Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, 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 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:
“There were tales that only the island knew. Ones that had never been told. I knew, because I was one of them.”
Hello friends, I’m back today with another month’s edition for The Birthstone Book Covers series created by one of my favourites, Leslie. 💜 She began this at the start of 2022 and it was born out of her curiosity about birthstone colours. It’s fun to show different book covers/titles corresponding to that month’s birthstone. 🙂
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:
This week’s topic isThings Getting in the Way of Reading (what’s taking up your time right now?) (lovingly stolenfrom A Cocoon of Books during freebie week)
Angel Smith is finally ready to leave Antarctica for a second chance at life. But on what was meant to be her last day, the remote research station she’s been calling home is attacked. Hunted and scared, she and irritatingly gorgeous glaciologist Ford Cooper barely make it out with their lives…only to realize that in a place this remote, there’s nowhere left to run.
Isolated with no power, no way to contact the outside world, and a madman at their heels, Angel and Ford must fight to survive in the most inhospitable—and beautiful—place on earth. But what starts as a partnership born of necessity quickly turns into an urgent connection that burns bright and hot. They both know there is little chance of making it out alive, and yet they are determined to survive against the odds—and possibly, the world.
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 your time curled up reading in bed with or which book you wish you had time to read today!
Today I’m spending a very minuscule part of my Sunday in bed reading How to Win a Breakup by Farah Heron.
I’ve been meaning to read this author’s books for a while and I have two or three of her YA contemporary romances on my TBR. I started this quite a while back but since I wasn’t sure what to pick up next, I decided to go back to this and hopefully, I’ll finish it soon!
Happy Saturday, friends! Today I’m excited to share my review for Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani, the third finalist of the 2022 BBNYA! I read this book as part of the BBNYA Finalist Blog Tour hosted by The Write Reads.
Special thanks to the tour organisers for having me on tour and to the author for providing a digital copy of the book in exchange for an honest review!
About BBNYA
BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists and one overall winner. If you are an author and wish to learn more about the BBNYA competition, you can visit the official website or Twitter. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
The winding streets and narrow alleys of Karolene hide many secrets, and Hitomi is one of them. Orphaned at a young age, Hitomi has learned to hide her magical aptitude and who her parents really were. Most of all, she must conceal her role in the Shadow League, an underground movement working to undermine the powerful and corrupt Arch Mage Wilhelm Blackflame.
When the League gets word that Blackflame intends to detain—and execute—a leading political family, Hitomi volunteers to help the family escape. But there are more secrets at play than Hitomi’s, and much worse fates than execution. When Hitomi finds herself captured along with her charges, it will take everything she can summon to escape with her life.
⚠️CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNINGS
Death of parent, mild xenophobia, violence, blood, imprisonment, torture
TL;DR: This is my first book by Khanani and I can see why so many of my blogger friends love her writing and her books. There was so much to enjoy about this novella and the author does a good job of teasing elements of a world that I’m hoping will be further expanded in the next book. The characters are a rich mix of different cultures and I also enjoyed the paranormal fantasy setting. We’ve got the typical vampires, werewolves and shapeshifters, but also other supernaturals that I’ve not read about before, combined with an interesting magic system that I’m looking forward to understanding more of. Overall, I thought this was an intense, action-packed novella that excited me for the next book in this series and I want to read it ASAP!
In less than 200 pages, Sunbolt takes us on a whirlwind adventure with plenty of action and magic. Our MC is Hitomi, an orphaned teen who is strong-willed, honourable and willing to fight and sacrifice to see justice prevail. It was so easy to root for Tomi and to want to see her get free of her various captors throughout the read. One thing is for sure, she’s not the “weak young thing” that people perceive her to be and she’s definitely not someone who’s easily defeated! I loved her grit and strength of character and despite hiding a huge life-changing secret and encountering fearful monsters she’s only ever briefly encountered before, she doesn’t let that fear stop her from taking action and using her brain. This determination combined with her big heart was something that I also really loved about her!
There’s a big cast of side characters that we briefly meet along the way and there were some I loved (Hotaru!), some I strongly disliked and wanted to give a good shake to (IFYKYK), and others that I was very curious about (Val, Mistress Stormwind), but they mostly existed to move things along in this novella. I hope that we return to and get to learn more about many of them in the next book because I loved the levity of their humour and the lightness of their interactions with Tomi.
I think what would’ve made this book stronger is better world-building. I appreciated the rich mix of cultures and the diversity of the characters—from Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and the West (from what I can tell), but what was lacking was a clear history and geographical understanding of this world. I don’t know if this Karolene and the other lands have already been established in a previous book/series but we’re kind of thrown into it without much context. We do get drops of information further in the read about historical conflicts, mages and different types of magic, as well as other supernaturals, but it’s very minimal. This is a book that would’ve benefitted from having a map available at the start, but I appreciate that the author provided a short pronunciation guide (although I found it funny that the first word after said guide wasn’t included in it and it would’ve been great if it was! 😂). The world-building we got was enough to pique my interest though and the need to know more drove me to keep reading.
Overall, I thought that this was a great first book and I’m looking forward to continuing Hitomi’s story. I’m also really looking forward to reading more by Khanani cos their writing has an intense but wonderfully compelling quality that made me want to keep reading.
Intisar Khanani grew up a nomad and world traveler. She has lived in five different states as well as in Jeddah, on the coast of the Red Sea. Intisar used to write grants and develop projects to address community health and infant mortality with the Cincinnati Health Department, which was as close as she could get to saving the world. Now she focuses her time on her two passions: raising her family and writing fantasy. She is the author of The Sunbolt Chronicles, and the Dauntless Path novels, beginning with Thorn.
Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, 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 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:
“Marvelous. The lucky kids got called that. Praise like honey drizzled on biscuits. But Ella’s family didn’t believe in gassing you up. Clothes ironed? Make your bed? Clean your plate? And most importantly, did you mind your business so nobody was minding you?”
Devon King has a plan. An actual with bullet points and everything plan for his life. When he’s called out at work for never participating in any of the office activities he feels compelled to take part in the upcoming office bake off competition to prove he’s a team player, as making partner at his architectural design firm is top on his list of career goals. Only problem, he doesn’t know anything about baking. Failure is not an option so when his first choice for help is unavailable, desperate times lead him to ask Reba Johnson, assistant pastry chef to his brother’s girlfriend.
Reba’s been having fun texting the super serious Devon ridiculous cat pictures, for an entire month, but she’s surprised when he asks for her help with a potential baking crisis, since their conversations have been one sided until now. When her friends make a bet that even she can’t get the stoic Devon to fall for her charms, Reba sets out to prove them wrong and get Devon to have some fun.
As the competition draws closer, their sessions get hotter with a one night stand turning into two nights then three…Reba doesn’t fit into Devon’s carefully crafted life and as he tries to focus on winning the company contest, he discovers that sweet treats aren’t the only thing baking in the kitchen, and all his perfect plans are crumbling.
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:
dinipandareads 