Under The Book Cover: playground

F is for Friday: 21 July 2023

Hi hello and welcome to F is for Friday, hosted by Nomadic Worlds. With F is for Friday, you answer a few prompts that relate to your reading for the past week and even share some things that made you happy! This is a great post to do because it helps remind me of all of the good things I’ve experienced weekly, even if it doesn’t feel like anything good happened in the moment. Whether it’s book related or just life in general, I’m trying to remember to count the positives in my daily life! Let's get started!
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F – Feature your latest book obsession (it doesn’t have to be your current read)

My current bookish obsession is absolutely my current read! I’m doing a beta read for an amazing book right now and am loving it so much. The vibes, the characters, the pacing, everything about it is immaculate and I’m so in love. I won’t be sharing anything about the book out of respect for the author but just know that it’s incredible and I’m so grateful to be beta reading this beauty.

I – Indicate which book/s you are looking forward to reading this weekend

I’m definitely going to continue working on reading my beta read book but I also plan to start Playground by Aron Beauregard! Aron is one of my all-time favorite extreme horror authors and this book is apparently causing all kinds of a ruckus, so I’m really excited to see what it’s all about. I’ve been considering doing my first bookish TikTok and making it about this book so if you’d like to follow me over there, my username is @firehawkarts!

F – Favorite quote of the week/day

I have so many from the beta read book that I’m doing but as I mentioned above, I won’t be sharing anything about the book out of respect for the author! But I genuinely do have so many quotes that I’ve literally clutched my iPad to my chest over while reading them.

F – Five Things You’re Happy Or Grateful For This Week

1. My friend had a successful appendectomy and is safe at home! She’s one of my very best friends and I love her dearly, so knowing she’s taking steps towards reducing her pain and that she’s now able to start recovering makes me so happy for her. She’s been through a lot and deserves this win!

2. The bottom of my own surgical incision is almost healed! This has been the part that is giving me the most trouble with healing and I’m so happy that it’s finally more healed than not. I’m also relatively pain-free in that area and down my leg and I cannot explain what a relief it is. Now I can go back to my regularly scheduled post-cancer pains!

3. I’m going to be annoying about this but the book I’m beta reading is something I’m happy about. It’s been a while since I’ve felt like this about any book I’ve read, so I know I’ve found something special here. The way the author writes is so fluid and descriptive, but not overly so. And the plot? Oh my god y’all, the plot is so good. Just be prepared for me to be super vague about this but also constantly gush about how much I’m loving it.

4. I finally launched both shirt designs I made! I don’t talk about this but graphic design and digital art is a hobby of mine and I love to create shirt designs for the teams I volunteer at conventions for. I’m really proud of both designs that I’ve created and they have both been super well received which is such a relief. I was really nervous about if they would be liked or not but they are and I can’t wait to have them in my wardrobe!

5. A cosplayer that I really look up to, Sarah Spaceman, released her video on how she became best birb boi Tulin from Tears of the Kingdom and I loved it so much. A little fun fact about me, furries actually scare me. Like, a lot. But this costume is so cute and I love seeing how she made the whole thing come to life! Seriously, I learn at least three new things with every video of hers that she releases. It’s over an hour long but I promise you it’s worth getting a snack and sitting down to watch because the costume is amazing, but her process of creating it is so great to watch!

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And that does it for this F is For Friday post! I had a good week this week both reading and personal life wise. I’m almost done with a big crochet project, I’m making progress on Tears of the Kingdom, my reading has been very successful, and a new patch got released in Final Fantasy XIV! I’m looking forward to this next week and I hope it’s a good one. How has your week been? What’s something you’re looking forward to reading this weekend? Is there something that happened this week that made you happy? Are you also now grinding out the next step in the Manderville relic weapon line? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for stopping by and I’ll see you in the next chapter!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books With One-Word Titles

adalyn grace 6:00:00 AM

Hi hello and welcome to Top Ten Tuesday! This weekly post is hosted by the wonderful Jana from That Artsy Reader Girl so please be sure to go check out her post with all of the information about TTT. The topic this week is books with one-word titles and this was both harder than I thought and really fun! I never noticed before just how many books have multiple words in their title until I was searching for ones that only had one word. I think I picked out some good ones, though, and maybe one or two you've been thinking about picking up to read or will add on your TBR. Let's get started!
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1. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

"Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena's a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn't even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I. So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree. But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves."

2. Playground by Aron Beauregard

"Three low-income families have been given a handsome retainer to join Geraldine Borden for a day at her cliffside estate. All the parents must do to collect the rest of their money is allow their children to test out the revolutionary playground equipment Geraldine has been working on for decades. But there’s a reason the structures in the bowels of her gothic castle have taken so long to develop—they were never meant to see the light of day.

