Thank you NetGalley and Fiewel & Friends/Macmillan for the eARC for review!

I’ve mentioned this book on the blog before – when I made a list of retellings! In that post I talked about how excited I was for this book. Naturally I didn’t actually get around to reading it until 4.5 months after it released….whoops. Life gets in the way sometimes yknow? I had a lot going on (moving cross country, sick relatives, etc). BUT now I’ve read it. And I can say that I indeed loved it.

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.

Today (well, today as I’m writing this) I saw the following tweet:

This is something that I KNOW we can all relate to haha. This is extremely relevant to our topic today, since we chose to talk about backlist books that we meant to read in 2021. I have 10000% said the above almost word for word about all of these books. So I feel personally attacked by this tweet lol. But anyway, read on to find out which books I STILL NEED TO READ. And then go berate me into reading them hehe.

Thank you so much to TorDotCom Publishing for sending me an ARC to review! This does not affect my review in any way.

It’s no secret that I love Seanan McGuire. I mean, she and Tamora Pierce are my top two favorite authors, easily. I saw Heron (a friend from Bookstagram) mention in their review that for them it’s now more of a question of how much they’ll like these books, rather than a question of if they’ll like them. That is definitely how it is for me. I have loved the previous six books of this series, to varying degrees, so I went into this one pretty confident I would like it. Little did I know it would actually become on of my favs of the series!!

I joined the first iteration of this readathon last January, and now it’s time for round two! This is a creation of CW and the other members of the blog The Quiet Pond. I love their blog so much, it’s probably one of my favorite little corners of the internet. They champion diverse books, and the space is so welcoming and wholesome. The art that CW creates is beautiful! I love all the characters that she has made that are “permanent residents” of the pond.

Well here we are at the start of a new year! I’m a little late on my 2021 wrap up, but oh well. That’s just how it is sometimes! I really like seeing wrap ups of people’s reading years, so I hope you do too since I’m doing it haha. Let’s get to it!