My new Spotlight feature highlights anything within the bookish world that I feel deserves a spotlight for a few minutes – publishers (or more specifically, imprints!), new or old favorite authors, bookish people/bloggers, covers or cover trends, topics/genres within books, and anything else that should be on your radar. Berkley Publishing / Romance I’ve covered a lot of different things for these Spotlight posts, but this is only the second publisher/imprint I’ve featured. It was one of the first ideas I had for this series though! I’ve loved expanding further into romance and contemporary novels featuring adults instead of young adults and Berkley (along with Forever) have been some of my favorites to read. Now’s the time to feature some of my favorite books, covers, and any other things you should keep an eye on! Favorite Berkley Romance Books So Far I’ve read a number of their books so far and really enjoyed the VAST majority of them! Here are some of my favorites that I’ve read and rated somewhere above 3.5 stars: A companion series I’ve been loving by them is the Playbook series by Alexa Martin. Each book features a girl dating a different member of the Denver Mustangs (lol!) football team. They all had really unique stories and romance situations that I enjoyed. My favorite trope – second chance romance – happens in the first two books. Illustrated Cover OGs Whenever I think of illustrated book covers, Berkley comes to mind as some of the originators of […]

I loved filling out Jamie’s survey in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. This is the 10th time she’s hosted this survey and it’s so fun to see what everyone chooses for the categories. Last year, I didn’t allow myself any duplicates. I’m going to try to keep them to a minimum for this survey, but it feels impossible. I’ll need to have a few. To learn more about it and see a blank set of questions, check here! It was so fun to reread my answers for last year, since I copied that survey here to clean out and fill out. Number of Books You Read: 123 Number of Re-Reads: 4 | Number of DNFs: 7 Genre You Read The Most From: Contemporary 1. Best Book You Read In 2018? Totally cheating and adding multiple categories! (Not including rereads.) See a full list of my “best reads” of the year (5 stars and 4.5 stars) here if you’re curious. Best of the best: Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston Best contemporary: The Bride Test by Helen Hoang Best non-contemporary: Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo Best adult fiction: Meet Cute by Helena Hunting Best sequel or companion: The Map From Here to There by Emery Lord Best diverse read: There’s Something About Sweetie by Sandhya Menon 2. Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love more but didn’t? I feel like I had quite a few books that disappointed me this year or didn’t live up to what I was expecting them to be. The biggest disappointment overall was probably […]

I was in the mood to do some Christmassy tags on the blog for this season, so I decided to start with The Christmas Tag. It looks like this particular set of questions was developed back in 2012 HERE. I decided to skip a couple and add a few more on my own at the end. What is your favorite Christmas film? This is always such an easy question for me. Since I was a kid it’s always been The Santa Clause. There’s something about this movie from the very first sounds of the opening song that just get me every time. I don’t watch the sequels every year but I do every few years (they’re not great lol the second one isn’t TERRIBLE). I’d have to say my second favorite Christmas movie is definitely National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – just SO funny. Have you ever had a white Christmas? Oh yes, that’s one major benefit of living here! I will say that the amount of white Christmases has decreased in recent years (sup global warming) but it IS the best way to have a Christmas in my opinion. My ideal situation is that it snows December 23rd and stays on the ground but doesn’t snow MORE on the actual holiday. I got places to go, ya’ll. Where do you usually spend your holiday? Phew so we do a lot of running around – too many parents to see. On Christmas Eve, both my dad’s family and Chris’s family get together, so […]

Like any good book reader and blogger, I LOVE to creep on what others are reading and take recommendations from people. Who better to tell me what books to read than the people who (a) equally creep on my Goodreads and (b) know what the general YA-reading population would like? This can be a beautiful thing; I love this community for that! HOWEVER, I’ve been thinking lately about the books everyone is going crazy for, giving great reviews, or explicitly recommending to you that you DON’T think you’d like. How often do you trust your gut about a book, and how often do you take a risk?  It’s pretty safe to say that every review I saw for Rites of Passage by Joy N. Hensley was glowing. Everyone loved this book or at least really, really liked it… but I was totally turned off from it based on the description. The military school vibe didn’t appeal to me for whatever reason. Once I saw the reviews start rolling in and it seemed that EVERYONE loved it, I started to second guess myself. I figured, if all of these people who usually have similar tastes to mine end up liking it, maybe I will too. I also convinced myself that the military school aspect could be reminiscent of the boarding school books I loved (wrong). I learned that the main character was a badass girl who tried to change the gender norms at military school.. that’s one aspect I could get on […]