Month: May 2018

From Twinkle, With Love | ARC Review

Posted May 31, 2018 in Reviews / 0 Comments

*Thanks so much to Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing and NetGalley for providing a galley in exchange for an honest review!* What’s not to love about From Twinkle, With Love? The title is adorable, the cover is STUNNING, and the epistolary format was really fun to read. In some ways, I loved Menon’s sophomore novel even more than her first, because it was just so much fun. Twinkle’s personality coupled with some of the tried and true YA tropes and laugh out loud writing had me itching to pick up the story at every spare moment I had the week […]

Real Talk: A Case for Kindness

Posted May 30, 2018 in Discussions / 9 Comments

Real Talk is an original feature here at Girl in the Pages where I’ll discuss random things that come across my mind in an honest and sometimes spontaneous manner. It may be about books, blogging, life, or anything else! You know what I’m really and truly tired of? All of the negativity and author hate that I see happening when authors decide to continue writing multiple series in the same universe. I’ve seen everything from people claiming these additional installments are no better than fanfiction to the old “they’re just milking the cash cow argument.” While there are definitely series […]

The Art of French Kissing | ARC Review

Posted May 28, 2018 in Reviews / 6 Comments

*A huge thank you to NetGalley and Sky Pony Press for providing an ARC free of charge in exchange for an honest review!* I am a HUGE fan of any sort of competition cooking show out there- Chopped, Master Chef, Holiday Baking Championship, you name it, I watch it. So my interest was definitely peaked when I came across The Art of French Kissing, which combines two of my favorite things: YA novels and cooking competitions. I’d never read a book that actually focused on a cooking competition (though I’m always on the lookout for food-centered novels) so I was […]

Giving Scribd Another Shot

Posted May 23, 2018 in Features / 11 Comments

So if you’ve been around the blog recently, you’ll notice that I’ve recently (as in, since 2018) become a fan of audio books. I talked about my struggles with them years ago, and then recently shared my revelations about how I’ve gotten them to work for me (listening to them through my bluetooth portable speaker while I do chores around the house has been a godsend). While I love Overdrive and have been using that as the source for most of my audio books, I find that the selections available through my local library can be slow to update and […]

Adult Fiction Mini Reviews: The Immortalists, The Party, & Forever, Interrupted

Posted May 21, 2018 in Reviews / 8 Comments

I’ll admit I didn’t go into this book knowing much- mostly that is was about a group of siblings that know their death date after a chance encounter with a psychic when they are children (a terrible thing to find out but a great premise for a book). I had also heard it was pretty literary, but I was ready for it since contemporary literary fiction was my JAM in college. And while the plot of the book overall was interesting, I really wasn’t blown away by anything happening here. A few thoughts: I liked how the book was divided […]

Beyond the Books: Yoga

Posted May 16, 2018 in Beyond the Books, Features / 13 Comments

As much as I love reading and book blogging, I have a variety of interests outside of those hobbies that I love to chat about and share with others. I started Beyond the Books as a way to take a break from bookish content and feature some of my other favorite things! I really owe this whole post to Kristin from Super Space Chick, because after stumbling upon her own yoga related blog post one day, I discovered Yoga with Adriene, the Youtube channel that I can safely say is changing my life. After reading Kristin’s post about how Adriene’s […]

The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza | Review

Posted May 14, 2018 in Reviews / 0 Comments

I’m not sure what I expected when I started this book, to tell you the truth, but it certainly wasn’t what I read. The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza took me by surprise, as I suppose any end of the world YA story that starts in a Starbucks would. Our protagonist, Elena, is immediately established to be ~unique~ as she was the product of a virgin birth, explained by the happening of parthenogenesis, which was cool in theory but I have no idea if it could ever happen in real life to a human, but I just went along with it, […]

A Court of Frost and Starlight | Review

Posted May 11, 2018 in Reviews / 6 Comments

Everyone who knows me knows I am complete and utter trash for this series, so I was beyond thrilled to receive my beautiful hardcover copy of this, dutifully waiting for me when I arrived home from YALLWEST this year. I devoured it in just a few hours (a luxury I often don’t have, to read a book in one sitting) and I was delighted and content to return to Velaris and read about domestic life with my all my fae baes. We had: Lots of eating, shopping and celebrating which LORD KNOWS they all deserve after the war in ACOWAR. […]

YALLWEST Round 4: Senior Year

Posted May 9, 2018 in Book and Author Events, Features, Travel / 7 Comments

I’ve been blessed enough to be able to attend YALLWEST since its inaugural year in 2015, and returned again this month for its fourth year (“senior year,” if you will) in sunny Santa Monica. The festival was a bit more hectic that usual for me due to work commitments as it happened a bit later than it usually does, however we still ended up making it and catching up with our book squad from last year and having a fantastic time! Each year more and more publishers and vendors come out for the west coast event and it was great […]

The Astonishing Color of After | Review

Posted May 7, 2018 in Reviews / 4 Comments

The Astonishing Color of After caught my eye as it’s a mix of a lot of wonderful elements that I hadn’t quite seen put altogether before: magical realism, death & grief, mental illness, and an Asian protagonist. Excited by the synopsis and by the prospect of a setting in Taiwan, I dove into the novel curious to see how all of the elements meshed together. What I encountered was a beautifully written story with vivid settings and prose that was literary without being too weighed down or pompous. A longer contemporary (clocking in at almost 500 pages), there are quite […]