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!
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.
TL;DR: Don’t Go Baking My Heart took a minute for me to get into but I ended up really enjoying it. This was in large part due to Reba and her amazingness—talk about girl crush material because her fun-shine personality, wit and sass were literally *everything!* I can’t lie and say that I wasn’t worried Devon wouldn’t grow because that stick was shoved so far up his behind that I didn’t think anyone could pull it out but I shouldn’t have underestimated Reba! Her charm chipped away at his cold and stiff demeanour and brought out a surprisingly charming, funny, and flirty guy. They’re the definition of opposites attract and I loved their slow-burn romance!
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:
Evening, fellow book lovers! Somehow April has come and gone and even now, we’re starting our second week of May (hello?)! As you know, I don’t participate in many readathons but The Magical Readathon is one that I happily and very excitedly participate in every year.
April marked the first semester back at school and now that the month is over, it’s time to take a look at how I did for ✨ The Magical Readathon: Orilium Spring Equinox 2023! ✨ How well did the first semester of my second year at Orilium go? Read on to find out!
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!
This Sunday I’m in bed with two books…
Don’t Go Baking My Heart → 45% I actually haven’t made any progress with this cos I haven’t picked it up since last week. I’m reading it right now though!
Castles in Their Bones → 35% I’m buddy-reading this with Leslie and I’m loving it! I already can’t wait to pick it back up again—it was so hard to put down!
Happy Saturday, friends! I was wondering what to post today because as usual I’m preparing things at the last minute and when I decided to do an ‘easy’ tag, I remembered that I still haven’t done The Folklore Book Tag. Folklore is top-tier TS for me and one of my all-time favourite albums. I wasn’t tagged to do this but I saw it on Elli’s blog *ages* ago and since I’ve seen mentions of TS on the bird app’s feed quite a bit today I thought why not?
So I’m turning up the track and diving straight into this!
This tag and the awesome graphics you see are originally created by Ilsa @ Whisper of Ink.
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:
“It is said that the stars shine brighter on the princesses’ birthday, but the princesses themselves think that is balderdash. The stars look the same as they always do, and this year, on the night before the three of them leave their home and one another for the first time in their lives, everything—the stars included—seems far darker.”
dinipandareads 