War and Speech Blog Tour: Review and Favourite Quotes

May 2, 2020May 2, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

Hello, friends! I’m back with another The Fantastic Flying Book Club blog tour today for the hilarious YA contemporary: War and Speech by Don Zolidis! Every time I get picked to be part of any FFBC blog tour I die a little bit inside out of pure happiness because it’s always such a privilege 🥰 Huge thanks to FFBC for organising these amazing tours and to the authors as well for making the eARCs available to us.

Be sure to click on the banner above to see the other bloggers on tour! 😊

War and Speech
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Release date: 05 May 2020
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary, Realistic Fiction

Panda Rating:

Not everyone can be a winner…
Sydney Williams knows this better than anyone. After her white-collar- criminal dad is sent to prison, Sydney fails almost all of her classes and moves into a dingy apartment with her mom, who can barely support them with her minimum-wage job at the mall. A new school promises a fresh start. Except Eaganville isn’t exactly like other high schools. It’s ruled with an iron fist by a speech team that embodies the most extreme winner-takes-all philosophy. Sydney is befriended by a group of fellow misfits, each of whom has been personally victimized by the speech team. It turns out Sydney is the perfect plant to take down the speech team from within. With the help of her co-conspirators, Sydney throws herself into making Nationals in speech, where she will be poised to topple the corrupt regime. But what happens when Sydney realizes she actually has a shot at . . . winning? Sydney lost everything because of her dad’s obsession with being on top. Winning at speech might just be her ticket out of a life of loserdom. Can she really walk away from that?

Amazon (US) | Book Depository | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

Goodreads Monday – Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston

April 27, 2020April 28, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads23 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 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!

Top 5 Saturday: Books Under 300 Pages

April 26, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads44 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 under 300 pages.

This was a lot harder than I anticipated because I thought I’d have a lot more books that were less than 300 pages but a lot of them are more under the 400 page mark. After a bit of searching I did find a few on my actual TBR. I don’t actually have a preference for book lengths, it really all depends on the content. If a book is great I’ll likely never want it to end but when it’s the opposite, even less than 300 pages sounds like too much! I also generally don’t pay much attention to details such as page numbers, so I’m surprised by a few of the ones on here. I definitely thought they’d be longer!

209 pages

I feel like This Is How You Lose the Time War has been featuring on quite a few of my lists lately or maybe that’s just my mind constantly conjuring it up because I want to read it soon?!

#WWWWednesday: 22 April

April 22, 2020April 22, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads22 Comments

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.

#5OnMyTBR: Hyped from the Past

April 21, 2020April 20, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads19 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: Hyped from the past.

Top 5 Saturday: Sibling Relationships

April 18, 2020April 18, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads28 Comments

As much as I love a good love ship, I really enjoy books that explore sibling relationships; more specifically positive and healthy sibling relationships! I love the good feels reading about these bring me! Plus, it also makes me more determined to have better relationships with my own siblings! I don’t have “terrible” relationships with my siblings, of course we disagree now and then, though my older brother doesn’t have a good relationship with basically any of us. But I digress! Basically, I love sibling relationships in books and here’s a selection from my TBR that I’ve heard have interesting ones:

Ellery’s never been to Echo Ridge, but she’s heard all about it. It’s where her aunt went missing at age sixteen, never to return. Where a Homecoming Queen’s murder five years ago made national news. And where Ellery now has to live with a grandmother she barely knows, after her failed-actress mother lands in rehab. No one knows what happened to either girl, and Ellery’s family is still haunted by their loss.
Malcolm grew up in the shadow of the Homecoming Queen’s death. His older brother was the prime suspect and left Echo Ridge in disgrace. His mother’s remarriage vaulted her and Malcolm into Echo Ridge’s upper crust, but their new status grows shaky when mysterious threats around town hint that a killer plans to strike again. No one has forgotten Malcolm’s brother-and nobody trusts him when he suddenly returns to town.
Ellery and Malcolm both know it’s hard to let go when you don’t have closure. Then another girl disappears, and Ellery and Malcolm were the last people to see her alive. As they race to unravel what happened, they realize every secret has layers in Echo Ridge. The truth might be closer to home than either of them want to believe.
And somebody would kill to keep it hidden.

Yep, it’s this book again. I know I’ve mentioned Two Can Keep A Secret a few times lately but this is an attempt at subliminally messaging my own conscience to finally read the damn book. 😂 I’ve heard that the twins in this are great characters and honestly, I don’t read books with twins very often.

#WWWWednesday: 15 April

April 15, 2020April 15, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads28 Comments

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?

Oh-em-goodness, can you believe?! Ya girl finished THREE books since last Wednesday! Although gaming is still taking up a lot of my waking hours outside of work, I’m chuffed that I can *finally* say I finished more than one book 😍 Happy tears for sure, fam!

