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!

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.