The Happy Place 5: Under-hyped books (< 1k Goodreads ratings)
The Happy Place 5 is a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. The name is from a Discord group that I am a part of. We created the space to have a positive environment for a handful of close friends. All of us are bookworms, and many of us are bookstagrammers and bloggers. So we decided to start a blog post series together! I’ll link my friends blogs and posts for this month’s topic at the end of this post.
Happy April!! This month my friends and I are discussing under-hyped books. Of course, under-hyped can be hard to define, depending on what social media you use. So we decided that for this post at least, we will define under-hyped as having fewer than 1000 ratings on Goodreads. I really had to go searching for some of these haha. So without further ado, here’s my list! And just to note, they all had fewer than 1000 ratings at the time I wrote this post, but hopefully some of them have crossed that point since then!
Actually before we do get into it 😅 look at that nice rainbow that the covers make!!! I’m kind of in love with it. Also just wanna note that we have three Tor.com novellas here haha. If you couldn’t guess from just that fact, I love them. If you want to hear me gush about them, check out my Tor.com post here!
Persephone Station
This book is pitched as a space opera for fans of The Mandalorian and Cowboy Bebop. At the time I read it, I had only see the first show but that pitch definitely pegged me haha. I loved this book! Characters that are a little bit criminal but have a heart of gold, a ragtag found family, queer characters, anti-colonization themes, and much more. I hope that more people pick up this book! I have a full review for it here. Also, I recently watched Cowboy Bebop and I can say that I agree with the pitch even more now haha.
Burning Roses
Ahhh I read this novella this past weekend and omg. I loooooved it. It pretty much had all of my favorite things.
- it’s a retelling! of Red Riding Hood, but there are other stories mixed in as well (Chang E, Goldilocks, Beauty and the Beast)
- found family, but make it queer!! (the two main characters both have a primary relationship that is f/f)
- older badass ladies!!!!! my kingdom for more books with older protagonists
- wonderfully imperfect characters who have both made big mistakes and are figuring out how to live with them
- beautiful prose!!!
In summary, I would like more novellas like this from S.L. Huang (the author) IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!
The Rush’s Edge
This book is such a fun space opera adventure, and I’m sad that more people don’t know about it!! It’s got found family! Genetic engineering! Sentient robots/AIs! And so much more. The found family relationships were so wonderful to read about. I also love that the author included discussions about what it’s like to deal with PTSD (since some of the characters were soldiers). There is also a character who is an older woman, and lemme just repeat what I said above – more older protagonists!!! Please!!! Especially badass ladies in space. If you want to hear more about the book, check out my review for it here!
Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters
This novella is a loose retelling of The Little Mermaid, but set in space! And also, it’s queer! I read it a while ago, and the more I think about it the more I like it. I wrote a review for it which you can find here. And here’s a little piece of that review “Reading this book was kind of like having a dream. Not in that it was super fantastical (though there are very cool sci-fi elements), but in the sense of like. If you had been thinking about love and what you would do for love all day, and then you go to sleep and have this dream. It’s like a dream in that it feels so much like deep feelings that everyone has but can’t quite vocalize. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it was wonderful.”
Void Black Shadow
This is the second book in the Voidwitch Saga, a trilogy of sci-fi novellas about a woman named Mariam Xi. She’s got wicked cool psychic powers (she can literally crush ships with her mind). The world-building is amazing, the action is incredibly engaging, and the characters are compelling. I wasn’t expecting to have emotional gut punches in this series but wow, there really are some sucker punches. Though the trilogy is finished, I would LOVE to see more in this world. The first book is called Killing Gravity if you’d like to check it out!
Have you heard of any of these? What are some of your favorite under-hyped books?
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