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I associate so many songs to so many books or shows or random scenes and characters and I feel like either no one sees the vision or I’m screaming into the void, hoping one day someone will hear.

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30 Somehow by Nicotine Dolls is such a Percy coded song.

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I haven’t posted here in a long time. Which is a damn shame. But if I can figure out how I want to contribute to this page nowadays, maybe I’ll get back into it.

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The autistic liminal space of being a fully grown adult but really not changing much since childhood is both a blessing for oneself but a curse within today’s society, and it’s a thought that’s been circling my mind. More now as I go through the last years of my 20’s

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Book: What Beauty There Is by Corey Anderson

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I received an e-arc of this book from NetGalley for an honest review.

Okay. I’m a sucky for a pretty cover, and I love the blue and the rest of the design for this cover. But honestly, it was the title that caught my attention first. Something about the title alone felt like the book would feel raw, and it was.

I had no expectations going into this story, but it somehow still surpassed any possible expectation. Everyone from the writing to the characters to the tone and so much more. Breathtaking. There was justos much worth loving in this book. I honestly can’t think of a starting point.

When it comes to this story and it’s characters, you have no choice but to feel. You just feel so much. It was breathtakingly real and honest and raw. It leaves you feeling exposed and even vulnerable. I have no idea how to explain it. There wasn’t unnecessary fanfare, just straightforward, brutal rawness. The story is amazing, but these characters are everything. They are so unbelievably real. It’s as if they were here with me. I could feel them as if they were in my own life. Jack. Matty. Ava. They were with me, and I was with them.

I could feel their struggle and their hurt but I also could feel their strength and see their resistance. These characters had layers and struggles and the right amount of complexity.

It was so intense. I feel like I’m being repetitive, but what more can be said? It was just stunning and it tore me apart so beautifully. It was stunningly hurtful. I really want a really good beautiful word to describe this book because it deserves it. The titled is so perfect for this book.

Forever grateful I got the chance to read and review this, and I’m hoping others gives this book a chance. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for the potential sequel.

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Book: Revenge of the Sluts by Natalie Walton

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I received an e-arc from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

From the get go, the title caught my attention. I love daring and explicit things like titles, and I have always loved the concept of women reclaiming words like slut and empowering themselves by doing so. So I loved seeing a story of a group of young women not only reclaiming the word slut but also fighting back and empowering themselves and other young women.

Not only did I love the concept, but this is also just such an important topic. Women are always being targeted and harmed and then somehow, the blame still falls back on us instead of the actual perpetrators. This story brings light to that and acknowledges it’s effects. This is something everyone should consider reading, regardless of gender because it’s something that needs to be brought attention to as a whole. This is a real issue all over the world.

There were many aspects to this book I really enjoyed. I appreciated the topic and the context given. I liked the way it showed the effects the victim bus,ing had. I appreciated seeing the story hold no punches when it came to showing the toxic masculinity, but it was also really nice to see someone like Atticus. It was such a nice and stark contrast to the toxic males. I appreciated seeing a male character acknowledging that spreading the photos were wrong and to see him standing up for his female friends and their choices. I have always wanted to see more men stand up to the harmful behavior they see other men engaging in like Atticus did. And I of course loved seeing girls/young women supporting each other. I appreciated that when almost everyone else tried to tear them down, they banded together and held each other up. I appreciated even more that they didn’t just take it laying down, but that they fought back. And I loved that they named themselves the Slut Squad. A word can only do as much as as you let it, and by not only reclaiming a word but naming their group it, is a mighty powerful Fuck off power play. It’s really something to look up to.

I truly did enjoy this book, and I’m so grateful I got the chance to read and review it. Although, I do feel like the ending began leading into other problematic areas that never got the chance to be fully addressed or resolved. It could’ve been another important lesson. Either way, I do hope many more people read this book and recognize our society in it.

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Book: Ace of Swords by Clare Carter

Rating: ⭐️⭐️

I received an e-arc of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The cover of this nook is beautiful , but it’s the description of this book that drew me in fully. It reminded me of the books I loved in middle and high school. It’d been so long since I’d had a good vampire book. And it’s so hard finding angel books. So to have Vampires and Angels? I couldn’t pass it up. Even better, we would be getting a hybrid species too.

I’ll start with the things that I liked that this story included. I liked to see the representation of a mute character and the active inclusion of ASL. I rarely see that kind of inclusion or representation in contemporary books, let alone fantasy. I also really liked to see that there was also queer representation. I did like the concept of the book, it’s uniqueness, and some of the story. That was about all I really liked though.

