Thank you to Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl for hosting/organizing Top Ten Tuesday!

I think I’ve done a similar topic before, but it was actually like two years ago?? Which is weird. But anyway, world-building/settings is one of my favorite aspects of books. I mean, I read to escape the real world! So I love going to wild and wonderful places in my reads. There are so many great settings, but here are just ten books with ones that I love. I won’t summarize the books, I’ll just talk a little bit about the different settings. But of course I’ll link the Goodreads pages so you can check them out yourself!

The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn't matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.
When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it's to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister's death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​
To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

Welp. I’ve absolute found both a new favorite book, and a new favorite author. This book was incredible, and I cannot wait for the sequel. It had everything I could ever want. Found family, queer characters, GIANT ROBOTS?? Ancient China inspired setting, vengeance, unapologetic rage, and so much more. Wow. I’m blown away. I couldn’t stop reading it, but I also never wanted it it end!! Maybe I’ll just have to reread it many many times until the sequel comes out…haha.

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.

Happy June and happy Pride month! Naturally we had to celebrate queer voices in the book community this month. We also chose to highlight BIPOC characters as well, since we would like to uplift those stories! I’ve read quite a few, but there are some that I wanted to highlight that I haven’t read yet. There are soooo many queer BIPOC stories on my TBR and I’m a little overwhelmed haha. I just want to read them all right now!!! But sadly I can only really read one book at a time haha. But anyway!!! Here are my picks. The first three are ones I’ve read, and the last two are to be read!