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 Harper Voyager for providing me with an eARC for review via NetGalley!

When I heard about this book, I immediately put it on my TBR for two reasons. One being that synopsis – I mean the good guy potentially going bad for love? And five warriors who saved the world have to reunite?? Yes. Dear god yes. The second reason was the author. I read the Queens of Renthia trilogy by Sarah Beth Durst a few years ago and LOVED it, so I was definitely excited to read more from her. That trilogy had such cool magic, and a mom as a main character! I really love seeing older protagonists, so I was excited that this one also feature a group of older heroes.

If you have read any of my blog posts, you probably know what I’m going to mention first about this book. Yes! That’s right! FOUND FAMILY!!!!! Let’s go baby!!!! I think the cool thing about this one was that we don’t actually get to see how they all came together, because that’s in the past. However! We get to see how their relationships with one another have evolved, and just how strong found family ties can be. I like that Durst didn’t make it easy for them to all reconnect, because obviously over 25 years people have changed a LOT.

Another thing I love: the bone magic. Yeah it’s a little creepy, but it’s also so cool!!!! Like enchanting specific bones from different animals to enhance specific traits? So awesome. If that doesn’t make sense, then think like, using bear bones for strength/stability, or cheetah bones for speed, etc. And also being able to read the future in bones? Terrifying but awesome. I kinda do wish we could have seen a bit more of the magic, but maybe that’s just me being magic greedy haha.

To be honest, reviews are kind of hard for me right now so I don’t have much more to say. But just know that this is definitely one of my favorites of the year. The adventures! The magic! The found family! And also that villain!!!! He was very well done. I also just really like the concept of this book, i.e. dealing with what could happen after the heroes save the world. So yes, I hope you go pick it up and see for yourself!

Tropes. Ohhhh tropes. There are ones we love, ones we hate, and everything in between. Of course there are tons of popular ones, such as enemies to lovers, love triangles, found family, only one bed, etc. These ones are all pretty generic and broad, and can be found in many books. We all know that I’m a fan of found family and enemies to lovers in particular.

Aside from the generic ones, I’m sure we all have a handful of verrrrry specific tropes that we love. These can be harder to pinpoint, since if they are specific then they are necessarily more rare than the generic tropes. I love the idea of these!! So I wanted to make a list of my favorite trope “deep cuts.” For all of these I tried to list at least one book that has the trope, but my memory is sooo bad haha. So like, I know I’ve absolutely read all of these but just can’t remember which specific books I’ve seen them in.

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 April!! This month my friends and I are discussing under-hyped books. Of course, under-hyped can be hard to define, depending on what social media you use. So we decided that for this post at least, we will define under-hyped as having fewer than 1000 ratings on Goodreads. I really had to go searching for some of these haha. So without further ado, here’s my list! And just to note, they all had fewer than 1000 ratings at the time I wrote this post, but hopefully some of them have crossed that point since then!

March was kind of a hard month for me. A lot of things going on in the world, one year pandemic anniversary, stressful stuff about my thesis, etc. You get the idea. So obviously, I didn’t have very many blog posts haha. I wanted to let you know what I was up to this month though, so here’s a wrap up/look back for my March! I’m toying with the idea of including more than just book-focused posts in the future. So I’m going to be talking about other media in this post as well – I hope you enjoy it all!