There was so much potential, but this really missed the mark. It was just really difficult to get through for a few reasons. Even with the dates at the start of each chapter, it was still so hard to keep track of the timelines. I would spend chunks of each chapter confused before I’d go back to the start to remind myself what time we were in. Another reason it was difficult to get through is because of the constant changing different povs. It was hard to stay invested and interested when we hardly got a chance to really care for a character when the POV is regularly being shifted away from them. Adding both constant time jumps and POV changes together was not a good move. It only furthered my confusion and lessened my interest.

And it really sucks because I wanted to have a relationship to really root for and fall in love with, but since I couldn’t even fall in love with a character because we get so little time to really focus anyone in specific, I couldn’t even even care for the relationships, queer or not.

Overall, this book had so much potential and so many great aspects, but I think it tried to do so much at once that it just fell off from what it could’ve been. I don’t hate this book, but I am disappointed in what it could’ve been but wasn’t. However, I am grateful to have been given a chance to read an arc of this book and review.

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Book: Unwritten by Alicia J. Novo

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I received a e-ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

From the moment I saw the cover of this book, I was hooked. It has to be one of my favorite book designs. And the title only further solidified my interest. I’ve always liked the idea of something unwritten and stories untold, so I knew immediately that I wanted to read this book. I hadn’t even known what to expect going in.

However, I was a little scared of being disappointed by this book. It turned out to definitely be misplaced fear. I was worried this would be an instance where the cover deceived us, but just as it promised, this is a fantasy story full of mystery and magic and intrigue. It’s just as captivating as its cover. But it’s also so relatable to those of us who sometimes just want to escape with an adventure into fantastical, magical worlds.

This book has so many aspects to it that deserve to be acknowledged. Writing style? Chef’s kiss. World building? Wonderful, magnificent and just as vivid as if you were there. Highlightable quotes? Plenty. Even the epigraph quote was a great choice. It really was indicative to this book. This book also had such a great balance between its lighter moments and its darker ones. I felt so much love and hope but also sadness and aspects of loss. So well blended together.

I truly did not want to let this story go. I was sad to reach the ending, and the only complaint I can find is how rushed the ending felt, but it still made me want more. I would highly recommend picking Unwritten up when it’s released in May. I can’t imagine regretting it. Instead, I’ll be eagerly hoping for a sequel.

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Book: Lost in the Never Woods

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I’ll preface this by saying I love Peter Pan, and I generally like Peter Pan retellings. I’ve also reas Aiden Thomas’s debut novel, Cemetery Boys, and it was amazing, if not predictable. So I was sooo excited when I learned that he was releasing a Peter Pan retelling. And I was lucky enough to win an earc of this book. I read it as soon as I had time, and I was conflicted on how I feel about it. It was significantly less predictable than Cemetery Boys, but there was also no diversity. It was a bit of a let down to go from Cemetery Boys with trans, gay, latinx, etc, representation to Lost in the Never Woods where our leads are white and cishet. It was really disappointing, but understandable when Aiden Thomas explained that this was actually the first book that he wrote and sold, before he knew he could write characters that are like him. We were just lucky that we got to read Cemetery Boys first. Either way, this was actually a good story. I was not prepared for the direction it took, but I truly enjoyed this book, and I think it’s so worth delving into. Less diverse, but also less predictable.

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Ace Review

Book: Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

I received an arc of this from Edelweiss .

For starters, just knowing that this book exists means so much to me. I’m ace myself, and these past couple years, I’ve been looking for more books and media with ace rep, but sometimes it’s so hard trying to find decent rep when there’s truly not many compared to most other rep. I don’t normally care for nonfiction, but when I saw this, I knew it was something that would help me greatly.

And it did help me very much. It helped me feel a little more comfortable in my identity, and it and makes it so much easier to give sources and information to people when I’m at a loss on how to describe who I am and what it is. I am struggling to write even a half decent review because I just want to yell “YES” and just that “it’s absolutely epic and awesome!” I am so in awe and so happy with this book’s existence and the way it was written that I can’t get much further than that.

What I will say though is that Ace covers so many important topics: sex, sexuality, romance, societal norms and views for all of that and so much. This should be a widely read book, but it should especially be picked up for anyone wanting to further understand asexuality or learning more about themselves and how they experience asexuality, this is the book.

It also challenges the way society views sex and the “innateness” of it as well as other things society tells us is innate. It challenges the culture surrounding sex and marriage and much more. The author doesn’t hold back, which is something I vastly appreciate. I also love how personal and so informative this book is. It is definitely something I needed, personally and for others. I definitely appreciate how Chen didn’t only focus on the aspec part of identities either. She also included ethnicity, religion, gender, even geography (she even gave a disclaimer that her focus would be narrowed!), etc etc.

