First Lines Friday – 11 September

September 12, 2020September 9, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads9 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:

“They burned down the market the day Vivek Oji died.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Blog Tour Review: Accidentally in Love by Belinda Missen

September 11, 2020September 8, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads6 Comments

I’m back with another blog tour and this time it’s for Accidentally in Love by Belinda Missen. Thanks to Rachel @ Rachel’s Random Resources for organising this blog tour, and to Netgalley and HQ Ditigal for providing the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Be sure to click on the banner below to check out the rest of the bloggers on tour!

Goodreads: Accidentally in Love
Publisher: HQ Digital
Release Date: 11 September 2020
Genre: Women’s Fiction, Romance
Panda Rating:

Don’t miss the new laugh-out-loud rom com from the author of One Week ’Til Christmas! Perfect for fans of Mhairi McFarlane, Rosie Walsh and Josie Silver.

In the space of a week, Katharine Patterson has quit her job, decided to move back home, and broken up with the guy she thought was the one.
No big deal.

Because Katharine has a plan. She’s going to open her own art gallery, just like she’s always wanted. What she’s not going to do is worry about boyfriends. Then she meets Kit, a handsome and talented local artist. He might be the most stubborn person Katharine has ever met. He might also make her feel like no one ever has before.

And Katharine might be about to fall accidentally in love…

BUY NOW: Amazon (UK) | Amazon (US)

Blog Tour Review: Someday in Paris by Olivia Lara

September 10, 2020September 8, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads6 Comments

I’m back with another blog tour and this time it’s for Someday in Paris by Olivia Lara. Thanks to Rachel @ Rachel’s Random Resources for organising this blog tour, and to NetGalley and the author for providing a copy in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Be sure to click on the banner below to check out the rest of the bloggers on tour!

Goodreads: Someday in Paris
Publisher: Aria
Release Date: 14 May 2020
Genre: Historical Romance, Women’s Fiction
Panda Rating:

Finding the one is only the beginning…

1954. Zara is fifteen the first time she meets Leon. During a power cut in a small French museum, the two spend one short hour in the dark talking about their love for art, Monet and Paris. Neither knows what the other looks like. Both know their lives will never be the same.

1963. In Paris, Leon no longer believes he will ever find the girl he lost that night. After dreaming about him for years, Zara thinks she has already found him. When they meet at an exhibition, they don’t recognise each other – yet the way they feel is so familiar…

Over the course of twenty years, Zara and Leon are destined to fall in love again and again. But will they ever find a way to be together?

#WWWWednesday: 09 September

September 9, 2020September 11, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads17 Comments

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:

What did you read last?
What are you currently reading?
What will you read next?

I’ve managed to finish six books since last Wednesday. I guess you can say that I’ve been reading a lot lately and from looking at the books I’ve read, I guess you can also say my moods have been swinging pretty wildly. From romance to fantasy to middle grade fiction… I’m a little all over the place! 😅

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune ★★★★★
You might’ve seen me gushing about this book on Twitter and Instagram because this is hands down one of my favourite reads in 2020! This book was just… magical. It was a gem and it was the most perfectly soothing balm for my weary 2020 heart. I don’t know what else to say except that I highly recommend it! But you can also read my review! 😉

The Beast and The Bethany by Jack Meggitt-Phillips ★★★½
This was a really entertaining MG read that really reminded me of the joy I felt reading Roald Dahl’s books as a child! I loved how the relationship between Bethany and Mr. Tweezer transformed them, and it was all thanks to the evil doings of the Beast. Bethany and Tweezer were very similar in so many ways but through their scheming, they somehow managed to bring out the best in each other, and had a good lesson on kindness and family. Review to come!

#TopTenTuesday: Middle Grade Reads for a Younger Me!

September 8, 2020November 17, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads42 Comments

So, we’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Books for My Younger Self (these could be books you wish you had read as a child, books younger you could have really learned something from, books that meshed with your hobbies/interests, books that could have helped you go through events/changes in your life, etc.)

Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking a lot about the middle grade fantasies that I’ve read and that I still really want to read, and these thoughts fit so well with this week’s prompt, so I was quite excited to dive right in. Then I realised that I actually have more MG reads on my TBR than ones I’ve read so this week I’ve split the post into read and unread books, but they’re all books that I think my younger middle-school self would’ve very much enjoyed reading!

