Award-winning author Aliette de Bodard returns with a powerful romantic fantasy that reads like The Goblin Emperor meets Howl’s Moving Castle in a pre-colonial Vietnamese-esque world.
Fire burns bright and has a long memory….
Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace.
Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.
Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate—and her own?

I have been meaning to read Aliette de Bodard’s work for a long time now, so I practically jumped when Tor.com approved me for this eARC!! I’d like to start this review with the AO3 content warnings and tags that the author wrote herself:

[tw-abuse, tw-assault-non-explicit] sword lesbian, diplomat lesbian, sunshine girl, fire girl (who is also sunshine girl), colonialism, sapphic shenanigans, symbolically unsubtle chess, garden flirting & more, drawn sword, tea on fire, scary tiger

If you didn’t know, AO3 is a fan-fiction website and their tagging system is godly. I need all books from now on to be described in this way, THANKS.

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.
A flying demon feeding on human energies.
A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.
And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.
The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.
She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

I feel like it has been SOOOO long since I fell this in love with a YA fantasy book. But omg you GUYS!!! This book is so good!!! I had seen a bunch of my bookstagram friends reading and loving it, so I was expecting to like it as well. But I didn’t know JUST how great it would be.

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.

Welcome to the February edition of The Happy Place 5! This month we are talking about new beginnings. By this we mean new/upcoming releases that are the first book of a series, or first books in a series that you have and want to start. I am choosing to do upcoming releases, since I just recently posted a list of series I own. I’m really bad at keeping track of new releases to be honest, BUT!! I did have quite a few already on my list that sound absolutely incredible. So here they are!

I haven’t done a Top Ten Tuesday post in quite a while, but I loved this prompt! So I had to do it hehe. TTT is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and you can find a full list of prompts here!

While looking for older books, I realized…I was born kind of a while ago hahah. I really had to scroll back through my Goodreads logs to find 10 books!! Okay like obviously there are thousands (more?) of books that were published, but I wanted to pick ones that I’ve read and really enjoyed. So here we go, here’s my top 10! I’m listing them chronologically based on publication date. Oh, and for the record, I was born in 1994.

If you follow my bookstagram (and maybe I’ve mentioned it here too?) then you know I am on a perpetual quest to read all the books I own. This year I’ve decided to make a VERY concerted effort, so I’m actually very closely tracking my owned books and my acquired books.

I realized I own quite a few first books in a series, so I made this post to talk about new series that I wanna start. They all sound so good and I’m super excited!! Please do let me know if you’ve read any of them, and what you thought.

Since I haven’t read them, I’m just going to post the link to them with the synopsis from Goodreads!