We're an Open Book
501 pages | Margaret K. McElderry Books | Urban Fantasy | 9/15/2020
This is my first TikTok made me read it books.
Legendborn follows 16-year-old Bree Matthews, a high school student attending UNC Chapel Hill as part of an Early College program, who accidentally stumbles into the world of the Legendborn— magic-wielding descendants of The Knights of the Roundtable. As Bree works her way into the Legendborn world (and falls for their King) she learns more about her own family history.
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10 Hours 19 Mins | Harper Audio | Contemporary YA | 1/05/2021
16-year-old Tessa Johnson loves to write romance. When her family relocates to Long Beach she gets to attend a writing conservatory. But during her first writing class, all her story ideas vanish. She decides the best course of action to jumpstart her romance writing mojo is by falling in love IRL.
Tessa sets her eyes on Nico, the brooding dark-haired, rich boy who looks like he walked out of one of her stories while being completely oblivious to Sam, the goofy boy next door who drives her to school everyday.
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14 Hours 4 Mins | Margaret K. McElderry | Historical/Sci-Fi/Horror | 1/26/2021
These Violent Delights is a Historical (sci-fi ?. .horror ?) YA set in the dangerous and dazzling city of Shanghai during the roaring 20s Shanghai. The novel is an homage (read: Not a retelling. Not even a little bit) to Romeo and Juliet and follows rival gang heirs Juliette the cutthroat fierce heir to the Scarlett Gang and Roma the stalworth Russian heir to the White Flowers, as they hunt down the source of a maddening disease sweeping the city
Going in I didn’t know much about Shanghai’s history as an international (read colonized) port. It’s the perfect setting for this dark and mysterious mystery the main characters find themselves in. I’m curious to read more book set during this time period.
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I did the thing. I saw a fantasy written by a female author and assumed it was YA. I am not proud of how long it took me to realize this wasn’t YA. I t convinced I was calculating the character ages wrong. *sigh*. Anyway…
Black Sun is an immersive pre-Columbian-inspired fantasy with intrigue, danger, and magic. The countdown is on as we follow an ensemble of characters to the day of a prophetic solar eclipse, where a vengeful god is set to claim his rightful place from the Sun Priest. The characters and plot completely pulled me into the story and left me wanting more.
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7 hours 21 minutes | Quirk Books | Contemporary YA | 8/4/2020
This was such a clever retelling of Beauty in the Beast.
Bookish high school senior Rosie Thorne inherited her love of the Starfield franchise from her mother. Little does she know Vance Reigns–the bad-boy star of the Starfield movie– has been banished to her backwoods North Carolina town until his 18th birthday.
When Rosie accidentally ruins a book in the library she agrees to catalog the house’s massive science fiction library. Vance brings the expected grumpy broodiness from the Beast archetype but he’s also just kind of full of regret -much like the Beast in the Disney movie.
This is is the third book in the Once Upon A Con series but each book takes place a year apart so, while there are some cameos and references, I think it can be read as a standalone.
I did a lot of this on audio. Narrator Caitlin Kelly is one of my favorites and the main reason I picked this up. She has such a great YA voice and range of characters. This was my first time hearing Curry Whitmire–he does a great British teenager even though I think he’s American. However, I found it so odd that they pronounced Vance Reigns’ last name with a hard “G”. I have never heard of this pronunciation.
16 hours | Macmillan Audio| Science Fiction | Release Date: 7/21/2020
I’ve been following Lindsay Ellis for a while. She creates incisive, deep-dive video essays on film theory that have been helpful for me when I get in a review rut. She’s more recently been involved in some bonkers omegaverse lawsuit drama–which I’m sure did great things for this book’s publicity. All that said I was rooting for this book to be good but it was kind of a disappointment.
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