Ummmm so APPARENTLY according to my calendar it is the last day of 2020! To be honest, I’m kinda just sitting here shocked that it’s over. It feels like 2020 was an eternity. So naturally, it’s time to look at what I read this year! I don’t like just doing a list of top books, so I have a few different sections to tell you about what I read.

Hello friends! Well clearly I have dropped off the map the last month or so – which I fully blame on the game Animal Crossing New Horizons. Actually, Shari is the one who got me in to playing this game. We’ve been playing quite a bit together and it’s so much fun. I love that books brought us together, but our friendship has really evolved from that. ANYway, I found this book tag based on the game, which was created by Two Book Thieves. I figured it would be a perfect way to get back to blogging!

And GUESS WHAT?????? Shari is gonna join me on this tag too!!! She’s been very busy kicking ass at art school, but has a little bit more time now to hop in on this post. SO YAY!

I feel like I haven’t read a young adult contemporary in so long?? But I’m so glad to come back to the genre with this book, because it was so much fun to read! Though it’s a contemporary, it reminded me a lot of the Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce. You know it’s gonna be good when a book reminds you of a favorite!

There are a lot of different aspects to this book. There is obviously the main plot line, that Kit would like to be a knight at the medieval restaurant where she works. Another somewhat side plot line is the fact that Kit and her brother need to work because their family is very poor. So there is a very real and raw discussion about what it’s like to live in those circumstances. There’s also all kinds of relationships! Family, sibling, friends, and romantic interests. It’s really nice to see a book that’s not just focused on the romantic relationship.

Retellings are hugely popular in young adult books these days. I love them, but I’m getting tired of the same fairytale being redone over and over. So thank goodness I finally picked up this one! This is a retelling of the longest epic poem ever, the Indian poem called The Mahabharata. I don’t know much about the original, except what I read on Wikipedia. Knowing that it’s a non-Western retelling kinda makes me love it already without reading it haha.

Another thing that intrigued me right away was that the gods and goddesses were a part of the story. I loooove that so much. It also means that since this is set in space, it is a space fantasy! Aka my favorite genre! And in my opinion, a genre we need a lot more of.

You might remember that I’ve been participating in the Pondathon, a collaborative readathon hosted by CW @ The Quiet Pond. If you don’t follow them, YOU SHOULD. There are different characters that inhabit the pond, and each of them features different sorts of things!

Anyway, one of the features of this readalong is that there are side quests you can complete. In each quest you help the different members of The Quiet Pond with various tasks. For the most recent side quest, to get a bonus reward item we were asked to make a post about a book that helped us through a hard time. I talked about an important book to me on my Twitter, but there are so many that are dear to my heart. So I thought I’d make a blog post about it as well!