They Went Left by Monica Hesse ★★★★★
This was a blog tour read and ugh, this book! This had me silently crying with tears constantly flowing down my face, punctuated by the occasional sob. It was so emotional and I don’t know what kinda crazy I was in thinking that a story on the aftermath of the Holocaust would be less emotional 🤦🏻‍♀️ I recommend it to those lovers of historical fiction set in this period and for masochists such as myself! Check out my full review.

Donut Disturb (Donut Disturb #1) by Melissa Williams ★★☆☆☆
After reading the above book, I needed something light and this one sounded perfect! Unfortunately… I felt like I was reading a half-finished novel. No mistake, this was a very light read because all the things concerning character and plot development happened off page. We were shown nothing and told everything. Plus, there were so many tenses (past/present) used in one paragraph it was frustrating because I felt like I was getting whiplash trying to follow the writing. The characters weren’t bad but I also just didn’t feel for any of them. This was definitely not a win! Review coming soon.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami ★★★½
This is another blog tour read and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t fully connect with the stories or characters. I’ve always struggled to really enjoy short stories and this one was sadly no different. These stories were more like character portraits, and they were very short and easy reads, but I was also left wanting more. Still, I thought it was a good exploration of immigrants and the reasons why people would risk their lives to cross the unpredictable sea in search of a better life; because of hope. I liked how Lalami brought twists to some of these stories as well, but I think I just prefer full-length novels over short stories. My full review is going up tomorrow!

Top 5 Saturday: Books with a Colour in the Title

April 12, 2020September 14, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads17 Comments

I totally spaced yesterday and forgot that it was Saturday because the days have blurred since I’ve been WFH… I only realised I had missed Saturday’s post when I was doing a little after midnight gaming. Oops!

I thought that I would be able to very easily recall five titles with colours in them off the top of my head but apparently I can’t! LOL So here comes Goodreads and Google searches to the rescue! I don’t know what I’d without these mad interwebs brains 😂

JADE CITY is a gripping Godfather-esque saga of intergenerational blood feuds, vicious politics, magic, and kungfu.
The Kaul family is one of two crime syndicates that control the island of Kekon. It’s the only place in the world that produces rare magical jade, which grants those with the right training and heritage superhuman abilities. The Green Bone clans of honorable jade-wearing warriors once protected the island from foreign invasion–but nowadays, in a bustling post-war metropolis full of fast cars and foreign money, Green Bone families like the Kauls are primarily involved in commerce, construction, and the everyday upkeep of the districts under their protection. When the simmering tension between the Kauls and their greatest rivals erupts into open violence in the streets, the outcome of this clan war will determine the fate of all Green Bones and the future of Kekon itself.

JADE CITY! I can’t believe I forgot this one especially since it’s currently on my bedside table as I was attempting to read it a few weeks back! I put a hold on reading this for now because it requires a lot of concentration and I’m really not in the right headspace for it, although I did enjoy what I read!

eARC Graphic Novel Review: Eat, and Love Yourself by Sweeney Boo, Lilian Klepakowsky

April 11, 2020April 10, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads15 Comments

Goodreads: Eat, and Love Yourself
Publish date: 21 April 2020
Publisher: BOOM!Studios
Genre: Graphic Novel
Panda Rating:

A story about Mindy, a woman living with an eating disorder who has to learn how to love herself again.

In pursuit of the perfect body, Mindy buys the low-fat diet products and the glossy magazines which promise the secret to losing weight. One night, while perusing the aisles of the neighborhood convenience store for a midnight snack, she finds a new product. A chocolate bar called “Eat and Love Yourself”. On a whim, Mindy buys the curious candy, not knowing that with every piece of chocolate she eats, she will be brought back to a specific moment of her past — helping her to look at herself honestly, learn to love her body the way it is, and accepting love. Perhaps, she will even realize that her long lost high school best friend, Elliot, was more than just a friend…

Trigger warnings: Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, body shaming, binge-eating, purging

I got extremely excited when I saw this cover and read the synopsis. The comic covers an extremely important topic that is such a personal issue for so many people who have struggled with their weight, and loving and accepting themselves. So I’m pretty sad to say that the story gave me pretty mixed feelings and that ending was especially disappointing because it was so abrupt. I checked to see if this was a series but I couldn’t find any information on it. I’m kind of hoping that Mindy’s journey will continue but I have a feeling it won’t?

#WWWWednesday: 08 April

April 8, 2020April 8, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads22 Comments

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?

My big question to you is: WHAT ARE BOOKS?! Because I certainly haven’t been reading them 😂😭 Since last Wednesday I’ve only managed to finish one book and that was a graphic novel for the blog tour I was part of today!

Gotham High by Melissa de la Cruz, illustrated by Thomas Pitilli ★★★½
I read this one for the FFBC tour and my stop was today! I haven’t read a DC comic before but I have seen seen pretty much all of the movies, so I really enjoyed this graphic novel! I love seeing known characters as their younger selves because I love knowing their origin story and how they end up where they do. The story/writing wasn’t anything ‘wow’ but it was so enjoyable spotting characters and I loved how the characters were diversified–Bruce Wayne is half-Chinese! Check out my full review.