First Lines Friday – 12 June

June 12, 2020June 12, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads17 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:

“Can you see the girl crying?
She’s not always easy to spot. She may have her head down, pretending to be on her phone, using her hair to cover her blotchy face.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Goodreads Monday – If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

June 8, 2020June 8, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads9 Comments

Welcome back to Goodreads Monday! 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 If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio. This mystery/thriller was published in 2017 and has an impressive 4.10 rating on Goodreads!

Sundays in Bed With… #MyWeeklyWrapUp

June 7, 2020June 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads8 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!

I spent Sunday morning in bed finishing my read of The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones and let me tell you friends… The tears did not stop for the last 30%! Oh granola, I’m an emotional reader and we all know how intense emotions have been running these last few weeks but… This book was just… so everything? It was heartwarming and heartbreaking. It’s a poignant YA historical fiction coming-of-age story about race, friendship and family. It’s out later this month (16 June) and it couldn’t be more relevant right now. I’ll be sharing my review for it as part of the FFBC blog tour on Wednesday, so keep an eye out!

It’s the summer of 1955. For Ethan Harper, a biracial kid raised mostly by his white father, race has always been a distant conversation. When he’s sent to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in small-town Alabama, his Blackness is suddenly front and center, and no one is shy about making it known he’s not welcome there. Except for Juniper Jones. The town’s resident oddball and free spirit, she’s everything the townspeople aren’t―open, kind, and full of acceptance.

Armed with two bikes and an unlimited supply of root beer floats, Ethan and Juniper set out to find their place in a town that’s bent on rejecting them. As Ethan is confronted for the first time by what it means to be Black in America, Juniper tries to help him see the beauty in even the ugliest reality, and that even the darkest days can give rise to an invincible summer.

What are you currently reading?

Top 5 Saturday: Books Set Near/On the Sea

June 6, 2020June 6, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads24 Comments

We’re 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: books set near/on the sea.

This is a great topic that I don’t think I’ve ever answered in a meme before. Now that I’m thinking about it, I realise that I have a lot of books set near/on/in the sea, so it’s clear I love the idea of a story set by the sea or on the sea. I say I love the idea because these are all on my TBR (*cough*) LOL

It’s funny when I think about it because when I think of books set on the sea I always think of fantasy (mostly YA) and when I think of books set near/by the sea, a lot of the time I think about women’s fiction books that are set in the summer and revolve around quaint sea-side towns and have cute fluffy romances! That said, when thinking about books for this list none were the latter but one was the former 😂 I’m looking forward to reading all of these though and I’m really hoping I’ll be able to get to them them at some point this year!

First Lines Friday – 05 June

June 6, 2020June 5, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads15 Comments

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:

“All good stories start with bad decisions.“

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Review: The Fallen Angel by Kenneth B. Andersen

June 4, 2020June 3, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads9 Comments

You can find my review for the previous books in The Great Devil War series here and here.

Goodreads: The Fallen Angel (The Great Devil War #5)
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Average Panda Rating:

It’s been almost two years since Philip left Hell and returned to life—this time for good. But things have changed and so has Philip. He’s haunted by terrifying nightmares and has never felt so lonely. Lonely and angry. Then one day the impossible happens and Philip is brought back to Hell. Not by the Devil, but by the Almighty himself. Although the Great Devil War ended a long time ago, the battle is far from over—and the worst is yet to come.

The Fallen Angel is volume 5 of The Great Devil War series.

#WWWWednesday: 03 June

June 3, 2020June 3, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

This is starting to feel a little bit like de ja vu but how is it already Wednesday now? What have I done this week? I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing and… that actually shows in my reading! *womp womp womp*

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 Wednesday I’ve only finished one book. Technically, I read two but for the first time in pretty much ever I purposefully set aside a book and decided to DNF it. Yep, it’s a mood. But anyway, I’m going to focus on the one book I did finish this past week: The Fallen Angel by Kenneth B. Andersen. This is book five in The Great Devil War series and while I enjoyed it, it wasn’t my favourite in the series (that title still belongs to book four)! My review will be posted later tonight so be on the look out for that 😊

Goodreads Monday – Romanov by Nadine Brandes

June 1, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads16 Comments

This week’s featured book is Romanov by Nadine Brandes. This is a standalone Young Adult Historical Fiction/Fantasy re-telling about the famous Romanov family. This was released in May 2019 and currently has a 3.80 rating on Goodreads!

Sundays in Bed With… #MyWeeklyWrapUp

May 31, 2020May 31, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

We’re already half-way through Sunday and I’ve not touched a book all day, but I hope to spend the latter half of my Sunday diving into book two of Venators: Promises Forged. I thought book one’s cover was amazing but I’m definitely loving book two’s cover more. I’m guessing that’s my little marshmallow, Grey, on the cover? I can’t wait to dive back into Devri Walls’ world! I’ve been hearing really great things 😍

It has been mere days in the world of Eon, where Rune Jenkins, her twin brother Ryker, and their friend Grey have been trapped, fighting for their lives. After discovering the truth of their ancestry, the three are far from home, and far from anything resembling their mundane lives of the past. While Ryker is still held captive by the eerily beautiful Zio and her goblins, Grey falls into the clutches of Feena, the Fae queen. She begins to drain his soul bit by bit to feed her dark underground garden, and Grey has no hope of escaping on his own.

It is now up to Rune to save Grey, as his precious time slips away inexorably. But the Council has denied her permission to embark on a rescue mission, until she can harness her Venator gifts and prove herself capable of venturing into the Fae queen’s territory. As Rune discovers that promises in Eon are forged with life-or-death consequences, she realizes that she must act quickly, or else be swallowed and Grey along with her by the dangers of Eon.

What are you currently reading?

Top 5 Saturday: Books from Male only POVs

May 30, 2020May 30, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads27 Comments

Okay wow, I didn’t think I’d struggle as much as I did to think of a list for today’s prompt! Turns out, a lot of the books I own on my TBR aren’t written from male (only) POVs 🙃 I also don’t think I ever properly paid attention to this before (oops! 🙈) but that’s pretty interesting to note! Also interesting was that when I took to Google and Goodreads (as I usually do to jog my memory for these prompts), it turns out a lot of male POV lists are either romance or YA related (or both), with little to no mention of contemporary fiction, mysteries/thrillers, adult fantasy or the sub-genres. So that wasn’t really useful… but after deep-diving into my failing memory (and my Kindle shelf!) I’ve managed to make a list of five books from mixed genres including adult fantasy, middle-grade fantasy and contemporary fiction!