After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.
A flying demon feeding on human energies.
A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.
And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.
The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.
She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

I feel like it has been SOOOO long since I fell this in love with a YA fantasy book. But omg you GUYS!!! This book is so good!!! I had seen a bunch of my bookstagram friends reading and loving it, so I was expecting to like it as well. But I didn’t know JUST how great it would be.

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.

One of my favorite type of books to read is retellings, of any kind (though diverse ones are always better). Mythology, fairytales, classics, etc; I will literally consume it all. There have been a lot of new releases that are retellings, so I thought I’d make a post about my favorite ones I’ve read, and ones that I’m excited to read! I also wanted to make sure that I included adult SFF retellings. It seems that most of the popular ones out there are YA, but never fear, adult retelling fans! I am here to help you. And me. Mostly I made this list for me 😂.

I love hearing about what my friends are reading! It’s one of the best ways to learn about new books that I might like. That gave me the idea to do a post celebrating my friends and the books that they loved this year. I asked my friends to pick up to 7 of their favorite reads of the year, and say a bit about them if they wanted. I hope you find some great new books to check out from this list, I know I did. Also, this ended up being a lot longer than I expected haha but it’s worth it I promise!