reads, ARCs and new books on my TBR.

Being the only book I rated 4.5 stars this month, The Cousins was my favourite read but I think the Moose Springs series are close contenders because they really brought me a lot of joy and I can’t wait to continue on with the series in December as I was lucky enough to get the ARC!

Read More »

First Impressions Spotlight: Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

So it turns out that I noted my date incorrectly for this Algonquin tour and I didn’t bother to recheck it like I usually do because it’s been so busy… and I feel terrible about it! 😰 I have read 30% of the book though so this will be a “First Impressions” review but I will follow it up with a full review ASAP!

Thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Goodreads: Big Girl, Small Town
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Release Date: 01 December 2020
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Irish Literature

Majella is happiest out of the spotlight, away from her neighbors’ stares and the gossips of the small town in Northern Ireland where she grew up during the Troubles. She lives a quiet life caring for her alcoholic mother, working in the local chip shop, and watching the regular customers come and go. She wears the same clothes each day (overalls, too small), has the same dinner each night (fish and chips, microwaved at home after her shift ends), and binge-watches old DVDs of the same show (Dallas, best show on TV) from the comfort of her bed. But underneath Majella’s seemingly ordinary life are the facts that she doesn’t know where her father is and that every person in her town has been changed by the lingering divide between Protestants and Catholics. When Majella’s seemingly mundane existence is upended by the death of her granny, she comes to realize there may be more to life than the gossips of Aghybogey, the pub, and the chip shop. In fact, there just may be a whole big world outside her small town. 

Read More »