We're an Open Book
Imma let you finish Twilight, but The Daughter of Smoke and Bone series is the best YA paranormal romance about a teenager and male-paranormal-who-is-super-old-but-looks-super-hot-and super young-so-we-swear-it’s-not-creepy of all time. Of all time.
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Apparently my new jam is contemporary told from the POV of a trio of friends because in a lot of ways this book is like Fans of The Impossible Life by Kate Scelsa which I read last year around this time and enjoyed.
Our unlikely friend group in The Serpent King consists of; Travis who lives in a fantasy world to escape his abusive home life; Dill, the son of the Pentecostal signs preacher who handles snakes and is currently in prison for possession of child porn and then there is Lydia. Lydia should be the popular girl, her parents are upper middle class, she runs a successful fashion blog and is internet friends with the daughters of New York elite. But all of that makes her a misfit in Forrestville, a small Tennessee town named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.
The dynamics of the characters and sense of place are just perfect. There was an interesting tension between Lydia and the boys because she is from a richer, more liberal family while they are from poorer and more religious conservative upbringings. I happened to hear Gwen Glazer on The Librarian Is In podcast describe this book as evocative and that is just the perfect way to describe it. I actually read the first 50% of this in May and then forgot about it until August, but I was thrown right back into the story and characters, three months later.
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If you’ve ever checked out the romance blog you’ll see a lot of the books I discover are from Sara Wendell’s Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. So when Kat texted me that Wendell was moderating a Trends In Romance panel at Baltimore BookFest I knew I wanted to find the time to stop by.
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A few weekends ago Kat and I went up to National Book Festival. I felt like I needed to stretch first because it’s been so long since I’ve been to an author/book event.
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