☕️🩸A Steeping of Blood🩸☕️ ⭐️⭐️ This is the sequel to Hafsah Faizal’s A Tempest of Tea, which I didn’t love, but (because I have a pathological inability to DNF a series) I continued with this one, with hopes it would be better!  We pick up where we left off at the cliffhanger at the end of Tempest. Arthie Casimir, now a fully-flegded vampire, must reassemble her crew, scattered across the wreckage of White Roaring. Reeling from the burning of Spindrift and everything she’s worked towards, Arthie must now confront the ghosts of her past, and journey to the island where…

Continue Reading

🎓🎭Keep Your Friends Close 🎭🎓 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ This is a prequel to Murphy’s Win Lose Kill Die, set in Morton Academy twenty years earlier. However, I remember almost no details from that, so you certainly don’t need to have read that one in order to enjoy this though! Last year at Morton, Chloe was narrowly beaten to the prestigious spot of Head Girl by none other than her ex-best friend, Nikhita. To add insult to injury, Chloe’s boyfriend just dumped her and Nikhita has her sights set on him too. Ostracised by her usual friend group, Chloe gravitates towards her new…

Continue Reading

🍂People Watching 🍂 Hannah Bonam-Young  ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Prudence Welch is living a quiet, introverted life in a Canadian small town, working for her father at the family gas station and caring for her mother, who was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. But when adventurous stranger Milo visits town to help out his brother and his path intertwines with Prue’s, she realises she might be more than ready for a change.  It’s definitely a bit insta-lovey, which isn’t my favourite. Instead of the romance, the storyline was Prue’s family, her dad encouraging her to spread her wings and her self-realisation throughout the…

Continue Reading

The Enemy’s Daughter ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This is a YA reimagining of the myth of Tristan and Isolde from Celtic folklore. I do love a myth retelling, and this one I wasn’t overly familiar with, so it did definitely seem like I was reading an original story. At first, I found the dystopian setting a bit bizarre. When I think of dystopia, I imagine futuristic technology and military compounds (probably a product of my Divergent upbringing). That’s not what we get in The Enemy’s Daughter, and honestly, when I got over the initial shock, I thought it was really fresh and unique.…

Continue Reading

📜✒️When We Were Monsters 🖋️📜 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Show of hands who else had their adolescence hearts broken by Jennifer Niven circa 2015? 🙋‍♀️ When I saw Jennifer Niven had a new book coming much, I was intrigued. I was even more intrigued when I saw it was a dark academia YA thriller (aka, the best genre in the world). At an elite academy, every year eight of the best and brightest students are selected for Jan Term, a special programme taught by an illustrious alum. This years mentor is author and actress Meredith Graffam, famous for her novels about the scandal…

Continue Reading

📜⚔️ Wild Reverence ⚔️📜 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Where to begin!!! Rebecca Ross, you did it again. I absolutely adored this story. The prose is so lyrical and melodic, and I fell immediately in love! Matilda is the herald of the gods. She is one of the only goddesses to have the ability to flog between the two god realms, carrying words and letters back and forth between politicking gods. Her escape lies in the mortal realm, where she dreams each night of a human boy. When Matilda is cast out of her home in the Under Realm after tragedy strikes, she loses…

Continue Reading