Blog Tour Review: Iron Heart by Nina Varela // Beautiful Prose and Yearning

Another day, another sapphic book!

Last year, I fell in love with the YA fantasy Crier’s War. It had everything I wanted in a book: slowburn enemies to lovers f/f, compelling characters, and absolutely stunning writing. I’m so excited to have been able to read the sequel Iron Heart and be reviewing it today! If you’re eagerly awaiting this book after having read the first one, or interested in this series (especially with their gorgeous covers), I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Thank you so much to Shealea for making it possible for me to have received an ARC of this book and be a part of this blog tour!

There are no spoilers for Iron Heart in this review, and though I tried my best to keep every reference I made to the events of Crier’s War vague, they may be viewed as spoilers, so take care!

Blog Tour Review: The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea G Stewart // Immersive Fantasy that Unfurls Deliciously

I’m back with another Asian fantasy to push on to you!

I am so excited to be here today to talk about and review The Bone Shard Daughter, which was one of my most anticipated releases of the year. While it was not what I expected, I loved it so much and I can’t wait to see others fall in love with it too! (And I’ll say after being disappointed by several Asian fantasies this year, I am beyond happy this was quite an exception.

Thank you so much to Kate for making it possible for me to have received an ARC of this book and be a part of this blog tour!

50 of My Anticipated Book Releases for the Second Half of 2020: July to December!

Episode 39447 in which I spend way too much time on a blog post!

I was perhaps a bit… overly ambitious with the amount of books I put in this post. But I’m so excited about ALL of these releases, and authors could use a boost especially during this whole covid mess, so why not!!

I’m not going to make this a long intro because this is already a nightmarishly long post, but I would just like to say that we are pretending not to see that almost half of these are coming out in September while there are only two books for December…

Click for BLM resources.

• petitions
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• videos to stream (ad revenue will be donated)
• George Floyd gofundme
• Gianna Floyd (his daughter) gofundme
• Breonna Taylor gofundme
• Ahmaud Arbery gofundme
• Elijah McClain gofundme
• bail funds, research local ones near you too
• organizations
• small Black businesses that were destroyed
• Black-owned businesses
• indie Black-owned bookstores
• tips on overall protest safety
• google doc masterlist of BLM resources

50+ YA Books by QPOC About QPOC that You Should Have on Your TBR, Especially for Pride Month!!

It’s that time of the month again…

…and by that I mean it’s time for me to list some book recommendations for Pride Month and beyond!!

I made a similar post last year, about books with intersectional queer rep, but a few of those were by white authors. Because of semi-recent discourse on book twitter concerning bad QPOC rep by a white author, I decided that this time I’d focus on books about QPOC by QPOC, because it can’t get better than that!! The QPOC experience is often hard to understand unless you’ve lived it yourself, so these ownvoices stories are incredibly important.

I haven’t read all of these books, but my point in including all of them is to show that there’s a wide selection of books that you can pick from that aren’t by white authors and aren’t about white people. And especially during Pride month, when people will pick up white m/m and ignore everything else—by ignoring QPOC, specifically Black trans people, you are ignoring the very origins of Pride.

When I began reading LGBTQIAP+ books, I started with a lot of white m/m books. These were books that were heavily promoted and hyped in the community, and though it was on me to put in the effort to find more diverse books, it was also on all the people hyping those books who refused to branch out. So I hope this post can help you to find new books that will add a lot more variety (and actual flavor) to what you read. It’s never too late to start diversifying your reads!!

My Revised June Pride TBR: Reading as Many Books by Black Queer Authors As I Can!!

This is proof that I’m terrible with TBRs!

I made my original June TBR right before Black Lives Matter protests broke out all over the world, spurring people and companies and also the book community to take action. One of the things that we can do in the book world moving forward is to read from Black authors and support their work.

So! I decided to drop a few books off my original Pride TBR to make room for more books by Black authors. Of course, I’ll be holding myself accountable to keep this same energy throughout the entire year instead of just this month with the protests, but I thought it was especially fitting for June since Pride exists today because of Black queer activists!!

(I also was looking at my TBR and realizing that I wasn’t really too excited about some of the books. And as a mood reader, especially right now with my inability to focus, being excited about the books I plan to read is really important!)