Bury the Lede by Gaby Dunn, Claire Roe – #eARC #BookReview

Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

Goodreads: Bury the Lede
Publish date: 08 October 2019
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Genre: Crime Thriller, Mystery, Graphic Novel, LGBTQ+
Panda Rating:

Twenty-one-year-old Madison T. Jackson is already the star of the Emerson College student newspaper when she nabs a coveted night internship at Boston’s premiere newspaper, The Boston Lede. The job’s simple: do whatever the senior reporters tell you to do, from fetching coffee to getting a quote from a grieving parent. It’s gruelling work, so when the murder of a prominent Boston businessman comes up on the police scanner, Madison races to the scene of the grisly crime. There, Madison meets the woman who will change her life forever: prominent socialite Dahlia Kennedy, who is covered in gore and being arrested for the murder of her family. The newspapers put everyone they can in front of her with no results until, with nothing to lose, Madison gets a chance – and unexpectedly barrels headfirst into danger she never anticipated.

I love discovering new graphic novels and I requested this because the cover hooked my interest, plus I don’t think never read a crime noir graphic novel/comic before! Bury the Lede was mostly what I anticipated it to be, although there were some elements that really grated on my nerves and that’s what made me only give it three stars.

Read More »

Top 5 Saturday: Series I Want to Finish Before 2019 Ends…

Dini @ dinipandareads24 Comments

Yes, I’m aware it’s now Sunday but yesterday was a weird day for me combined with work + bingeing The Good Place. I didn’t realize I hadn’t posted anything until it was 1AM and I was still binge watching the series. So I’m posting this a little late… But one day late is better than never!

It’s time for another Top 5 SaturdaySunday, a weekly meme created by Mandy @ Devouring Books and this week’s topic is: books to be read by the end of the year. I actually answered a similar prompt for last week’s Thursday Discussion post, which you can read here. For this prompt I decided to look at the final books in series that I wanted to read this year and still haven’t got to. Is it highly ambitious to want to finish these series seeing as December is already here and I’ve got so many freaking books that I hope to finish before 2019 ends? It definitely is. But who knows what’ll happen, right?! Maybe December will be my miracle month of reading and I’ll be able to fly through whatever I pick up, even if I’m unsure that I’m really in the mood for it 😃It could be my tropical Christmas miracle! 😂

Read More »

First Lines Friday – 29 November

Dini @ dinipandareads9 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:

“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.”

Read More »

Friday Favorites: Books That Make Me Thankful to be A Reader

Dini @ dinipandareads7 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 books that make me thankful to be a reader. So… This is a really tough prompt to answer! I find the idea of narrowing it down to a small list so daunting because obviously there are gonna be loads of amazing favorites that don’t show up below. I think almost every book I’ve read has left a part of itself with me that makes me thankful to be a reader. There are just too many books to name one-by-one but I’m only going to name five below. I’ve learned and experienced so many different thoughts and emotions while reading all of these books. Forever thankful!

Read More »

Notes On A Nervous Planet by Matt Haig – #MiniBookReview

Dini @ dinipandareads12 Comments

Goodreads: Notes On A Nervous Planet
Genre: Non Fiction, Self-Help, Mental Health
Panda Rating:

Rates of stress and anxiety are rising. A fast, nervous planet is creating fast and nervous lives. We are more connected, yet feel more alone. And we are encouraged to worry about everything from world politics to our body mass index.

– How can we stay sane on a planet that makes us mad?
– How do we stay human in a technological world?
– How do we feel happy when we are encouraged to be anxious?

After experiencing years of anxiety and panic attacks, these questions became urgent matters of life and death for Matt Haig. And he began to look for the link between what he felt and the world around him.

Notes on a Nervous Planet is a personal and vital look at how to feel happy, human and whole in the 21st century. 

This was my first book by Matt Haig and it certainly won’t be my last! I’m not much of a nonfiction reader but I’m so glad that I decided to read this book because Haig touches upon incredibly relevant issues that we face today living on this increasingly overloaded and sensitive nervous planet.

