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!

I saw my friend Kori do this on her bookstagram, so I thought I’d do the same thing here! If you want to see her post, you can find it here. Thanks for sharing that Kori ❤️. Here is a preview of some of the books that I’ll be talking about!

Guess what! It’s my mom’s birthday today!!! Since she (and my dad) got me into reading, I thought I’d celebrate by dedicating a post to books with awesome mom characters. There are quite a few books where there are moms as side characters. However, I wanted to highlight books where the mom is the main character! Half of my choices are books that I’ve read, and the other half are ones that I’m really excited to read. These books are all adult fiction – I guess it’s natural that young adult books would center, well, young adults, who tend to not have become mothers yet.

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.

So apparently May 15th was International Day of Families. NATURALLY this means that we had to pick found family as our Happy Place 5 topic this month! You (probably) already know that I’m a huge sucker for found family. Luckily, my friends are as well so we are all very happy to have this as our topic this month haha. As you may have noticed, I am posting this month’s post on the last day of the month. May has been kind of a hard month for me, so I haven’t been able to do much blogging. But I did want to share my choices with you!! Since I don’t have much energy I’m just going to post the Goodreads summary for each book, but I really hope you check them all out. So what are my choices??

Tropes. Ohhhh tropes. There are ones we love, ones we hate, and everything in between. Of course there are tons of popular ones, such as enemies to lovers, love triangles, found family, only one bed, etc. These ones are all pretty generic and broad, and can be found in many books. We all know that I’m a fan of found family and enemies to lovers in particular.

Aside from the generic ones, I’m sure we all have a handful of verrrrry specific tropes that we love. These can be harder to pinpoint, since if they are specific then they are necessarily more rare than the generic tropes. I love the idea of these!! So I wanted to make a list of my favorite trope “deep cuts.” For all of these I tried to list at least one book that has the trope, but my memory is sooo bad haha. So like, I know I’ve absolutely read all of these but just can’t remember which specific books I’ve seen them in.