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 Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston. I think this is the third book in a series but when I saw the cover/title and synopsis, I knew I needed to get my hands on this book. It sounds so cute. This YA contemporary retelling will be released in June 2020!
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:
“My house has chicken legs. Two or three times a year, without warning, it stands up in the middle of the night and walks away from where we’ve been living. It might walk a hundred miles or it might walk a thousand, but where it lands is always the same. A lonely, bleak place at the edge of civilization.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
Holy wow, can someone tell me where April went to because it has seriously zoomed by! I can’t believe we’re just a few days from the last week of the month. I’m not ready for April to be over because I literally still have all the things to do and all the books to read!
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?
Well, we’re back to my reading taking a hit thanks to Animal Crossing (yes, still)! Although we’re quite late into the month of April and my reading game has been thrown completely off this month (because what are books even), I feel like I’m slowly coming off the AC high. I’m not trying to jinx myself but I can feel it. That said, I only managed to finish one book since last Wednesday and it was another blog tour read.
The Silence of Bones by June Hur ★★★★½ This book was so different and so much more than I thought it’d be in all the best ways. I’ve never read a YA historical fiction, murder mystery/thriller before and it was incredible. It’s a bit slow to start but once you get sucked in you can’t put this book down. I’d also never read about this Korean dynastic empire before but despite being clueless to it, Hur’s writing was so immersive and I could still picture it clearly. Loved the characters and the exploration of sociopolitical themes of the era. Did I mention that it’s also highly quotable? Loved it and would definitely recommend it!Check out my full review.
We’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Titles that would make good band names (submitted by Michelle).
Ooh, this is a really fun topic! I’ve never looked at a title and thought it’d make a good band name but now that the seed has been planted, there are quite a few that pop up in my head! You might notice a trend in the types of titles that I pick… Also, for some reason when I’m thinking bands my mind doesn’t immediately think boy/girl pop bands but more like… heavy metal/rock bands? LOL Maybe it’s residual from my emo days when I used to listen to bands with names that (now) remind me of book titles 🤣 It’s weird that my brain does this but interesting. Anyway, without further ado, let’s get to it! I’m really curious to see if any other bloggers will pick the same book titles?!
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!
Thanks to NetGalley, Feiwel & Friends, and author June Hur for providing the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
The Silence of Bones Publisher: Feiwel & Friends Release date: 21 April 2020 Genre: Young Adult, Historical Fiction, Mystery/Thriller
Panda Rating:
I have a mouth, but I mustn’t speak; Ears, but I mustn’t hear; Eyes, but I mustn’t see.
1800, Joseon (Korea). Homesick and orphaned sixteen-year-old Seol is living out the ancient curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Indentured to the police bureau, she’s been tasked with assisting a well-respected young inspector with the investigation into the politically charged murder of a noblewoman.
As they delve deeper into the dead woman’s secrets, Seol forms an unlikely bond of friendship with the inspector. But her loyalty is tested when he becomes the prime suspect, and Seol may be the only one capable of discovering what truly happened on the night of the murder. But in a land where silence and obedience are valued above all else, curiosity can be deadly.
June Hur’s elegant and haunting debut The Silence of Bones is a bloody tale perfect for fans of Kerri Maniscalco and Renée Ahdieh.
A STANDALONE romantic comedy from author Melissa Williams. A hot cop and a donut baker, what could go wrong?
It was a donut emergency. A dough or die moment. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. It would explain why, from the moment Baxter DeCavhalo comes crashing into my kitchen, I’ve been acting out of character.
Why I’m sharing secret donut recipes, licking frosting off fingers that aren’t mine, and falling for the off-limits neighbor. I know better, I need to be focusing on my bakery and my next donut creation…but there’s just something about Bax that keeps me coming back for more. It’s not the heat of the kitchen that’s getting to me, it’s Bax. And this slow burn is about to combust.
I was looking for a light and fluffy romantic comedy when I came across this book and it sounded just like what I was looking for. It didn’t hurt that it also has such a colourful and eye-catching cover! I was sold. Unfortunately, this book was not it and it didn’t work out for me.
The plot and character arcs felt very underdeveloped because everything seemed to happen off-page. There were many allusions to “something not being right” with the friendships and sibling relationships, and that’s even before we get into the police drama that stems from Bax’s work as a police detective. It felt like there was a lot happening in the story but at the same time, not much either, if that makes sense. There were no discussions to try to solve those “not right” feelings with her brother and her best friend, although something was clearly up. It all came across as very vague.
I also didn’t connect with our heroine or hero. Cassidy seems to have a history of being hurt and so has built up her walls; however, we never really learn about what made the walls go up in the first place. Again, hints of her history are dropped but we don’t get any details. Of course these walls end up being a barrier to whatever is going on with Bax, but after some not-very-nice hints from her best friend about her inability to trust anyone, Cassidy simply decidesthat she’s going to let Bax in… And she does it. Despite a rough meet-cute for our characters, Bax became very quickly “all-in” with Cassidy. He decides at one point during their second interaction that he wants all or nothing, and he’s going to make Cassidy realise that he’s serious about them. I didn’t get it. Yeah, she’s quirky and makes delicious donuts but… That’s it? Don’t tell me he’s all in, show me why! I felt very little chemistry between them and that made their steamy scenes also fall flat for me.
Overall, a fairly disappointing read. It just never clicked for me and that’s disappointing because I was expecting more… Even the part about the bakery, which I thought would leave me with endless donut cravings, didn’t even really do that… I’m glad that I did give this a try though–I don’t think I could’ve resisted such a cute cover for very long, but I’m also glad it was on Kindle Unlimited!
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:
“If I believe in omens, this would be a bad one. There’s only one suitcase left on the baggage carousel. It’s bright pink, covered with Hello Kitty stickers, and definitely not mine.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
We’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Books I Enjoyed but Rarely Talk About (This is for the books you liked, but rarely come up in conversation or rarely fit a TTT topic, etc.)!
OK, I have to admit that I struggled a bit with this one because a lot of the books I loved/enjoyed I DO talk about quite often? I feel like maybe I talk about all of them too much? Admittedly these books are more “recent” reads over the last few years because my memory is truly terrible. It’s weird and (I know) doesn’t make sense but it is what it is! So I went digging through Goodreads and found some reads that I think qualify (sorry if I end up cheating just a little bit)! I don’t talk about these books much because there’ve never really been any prompts in tags, award questions, or TTT topics that necessarily fit it!
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: Heartwarming and I’m going to be focusing on graphic novels specifically!
dinipandareads 