Reading, Writing, and Me

  Happily Ever Afters  by Elise Bryant  Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an ARC so I could share my honest thoughts with all of you! Overview: Tessa gets the writing opportunity of her dreams, but her words run out at the same time. While she can't wait to take a novel writing class at her new school, the idea of sharing her work with anyone but her best friend, Caroline, makes her unable to keep writing, even for herself. Caroline devises a plan to get her to fall in love so that she can jumpstart her creative juices for the romances Tessa writes herself into. Real life inspiration is clearly not the answer, and Tessa is left even further from the answer to all of her problems. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 While I knew this book was going to have a kind of forced dating situation as Tessa tried to get this boy to fall for her, I didn't predict the love triangle till I started reading. I'm not going to fault Bryant for using a love triangle because everyone do...

 Welcome to my big list of 2020 favorites! Usually, I do this award show style and give out different awards in a variety of categories I made up. This year is a little different because it's 2020, and I'm out of brain power to think of categories. These books appear in no particular order, and I selected them purely based on which books are still in my head months after I read them. I didn't read nearly as many books this year as usual, but I think I managed to read more books that I fell head over heels for than ever. Publishing a book this year is a major accomplishment in itself, so these authors all deserve extra rounds of applause for launching their books into an uncertain world, and even if a book from this year doesn't make a list, it's still incredible for existing. Even though I've already talked everyone's ears off about these books all year long, I'm going to do it one more time because they got me through both a hard and hectic year and pro...

Super Fake Love Song  by David Yoon Overview: Sunny Dae is sick of his California neighborhood where everyone pretends to be something they're not to keep up with all the other rich families. He's happy in his own world, LARPing with his friends, even if he gets made fun of for it at school. That is until Cirrus comes into the picture. She's undeniably cool and he's undeniably a loser in everyone's eyes, so he finds a new personality. He borrows a life from the coolest person he used to know, his older brother Gray, who's on his way to becoming a rockstar. Of course, lies like that always fall apart, and the music industry is unforgiving. It's a long fall from the top. Overall: 3  Characters: 3 This is the weirdest book I've ever read, which I'll get into more later. One part of that is the book is basically only told in details. You'd think this would help with characterization, but so many characters are left completely flat. Sunny is unashamed...

  Be Dazzled  by Ryan La Sala Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an ARC so I could share my honest thoughts with all of you!   Overview: Raffy is one of the most talented cosplayers in Boston. He knows how to sew, bedazzle, conceptualize, and execute intricate costumes that allow him to embody his favorite characters at conventions. Despite having an artistic mother, she looks down on his pursuits as childish and a waste of time. Raffy is driven and determined despite the lack of support, and his focus doesn't wane until Luca stumbles into his life. Buff and a soccer player, Luca looks like the last person Raffy wants to befriend, but Luca is drawn into Raffy's cosplaying world despite having to hide the hobby (and Raffy himself) from his parents. Unfolding on duel timelines, we follow Raffy and Luca's journey falling in and out of love and maybe back in over the course of one of Boston's biggest comic cons. Overall: 4  Characters: 5 I identified with R...

As you probably know, I absolutely adore Taylor Swift, and I recently did a folklore book tag, so I figured I should make a version of evermore as well! If you want to read that post, you can find it here . And if you want all my thoughts on folklore, you can watch my original folklore reaction on my YouTube channel here.   I'm so happy to have found an evermore book tag I loved created by  Star Is All Booked Up ! That post is linked (I really enjoyed it!), and those are the prompts I'm using here.  In this tag, I just talked about books for the prompts and didn't get into the songs. If you want more of my evermore thoughts specifically, check out my blog post of favorite lyrics here and my new reaction to evermore here . You can also scroll to the bottom of the post to watch the video as well. If you want to know more about any of the books I mention, all of their titles are linked to my review.  I hope you love the post, and let me know your favorite evermore songs...

  Admission  by Julie Buxbaum Overview:  Chloe has always lived an upscale life. Her mom is a B list actress who's found steady work in Hallmark movies and sitcoms for the last twenty years. Her dad is a venture capitalist. Even though they might not be as rich as private jet flying Aunt Candy, Chloe never thinks about money from her giant house in Beverly Hills. Life isn't perfect, but it's remained generally uncomplicated until college admissions season. Told in a dual perspective, we watch Chloe open the door to FBI agents ready to haul off her mom while zooming back in time to see where it all went wrong. It's a complex story full of moral gray and confusion over who the villain truly is. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 The biggest thing to know about this book going in is that it's basically fan fiction of the college admissions scandal. All of the details are exactly there or tweaked slightly. The school Chloe cheats to get into is called SSC and is still a Southern ...

  Last night, I had the most magical reading experience, probably because I haven't read for fun since maybe October or the first week of November. I've been carrying Admission  around the house since it arrived at my house on the first day of December, and I'd gotten to maybe 20 pages. Last night, I finished drafts on my last two papers and didn't have the brain power to keep doing stuff for college, so I picked up the book and started reading. Three hours and well over a hundred pages later, I just felt a thrill. Like I remembered why I liked reading and YA after all cause I was starting to wonder if I just didn't love it anymore. Turns out my brain has just been at max capacity and everything I've had to read has been awful lately. It's really annoying. But I'm glad I still love reading and YA, and it even made me want to start writing prose again, which I've done none of since the semester started. I tell this whole story to preface that I decide...

  We're already way into December, but I still wanted to provide a bit of a recap of November. It felt like one of the longest months yet and also the shortest. Maybe because the first two weeks felt interminable and the final two felt like a mad rush. I've been incredibly busy juggling school stuff while still trying to blog and post YouTube videos, so that has been an adventure. It's definitely hampered my reading goals. I still read more than in October, but I didn't have any saved up posts, so I only got about one blog post up a week. It'll probably be like that until the new year as I try to get through finals, but I do have a couple exciting posts planned for the end of the year. For a quick school update, I'll be honest and say that I'm completely burnt out. Going to class on Zoom has worn me out completely since the start of the semester, and that hasn't gone away. I'm exhausted, and I've been working really late, so I'm physically ti...

It's the holidays again, and this year shipping will be more tricky due to COVID, so it's time to start thinking about gifts for everyone on your life. It's always hard to think of what someone might love, so I've tried to do some of the thinking for you! I've taken some of my favorite books and organized them based on personality types or traits that would make them the perfect match for these books! Spanning both YA and nonfiction and over a wide variety of interests, hopefully these books are able to give you some good inspiration.  Also, after you've read the blog post, if you want to go ahead and order the books, I've compiled them all in a list on my Bookshop page. Bookshop is a great way to support indie bookstores while shopping online and particularly good if you don't have a local indie. Additionally, shopping through the individual links in the post or the list benefits the blog because I might get a small commission at no cost to you. I would...