When a band of dysfunctional children is suddenly thrust into a diabolical realm of violence, they must grow up instantly to have a chance at survival. Will they find a way to put their differences aside, or be swallowed up by the insidious architecture all around them?"

3. Chlorine by Jade Song

"Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life. But these are human concerns. These are the concerns of those confined to land, those with legs. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Ones that called sailors to their doom. Ones that dragged them down and drowned them. Ones that feasted on their flesh. Ones of the creature that she's always longed to become: mermaid. Ren aches to be in the water. She dreams of the scent of chlorine--the feel of it on her skin. And she will do anything she can to make a life for herself where she can be free. No matter the pain. No matter what anyone else thinks. No matter how much blood she has to spill."

4. Vicious by V.E. Schwab

"Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?"

5. Sundial by Catriona Ward

"All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.

Callie is worried about her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely, and speaks of past secrets. And Callie fears that only one of them will leave Sundial alive…

The mother and daughter embark on a dark, desert journey to the past in the hopes of redeeming their future."

6. Mary by Nat Cassidy

"Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself. But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things. Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.

Then the killings begin again.

Mary’s definitely going to find herself."

7. Nightstrider by Sophia Slade

"Wren has spent her life doing the bidding of her cruel creator Para Warwick in the dream world known as the Reverie. When she learns of a weapon with the power to destroy him, she jumps at the chance to steal it. Her plan goes awry and she finds herself in the clutches of the rebellion and the rogue Alaric, a nightmare himself with twisted horns and dark magic. When a plea from a strange being known as a dreambreaker reaches them, the two ’mares find themselves thrown together in a desperate mission to save her before time runs out. Meanwhile, in the waking world, Caine Fallon, son of King Warwick and Prince of Wolfhelm, prepares to wed Ila Enevoldson, the young queen from the wild kingdom of Galesborough. But Ila is more than a queen. She is a weaver, a protector of the ancient Boundary that separates the Reverie and the Wake. Three nights before their wedding, Caine catches Ila in the act of opening a portal to the dream world and follows her, landing himself in a universe stranger than he could have imagined—a realm where his father is more monstrous than he ever could have fathomed. Now, the fates of four strangers will become intricately entwined, and the fate of their worlds will be sewn by their choices."

8. Bride by Ali Hazelwood

"Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast—again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres, and she sees little choice but to surrender herself in the exchange—again. Weres are ruthless and unpredictable, and their Alpha, Lowe Moreland, is no exception. He rules his pack with absolute authority, but not without justice. And, unlike the Vampyre Council, not without feeling. It’s clear from the way he tracks Misery’s every movement that he doesn’t trust her. If only he knew how right he was. Because Misery has her own reasons to agree to this marriage of convenience, reasons that have nothing to do with politics or alliances, and everything to do with the only thing she's ever cared about. And she is willing to do whatever it takes to get back what’s hers, even if it means a life alone in Were territory…alone with the wolf."

9. Rouge by Mona Awad

"For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass."

10. Belladonna by Adalyn Grace

"Orphaned as a baby, nineteen-year-old Signa has been raised by a string of guardians, each more interested in her wealth than her well-being—and each has met an untimely end. Her remaining relatives are the elusive Hawthornes, an eccentric family living at Thorn Grove, an estate both glittering and gloomy. Its patriarch mourns his late wife through wild parties, while his son grapples for control of the family’s waning reputation, and his daughter suffers from a mysterious illness. But when their mother’s restless spirit appears claiming she was poisoned, Signa realizes that the family she depends on could be in grave danger and enlists the help of a surly stable boy to hunt down the killer. However, Signa’s best chance of uncovering the murderer is an alliance with Death himself, a fascinating, dangerous shadow who has never been far from her side. Though he’s made her life a living hell, Death shows Signa that their growing connection may be more powerful—and more irresistible—than she ever dared imagine."

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And that does it for this Top Ten Tuesday! I don't think it was surprising that I had Yellowface on my list because of how much I've been talking about it ever since I read it. Vicious was honestly probably another unsurprising pick, simply because it's my favorite book! I'm really excited to see the wide variety of choices for the topic this week, mostly because I'll have new books to add to my TBR and that's never a bad thing. What books were on your list this week? Have you read (or do you want to read) any of the books that I listed? Be sure to let me know in the comments below and link me your post if you participated in the topic this week. Also, don't forget to visit That Artsy Reader Girl to see Jana's post and check out some of the other wonderful bloggers that have shared their links. Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you in the next chapter!

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F is for Friday: 21 July 2023

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With One-Word Titles

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