So…May is over. That’s a thing. I didn’t get much blogging done, as it was a hard month for me. But!! I did do a lot of reading. And gaming. Both are an escape for me, so naturally I’ve done a lot of both this month haha. So without further ado, let’s see what kinda stuff I did this month!

What Did I Read?

1. The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty
2. The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty
3. Counting Down with You by Tashie Bhuiyan
4. The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez
5. People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry
6. Horrid by Katrina Leno
7. The Prison Healer by Lynette Noni
8. Lore by Alexandra Bracken

I had four favorites this month, which is half of the books that I read haha. Those being: The Kingdom of Copper, People We Meet On Vacation, Horrid, and Lore. I love that I these are across a few different genres! KoC and Lore are both fantasy, PWMOV is contemporary/romance, and Horrid is fantasy horror! I’m a massive horror baby, but Horrid wasn’t that scary. And I love Katrina Leno (which you can see from this post). If you are thinking about wanting to try horror, I highly recommend this book. Also, I’m in a huge Greek myth phase right now because of a game, so I picked up Lore. It was such a wild ride, and a great modern take on Greek mythology! I loved it.

Don’t mind me slightly panicking over here that it’s May tomorrow. It’s fine. IT’S FINE. Cue nervous laughter. Of course, end of the month means it’s time for a wrap up! I’ve noticed that each month I feel like I haven’t read that much, but it turns out to be quite a decent number. Maybe this is because I read so quickly, I don’t actually spend that much time reading? I don’t know haha. But overall I had a very enjoyable reading month! And I also watched a good show and played some great games!

What Did I Read?

Thank you so much to the team at SparkPoint and Greenwillow Books for sending me books 2 and 3 for this series review!

Today I’m bringing you a recommendation for a young adult fantasy trilogy that I really love. It’s the Shadow Players trilogy by Heidi Heilig. The final book (On This Unworthy Scaffold) is out NOW! It just released yesterday!! So it’s a perfect time to read this series – you can read all three at once hehe.

First of all, we obviously have to appreciate these covers because WOWOWOWOW. The cover artwork for each book is done by Leo Nickolls and oh man. I really could stare at these all day. I LOVE the colors, and the slightly dark and ominous feeling that the covers give. It works really well with the title of the series, and the kind of magic in the books. Like seriously I kind of wish I had more shelf space so I could turn these to face outward on the shelf haha.

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.

March was kind of a hard month for me. A lot of things going on in the world, one year pandemic anniversary, stressful stuff about my thesis, etc. You get the idea. So obviously, I didn’t have very many blog posts haha. I wanted to let you know what I was up to this month though, so here’s a wrap up/look back for my March! I’m toying with the idea of including more than just book-focused posts in the future. So I’m going to be talking about other media in this post as well – I hope you enjoy it all!