This is really something that more people need to read, whether you’re ace, aro, allo, or anything at all.

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The Raven Tower Review

Book: The Raven Tower by Emma Miles

I received a free digital copy of this from Booktasters and the author on twitter for an honest review. I’ll be honest, this review is months overdue. I started it, and I immediately loved it. I was gripped into this new world right from the start, but then life got in the way, and I didn’t get the chance to finish it for a long while, but I would regularly think on this book and how eager I was to get the chance to finish it. Now here we are. It’s amazing to me that if it weren’t for Booktasters, I would have probably never heard of this book. It is wildly underrated, and it deserves so much more recognition, which is why I’m forcing time to finally make this review. There are so many elements to this story: magic, wonderful world building, mysterious characters, action, love, and soo much more. First, I should give an idea of what it’s about. There’s a world with four vastly different lands. Fulmer is the land our main character calls home. Here, women are valued and given higher places of power. This is a startling contrast to Chem. There, men hold power, and women are sold and traded. Our primary main character, Kesta, is one who extremely values her freedom, but she is willing to tame her wildness and sacrifice so much to save her people and her home from the same enslavement. The book’s blurb drew me in, but everything about this book kept me there. When I say the world building is chef’s kiss, I do mean it. I’m also extremely picky when it comes to romances, but the love we see in The Raven Tower is not one to be missed. One reason I don’t particularly like romance in fantasy is because authors can struggle with balancing it with the rest of the story, but Emma Miles seemed to effortlessly create the perfect balance between the romance and action and magic. Even more, she managed to wonderfully balance the different points of view without anything feeling lost from it. If anything, it further enhanced our understanding of the story and its characters. This book deserves sooo much more recognition, and I’d recommend you giving it the chance. I’m excited to eventually read the sequel. I’m hoping it’ll be just as amazing. Now, I need to go write a few other reviews I’ve fallen behind on this year. 

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The Bone Fire Review

Book: The Bone Fire by György Dragoman

I received a digital copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I had no expectations for this book at all. I saw the cover and I thought the title was interesting enough that I said, “yep. That looks worth reading.” I had no idea what this book was even about as I picked it, and I was definitely not prepared for everything that came through with this book. It’s probably best that I hadn’t read the summary for it before agreeing to read it because then I likely wouldn’t have read it. I usually try avoiding books that have any basis in serious real world events. This book talks about WWII, the Holocaust, reeducation camps, etc. But I don’t regret picking this up.

I wouldn’t even know where to begin describing this book. It is such a contradiction. It was magical, but it was also disturbing. This is in part due to the fact that, more often than not, the story really makes you feel like you’ve been transported to the times they’re discussing. I have always found magical realism to be a great way to tell certain stories, especially stories like this that include such heavy topics, and it was done wonderfully.

It was also beautiful and yet heartbreaking. It’s hard to find a balance between them both, but this author has managed it stunningly. I also appreciate that while important to the story, the politics aspects were not the focus of it. I also absolutely adore Emma’s grandmother. And Emma herself is quite likeable and even relatable. I liked the way we get to see Emma growing through her experiences, and how well it all fit into the plot.

The only real downside for me was how abrupt and maybe a little unended the ending felt. While far from an easy read, it was an important one to me, and it was beautiful and painful. This was definitely a different kind of read for me, and I was very out of my comfort zone with it, but I am so grateful to have been given this opportunity to read it.

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How To Break An Evil Curse Review

Book: How to Break an Evil Curse by Laura Morrison

I received an arc of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. First, I’d like to start this by saying I was drawn in by both the title and the cover, which is beautiful. And the summary seemed pretty spot on for what I might enjoy. I do love a good fantasy that involves a curse. And I especially enjoy the idea of an independent and strong young lady or woman. However, after reading it, I realized that while this may still be considered a fantasy, this should not have been described and advertised as a high fantasy the way it was when I first saw. This book was marketed towards a slightly different audience than it should have been. While high fantasy lovers may still enjoy this, it also sets them up for disappointment when it is not as it was marketed. It was definitely not the kind of story I was expecting. How to Break an Evil Curse is exactly as the title says. It’s a story of a girl who has been locked away her whole life for fear of dying by sunlight because of curse placed upon her by an evil wizard before she was even born, so when she’s older, she sets out to break said evil curse.

