Tropes. Ohhhh tropes. There are ones we love, ones we hate, and everything in between. Of course there are tons of popular ones, such as enemies to lovers, love triangles, found family, only one bed, etc. These ones are all pretty generic and broad, and can be found in many books. We all know that I’m a fan of found family and enemies to lovers in particular.

Aside from the generic ones, I’m sure we all have a handful of verrrrry specific tropes that we love. These can be harder to pinpoint, since if they are specific then they are necessarily more rare than the generic tropes. I love the idea of these!! So I wanted to make a list of my favorite trope “deep cuts.” For all of these I tried to list at least one book that has the trope, but my memory is sooo bad haha. So like, I know I’ve absolutely read all of these but just can’t remember which specific books I’ve seen them in.

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!

March was kind of a hard month for me. A lot of things going on in the world, one year pandemic anniversary, stressful stuff about my thesis, etc. You get the idea. So obviously, I didn’t have very many blog posts haha. I wanted to let you know what I was up to this month though, so here’s a wrap up/look back for my March! I’m toying with the idea of including more than just book-focused posts in the future. So I’m going to be talking about other media in this post as well – I hope you enjoy it all!

Hooooo boy. What a book. What a magnificent masterpiece of a book. I’m not this will be a review, so much as me rambling and spewing thoughts. I think a lot of people went into this one expecting it to be a romcom type of book. However, it is more of a coming of age/exploration of adulthood with some romance. The main focus is Grace and her journey, rather than the romance (though that is definitely a part of her journey). I just. Ugh. Reading this as someone who is nearing the end of an astrophysics PhD (like Grace) and experiencing burnout, depression, and anxiety (like Grace) hit so me so hard. It really made me feel SEEN.

IT’S MY BIRTHDAYYYYY!!! This tag is from Antonia @ Always Books, and I actually did it last year on my birthday (find it here). I figured, why not do it again and see how my answers differ this year! So let’s get started!