New month, new Top Ten Tuesday!! Today I’m going to share some of the 2023 debut books I’m excited about. I’m thankful for these kinds of topics, because normally I’m so bad at keeping track of new releases! But these make me actually look up new releases and write them down haha.

Thank you to Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl for hosting/organizing Top Ten Tuesday! Find my past Top Ten Tuesday posts here.

I know that not all of us have been readers since we were tiny humans. Not all of us were lucky enough to have that exposure! I was one of those fortunate enough to start reading very early, as my parents are both big readers. My friend Brooke (who I met on Bookstagram) is also someone who started reading early. To celebrate that, and the books we read as youngsters, she create a rereading challenge for 2023. It is called “23 and Me – The Books That Made Me.” It’s about rereading the books that were super formative for you! The information post from Brooke is below, along with the specific prompts.

One challenge that is very popular on bookstagram is the “12 book recommendations from 12 friends” challenge. I think the idea is to read one of those 12 for each month of the year. I wanted to do it this year, but I did it a little differently. Since you know that one of my goals is to reduce my physical TBR, I had my friends choose books from my physical TBR!

Thank you so much to TorDotComPub for sending me an ARC for review. This does not affect my thoughts, all thoughts are my own honest opinions.

Before I start this review, I just want to make sure that if you are thinking of reading this you check out the trigger warnings. This book deals with some heavier subject matter than the others in the series. Some triggers include: gaslighting from a parent, grooming, death of a parent (specifically witnessing the death of a parent). Please do look up other ones if you are concerned. But as Seanan says in the forward, “Antsy runs” before anything can happen with her stepfather.

I love it when books have a mix of genres. The Monsters We Defy is such a great mix of historical fiction and fantasy. Set in the 1920s in Washington DC, some characters and events in the book were actually inspired by real life. I’m not at all familiar with what happened in DC around this time, and while a fictional book isn’t the best source, learning about it was still really cool!