ARC Review: Wranglestone |A Gay Zombie Thriller with a lot of Heart

TITLE: Wranglestone
AUTHOR: Darren Charlton
SERIES: N/A
RELEASED: February 2020; Stripes Publishing
GENRE: YA Science Fiction
FORMAT: Paperback

KEY INFO: post-Apocalyptic American, zombies, romance, dark secrets, winter settings
REPRESENTATION: 
m/m relationship between lead characters

Content Notices

death, queer death

amazon // book depository // goodreads

imageedit_5_3847060594

Continue reading “ARC Review: Wranglestone |A Gay Zombie Thriller with a lot of Heart”

14 Book Releases to Look Forward To in 2020

As always, I love spending the beginning of the year looking forward to see what’s being published in the coming year to discover which books excite me, which to keep an eye on, and which I definitely need to get my hands on (sorry backlog TBR!). With every year that I’m a book blogger, it brings my heart so much joy to watch the increasing amount of diverse fiction being published. This year there are so many incredible diverse books written by diverse authors being published that I can’t wait to read and champion. Here are 14 of my most anticipated 2020 releases – each book includes the Goodreads blurb and a 🔍 to signify my reason for including it on my list. Covers link back to GR.

Continue reading “14 Book Releases to Look Forward To in 2020”

Best Books of 2019

2019 was an interesting year for me in terms of books and reading. I completely smashed my Goodreads Challenge goal in 2018, reading 31 books over my goal and 55 books more than I did in 2017. Although on the surface that looks fantastic (which it was!) it was also a little misleading as 2018 was the only year where I wasn’t in education, with the exception of the last few months of the year when I started my Masters in September, which meant I had a lot more time for reading! At the beginning of 2019, I naively set my Goodreads Challenge goal at 75 books and managed to read 51 books due to a combination of academia, depression and reading slumps. Not too bad overall but I’ve definitely learned my lesson about setting unrealistic goals haha.

Although I didn’t read as many books as I had wanted to, I did read a lot of great books – books that I thoroughly enjoyed and books that I fell in love with. Ultimately that is more important to me than how many books I ended up reading – I would rather enjoy my books than reading loads of books I end up not liking. Whilst I enjoyed almost all of the books I read in 2019, I’ve picked out 10 books that really stand out to me as the ones I loved the most which have made my best books of 2019 list.

Continue reading “Best Books of 2019”

YALC 2019 | Access is Important!

Last year I did a general review for YALC which included looking at the best things about YALC 2018, some problematic panels, and then a whole rant about the awful accessibility. I returned this year for YALC 2019 and although I am pleased to report that there have definitely been some improvements, there are still access issues for disabled attendees and some downright awful behavior towards disabled attendees from able-bodied ones.

Rather than doing one huge post for YALC 2019, I decided to split them up into my 2019 haul and this accessibility post to allow for more space for each thing. Accessibility is quite often an individualized experience, although some things are common across different disabled people, so I would encourage you to check out other attendees posts. So far, I’ve only seen a great one from Jenn but if you know of any others please free to point me in their direction so I can include them here as well!

Continue reading “YALC 2019 | Access is Important!”

Saturday Smalls | 3rd August 2019 | Appropriative Magic, Fascinating Algorithms, & a Kick-Ass Latina

I’ve been eyeing up Destiny’s brilliant Saturday Smalls feature for a while now but didn’t get round to introducing it on my blog until now given all of my unintended hiatus’ these past few months. Now seems the perfect time to pick it up though as I have so many books I’ve read that I never got round to reviewing so I’m hoping that Saturday Small can help me to catch up.

Each feature will include a handful of mini-reviews for books that I’ve read but didn’t get a chance to review at the time and once I catch up, I will then use it to review books I don’t feel I can commit to doing a full review for. A huge thank you to the lovely Destiny for letting me adopt Saturday Smalls.

This week’s mini-review round-up includes:

  1. YA historical fiction/magical realism/horror novel
  2. Adult non-fiction book
  3. YA contemporary novel

Continue reading “Saturday Smalls | 3rd August 2019 | Appropriative Magic, Fascinating Algorithms, & a Kick-Ass Latina”