READ

Nevermoor Series
The Ship of Shadows
Malamander
Wonder
The Tea Dragon Society

UNREAD

Other Words for Home
Race to the Sun
The Unadoptables
Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky
Wonderscape

Goodreads Monday – Columbine by Dave Cullen

September 8, 2020September 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads6 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 Columbine by Dave Cullen. This is a true crime non-fiction that was published in 2009 and it has a 4.28 star rating on Goodreads.

#5OnMyTBR: Autumn Read

September 7, 2020September 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads21 Comments

Hello Mondays, welcome back to #5OnMyTBR, a meme created by the wonderful E @ The Local Bee Hunter’s Nook. This bookish meme gets us to dig even further into our TBRs by simply posting about five books on our TBR! You can learn more about it here or in the post announcing it. You can find the full list of prompts (past and future) at the end of this post!

This week’s prompt is: Autumn Read

Sundays in Bed With… #MyWeeklyWrapUp

September 6, 2020September 6, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads17 Comments

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!

This Sunday I’ve spent the majority of the day in bed with The Extraordinaries by T.J. Klune. I haven’t been able to get that far into it yet because I’m finding it more than a little difficult to focus this weekend. What I read did have me laughing out loud at times and I can already tell what relationships I’ll be loving in this book. This is Klune’s YA debut and I’m keen to see if it’ll leave me feeling the same way I did after finishing The House in the Cerulean Sea last week. Hopefully I’ll get a bit more reading in this week.

Some people are extraordinary. Some are just extra. TJ Klune’s YA debut, The Extraordinaries, is a queer coming-of-age story about a fanboy with ADHD and the heroes he loves.
Nick Bell? Not extraordinary. But being the most popular fanfiction writer in the Extraordinaries fandom is a superpower, right? After a chance encounter with Shadow Star, Nova City’s mightiest hero (and Nick’s biggest crush), Nick sets out to make himself extraordinary. And he’ll do it with or without the reluctant help of Seth Gray, Nick’s best friend (and maybe the love of his life). Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl meets Marissa Meyer’s Renegades in TJ Klune’s YA debut.

What are you currently reading?

Book Review: Force of Nature by Jane Harper

September 5, 2020October 16, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

Goodreads: Force of Nature (Aaron Falk #2)
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication Date: 06 February 2018
Genre: Mystery Thriller

Panda Rating:

(4 pandas)

FIVE WOMEN GO ON A HIKE.
ONLY FOUR RETURN.

When five colleagues are forced to go on a corporate retreat in the wilderness, they reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking down the nuddy path. After all, this retreat is supposed to take the office workers out of their air-conditioned comfort zone. It’s supposed to be abonding experience. It’s supposed to be a bonding experience. It’s supposed to build trust.
But it doesn’t work out that way.
One of the women doesn’t come out of the woods. And each of her companions tellsa slightly different story about what happened.
Federal Agent Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker. Alice Russell is the whistleblower in his latest case–and in just a matter of weeks, she was supposed to help him bring down both the company she works for and the people she works with.
In an investigation that takes him deep into isolated bushland, Falk discovers secrets lurking in the mountains and a tangled web of personal friendship, suspicion, and betrayal among the hikers. But did that lead to murder?

Review: Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

September 5, 2020September 4, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads16 Comments

Get A Life, Chloe Brown (The Brown Sisters #1)
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Panda Rating:

Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost—but not quite—dying, she’s come up with seven directives to help her “Get a Life”, and she’s already completed the first: finally moving out of her glamorous family’s mansion. The next items?

• Enjoy a drunken night out.
• Ride a motorbike.
• Go camping.
• Have meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable sex.
• Travel the world with nothing but hand luggage.
• And… do something bad.

But it’s not easy being bad, even when you’ve written out step-by-step guidelines. What Chloe needs is a teacher, and she knows just the man for the job: Redford ‘Red’ Morgan. With tattoos and a motorbike, Red is the perfect helper in her mission to rebel, but as they spend more time together, Chloe realises there’s much more to him than his tough exterior implies. Soon she’s left wanting more from him than she ever expected . . . maybe there’s more to life than her list ever imagined?