Thank you Tor.com and NetGalley for the eARC for review!

Happy book birthday to this wonderful little novella!! I really enjoyed this one. I honestly feel like a broken record at this point, because I truly have enjoyed every single book I’ve read that they’ve published. That’s why I made a whole blog post about them haha. But ANYway, back to the book at hand.

Somehow I didn’t realize that this was a (very) loose retelling of The Little Mermaid!!!!! You know me and retellings. While reading, I picked up on the little nods to the fairytale and it made me love the book even more.

Reading this book was kind of like having a dream. Not in that it was super fantastical (though there are very cool sci-fi elements), but in the sense of like. If you had been thinking about love and what you would do for love all day, and then you go to sleep and have this dream. It’s like a dream in that it feels so much like deep feelings that everyone has but can’t quite vocalize. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it was wonderful.

The world is so creative and blends so many ideas of different types of civilizations (space, land, sea) together. It is also very queernormative in a quiet way, and I love that so much.

I’m sorry for the short review I don’t want to say too much more, because I don’t want to ruin the experience for anyone. The bottom line is I definitely recommend this novella, and am eagerly awaiting more books from this author. Go get this one from your local indie bookstore (safely), an ebook retailer, your library, or wherever else you get books!

I think I may have mentioned before that my whole family are readers. My parents are basically the reason that I became a reader! When my brother and I were very young, they started by reading all sorts of books to us. Eventually once I started to learn to read, I stopped wanting my parents to read to me because they were too slow hahaha.

My mom reads a lot of similar things to me (science fiction and fantasy), and more!! She likes pretty much all genres haha. But mostly I would say historical fiction, mystery, action/thrillers, and nonfiction in addition to SFF. Dad on the other hand mostly reads action/thrillers, mystery, and nonfiction. Occasionally he reads some science fiction, but it’s not that often. So I guess my mom is a mix of my dad and me haha. My brother likes mostly science fiction and fantasy, like me, but reads a lot more manga and graphic novels than I do.

I obviously discuss books frequently with my family, so I thought it would fun to share with all of you what my family’s favorite books/series/authors are! My parents both wanted to put like 100 books on this list, but I had to limit them hahaha.

I just couldn’t get enough of retellings hahaha. So here is my list of retelling recommendations, part two! A lot of you seemed excited by the last post, so I hope you will enjoy this one as well. And if you have any other suggestions, please do let me know so I can further expand my TBR lol.

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.

Welcome to the February edition of The Happy Place 5! This month we are talking about new beginnings. By this we mean new/upcoming releases that are the first book of a series, or first books in a series that you have and want to start. I am choosing to do upcoming releases, since I just recently posted a list of series I own. I’m really bad at keeping track of new releases to be honest, BUT!! I did have quite a few already on my list that sound absolutely incredible. So here they are!

I haven’t done a Top Ten Tuesday post in quite a while, but I loved this prompt! So I had to do it hehe. TTT is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and you can find a full list of prompts here!

While looking for older books, I realized…I was born kind of a while ago hahah. I really had to scroll back through my Goodreads logs to find 10 books!! Okay like obviously there are thousands (more?) of books that were published, but I wanted to pick ones that I’ve read and really enjoyed. So here we go, here’s my top 10! I’m listing them chronologically based on publication date. Oh, and for the record, I was born in 1994.