First Lines Friday – 04 September

September 4, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads19 Comments

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:

“This house was made for someone without a soul. So I guess it makes sense that my mother wanted it so badly.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Goodreads Monday – The Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe

August 31, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads12 Comments

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 The Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe. This is a YA Contemporary that was published in January 2019 and it has a 3.81 star rating on Goodreads.

Top 5 Saturday: Young Adult Detective Books

August 29, 2020August 29, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads8 Comments

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: detective books but I really wanted to do last week’s topic on Young Adult Books and I’m sad that I missed it. So I decided that I would combine the two topics this week to share: Young Adult Detective Books!

After making the decision to focus on YA Detective Books I realised that I wasn’t even sure I had (m)any on my TBR in the first place! Luckily, after a quick sweep through my Kindle shelves and my Goodreads TBR, I’ve managed to find a few. A lot of these are pretty hyped and popular titles although one is a much older release from 2014 but I only added it to my TBR last year. I’ve had the majority of these on my shelf for at least one year? So I’m hoping that I can get to at least a few at some point this year!

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

Goodreads Monday – Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

August 24, 2020August 24, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads12 Comments

This week’s featured book is Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano. This is a contemporary fiction/coming-of-age story that was published in January 2020 and it has a 4.16 star rating!

Top 5 Saturday: Recommended Reads

August 15, 2020August 15, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads16 Comments

For today’s prompt on recommended reads, I’m going to look at five books on my TBR that have been recommended to me and I’m going to use the term “recommended” pretty loosely here because I consider the books that I see on blogs as recommendations, so there’s definitely no shortage of that! 😂 I don’t think I’ll be focusing on any particular theme either so it’s just going to be the first ones that come to mind…

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

Blog Tour Review: The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed

August 12, 2020August 12, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads9 Comments

I’m so honoured and excited to share my review today as part of the book blog tour for The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed. Special thanks to Shivani at Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing for reaching out and asking if I’d like to be part of their tour for this incredible book. Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Goodreads: The Black Kids
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Release Date: 04 August 2020
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Coming-of-Age
Panda Rating:

Perfect for fans of The Hate U Give, this unforgettable coming-of-age debut novel explores issues of race, class, and violence through the eyes of a wealthy black teenager whose family gets caught in the vortex of the 1992 Rodney King Riots.

Los Angeles, 1992
Ashley Bennett and her friends are living the charmed life. It’s the end of senior year and they’re spending more time at the beach than in the classroom. They can already feel the sunny days and endless possibilities of summer.

Everything changes one afternoon in April, when four LAPD officers are acquitted after beating a black man named Rodney King half to death. Suddenly, Ashley’s not just one of the girls. She’s one of the black kids.

As violent protests engulf LA and the city burns, Ashley tries to continue on as if life were normal. Even as her self-destructive sister gets dangerously involved in the riots. Even as the model black family façade her wealthy and prominent parents have built starts to crumble. Even as her best friends help spread a rumor that could completely derail the future of her classmate and fellow black kid, LaShawn Johnson.

With her world splintering around her, Ashley, along with the rest of LA, is left to question who is the us? And who is the them?

Buy: Publisher | Amazon (US) | Amazon (UK) | Book Depository

Blog Tour Review: A House is a Body by Shruti Swamy

August 9, 2020August 9, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

Today I’m back with another Algonquin book tour for A House is A Body by Shruti Swamy. Thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. This book is out 11 August 2020!

Goodreads: A House is a Body
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Release Date: 11 August 2020
Genre: Literary Fiction, Short Stories
Panda Rating:

In two-time O. Henry-prize winner Swamy’s debut collection of stories, dreams collide with reality, modernity collides with antiquity, myth with true identity, and women grapple with desire, with ego, with motherhood and mortality. In “Earthly Pleasures,” Radika, a young painter living alone in San Francisco, begins a secret romance with one of India’s biggest celebrities. In “A Simple Composition,” a husband’s moment of crisis leads to his wife’s discovery of a dark, ecstatic joy and the sense of a new beginning. In the title story, an exhausted mother watches, distracted and paralyzed, as a California wildfire approaches her home. With a knife blade’s edge and precision, the stories of A House Is a Body travel from India to America and back again to reveal the small moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world.

Buy: Amazon (US)

Top 5 Saturday: Underrated Books/Hidden Gems

August 8, 2020August 8, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads27 Comments

The prompt this week is pretty straightforward so I don’t really have much to say to introduce the topic. While it’d be easier to share underrated books that I’ve already read, I thought it’d be interesting to do an underrated books list for five on my TBR. I took to Goodreads to help me come up with a random list. These are books that I’ve heard good things about but I haven’t seen a lot of hype for (or at least not to my knowledge). I’m quite excited to read it Without further ado, let’s get to it!

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

Blog Tour Review: With or Without You by Caroline Leavitt

August 8, 2020August 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads14 Comments

I’m back with another Algonquin blog tour and this time it’s for With or Without You by Caroline Leavitt. Thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Goodreads: With or Without You
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Release Date: 04 August 2020
Genre: Literary Fiction
Panda Rating:

A powerful story of love, identity, and the price of fitting in or speaking out.
After her father’s death, Ruth Robb and her family transplant themselves in the summer of 1958 from New York City to Atlanta—the land of debutantes, sweet tea, and the Ku Klux Klan. In her new hometown, Ruth quickly figures out she can be Jewish or she can be popular, but she can’t be both. Eager to fit in with the blond girls in the “pastel posse,” Ruth decides to hide her religion. Before she knows it, she is falling for the handsome and charming Davis and sipping Cokes with him and his friends at the all-white, all-Christian Club.

Does it matter that Ruth’s mother makes her attend services at the local synagogue every week? Not as long as nobody outside her family knows the truth. At temple Ruth meets Max, who is serious and intense about the fight for social justice, and now she is caught between two worlds, two religions, and two boys. But when a violent hate crime brings the different parts of Ruth’s life into sharp conflict, she will have to choose between all she’s come to love about her new life and standing up for what she believes.

Top 5 Saturday: Enemies to Lovers…

August 1, 2020October 11, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads28 Comments

If you’ve been following my blog for a while now, you might’ve noticed that I’ve been unexpectedly MIA for a while now. Life has been… Life? No excuses but if you want to read me waffle on about it, check out my smol life and reading update post. On that note, I’m looking forward to getting back into the groove and a perfect way to do this is to start doing my regularly weekly memes (that I’ve missed so much)! Glad to be back with…

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: enemies to lovers.

I used to be embarrassed to admit that I’m a big fat hopeless romantic but… I am indeed a big fat hopeless romantic. GIVE ME ALL THE LOVE and I will (probably) love it! I think I’ve only really taken the time to notice this year just how much romance I read and the enemies-to-lovers trope is one of my all time favourites! I mean, who doesn’t love the delicious tension that builds between two characters who, deep down, have all these feelings for each other that they don’t know what do with until one day it finally explodes? Not to mention all the hilarious, snarky banter that’s usually a staple in our protagonists’ exchanges? Just thinking about it gets me giddy with excitement and anticipation! Safe to say, I’ve read my share of enemies-to-lovers but I’ve still got plenty on my TBR! Here are five of them that I hope to read ASAP: