You all know I love a good retelling right? So obviously when TorDotCom asked me to review Spear by Nicola Griffith, I couldn’t say no. I hadn’t read anything by this author before, but now I will definitely be looking forward to more from her. And picking up her backlist works! Her prose is beautiful, and I love how she took Arthurian legend and made it genderbent and queer.

Hello friends! It is now April, and that means that round 4 of Pondathon II has finished! I’ve been really enjoying this whole readathon, and especially connecting with other participants via social media and/or Discord. And good god my TBR has exploded even more from hearing about all the books people are reading! So anyway, I’m gonna tell you a bit about what the quests and rewards were for this round, and what I read! And of course at the end I’ll show you my garden.

A few notes:

• All of the Pondathon graphics were created by CW of The Quiet Pond and belong to her!
• Find my intro post about joining Pondathon II here!
• And find all my other Pondathon blog posts here!

Okay, imagine that you’ve been hired (or coerced) into executing a high stakes heist for a magical artifact. Which book characters would you choose to make up your heist squad? I’ll share the books that I chose characters from – can you guess which characters and why I chose them? I mean, before you read the rest of the post and find out hahaha.

I’ve been wanting to write video game reviews in addition to book reviews on here, so I’m gonna kick it off with a review of one of my favorite games: GRIS! I actually just talked about this game a bit in my previous post about book and video game pairings (which you can read here). For those of you who are not gamers (yet??) please stick around, this game is GORGEOUS and I’ll be showing off some stills from it. I really think GRIS can appeal to many readers!

Developed by Nomada Studios, GRIS has many of my favorite elements combined in one game:

• 2D platforming mechanics
• simple gameplay controls
• stunning artwork
• a haunting but beautiful soundtrack
• a story that leaves room for player interpretation

For the rest of the review, I’ll go into a bit more detail about each of these things. And since I haven’t done a video game review before and I know many of you are not gamers, I’ll try to keep the jargon as minimal as possible while I talk about GRIS. And I’ll explain the jargon that I have used or will use!

Hi friends! Are any of you video gamers in addition to being readers? I follow some other great bloggers who talk both books and video games, such as Caitlin at Realms of My Mind, and Kirsten at Video Games as Literature. Go check them out!

I came to video games late in life, since my parents weren’t big on them. I mostly game on my Nintendo Switch, but I’ve watched my boyfriend play quite a few games on the PlayStation (4 and 5). There are tons of games that have really great storylines and characters, and a lot of them make me want a book adaptation haha. And vice versa, I’ve read a lot of books that I think would make really interesting games! That inspired me to do a post all about pairing video games and books that have similar themes, settings, characters, etc. Sooo yeah that’s what I’m doing today! I hope you enjoy this post, it was fun to write and combine two of my hobbies.