Firstly, thank you so much to the lovely folks at Angry Robot for sending me a copy for review! And for including me on their tour for this book!

After I started reading this book, I realized that I don’t think I’ve really read a grimdark fantasy before? Okay I guess I’ve read Joe Abercrombie’s Shattered Sea trilogy, but that still felt a bit toned down (maybe because it’s young adult?). Anyway, I was kind of nervous. What if it’s too dark? Too gory? I was worried about liking it BUT it turns out I didn’t need to be worried. Yes, it was dark and gory and gruesome, of course. But it was also filled with humor and super interesting characters and scheming and so much more.

Thank you to Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl for hosting/organizing Top Ten Tuesday!

I love this topic!!! Rereading books is great, but often you can’t capture the same emotions and shock that you feel when you read a book for the first time. It was interesting to think about which books I’d choose, and the reasoning behind them. I wish there was some way we could actually do this though haha.

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 August! This month for our “The Happy Place 5” series, we are choosing books that we’d bring with us to a deserted island. I thought this was going to be difficult, but it turned out to be really easy for me! I was surprised. Also making this post really made me want to read all of these books like right now hahaha.

You know what’s amazing? That I know people who write books. I think all authors are amazing – writing a book (or fanfiction!) is a great accomplishment. And it blows my mind that I’ve been able to meet up and coming authors through the bookstagram community!! One of those is Hannah Marae, who you can find on Instagram @hannah.marae. When I heard about this book of hers, I was super excited. She offered me an advanced copy, and I’m so glad I took her up on the offer. I really enjoyed the book overall.

Yes!!! That’s right!! I’ve been on Bookstagram for six whole years. Okay yes, I know this is the blog and not Bookstagram. But since BG was my first platform for books, I wanted to talk about it a bit here. The community (and platform) has changed a lot since I started, but I still love it so much. I don’t often look back at my old photos, but JUST FOR YOU GUYS I’ll show a little feed evolution of my account. Also I guess I should link my account for you LOL so here it is!