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

I love this topic!!! Rereading books is great, but often you can’t capture the same emotions and shock that you feel when you read a book for the first time. It was interesting to think about which books I’d choose, and the reasoning behind them. I wish there was some way we could actually do this though 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!

A refreshingly timely and relatable debut novel about a young woman whose life plans fall apart when she meets her wife.
With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.
This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.
In New York, she’s able to ignore all the annoying questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

Hooooo boy. What a book. What a magnificent masterpiece of a book. I’m not this will be a review, so much as me rambling and spewing thoughts. I think a lot of people went into this one expecting it to be a romcom type of book. However, it is more of a coming of age/exploration of adulthood with some romance. The main focus is Grace and her journey, rather than the romance (though that is definitely a part of her journey). I just. Ugh. Reading this as someone who is nearing the end of an astrophysics PhD (like Grace) and experiencing burnout, depression, and anxiety (like Grace) hit so me so hard. It really made me feel SEEN.