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!

If you read nothing else this year, please read Babel.

I’m no writer and summarizing how I feel about this book, how it impacted me, and how incredibly awed I am by this written piece of literature, will be quite the undertaking. But I need you to know, because books like this are few and far between and we need more of them in people’s hands.

You may have seen this book around or you may have heard people talk about it online, but if you haven’t, I’m here to put it under your radar. There’s a lot of hype surrounding Kuang’s Babel and it is 100% deserving of it.

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.

A disclaimer – all of the Pondathon graphics were created by CW of The Quiet Pond and belong to her!

Hello friends! Instead of monthly wrap ups this year, I’m going to do Pondathon round wrap ups! If you are confused as to what the heck a Pondathon is, check out my intro post about it! Each round is ~roughly~ a month, so it’s basically the same thing. But instead of just sharing the books I read, I get to share the Pondathon quests I completed. And share my updated garden!! I’m excited. Round one has just finished so it’s time for my first wrap up.

BUT! FIRST! Since the Pondathon didn’t start until January 10th, I did read a few books before it started. Those were:

1. Along the Saltwise Sea by A. Deborah Baker (excellent middle grade adventure)
2. Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson (a new favorite book of mine!! Sabriel vibes)
3. Tides of Mutiny by Rebecca Rode (pirates! standalone! whee!)

Okay NOW on to the readathon stuff.

Thank you NetGalley and Fiewel & Friends/Macmillan for the eARC for review!

I’ve mentioned this book on the blog before – when I made a list of retellings! In that post I talked about how excited I was for this book. Naturally I didn’t actually get around to reading it until 4.5 months after it released….whoops. Life gets in the way sometimes yknow? I had a lot going on (moving cross country, sick relatives, etc). BUT now I’ve read it. And I can say that I indeed loved it.