I feel like I haven’t read a young adult contemporary in so long?? But I’m so glad to come back to the genre with this book, because it was so much fun to read! Though it’s a contemporary, it reminded me a lot of the Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce. You know it’s gonna be good when a book reminds you of a favorite!

There are a lot of different aspects to this book. There is obviously the main plot line, that Kit would like to be a knight at the medieval restaurant where she works. Another somewhat side plot line is the fact that Kit and her brother need to work because their family is very poor. So there is a very real and raw discussion about what it’s like to live in those circumstances. There’s also all kinds of relationships! Family, sibling, friends, and romantic interests. It’s really nice to see a book that’s not just focused on the romantic relationship.

You might remember that I’ve been participating in the Pondathon, a collaborative readathon hosted by CW @ The Quiet Pond. If you don’t follow them, YOU SHOULD. There are different characters that inhabit the pond, and each of them features different sorts of things!

Anyway, one of the features of this readalong is that there are side quests you can complete. In each quest you help the different members of The Quiet Pond with various tasks. For the most recent side quest, to get a bonus reward item we were asked to make a post about a book that helped us through a hard time. I talked about an important book to me on my Twitter, but there are so many that are dear to my heart. So I thought I’d make a blog post about it as well!

Hello friends! I said I was back to blogging and then didn’t post for weeks – classic. Haha well you know, life just gets busy sometimes! But since it is now December – dang!! – I thought I’d get back to it and share a wrap-up of my reads and etc from the past month.

Do you ever set monthly TBRs? I used to, but I kinda feel like that puts too much pressure on me to read certain things, so I don’t do it anymore. I’ve been working on reading all of my owned books, so really what I’ve been doing is trying to read books I have and not buy too many new ones. This proves difficult since I’m fortunate enough to have easy library access 😂so I cheat on my “owned books” goal with library books.

This month, I read 4 books that I owned and 3 books from the library! Over all of those, I read 2986 pages, and had an average rating of 4.1. I also have now read 101 books this year! I wasn’t expecting to hit that so early, since the past few years I’ve reached around 100ish right at the end of the year. So let’s get to the good stuff – the books themselves!

This month I managed to read 12 books!! 4867 pages!! I have no idea how that happened. Probably me trying to procrastinate on work or something haha. Did you know that Goodreads has a stats tracking feature where you can see how many books you read over time? It turns out April of last year was also a huge month for me! Maybe there’s just something about April that makes me read more – not sure what that would be though. Let me know if you have theories haha.

Have you discovered any new favorite authors recently? I HAVE. Thanks to @xcrini (on Instagram; also here on Twitter), recommending her books all the time, I finally read and fell in love with Katrina Leno. It actually messed up my February wrap up, because I read both Summer of Salt and Everything All at Once on the last day of February after I had already published my wrap up, oops. They were just THAT GOOD that I had to read them both in one sitting. And like, look at those covers?!??! THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL.