Goodreads: Before the Coffee Gets Cold Publisher: Picador Published: 19 September 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Magical Realism
Panda Rating: (4 pandas)
What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold…
Today is my stop on the TBR & Beyond Tours for The Other Side of Perfect by Mariko Turk. Special thanks to Netgalley and Little Brown Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Be sure to click on the banner below to check out the rest of the amazing bloggers on tour!
Goodreads:The Other Side of Perfect Publisher: Little Brown Books Publication Date: 11 May 2021 Genre: Young Adult Contemporary Panda Rating: (actual 4.5 pandas)
Alina Keeler was destined to dance, but one terrifying fall shatters her leg–and her dreams of a professional ballet career along with it.
After a summer healing (translation: eating vast amounts of Cool Ranch Doritos and binging ballet videos on YouTube), she is forced to trade her pre-professional dance classes for normal high school, where she reluctantly joins the school musical. However, rehearsals offer more than she expected–namely Jude, her annoyingly attractive cast mate she just might be falling for.
But to move forward, Alina must make peace with her past and face the racism she had grown to accept in the dance industry. She wonders what it means to yearn for ballet–something so beautiful, yet so broken. And as broken as she feels, can she ever open her heart to someone else?
Touching, romantic, and peppered with humor, this debut novel explores the tenuousness of perfectionism, the possibilities of change, and the importance of raising your voice.
CW/TW: the protagonist is dealing with a lot of anger and some depression, various experiences of racism, bullying
Today is my stop on the TBR & Beyond Tours for The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He. Special thanks to Netgalley and Roaring Brook Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Be sure to click on the banner below to check out the rest of the amazing bloggers on tour!
Goodreads:The Ones We’re Meant to Find Publisher: Roaring Brook Press Publication Date: 04 May 2021 Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction/Climate Fiction Panda Rating: (5 pandas)
One of the most twisty, surprising, engaging page-turner YAs you’ll read this year—We Were Liars with sci-fi scope, Lost with a satisfying resolution.
Cee awoke on an abandoned island three years ago. With no idea of how she was marooned, she only has a rickety house, an old android, and a single memory: she has a sister, and Cee needs to find her.
STEM prodigy Kasey wants escape from the science and home she once trusted. The eco-city—Earth’s last unpolluted place—is meant to be sanctuary for those commited to planetary protection, but it’s populated by people willing to do anything for refuge, even lie. Now, she’ll have to decide if she’s ready to use science to help humanity, even though it failed the people who mattered most.
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 The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso. This is an Asian epic/high fantasy that was released last year and is Villoso’s debut novel. 😍
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: blood on the cover.
So… I’m surprised by how much I struggled to come up with five books on my TBR for this prompt! I even struggled to think of five books that I’ve already read with blood on the cover and I don’t know why but this really surprises me? 😂 What I’ve decided to do for this week’s cover is take the prompt literally and I’ve found five books with the word blood on the cover (cos at least this was easier to find on my Goodreads TBR)! Without further ado… Here are five ‘blood-y’ books that I hope to read this year (she said) 😉:
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: books with diverse characters.
Well, this is gonna be tough because I can pick way more than five books with diverse characters off my TBR, and I’m looking forward to reading all of them soon! In recent years, I’ve made an active effort to diversify my reads because I realised that many of the books I had access to in the main bookstores in Indonesia tended to feature mostly white authors writing white characters. I also never questioned what I was reading and never actively sought out diverse reads—well, not anymore! It has been amazing to read more stories with characters of different ethnicities, nationalities, religions, LGBTQ+ and abilities in contemporaries, romances, and even SFF and I can’t wait to read even more in the future! For this prompt I decided to focus on books with Asian characters because I love to see the Asian rep! So without further ado, here are five books with diverse characters that I’m really excited for.
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 The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara. This is a literary historical fiction with elements of magical realism and is Yanagihara’s debut back in 2014.
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 Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo. This is a YA LGBTQ+ historical fiction that was released just last month (January 2021) and it has some a pretty high rating!
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.
This week’s featured book is Human Acts by Han Kang. This is a historical fiction set in South Korea that was published in 2017 and has a 4.17 star rating on Goodreads with several thousand ratings and reviews.
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 been you’ve spent time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!
I’ve spent a good chunk of my Sunday in bed with my eARC for Always Only You (Bergman Brothers #2) by Chloe Liese. After reading the first book in the series I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this one and I’m so lucky to have received an advanced copy from Chloe. I’m really enjoying it and I’m trying to pace myself but after starting it this morning I’m already at 60%, so I’ll easily be finishing it this evening! I am loving the Bergman brothers and their heroines so much–please give me more! 😍
Ren The moment I met her, I knew Frankie Zeferino was someone worth waiting for. Deadpan delivery, secret heart of gold, and a rare one-dimpled smile that makes my knees weak, Frankie has been forbidden since the day she and I became coworkers, meaning waiting has been the name of my game—besides, hockey, that is. I’m a player on the team, she’s on staff, and as long as we work together, dating is off-limits. But patience has always been my virtue. Frankie won’t be here forever—she’s headed for bigger, better things. I just hope that when she leaves the team and I tell her how I feel, she won’t want to leave me behind, too.
Frankie I’ve had a problem at work since the day Ren Bergman joined the team: a six foot three hunk of happy with a sunshine smile. I’m a grumbly grump and his ridiculously good nature drives me nuts, but even I can’t entirely ignore that hot tamale of a ginger with icy eyes, the perfect playoff beard, and a body built for sin that he’s annoyingly modest about. Before I got wise, I would have tripped over myself to get a guy like Ren, but with my diagnosis, I’ve learned what I am to most people in my life—a problem, not a person. Now, opening my heart to anyone, no matter how sweet, is the last thing I’m prepared to do.
Always Only You is an opposites-attract, forbidden love sports romance about a nerdy, late-blooming hockey star, and his tough cookie coworker who keeps both her soft side and her autism diagnosis* to herself. Complete with a meddling secretary, tantric yoga torture, and a scorching slow burn, this standalone is the second in a series of novels about a Swedish-American family of five brothers, two sisters, and their wild adventures as they each find happily ever after.
*This is an #OwnVoices story for its portrayal of autism by an autistic author.
dinipandareads 