I’m not the biggest reader of romance but The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy had the perfect amount of it for me to be hooked. This book is for fans of the Sunshine/Grumpy enemies-to-lovers pairing, slow burn romance, and a relationship that grows through letters. The pen pal aspect of the story was probably what drew me in the most and the fact that it’s set in a world with marshals, undertakers, and lost souls possessing cadavers.

As you may have noticed, my lovely co-blogger Ri has made her triumphant return to book blogging! The two of us thought we’d do a collaborative post to celebrate both being actively blogging again. We were playing around with ideas and I remembered that a looooong time ago, I did a bookish blog tag called “Six Degrees of Separation.” This involves starting with a given book, and then jumping from book to book making connections between them. You can see the previous posts I did here and here. You may have heard of the term in the context of how you are related to famous people, but this is the bookish edition.

We thought it would be fun to do this but trade back and forth in making connections to different books! We asked for suggestions for a starting book from our friends. And our friend Steph suggested that we start with Pachinko. But where do we go from there….?

If you read nothing else this year, please read Babel.

I’m no writer and summarizing how I feel about this book, how it impacted me, and how incredibly awed I am by this written piece of literature, will be quite the undertaking. But I need you to know, because books like this are few and far between and we need more of them in people’s hands.

You may have seen this book around or you may have heard people talk about it online, but if you haven’t, I’m here to put it under your radar. There’s a lot of hype surrounding Kuang’s Babel and it is 100% deserving of it.

“Father told me I’m broken.”

There are few first lines more intriguing than that. If you like a book with bone magic, smugglers, secrets, established queer relationship, mysterious islands, and magical animal companions, this book is for you.

I feel like any time I read a book from The Locked Tomb series, my head is always left reeling from all the ish that goes down before it ends.