Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

The 50 contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras.

But sadly, their airplane had another idea, crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner.

What’s a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program - or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan - or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?

Welcome to the heart of non-exfoliated darkness.

Discussion: Book Cover Changes

Book cover changes are so controversial. Most of the time, people hate them. It messes up the aesthetic of your collection when not all of the cover matches, and often, it's a downgrade from what the original covers looked like. They can be frustrating and annoying (especially if they happen in the middle of a series).

Books that Shaped me as a Reader

Without even realizing it, books have been such a formative force in my life. Since I learned how to read, they not only helped me grow academically but also personally. I thought it would be nice to go through each book that made an impact enough on me and my life as a reader throughout my childhood. I think a lot of the books that have impacted me are universal for a lot of young readers and I'd love to have that bond with so many of you!

Book Unhaul

I'm on Spring Break so I thought it was the perfect time for some spring cleaning. This means a book unhaul! My first book unhaul. I'm usually one of those people that keeps any and every book I've ever owned but recently, I've found that I need so much more space on my already tiny bookshelves and I was already taking books out I didn't like or am not interested in reading and putting them in a different storage. But after enough books taken out, I thought it was finally time to part with them. Plus, if I can sell them on ebay and get a little extra money from them, that's just a win-win situation right? So here's my unhaul:

20 Questions Book Tag

Hi everyone! I'm so excited to get this post up. It's been a month since my last post and I'm so upset about it but school really has been taking up all of my time. However, I've constantly been thinking of posting, reading and I've even bought a few new reads. I thought, what's a better way to come back after a while of not posting? A book tag of course! 

Discussion: How I Read

Reading is such a personal experience, in my opinion. The process is unique for everyone. I always find it super interesting to see the process other readers do in order to actually sit down (or lay down) and read a book. So I thought it'd be fun to let you in on how I read, from how I decide what to read to what I do while reading, when I read, and everything in between.

My Reading Goals (Not Necessarily for the New Year)

This isn't my first post of the year but I'll use this as the opportunity to say Happy New Years! I already know starting out that this is not going to be a great reading year for me as the limited time I have to read is going to be even more restricted. I'm going to have to take courses in the summer semester that will take up most of my time so I was so disappointed that I won't really be able to post my reading goals for the year or a 'the books I've read in 2020' thread on Twitter. But, the more I thought about it, I realized that the goals I have, reading wise, are not just limited for 2020. They're goals I can work on constantly and so I want to share my reading goals that I plan to start and reach, eventually - even if it isn't for this new year.

Review: Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle #3) by Maggie Stiefvater

Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs.

The trick with found things, though, is how easily they can be lost.

Friends can betray.
Mothers can disappear.
Visions can mislead.
Certainties can unravel. 

Review: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?

Belated Book Haul!

It's been such a long time since I've made a book haul and this haul is a long time coming! These are a few books that I've collected since the last one I made (which you can find here). I'm so blessed that the majority of these books were sent to me by either the author or a company so thank you so much to everyone who sent these to me.

This is a much smaller pile but they are books I am so excited about so let's get into it!

Get to Know Bookish Terms

Just like any other community, the book community has it's own jargon, slang and terms that are obvious to everyone on the inside but a little confusing to everyone on the outside, particularly the acronyms. However, this can make it confusing for new readers to get into the groove of things when they don't know what everyone is saying and what we mean when we say certain terms. Even for me, a reader who took a massive nearly 10 year break, when I got back into the community, there were a lot of new terms that took me a while to fully understand what they meant. 

So I chose a good number of terms whose meanings I think aren't 100% obvious, separate them into sections where they would relate to one another, and I'm going to define the terms. Hopefully a lot of new readers will find this helpful!