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!
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 time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!
I’ve done zero reading this Sunday. I finished three sci-fi romances this weekend and now I’m not sure what I’m in the mood to pick up. I think (just maybe) I’m on a bit of a romance kick but I’m also keen for fantasy, so I might pick up a romantasy (romance fantasy). Maybe… Fortuna Sworn? I think I’ll give it a try and see if it’s my jam but if not, I’m also tempted to try A Deal with the Elf King (available on Kindle Unlimited, by the way!).
Fortuna Sworn is the last of her kind. Her brother disappeared two years ago, leaving her with no family or species to speak of. She hides among humans, spending her days working at a bar and her nights searching for him. The bleak pattern goes on and on… until she catches the eye of a powerful faerie. He makes no attempt to hide that he desires Fortuna. And in exchange for her, he offers something irresistible. So Fortuna reluctantly leaves her safe existence behind to step back into a world of creatures and power. It soon becomes clear that she may not have bargained with her heart, but her very life. TRIGGER WARNING: This novel contains scenes or themes of toxic relationships and slavery.
The elves come for two things: war and wives. In both cases, they come for death. Three-thousand years ago, humans were hunted by powerful races with wild magic until the treaty was formed. Now, for centuries, the elves have taken a young woman from Luella’s village to be their Human Queen. To be chosen is seen as a mark of death by the townsfolk. A mark nineteen-year-old Luella is grateful to have escaped as a girl. Instead, she’s dedicated her life to studying herbology and becoming the town’s only healer. That is, until the Elf King unexpectedly arrives… for her. Everything Luella had thought she’d known about her life, and herself, was a lie. Taken to a land filled with wild magic, Luella is forced to be the new queen to a cold yet blisteringly handsome Elf King. Once there, she learns about a dying world that only she can save. The magical land of Midscape pulls on one corner of her heart, her home and people tug on another… but what will truly break her is a passion she never wanted.
Special thanks to Algonquin Books for inviting me to be on the blog tour and for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Goodreads: At the Edge of the Haight Publisher: Algonquin Books Release Date: 19 January 2021 Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Panda Rating: (actual 2.75 pandas)
Maddy Donaldo, homeless at twenty, has made a family of sorts in the dangerous spaces of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. She knows whom to trust, where to eat, when to move locations, and how to take care of her dog. It’s the only home she has. When she unwittingly witnesses the murder of a young homeless boy and is seen by the perpetrator, her relatively stable life is upended. Suddenly, everyone from the police to the dead boys’ parents want to talk to Maddy about what she saw. As adults pressure her to give up her secrets and reunite with her own family before she meets a similar fate, Maddy must decide whether she wants to stay lost or be found. Against the backdrop of a radically changing San Francisco, a city which embraces a booming tech economy while struggling to maintain its culture of tolerance, At the Edge of the Haight follows the lives of those who depend on makeshift homes and communities.
As judge Hillary Jordan says, “This book pulled me deep into a world I knew little about, bringing the struggles of its young, homeless inhabitants—the kind of people we avoid eye contact with on the street—to vivid, poignant life. The novel demands that you take a close look. If you knew, could you still ignore, fear, or condemn them? And knowing, how can you ever forget?”
It’s been a hot minute since I did my last FLF but I’m back with it today!
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:
“I never meant to kill my brother. I never set out to hate my father. I never dreamed I would bury my own son. Nor could I have imagined that I would betray the childhood friend who saved my life, or win a Pulitzer Prize for telling a lie.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
I know technically it’s 21 January and I’m a bit late but we’re rolling with it!
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?
Since last week, I’ve read 7 books but I’m not counting three of them because I didn’t count them on my Goodreads. As I mentioned in my weekly wrap up I picked up a reverse harem bully romance and it was one of those experiences where I was horrified and confused but also still curious so I kept “reading”. In reality I was just skimming as fast as possible to see what happens but it was honestly one helluva journey and I don’t even know what to think 😂
Girl on the Ferris Wheel by Julie Halpern & Len Vlahos ★★★☆☆ The Girl on the Ferris Wheel was a realistic YA contemporary about high school life, first love, culture and family. It also has good representation for anxiety and depression through the lens of a young adult. I felt the story was written for the younger end of the YA range though and I found it difficult to really connect to the characters. Check out my blog tour review!
Today is my stop on the TBR & Beyond Tours for Cast in Firelight by Dana Swift. Special thanks to Delacorte Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Be sure to click on the banner above to check out the rest of the amazing bloggers on tour!
Goodreads: Cast in Firelight (Wickery #1) Publisher: Delacorte Press Publication Date: 19 January 2021 Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Panda Rating: (4 pandas)
Adraa is the royal heir of Belwar, a talented witch on the cusp of taking her royal ceremony test, and a girl who just wants to prove her worth to her people.
Jatin is the royal heir to Naupure, a competitive wizard who’s mastered all nine colors of magic, and a boy anxious to return home for the first time since he was a child.
Together, their arranged marriage will unite two of Wickery’s most powerful kingdoms. But after years of rivalry from afar, Adraa and Jatin only agree on one thing: their reunion will be anything but sweet. Only, destiny has other plans and with the criminal underbelly of Belwar suddenly making a move for control, their paths cross…and neither realizes who the other is, adopting separate secret identities instead.
Between dodging deathly spells and keeping their true selves hidden, the pair must learn to put their trust in the other if either is to uncover the real threat. Now Wickery’s fate is in the hands of rivals..? Fiancées..? Partners..? Whatever they are, it’s complicated and bound for greatness or destruction
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!
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!
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 time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!
I’ll be spending the rest of my Sunday in Bed with Cast in Firelight. I’m reading this as part of the blog tour for next week. I’m definitely curious to know what #OwnVoices readers will think of it because the author states it’s not OV but she wrote it so her children can identify with characters who look like them. It’s still ‘early days’ in the book but I am enjoying it so far and can’t wait to keep it reading it in bed tonight.
Also, I know a lot of people have commented about how Bowater’s art is basically the same everywhere and yeah, I do agree (especially when looking at this cover), but that doesn’t make this cover any less beautiful! I absolutely LOVE it and it makes me even more excited to dive back into this story! Have you read it?
I’m back with another blog tour with The Storytellers on Tour for Kept from Cages by Phil Williams. Thanks to the author for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review!
Be sure to click on the banner below to check out the rest of the bloggers on tour!
No one returns from Ikiri. Reece’s gang of criminal jazz musicians have taken shelter in the wrong house. There’s a girl with red eyes bound to a chair. The locals call her a devil – but Reece sees a kid that needs protecting. He’s more right than he knows. Chased by a shadowy swordsman and an unnatural beast, the gang flee across the Deep South with the kid in tow. She won’t say where she’s from or who exactly her scary father is, but she’s got powers they can’t understand. How much will Reece risk to save her? On the other side of the world, Agent Sean Tasker’s asking similar questions. With an entire village massacred and no trace of the killers, he’s convinced Duvcorp’s esoteric experiments are responsible. His only ally is an unstable female assassin, and their only lead is Ikiri – a black-site in the Congo, which no one leaves alive. How far is Tasker prepared to go for answers? Kept From Cages is the first part in an action-packed supernatural thriller duology, filled with eccentric characters and intricately woven mysteries. Start your journey to Ikiri today.
dinipandareads 