June Wrap up - Book Haul & What to Expect Next Month

Welcome, welcome my dear readers.

Welcome to the blog.

Another month has flown by. Mostly a month with moving for us. We got the key to our new house on June 1st. A lot of cleaning and painting has been done and we've been slowly moving in.

The bedroom, bathroom and kitchen are left to be moved and after that we're finally done with moving. It will probably be next week or the week after and on July 18th I will hand over the key from my old house.

I'm really happy with our new house, it's so big, with a lovely garden and a home library for me. I can imagine already that we will have amazing years there. Hopefully we have the time and money to maybe go a few days on a vacation this summer (we're both so tired), but we will see.

I'm also applying for new jobs at my new hometown and have been having conversations with the libraries that work together with schools. If I get the job, I will have the best of both worlds! Working with kids and with books. I will know a bit more in a month, when I will visit the library and have a conversation about the job.

As of my own health, days have been up and down, weeks have been up and down, but I'm still here.

Thanks for sticking with my blog and for reading!

Have a great month with loads of sunshine.

🌞

Review: Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass #7)

Author: Sarah J. Maas

Started reading: June 5th 2022

Finished the book: June 14th 2022

Pages: 992

Genres: Fantasy

Published: October 8th 2019

Source: Bought the book

Goodreads score: 4.61

My score:

Synopsis

Aelin has risked everything to save her people-but at a tremendous cost. Locked within an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, Aelin must draw upon her fiery will as she endures months of torture. Aware that yielding to Maeve will doom those she loves keeps her from breaking, though her resolve begins to unravel with each passing day…
With Aelin captured, Aedion and Lysandra remain the last line of defense to protect Terrasen from utter destruction. Yet they soon realize that the many allies they've gathered to battle Erawan's hordes might not be enough to save them. Scattered across the continent and racing against time, Chaol, Manon, and Dorian are forced to forge their own paths to meet their fates. Hanging in the balance is any hope of salvation-and a better world.
And across the sea, his companions unwavering beside him, Rowan hunts to find his captured wife and queen-before she is lost to him forever.

Review: Sacrifice

Author: Sharon Bolton

Started reading: May 30th 2022

Finished the book: June 19th 2022

Pages: 384

Genres: Mystery, Thriller

Published: June 9th 2009

Source: Bought the book

Goodreads score: 3.91

My score:

Synopsis

In this masterful debut that starts off as a mystery and becomes much more, Tora Hamilton is an outsider at her new home on the rocky, wind-swept Shetland Islands, a hundred miles from the northeastern tip of Scotland. Though her husband grew up here, it’s the first time he’s been back in twenty years. Digging in the peat on their new property, Tora unearths a human body, at first glance a centuries-old bog body, interesting but not uncommon. But realizing that the body is in fact much newer, that the woman’s heart has been cut out and that she was killed within a few days of bearing a child, Tora, herself an obstetrician, becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her—even when the police, her colleagues and eventually her husband warn her against getting involved.
Sacrifice is a bone-chilling, spell-binding debut that will grip readers from its beginning to its startling end.

Review: Rose Petal Graves (The Lost Clan #1)

Author: Olivia Wildenstein

Started reading: May 23rd 2022

Finished the book: June 8th 2022

Pages: 368

Genres: YA, Fantasy

Published: March 29th 2017

Source: Netgalley

Goodreads score: 3.75

My score:

Synopsis

I wasn't the type of girl who believed in fairytales, much less tales about faeries, but that changed the day the fae walked into my life.

Staying away from my lakeside hometown was the plan, but Mom died suddenly. Dad said she suffered a stroke after she dug up one of the ancient Native American graves in our backyard. Creepy, I know. Creepier still, there was no corpse inside the old coffin, only fresh rose petals. As we made preparations for her burial, unnervingly odd and beautiful newcomers poured into my small town. A coroner with emerald eyes and black hair, much too young for the job. An arrogant blond socialite, who lived to get under my skin. And a tattooed Native man, who wasn’t supposed to be alive. By dying, my mother had inadvertently revived an age-old feud between the fae and the tribe that hunted them. A feud that was about to tear my world apart.

Two Short Stories #33

Today I will be highlighting two short stories.

Both of them are picture books with really beautiful illustrations!

Let's dive right in.

Review: The Silent Bluebird

Author: Elle M. Holmes

Started reading: May 29th 2022

Finished the book: June 5th 2022

Pages: 276

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction

Published: November 17th 2020

Source: Netgalley

Goodreads score: 3.67

My score:

Synopsis

The stories we read have the power to change our lives.

Sadie Smith lives an ordinary life, unlike the extraordinary ones of the characters in the books where she finds an escape. She dives into her stories with wanton abandon.
Until one story changes it all.
The story of the impetuous Killian Quinn: an agent for the Zeta Defense Agency, determined to avenge his fallen partner. As she follows him further down the rabbit hole, worlds collide when she awakens with her hands tied to a chair in the face of armed men. Sadie finds herself dropped in the middle of a battle between secret agencies she didn’t even know existed, but maybe where she’s belonged all along.

Review: Our Trespasses

Author: Michael Cordell

Started reading: May 25th 2022

Finished the book: May 28th 2022

Pages: 247

Genres: Paranormal, Horror

Published: October 15th 2021

Source: TCK Publishing

Goodreads score: 3.95

My score:

Synopsis

Drowning in a meaningless existence flipping burgers, Matthew Davis suddenly collapses from a powerful psychic connection he shares with his twin brother, Jake. The pain is violent and immediate, and Matt knows exactly what it means… hundreds of miles away, Jake has been viciously killed. But instead of severing their connection, the murder intensifies it and Matt begins to suffer the agony of Jake’s afterlife.
Hell bent on solving Jake’s murder in order to break the connection, Matt travels to his troubled hometown of Hatchett, Nebraska, where an old lover and savage new enemies expose the festering wounds that Jake left behind.

Matt tries atoning for Jake’s sins, but when a demon infests the connection between the two brothers, Matt must find a way to sever their bond before his world, and ours, become engulfed in the flames of hell.

Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games #0)

Author: Suzanne Collins

Started reading: May 4th 2022

Finished the book: May 26th 2022

Pages: 541

Genres: YA, Dystopian

Published: May 19th 2020

Source: Bookbox

Goodreads score: 3.82

My score:

Synopsis

It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capital, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute.

The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.

Review: Guiltless (Sandhamn Murders #3)

Author: Viveca Sten

Started reading: May 23rd 2022

Finished the book: May 24th 2022

Pages: 370

Genres: Crime, Fiction, Mystery

Published: May 23rd 2017

Source: eBook

Goodreads score: 4.10

My score:

Synopsis

The tiny Swedish island of Sandhamn has always been a haven for lawyer Nora Linde. With trouble brewing in her marriage, she finds its comforts more welcome than ever, even in the depths of winter. That is, until her two young sons trip across a severed arm in the woods.

The boys’ gruesome discovery will once again connect Nora with her childhood friend Thomas Andreasson, now a local police detective. When the limb is identified as belonging to a twenty-year-old woman who disappeared without a trace months earlier, what had been a missing persons case takes on a whole new urgency.

Nora and Thomas delve deeply into the woman’s final hours, each of them wrestling not only with the case but with the private demons it awakens in them. As they do, they’ll find themselves drawn into the history of Sandhamn and the tensions that have been simmering just below the surface for more than a hundred years.