Hooooo boy. What a book. What a magnificent masterpiece of a book. I’m not this will be a review, so much as me rambling and spewing thoughts. I think a lot of people went into this one expecting it to be a romcom type of book. However, it is more of a coming of age/exploration of adulthood with some romance. The main focus is Grace and her journey, rather than the romance (though that is definitely a part of her journey). I just. Ugh. Reading this as someone who is nearing the end of an astrophysics PhD (like Grace) and experiencing burnout, depression, and anxiety (like Grace) hit so me so hard. It really made me feel SEEN.

IT’S MY BIRTHDAYYYYY!!! This tag is from Antonia @ Always Books, and I actually did it last year on my birthday (find it here). I figured, why not do it again and see how my answers differ this year! So let’s get started!

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.

Aaaaand just like that, it’s March. Which means! Yes, it’s time again for The Happy Place 5! This month we are talking about “Places you’d take a portal to in an instant.” To be honest, this one was kind of hard for me. Mostly because a lot of the settings in the books I read seem really cool but also really dangerous or scary lol. I tried to pick books where I’d be okay living there if there’s no portal back. Buuuuut really, I’m making this post assuming that I can portal back home if I want to hahaha.

Although I missed the first day of Lunar New Year, I know that at least in Chinese tradition the new year celebration lasts for 15 days. So really, I’m only a little bit late to the festivities, as today (Feb. 26) is the last day (Lantern Festival). I originally wanted to make a post about books that take place during LNY, but ummmm I didn’t know of any haha. SO you get to have a good smattering of my favorite Asian authors (and a few authors I need to read)! Lunar New Year is celebrated in many different Asian cultures, so I wanted to include authors of many different Asian heritages.

Thank you Tor.com and NetGalley for the eARC for review!

Happy book birthday to this wonderful little novella!! I really enjoyed this one. I honestly feel like a broken record at this point, because I truly have enjoyed every single book I’ve read that they’ve published. That’s why I made a whole blog post about them haha. But ANYway, back to the book at hand.

Somehow I didn’t realize that this was a (very) loose retelling of The Little Mermaid!!!!! You know me and retellings. While reading, I picked up on the little nods to the fairytale and it made me love the book even more.

Reading this book was kind of like having a dream. Not in that it was super fantastical (though there are very cool sci-fi elements), but in the sense of like. If you had been thinking about love and what you would do for love all day, and then you go to sleep and have this dream. It’s like a dream in that it feels so much like deep feelings that everyone has but can’t quite vocalize. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it was wonderful.

The world is so creative and blends so many ideas of different types of civilizations (space, land, sea) together. It is also very queernormative in a quiet way, and I love that so much.

I’m sorry for the short review I don’t want to say too much more, because I don’t want to ruin the experience for anyone. The bottom line is I definitely recommend this novella, and am eagerly awaiting more books from this author. Go get this one from your local indie bookstore (safely), an ebook retailer, your library, or wherever else you get books!