At the beginning of this month I decided that I’d choose all of my August reads – with the exception of ARCs and book club reads – by pulling prompts out of a jar. With August coming to a close (Miss Swift was right, August really did slip away into a moment in time) I thought it would be fun to look back on the prompts and books I read this month.
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Hi, friends! I thought this week it would be fun to spotlight my current audiobook read: Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam. Despite not being very far into this book, so far it’s absolutely fantastic! Written in verse, this book is compelling from the start, and you will find yourself utterly entranced by the poetry. Centred around Amal, a teenage boy convicted and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, this book explores the systematic racism in the justice system in an impactful and devastatingly beautiful way. And I tell you what, I cannot wait to finish it and write a full review for the blog.
Here’s the full synopsis!
From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. Perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds, Walter Dean Myers, and Elizabeth Acevedo.
The story that I thought
was my life
didn’t start on the day
I was born
Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he’s seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. “Boys just being boys” turns out to be true only when those boys are white.
The story that I think
will be my life
starts today
Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal’s bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it?
With spellbinding lyricism, award-winning author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth, in a system designed to strip him of both.
Like I said, I cannot wait to finish this book. I can just tell it’s going to be a five-star read. What are you currently reading? Be sure to let me know in the comments below!
Links for Punching the Air: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
Hi friends! We’re so excited to bring to you today the theatreathon! To celebrate the incoming Tony Awards, and celebrate theatre in general, we thought it would be fun to host a read-a-thon to combine both of our loves! The theatreathon will run from September 1st – September 30th. You can find the official prompts and book recommendations for the read-a-thon below, and be sure to keep up to date with us on our socials! You can follow [@] theatreathons to see how everyone else participating is progressing, and be sure to use the hashtag #theatreathon to stay connected!
To keep up the excitement, we’ll be hosting reading sprints throughout the read-a-thon through our twitter page, to keep everyone inspired and motivated. We hope you enjoy this read-a-thon, and have as much fun participating as we did make it!
While there’s a lot of prompts in this read-a-thon, feel free to pick and choose the ones you feel inspired by! Do as much, or as little, as you’d like to do – the purpose of this is to have fun, celebrate theatre, and read some new books!
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Hi, hello friends! We hope you had a wonderful August, and September continues on being lovely. We’re so excited to announce that the tea party has a tie for 2 books this month, so we will be splitting our time between two books. The two books selected this month are FAT CHANCE, CHARLIE VEGA by Crystal Maldonado and THIS POISON HEART by Kalynn Bayron. The tea party will be reading FAT CHANCE, CHARLIE VEGA from September 1st through September 15th, and THIS POISON HEART from September 16th through the end of the month. We are so happy that these two books are our September reads, and we hope you are too!
FAT CHANCE, CHARLIE VEGA is one of Caitlyn’s favourite books of the year, so we are very excited to be reading it alongside the tea party.
Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard.
Harder when your whole life is on fire, though.
Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat.
People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it’s hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn’t help. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be whiter. Be quieter.
But there’s one person who’s always in Charlie’s corner: her best friend Amelia. Slim. Popular. Athletic. Totally dope. So when Charlie starts a tentative relationship with cute classmate Brian, the first worthwhile guy to notice her, everything is perfect until she learns one thing–he asked Amelia out first. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her? UGHHH. Everything is now officially a MESS.
A sensitive, funny, and painful coming-of-age story with a wry voice and tons of chisme, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega tackles our relationships to our parents, our bodies, our cultures, and ourselves.
Links for Fat Chance, Charlie Vega: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | IndieBound | Bookshop
Content Warnings for Fat Chance, Charlie Vega: Fataphobia, mentioned death of a parent, mentions of sex, underage drinking (chapter 13), racism, a strained relationship with a parent, diet culture, emotional abuse + manipulation
Our second book of the month is THIS POISON HEART by Kalynn Bayron! This book is fun, exciting, and will definitely fill your fantasy needs. We are so excited to be reading it alongside the tea party in the second half of September!
Darkness blooms in bestselling author Kalynn Bayron’s new contemporary fantasy about a girl with a unique and deadly power.
Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch.
When Briseis’s aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they could never have imagined–it comes with a specific set of instructions, an old-school apothecary, and a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world that can only be entered by those who share Bri’s unique family lineage.
