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Teatimereads December Pick: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Hello friends! It’s hard to believe that we’re already near the end of November. As the month is coming to a close, it’s time for us to announce the December teatimereads pick, and we’re so excited to tell you all that we’ll be reading Tracy Deonn’s LEGENDBORN!

Here is the full summary for Legendborn:

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

Links for Legendborn: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | Indie Bound 

Content Warnings for Legendborn: Death of a parent and traumatic grief/flashbacks, alcohol consumption, mind control/memory manipulation, racist macro and microaggressions, emesis (vomiting), blood, mild gore, combat violence, mention(s) of: physical abuse, racist violence, sexual violence.

We’re so excited to read this magical story with everyone and are so excited to hear your thoughts on Legenborn! Have a wonderful rest of November, and we can’t wait to start reading with you all!

Let’s Talk: 4 Books I Want to Read Before the End of the Year

I can’t believe that we’re almost at the end of the year! Truly, where did the time go? As the year is winding down, I’ve started to think about my usual end of the year wrap up post and it reminded me of how many books I’ve wanted to read this year that I still haven’t gotten to! 

I won’t lie, I think I’ve been in the midst of a tiny reading slump lately! Work has been pretty busy the last few weeks, which has made reading a bit more difficult. Besides working through my Nancy Drew reread, I haven’t been reading a lot as of late. Luckily, I’m doing just fine on my reading goal, so I’m not feeling too bad about not getting a whole lot of reading done in the last few weeks. That being said, there are some books that I definitely want to get to before the year is up!

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Let’s Talk: “Unlikeable” Female Characters

When I think of “unlikeable” characters, I think of characters who are morally corrupt, characters who are unable to admit their faults, and characters who do not take ownership of their actions. However, I’ve noticed that in the literature world, oftentimes, characters that are labeled as “unlikeable” are not morally corrupt characters. Instead, they’re characters who are flawed, multi-layered, maybe a little selfish, and sort of prickly until you get to know them. So I then started thinking about my favorite books with “unlikeable” characters. In doing so, I noticed that most of the time, those “unlikeable” characters were women.

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Wrap Up: October 2021

And yet another month has flown by, and we cannot believe we are so close to the holiday periods starting! We’ve been loving the books we’ve been reading lately, and we are so excited to be sharing with you some of our favourites today in this post! Without further adieu, let’s get started! 

This month Caitlyn read 21 books, Cossette read 24 books, and Mary read 5 books. 

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Spotlight: 5 Reasons to Read the Kingdom of Cards Series

If you didn’t know, October is Filipino-American Heritage Month. As a Filipino-American myself, I always want to amplify the voices of other Filipino authors. Last year, I had posted a spotlight on Janella Angeles’ debut novel, Where Dreams Descend, and it just so happens that the sequel, When Night Breaks, was released earlier this month. I felt compelled to spotlight Janella’s fabulous work again, so I thought I’d list 5 reasons why you should read the Kingdom of Cards series!

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Teatimereads November Pick: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Hi everyone! It’s that time again! Time for another teatimereads announcement. We’re so excited to announce that our November book will be BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. We can’t wait to read this book with you. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

Here is the full summary for Before the Coffee Gets Cold:

What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

Links for Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound

Content Warnings for Before the Coffee Gets Cold: hospitalization, injury, pregnancy, pregnancy complications, death of a parent. health issues, alzheimer’s, grief, mentions of depression, mentions of anxiety, breakup

We hope that the rest of your October is wonderful and we can’t wait to read and discuss Before the Coffee Gets Cold with you all in November!

Review: Not Here to Be Liked by Michelle Quach

Emergency Contact meets Moxie in this cheeky and searing novel that unpacks just how complicated new love can get…when you fall for your enemy.

Eliza Quan is the perfect candidate for editor in chief of her school paper. That is, until ex-jock Len DiMartile decides on a whim to run against her. Suddenly her vast qualifications mean squat because inexperienced Len—who is tall, handsome, and male—just seems more like a leader.

When Eliza’s frustration spills out in a viral essay, she finds herself inspiring a feminist movement she never meant to start, caught between those who believe she’s a gender equality champion and others who think she’s simply crying misogyny.

Amid this growing tension, the school asks Eliza and Len to work side by side to demonstrate civility. But as they get to know one another, Eliza feels increasingly trapped by a horrifying realization—she just might be falling for the face of the patriarchy himself.

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Let’s Talk: Rereading Childhood Favorites

When I started working on this post, Cossette asked me, “How did you get into reading?” and when I think about it, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading. Literature was such a huge part of my childhood that in my mind, the two are intertwined. As a kid, I would constantly beg my mom to take me to the library or a bookstore whenever we had the time, and once she got me in there I never wanted to leave.

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Review: The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling

New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins, writing as Erin Sterling, casts a spell with a spine-tingling romance full of wishes, witches, and hexes gone wrong.

Nine years ago, Vivienne Jones nursed her broken heart like any young witch would: vodka, weepy music, bubble baths…and a curse on the horrible boyfriend. Sure, Vivi knows she shouldn’t use her magic this way, but with only an “orchard hayride” scented candle on hand, she isn’t worried it will cause him anything more than a bad hair day or two.

That is until Rhys Penhallow, descendent of the town’s ancestors, breaker of hearts, and annoyingly just as gorgeous as he always was, returns to Graves Glen, Georgia. What should be a quick trip to recharge the town’s ley lines and make an appearance at the annual fall festival turns disastrously wrong. With one calamity after another striking Rhys, Vivi realizes her silly little Ex Hex may not have been so harmless after all.

Suddenly, Graves Glen is under attack from murderous wind-up toys, a pissed off ghost, and a talking cat with some interesting things to say. Vivi and Rhys have to ignore their off the charts chemistry to work together to save the town and find a way to break the break-up curse before it’s too late.

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