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??

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.

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!

I think I may have mentioned before that my whole family are readers. My parents are basically the reason that I became a reader! When my brother and I were very young, they started by reading all sorts of books to us. Eventually once I started to learn to read, I stopped wanting my parents to read to me because they were too slow hahaha.

My mom reads a lot of similar things to me (science fiction and fantasy), and more!! She likes pretty much all genres haha. But mostly I would say historical fiction, mystery, action/thrillers, and nonfiction in addition to SFF. Dad on the other hand mostly reads action/thrillers, mystery, and nonfiction. Occasionally he reads some science fiction, but it’s not that often. So I guess my mom is a mix of my dad and me haha. My brother likes mostly science fiction and fantasy, like me, but reads a lot more manga and graphic novels than I do.

I obviously discuss books frequently with my family, so I thought it would fun to share with all of you what my family’s favorite books/series/authors are! My parents both wanted to put like 100 books on this list, but I had to limit them hahaha.

I just couldn’t get enough of retellings hahaha. So here is my list of retelling recommendations, part two! A lot of you seemed excited by the last post, so I hope you will enjoy this one as well. And if you have any other suggestions, please do let me know so I can further expand my TBR lol.