Read More »

Kiss Me Not (Kiss Me #1) by Emma Hart – #BookReview

Dini @ dinipandareads8 Comments

Goodreads: Kiss Me Not (Kiss Me #1)
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Panda Rating:

What do you do when you’re the reigning kissing booth champion but the only person you want to kiss is your best friend’s brother?

Let me make this clear right here, right now: I, Halley Dawson, do not care that Preston Wright is kissing other women. Not a lick. Not at all. Nuh-uh-freakin’-uh.
I do care that he’s doing it six feet away from me behind a gaudy velvet curtain—making him my competition in this year’s kissing contest.

Why do I care, you ask? Because I’ve had an unfortunate crush on the insufferable idiot since I was sixteen years old, but I also know it’s never going to happen. He’s the Creek Falls bachelor to die for, and I’m the Creek Falls racoon lady who puts peanut butter sandwiches out for them every night. I’m not going to let him break my four-year-long reign—no matter how many times he breaks the rules and slides the curtain across to do the one thing he’s not allowed to: Kiss me.

Kiss Me Not is a short and fluffy romantic comedy that certainly had me giggling at times but overall, I thought was just alright. The enemies-to-lovers story focuses on our MCs Halley and Preston. Halley is the all-around golden girl and notorious Raccoon lady, and Preston is her best friend’s older brother and the most eligible bachelor of Creek Falls. Halley has been the reigning champion of the town’s Kissing Booth for the last four years, but this year Preston is her competition and soon bets are made and truths come out.

Read More »

#TopTenTuesday: Bookish and Non-Bookish Things I’m Thankful For (Thankful Freebie)

Dini @ dinipandareads28 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: thankful freebie. I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving but I can’t help getting caught up in the thankful spirit that’s been going around in the book community lately. 2019 has been a year of… a lot. A lot of everything. In many ways I feel like this year has been one of extremes with either many high-highs and many low-lows, which has been incredibly trying. This basically means that I’ve been a hot-emotional-mess for 90% of the year, including right now! But before I become even more emotional, let’s get to what I’m thankful for this year. As this is a freebie, I’ve decided to keep it simple and write a list of all the bookish and non-bookish things I’m thankful for. Of course, I’ll try to keep it as bookish as possible 😉 Here we go:

Read More »

TH1RT3EN (Eddie Flynn #4) by Steve Cavanagh – #eARC #BookReview

Dini @ dinipandareads14 Comments

Goodreads: TH1RT3EN (Eddie Flynn #4)
Publish date: 13 August 2019
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Genre: Crime Thriller, Mystery
Panda Rating:

The serial killer isn’t on trial.
He’s on the jury…

They were Hollywood’s hottest power couple. They had the world at their feet. Now one of them is dead and Hollywood star Robert Solomon is charged with the brutal murder of his beautiful wife.

This is the celebrity murder trial of the century and the defence want one man on their team: con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn.

All the evidence points to Robert’s guilt, but as the trial begins a series of sinister incidents in the courtroom start to raise doubts in Eddie’s mind.

What if there’s more than one actor in the courtroom?
What if the killer isn’t on trial? What if the killer is on the jury?

Wow, what an incredible ride! Again, I’m facepalming myself for not reading this as soon as I got it on NetGalley because I loved every minute of this fast-paced courtroom drama and crime thriller. This book was like reading an episode of Criminal Minds and I could so clearly picture everything unfolding before me as if I watching it on TV. I knew I had to read this one as soon as I read the synopsis and saw that “the killer isn’t on trial, he’s on the jury”! I mean, is there a cleverer way of catching the reader’s attention with a blurb like that? It definitely worked it’s magic on me.

Read More »

Triwizardathon: Task 2 Possibility Pile

Dini @ dinipandareads7 Comments

RECAP

Unsurprisingly, the week for Task 1 went fairly quickly but I managed to read more than I thought I would! I almost read everything I set out to, but I changed one of the books that I initially picked because I wasn’t in the mood to read it when the time came around. On top of that, I also read one more book than I set out to, so that was pretty exciting and a pretty great start to the readathon 😍

Read More »