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.

The Happy Place who? The Happy Place 5 what? Guess what y’all – it’s time for a new regular feature on the blog! The Happy Place 5 is going to be a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. For example, you can see that this month’s topic is “Books that Kept Us Afloat in 2020.” The name came 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.

Okay, now that I’ve explained this new feature, let’s get to January’s topic! There’s no mincing words, 2020 was a shitshow for everyone. I naturally turned to books as an escape from the real world. There are definitely a handful that were really comforting for me during the year. So I’m going to share them with you, and hopefully they can do the same for you!

Hello friends! I hope you are all staying healthy and indoors – and relatively sane (as sane as we can be). I don’t know about you, but my reading has drastically slowed down because of everything happening. In March I only read 3 books, and April hasn’t been much better. I’ve been focusing on doing things that make me happy! And obviously reading makes me happy, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate and read sometimes.

As I said I’ve been trying to do things that make me happy – and by that I really mean reading or watching or playing things that make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside! Like, all the cute feels. So I’m here to recommend a variety of things that make me feel that way, in case you also need recs for things like that!

Guess what? Yes, it’s my birthday! I was looking for fun tags to do and I found this one from Antonia @ Always Books. So let’s get started!

1) Birthday Cake (A book with a plot that seems cliché but you adore it anyway)

Hmm I think it’s not so much the plot – because that was pretty novel – but the general idea of urban fantasy, and the kickass heroine. But the Kate Daniels series! I think the basic idea of warrior girl fights bad guys and there’s werewolves and vampires is a pretty cliché premise, but oh man you guys! This series is so much more than that basic premise. Even the werewolves and vampires are totally not like what you’d think. And Kate herself is THE BEST. So yeah. I love this series haha. Also – there’s nothing wrong with loving cliché things!