Did you ever have a phase as a kid where you were obsessed with Greek mythology? I definitely did. And I’m starting to realize that I don’t think I’ve ever left that phase haha. Lately I’ve been more sucked in than usual, and I totally blame that on the video game Hades. You already know I’m a sucker for retellings, and in particular I love mythology retellings. I think I find them interesting because with fairytale retellings, you are generally sticking to one story, whereas with mythology retellings you have soooo much more to draw from. I think in this way, the author can really shine with their own original take on things from mythology.

Because I’ve been drawn back in, I wanted to make a post about Greek mythology retellings/stories in various forms of media. Obviously I’ll talk about books, but I know we all consume other forms of media so I wanted to add those in as well!

So…May is over. That’s a thing. I didn’t get much blogging done, as it was a hard month for me. But!! I did do a lot of reading. And gaming. Both are an escape for me, so naturally I’ve done a lot of both this month haha. So without further ado, let’s see what kinda stuff I did this month!

What Did I Read?

1. The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty
2. The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty
3. Counting Down with You by Tashie Bhuiyan
4. The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez
5. People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry
6. Horrid by Katrina Leno
7. The Prison Healer by Lynette Noni
8. Lore by Alexandra Bracken

I had four favorites this month, which is half of the books that I read haha. Those being: The Kingdom of Copper, People We Meet On Vacation, Horrid, and Lore. I love that I these are across a few different genres! KoC and Lore are both fantasy, PWMOV is contemporary/romance, and Horrid is fantasy horror! I’m a massive horror baby, but Horrid wasn’t that scary. And I love Katrina Leno (which you can see from this post). If you are thinking about wanting to try horror, I highly recommend this book. Also, I’m in a huge Greek myth phase right now because of a game, so I picked up Lore. It was such a wild ride, and a great modern take on Greek mythology! I loved it.

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.

So apparently May 15th was International Day of Families. NATURALLY this means that we had to pick found family as our Happy Place 5 topic this month! You (probably) already know that I’m a huge sucker for found family. Luckily, my friends are as well so we are all very happy to have this as our topic this month haha. As you may have noticed, I am posting this month’s post on the last day of the month. May has been kind of a hard month for me, so I haven’t been able to do much blogging. But I did want to share my choices with you!! Since I don’t have much energy I’m just going to post the Goodreads summary for each book, but I really hope you check them all out. So what are my choices??

Don’t mind me slightly panicking over here that it’s May tomorrow. It’s fine. IT’S FINE. Cue nervous laughter. Of course, end of the month means it’s time for a wrap up! I’ve noticed that each month I feel like I haven’t read that much, but it turns out to be quite a decent number. Maybe this is because I read so quickly, I don’t actually spend that much time reading? I don’t know haha. But overall I had a very enjoyable reading month! And I also watched a good show and played some great games!

What Did I Read?

Thank you so much to the team at SparkPoint and Greenwillow Books for sending me books 2 and 3 for this series review!

Today I’m bringing you a recommendation for a young adult fantasy trilogy that I really love. It’s the Shadow Players trilogy by Heidi Heilig. The final book (On This Unworthy Scaffold) is out NOW! It just released yesterday!! So it’s a perfect time to read this series – you can read all three at once hehe.

First of all, we obviously have to appreciate these covers because WOWOWOWOW. The cover artwork for each book is done by Leo Nickolls and oh man. I really could stare at these all day. I LOVE the colors, and the slightly dark and ominous feeling that the covers give. It works really well with the title of the series, and the kind of magic in the books. Like seriously I kind of wish I had more shelf space so I could turn these to face outward on the shelf haha.