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

It’s been a few months since I last participated in Top Ten Tuesday! I love this prompt though, as it makes me actually write down release dates LOL. I’m normally really bad at keeping track of upcoming releases, but this post makes me be a little more on top of it. So what are the top ten books that I’m looking forward to for the rest of this year?

Guess what! It’s my mom’s birthday today!!! Since she (and my dad) got me into reading, I thought I’d celebrate by dedicating a post to books with awesome mom characters. There are quite a few books where there are moms as side characters. However, I wanted to highlight books where the mom is the main character! Half of my choices are books that I’ve read, and the other half are ones that I’m really excited to read. These books are all adult fiction – I guess it’s natural that young adult books would center, well, young adults, who tend to not have become mothers yet.

YES it is me ONCE AGAIN doing a post about retellings. I’m sorry!!! I just can’t get enough of them! (Ok let’s be real I’m not actually sorry haha.) This time I’m focusing on upcoming releases so that you can all fill your TBRs, and make some preorders (if you so desire). I’ll include the synopsis of each from Goodreads so you can get an idea of what each is about! I’m really excited for all of these because they seem to expand on whatever original tale they are retelling. By this I mean the authors have made the stories more diverse than the original. Some are queer, some center people of color rather than white characters, and some center non-cis men. Everything that I love to see!!!

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 June and happy Pride month! Naturally we had to celebrate queer voices in the book community this month. We also chose to highlight BIPOC characters as well, since we would like to uplift those stories! I’ve read quite a few, but there are some that I wanted to highlight that I haven’t read yet. There are soooo many queer BIPOC stories on my TBR and I’m a little overwhelmed haha. I just want to read them all right now!!! But sadly I can only really read one book at a time haha. But anyway!!! Here are my picks. The first three are ones I’ve read, and the last two are to be read!

It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of these mini reviews! Okay fine, it’s been a while since I shared any reviews in general. I thought this would be a great way to start doing it again. These aren’t all of my most recent reads. But! They are ones that I wanted to highlight and ones that stuck out to me. Also I just realized that each one is a different genre!! We’ve got contemporary, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. I guess I read across quite a few genres, not just sci-fi and fantasy!