I’m gonna be real here for a second: I HATE Valentine’s Day. I think it’s a stupid capitalist holiday created to make people spend money. I hate seeing all the red and pink everywhere. And I know that makes me a bit of a grinch but hey, I’m not against romance! I just think you should be telling the person/people you love that you love them every day, not just on this one day.

So I didn’t want to write an entire post on love and relationships in books. Don’t get me wrong, as much as I am a grinch I do like a good romance when it’s done well. But there are amazing books out there without romance! And sometimes I just don’t want to read about romance, I just want some good action and fighting and politics and friendships, y’know?

I wanted to share both sides: some of my favorite books without any romance (for those of us feeling non-romantic) and some books with my favorites couples (for those us feeling like reading about some romance).

eARC provided by St. Martin’s Press for review (via NetGalley)

Alright listen up you all! This book has been criminally under-exposed, seeing as how it comes out in less than two weeks and I’ve seen it absolutely nowhere except on NetGalley! If you’re a high fantasy fan, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

This book had pretty much everything I love – a cast of characters that all have their own strengths and weaknesses and are all fun to read about; magic!; an innovative world setup that I haven’t seen before; fight scenes on both small and large scales; and epic quests (or not so much as a quest as a fleeing from a recently discovered murdery conspiracy).

Have you ever been to an author signing event? I know that unfortunately authors can’t make it to every city, and can’t make it to every country. One of my wishes if I had infinite money would be to send authors to places they don’t usually get to go! Anyway, I live about halfway between Philadelphia and New York City, so I’m lucky enough to have access to many author events.

This past Tuesday (January 29th) I was able to attend the Leigh Bardugo’s launch event for King of Scars! This is the first book of her duology about Nikolai, a character originally from her Grisha trilogy. Since a lot of people can’t go to these author events, I thought I’d talk a bit about about what it was like, share what she talked about, and just talk about the whole day in general!

Hey, friends! Mackenzie and Shari here. We’re always mentioning how fun it would be to do more joint posts, so we’re taking every opportunity to do one. 😉

M: I definitely say something like this every time the month comes to an end but like, how is January over?? I swear we JUST started 2019. APPARENTLY, time has no regard for my feelings so a month has passed already.

S: Tell me about it! It hurts me because I just want the days to SLOW DOWN so I can enjoy them more, you know? It looks like we both had a great reading month though — let’s share our wrap-up!