Eighteen-year-old Liobhan is a powerful singer and an expert whistle player. Her brother has a voice to melt the hardest heart, and a rare talent on the harp. But Liobhan's burning ambition is to join the elite warrior band on Swan Island. She and her brother train there to compete for places, and find themselves joining a mission while still candidates. Their unusual blend of skills makes them ideal for this particular job, which requires going undercover as traveling minstrels. For Swan Island trains both warriors and spies.

Their mission: to find and retrieve a precious harp, an ancient symbol of kingship, which has gone mysteriously missing. If the instrument is not played at the upcoming coronation, the candidate will not be accepted and the people could revolt. Faced with plotting courtiers and tight-lipped druids, an insightful storyteller, and a boorish Crown Prince, Liobhan soon realizes an Otherworld power may be meddling in the affairs of the kingdom. When ambition clashes with conscience, Liobhan must make a bold decision and is faced with a heartbreaking choice.

Soooo this was meant to be a regular blog post series but apparently the last one I did was in 2019. THREE YEARS AGO. Whoops. But maybe I can get myself to do this again haha. I do love doing mini reviews! And I personally love reading shorter reviews, so I hope some of you do as well. This post will be about my 4 most recent reads, which all happen to be romance reads! Well okay, technically one of them I’d categorize as fantasy, if I had to pick a single genre. But it fits well into the “romance fantasy” genre mix. And one of them is a romance tinged with fantasy. I just can’t get away from fantasy for too long okay?? But anyway, I loved all of these! So let’s get into it.

Happy pride month everyone! For this month’s The Happy Place 5 post, we of course had to choose a topic centered on queer books. We chose to highlight our 5 queer favs from the last 5 years! I both love and hate this topic. Love because obviously I love highlighting queer books, and there are so many amazing books to choose from. Hate because THERE ARE SO MANY AMAZING BOOKS TO CHOOSE FROM. It’s painful to only choose one book from each year hahaha. Plus so many of my favs were actually published in the same year. So just know that obviously I have way more favs than just these 5 haha. But now on to my actual picks!!

The second Pondathon has now come to an end! Okay fine, it ended like 3+ weeks ago but I’ve been in a blogging slump. So I’m just now posting my final summary for Pondathon II. Time isn’t real! I can post things whenever I want! Anyway, I had so much fun with this readathon. I read so many amazing books, and had a BLAST creating my garden. Just wait until you see my final garden at the end!!

A few notes:

• All of the Pondathon graphics were created by CW of The Quiet Pond and belong to her!
• Find my intro post about joining Pondathon II here!
• And find all my other Pondathon blog posts here!

Look, we all know I’m not the best at being consistent with blogging haha. May has been a busy month for me – friends in town, catching COVID….etc. But now it’s blogging time again baby!! Today (May 21st) is International Tea Day so we decided to create a book character tea party. Which if you think about it, is actually quite difficult! Because a lot of characters out there, at least in SFF, are not ummm well-suited to attending a calm tea party haha. Do you think you can guess any of my attendees? Here’s a hint in the form of the books I chose from.