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 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.
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:
“They burned down the market the day Vivek Oji died.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
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!
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!
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.
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!
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?
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?
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:
“This house was made for someone without a soul. So I guess it makes sense that my mother wanted it so badly.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Books for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
The House in the Cerulean Sea Publisher: Tor Books Publication date: 17 March 2020 Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy Panda Rating:
A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret.
Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages.
When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he’s given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they’re likely to bring about the end of days.
But the children aren’t the only secret the island keeps. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn.
An enchanting story, masterfully told, The House in the Cerulean Sea is about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.
Note: The quotes below are taken from an advanced/unfinished copy and are subject to change in the final version.
dinipandareads 