When strangers begin to arrive on their doorstep, asking for tinctures and elixirs, Bri learns she has a surprising talent for creating them. One of the visitors is Marie, a mysterious young woman who Bri befriends, only to find that Marie is keeping dark secrets about the history of the estate and its surrounding community. There is more to Bri’s sudden inheritance than she could have imagined, and she is determined to uncover it . . . until a nefarious group comes after her in search of a rare and dangerous immortality elixir. Up against a centuries-old curse and the deadliest plant on earth, Bri must harness her gift to protect herself and her family.
From the bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead comes another inspiring and deeply compelling story about a young woman with the power to conquer the dark forces descending around her.
Links for This Poison Heart: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
Content Warnings for This Poison Heart: brief depictions of grief, mentions of adoption, murder, death of a parent, blood and gore, decapitation, dismemberment, strong language
We hope you enjoy reading along with us this month, and we cannot wait to start discussing with you all! Happy reading!
In the last two years I’ve read more than I ever have before. That’s partially due to quarantine, but I also noticed a huge change in my reading statistics towards the middle-end of 2019 when I started to really get into audiobooks. As my love for audiobooks has grown exponentially since then, I thought I’d take some time to talk about how audiobooks have changed some of my reading habits and why I love them so much!
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So, admittedly nobody tagged me to do this challenge, but after googling some book tags this one seemed like so much fun! This post from paperfury inspired this post, and I took all the tag questions from there. I’ll be tagging some blogs to participate too, so who knows, maybe we’ll get this tag cycling again! Let’s get on with the questions!
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Hello, tea party attendees! We’re so excited to have Aden Polydoros, author of The City Beautiful as a guest at our tea party today.
Death lurks around every corner in this unforgettable Jewish historical fantasy about a city, a boy, and the shadows of the past that bind them both together.
Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he’ll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania.
But when Alter’s best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World’s Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows.
Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter’s body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer—before the killer claims them next.
Links for The City Beautiful: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
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Read moreIn the follow-up to It Happened One Summer, Tessa Bailey delivers another deliciously fun rom-com about a former player who accidentally falls for his best friend while trying to help her land a different man…
King crab fisherman Fox Thornton has a reputation as a sexy, carefree flirt. Everyone knows he’s a guaranteed good time–in bed and out–and that’s exactly how he prefers it. Until he meets Hannah Bellinger. She’s immune to his charm and looks, but she seems to enjoy his… personality? And wants to be friends? Bizarre. But he likes her too much to risk a fling, so platonic pals it is.
Now, Hannah’s in town for work, crashing in Fox’s spare bedroom. She knows he’s a notorious ladies’ man, but they’re definitely just friends. In fact, she’s nursing a hopeless crush on a colleague and Fox is just the person to help with her lackluster love life. Armed with a few tips from Westport’s resident Casanova, Hannah sets out to catch her coworker’s eye… yet the more time she spends with Fox, the more she wants him instead. As the line between friendship and flirtation begins to blur, Hannah can’t deny she loves everything about Fox, but she refuses to be another notch on his bedpost.
Living with his best friend should have been easy. Except now she’s walking around in a towel, sleeping right across the hall, and Fox is fantasizing about waking up next to her for the rest of his life and… and… man overboard! He’s fallen for her, hook, line, and sinker. Helping her flirt with another guy is pure torture, but maybe if Fox can tackle his inner demons and show Hannah he’s all in, she’ll choose him instead?
In case y’all didn’t know, I’m a mood reader. Meaning there are books that have literally been on my TBR for years that I haven’t read, for no reason other than I haven’t been in the mood to read them. While my mood definitely influences what I decide to read and when, I thought that in the month of August it would be fun to switch it up a little bit!
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Hi, hello friends! For those who may not have known, I was just in a production of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a play based on the Australian classic novel. The show was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the book a lot, so I thought what better way to celebrate the end of the show than with a blog post spotlighting the book. Published in 1967, this book is set in the 1900s and follows a group of girls from a private college who go on a picnic to the mysterious Hanging Rock. A group of them go, but three of them do not return. Here’s the full book summary!
It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred.
Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three of the girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.
They never returned.
Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction the reader must decide for themselves.
Be sure to let me know if you end up reading this wonderful mystery! I’d love to know what you think, and what your theory is about what happened to the girls on the hanging rock.
Links to Picnic at Hanging Rock: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | Indiebound
