Hearts made of pink and Mimosa's kisses at The Secret of a Heart Note and Caravel book launch! Kepler's, Stacey, Stephanie, and their friends did such a beautiful job making this event special!
Hearts made of pink and Mimosa's kisses at The Secret of a Heart Note and Caravel book launch! Kepler's, Stacey, Stephanie, and their friends did such a beautiful job making this event special!
Rose cupcakes, Legend's love potion, and Caraval cookies at the Caraval and Secret of a Heart Note book launch. Kepler's, Stacey, Stephanie, and their friends did SUCH a beautiful job making setting up this event!
Some girly goodness (and an amazing cookie!) at the Caraval and Secret of a Heart Note launch party! Two great books, two great authors!
My pre-order perfume recipe for Stacey Lee's The Secret of a Heart Note! Orange blossoms for love; peony for health and courage; daisy for innocence; frankincense for divinity; fir needle for honesty; mandarin for prosperity; marigolds for creativity. The only thing cuter than the card Stacey made is the book itself. The adventures of a teen scent witch.
I've been thinking a lot about this quote. Especially because we know that our Crows are not feral or awful at core.
I don't usually get exciting book mail days, but today brought a college friend's debut novel (theater kids, stopping time, grief, growing up! Read it!) and an internet pal's 4th book (raging bisexual goes back in time)!
I completely fangirled at Kiersten White at her signing in SF on Tuesday! Haha! Also, we have confirmed imitation Arabic love poetry in book 2!
Had a wonderful time meeting Marie Lu at the North Berkeley Public Library with @BookNerdBritt ! Lu is so funny and kind,but her books will rip your heart out. Favorite moment: Someone asked what TYE characters would do in the present day, &we got treated to the mental image of Adelina getting mad at a toaster. Also, Lu wrote her first fanfic at 8: a sonic the hedgehog story where he has an existential crisis after having both his legs broken. 😆
I love Inej so much. (Just a Suli proverb. No spoilers.)
My preorder of Sacrifice came in, along with some beautiful goodies. Can't wait to follow Skybright on the next leg of her adventure. (Serpentine is book 1) 🐍💖
Cinna cat reads the Six of Crows duology. I think she expected more birds in book one.
Southern Cross is back! Southern Cross is back! (Yes I'm two weeks late on this. Oops.)
Got my signed pre-order postcard for Rachel Davidson Leigh's HOLD! Can't wait for it to come out so I can read it! 😄
Little black book and little black cat. Always in style. (Seriously though, the cover design for this book is A+. I'm really enjoying it so far too!)
#recommendsday: I love Stacey Lee's books, and Under a Painted Sky is so great. Friendship, found families, and the fact that it made me cry over a violin.
“Do you know what your problem is?”
"Enlighten me,” Quinn said.
Dorian hoped his grin was as violent as he felt. “You always underestimated him."
MY JASPER FEELS! MY DORIAN FEELS! MY JASPIAN FEELS! (Their ship is Jaspian, right?)
#recommendsday: Zen Cho's brilliant novel is both a charming Regency fantasy with wonderful characters and a SCATHING condemnation of British colonialism and its psychological effects on colonized peoples. And it features a lady hero of the unabashedly Slytherin variety. Brilliant. Can't wait for book 2! (Also Prunella and Zacharias FOREVER)
"Love is Lula. Love is my mom. Love is Rose. Love is in this power that I never asked for but courses through my veins like the blood of my ancestors." I'm not crying; it's just raining on my face. (Lula and Rose are her sisters. Not a spoiler ?)
"Love is Lula. Love is my mom. Love is Rose. Love is in this power that I never asked for but courses through my veins like the blood of my ancestors." I'm not crying; it's just raining on my face. (Lula and Rose are her sisters. Not a spoiler ?)
With killer world-building, technically innovative storytelling, and great characters, The Fifth Season shows a society built on literal shaky ground and the figurative shaky ground of subjugation of a people. There is so much I loved about this book: how it plays with point of view, how it kept me guessing as to how the pieces fit together, but I don't want to spoil it. Jemisin is doing amazing stuff in epic fantasy.
#recommendsday Lindsay Smith's Sekret serves up some Cold War spy drama with psychic teens and a large dose of feels. If Eleven was your favorite character on Stranger Things, pick this up now (no monsters or parallel universes, just really cool, and sometimes visceral psychic powers). I really need to read Skandal!
I have to say, Court of Fives and Poisoned Blade look great on the shelf together!
#recommendsday And I Darken is an amazing bit of alt-history (it's historical fiction except Vlad the Impaler is a women, not a man) that sets up deep emotional connections that I'm sure are going to DESTROY me in later books. This book is about Lada (the future Impaler)'s childhood as collateral at the Ottoman court with her gentle but deceptively clever brother Radu and the future Sultan Mehmed II, whom they both love... and hate.
"She pressed her palm hard against the branch, felt all the little hurts of its years and felt how the bark had grown up tough and fierce over those hurts..."
My brother's med school library has a mini exhibit on Harry Potter and Medieval/Renaissance medicine!
An Adelina sundae (dark chocolate ice cream, crushed unsweetened dark chocolate, candied ginger, and strawberry-rose syrup) & a Rafaelle sundae (Madagascar vanilla ice cream, pomegranate seeds, candied ginger, salted caramel) 🍨 (Excited for Midnight Star? Me?)
Today on Steph reads La Reine Margot: Coconnas really loves La Môle. The Duchesse de Nevers is feeling left out. (This is not really an exaggeration) Also thank you for putting up with my Dumas geekery; I promise I read other things too. ?
So cool to see this awesome biography as a staff pick at the airport bookstore! It's so good! It's the life of Dumas' father, a French general who inspired a lot of Dumas' work. General Alex Dumas, son of an enslaved Haitian woman and an asshole of a French noble, he came to France, rejected his titled name, took his mother's name, joined the army, and became indispensable, even rousing the jealousy of Napoleon! #dumasnerd #suchadumasnerd
And today on the adventures of badass noble ladies and the sword bros who love them... (Not really a spoiler. This is basic plot.)
#recommendsday: Since the sequel just came out yesterday, today I'm recommending Kate Elliott's Court of Fives! Like a lot of Elliott's work, the premise feels deceptively simple at first, and then gradually gets more complicated as it goes. Jes is a wonderful heroine, stubborn and difficult, with so much to learn! Book 2 is even better!
(Cross-posted from Instagram) I think it was @oceancitybooks who tagged me forever ago to post an illustrated book I own. Tony DiTerlizzi's MG WandLa series were designed to be a kind of Wizard of Oz for our times, in which a brave heroine, Eva 9, realizes that sometimes home... Changes. While the plot is pretty predictable, the artwork throughout all three books is truly breathtaking.
"No family rivalry, no treachery in love; everything fair, open, and aboveboard! An offensive and defensive alliance, for the sole purpose of finding and, if we can, catching on the fly, that ephemeral thing called happiness." (When you're a Queen, but your best friend has your back because it sucks to be a woman in 16th C France)
My copy has what looks to be a printing error on the edges of a few pages. I like it; I think it suits the book.
"It comes, I suppose," I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, " of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don't always stay where you put them."