There was so much potential in this story, and I was so excited to see how this might play out, but I was further disappointed by most of the story itself as well. There was a lot that could have been done to further develop the plot and especially the characters. I especially feel like Julianna’s character had so much room for growth and there was so much potential to what could’ve been done with her. She was who I was most looking forward to learning more about, but her character fell so short for me, and the way the narration is set up only furthered my dislike for both how the story is written and the Julianne as a whole. The characters all felt much the same in the end as they did in the beginning. I always love seeing characters grow and develop, but it was just hardly happening here. Most of them fell flat, and maybe if there weren’t so many tropes and topics crammed into the story at once, there would’ve been room for said character development.

There was a lot I wanted to like in this story. I wanted to like that it talked about women’s rights and poverty and so on, especially on top of wizards and pirates, but it really was too much all at once that it all felt halfway done. I don’t like reading something with the sole goal being the ending, but that’s how it felt reading this. The story was a struggle to get through, and it definitely took me a while. While funny at times, it was often more frustrating than funny. The povs were confusing, and the narration was lacking. It felt like a parody of what this story’s trope is meant to be. It almost felt like how The Hunger Games or Twilight parodies were. I was constantly waiting for the end to come because I also dislike not finishing books. I was hoping that at least the ending would give me some kind of hope for the rest of the series, but even the ending felt unsatisfying and anticlimactic. Part of me is hopeful that the sequel will show further development than this one. I know there’s so much more potential, and it could be great if that potential is really tapped into. 

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Reblog if you want a terrible, 3 sentence fan fiction in your ask, based on your url

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I had posted this on my main account, but maybe I should’ve posted it on my book account.

So if you see this, please comment or leave an ask cause bro. We’re struggling so hard trying to find a plot we both agree on and feel other people will actually enjoy.

What’s a young adult/new adult story idea y’all would like to read? What’s something you wish you could find in a book? What’s something that will make you want to pick up a book? What kinds of book do you want to see published?

For my fellow lgbtq+ and queer peeps especially, what do y’all wanna see?

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PLEASE PLEASE tell me where you bought the red kinda versions of the Villains Series. I can only find the white ones

Sorry I’m only just now seeing this! But I got my copies of the Villains series from a Barnes and Noble. And as far as I’m aware, they’re also available on amazon us. I get a little jealous myself cause I see people online with the white covers, and I really like those too, but I don’t know any way of getting my hands on them either.

If there’s any other way I can help, I’ll try!

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Okay. So one of my all time favorite authors is Adam Silvera. He’s such an amazing and talented writer. And he knows how to hurt you real good when writing a story. On top of all of that, he’s a queer author who writes queer stories. And honestly, what gets better than that?

The first book of his I’d ever read was a few years ago, and it More Happy Than Not. And let me tell you, I hated it. It had nothing to do with his writing. Objectively, the book was great. And I hated it. Lol but something about it cauaed me to go read all of his other books. My favorite being History is All You Left Me, I know that They Both Die at the end gets all the rep for the pain, but it definitely didn’t hurt as much as HIAYLM.

So when I first heard of this book coming out at some point last year, i couldn’t wait. I knew i just had to have it. And I was constantly stalking when preorder would be available. I preordered it in August, and it got here in January. It took me a couple months to finish it because I was in a bit of a reading slump and it was released shortly before my second semester of school was about to start.

There’s a lot of hate for this book, but there’s also a lot of love for it. I feel I fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t think it deserves quite the level of hate it received when it was released, but I can admit that I was also just a tad disappointed in this book when i read it. I was so hyped for so long about it, and when I was finally able to finish it, I was torn. It wasn’t a bad book, but it definitely wasn’t his best. The world building did feel just a little bit flat, and I wasn’t as invested in his characters as I usually am. I think his constant POV changes contributed to that. I know that in most of his books, there are POV changes, but in this one, there’s a lot more characters to change povs between and shorter chapters, so it made it a lot harder for me to care about any one character or care about their development when there’s never enough focus on a character at a time. And i definitely wasn’t all that invested in the little they did focus on each character. The motivations and the dialogue sometimes just felt too off. We also have to really understand that this is a book that’s been 10 years in the making, since he was a teenager, and so of course there’s still a lot of that roughness in it.

I did really enjoy the concept for this book, even if I felt too removed from the world or the characters. I will definitely check out the sequel, Infinty Reaper, because I love him, but also because I believe in his more honed abilities now and am excited to see where he takes his story. I hope that it’ll be so much better than this one. And I may not be that invested in the characters, but now I am curious as to what happens next and want all the gay.