First Lines Friday – 18 December

December 18, 2020December 18, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads10 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:

“We came to Birchwood Manor because Edward said that it was haunted. It wasn’t, not then, but it’s a dull man who lets truth stand in the way of a good story, and Edward was never that.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Blog Tour Review: The Forgotten Gift by Kathleen McGurl

November 12, 2020November 11, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

I’m back with another blog tour today with Rachel’s Random Resources for The Forgotten Gift by Kathleen McGurl. Thanks to NetGalley and HQ Digital for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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

Goodreads: The Forgotten Gift
Release Date: 11 November 2020
Genre: Historical Fiction
Panda Rating:

What would you do to protect the ones you love?

1861. George’s life changes forever the day he meets Lucy. She’s beautiful and charming, and he sees a future with her that his position as the second son in a wealthy family has never offered him. But when Lucy dies in a suspected poisoning days after rejecting George, he finds himself swept up into a murder investigation. George loved Lucy; he would never have harmed her. So who did?

Now. On the surface Cassie is happy with her life: a secure job, good friends, and a loving family. When a mysterious gift in a long-forgotten will leads her to a dark secret in her family’s history she’s desperate to learn more. But the secrets in Cassie’s family aren’t all hidden in the past, and her research will soon lead her to a revelation much closer to home – and which will turn everything she knows on its head…

Discover a family’s darkest secrets today. Perfect for fans of The Girl in the Letter, The Beekeeper’s Promise and The Forgotten Village!

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

Goodreads Monday – Human Acts by Han Kang

November 2, 2020November 2, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads9 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 Human Acts by Han Kang. This is a historical fiction set in South Korea that was published in 2017 and has a 4.17 star rating on Goodreads with several thousand ratings and reviews.

#5OnMyTBR: Historical Fiction

October 12, 2020October 11, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads12 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: Historical

Blog Tour Review: A Royal Christmas Quandry by Samantha Hastings

October 8, 2020October 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads8 Comments

I’m back with another blog tour today with Xpresso Tours for A Royal Christmas Quandry by Samantha Hastings. Thanks to Xpresso Tours for organising this blog tour and to Netgalley and the publisher for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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

Goodreads: A Royal Christmas Quandry
Publisher: Swoon Reads
Release Date: 06 October 2020
Genre: Young Adult Historical Fiction
Panda Rating:

When you spend Christmas in a castle, anything is possible.

1860. Lady Alexandrina Gailey is looking forward to a cozy holiday at Windsor Castle with her best friend, Princess Alice, and her long-time crush, Lord George Worthington. But Drina’s plans are all but dashed when Alice’s parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, declare that Alice must choose one of two royal princes to become engaged to before Christmas.

There’s just one problem: George, a junior member of the Foreign Office, has accidentally misplaced one of the princes.

Together, Drina and George scour the town of Windsor for the missing prince, desperately hoping to deliver him to the royal dinner party with the queen none the wiser. They might just need a royal Christmas miracle to pull it off.

BUY NOW: Amazon (US) | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | Kobo

Blog Tour Review: A Bachelor’s Pledge by Penny Hampson

October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads7 Comments

I’m back with another blog tour today with Rachel’s Random Resources for A Bachelor’s Pledge by Penny Hampson. Thanks to Rachel for organising this tour, and to the author for providing the book in exchange for an honest review.

Be sure to click on the banner above to check out the other bloggers on tour!

🎉 Happy Pub Day!!! 🎉

Goodreads: A Bachelor’s Pledge
Release Date: 07 October 2020
Genre: Historical Romance, Mystery
Panda Rating:

The woman who haunts his dreams
Secret agent Phil Cullen is upset when he discovers that the young woman he rescued from Mrs Newbody’s establishment has absconded from his housekeeper’s care without a word. Thinking he has been deceived, he resolves to forget about her… something easier said than done.

The man she wants to forget
Sophia Turner is horrified when she is duped into entering a notorious house of ill-repute. Then a handsome stranger comes to her aid. Desperate that no one learns of this scandalous episode, Sophia flees to the one friend she knows she can trust. With luck, she will never see her mysterious rescuer again.

But fate has other plans…
Months later, Phil is on the trail of an elusive French agent and Sophia is a respectable lady’s companion when fate again intervenes, taking their lives on a collision course.

Traitors, spies, and shameful family secrets – will these bring Sophia and Phil together… or drive them apart?

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

Goodreads Monday – The Unadoptables by Hana Tooke

September 14, 2020September 14, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads9 Comments

This week’s featured book is The Unadoptables by Hana Tooke. This is a middle grade historical fantasy that was released in May 2020 and it has a 4.13 star rating on Goodreads.

#5OnMyTBR: 2020 Release

August 17, 2020August 17, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads21 Comments

This week’s prompt is: 2020 Release

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: In the Neighborhood of True by Susan Kaplan Carlton

July 11, 2020July 11, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

I’m back with another blog tour and this time it’s for In the Neighborhood of True by Susan Kaplan Carlton. Thank you to Algonquin Young Readers for asking me to take part in it!

Thanks to NetGalley, Algonquin Young Readers for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review

Goodreads: In the Neighborhood of True
Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers
Release Date: 07 July 2020 (PBK pub)
Genre: Young Adult Historical Fiction, Own Voices
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.