Hi, hello! If you didn’t know, I really love The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I can’t really put into words why I love it so much, but it’s my all time favourite book, and I comfort read it a lot: it’s super special to me. The only problem is, I am always looking for a book that feels just as special and magical as this one. While The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern meets the criteria, I’m always on the hunt for other books that are similar.
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Read moreFans of Netflix’s On My Block, In the Heights, and readers of Elizabeth Acevedo and Ibi Zoboi will love this debut novel about a girl whose life is turned upside down after one local act of vandalism throws her relationships and even her neighborhood into turmoil.
Chinelo, or Nelo as her best friend Kate calls her, is all about her neighborhood Ginger East. She loves its chill vibe, ride-or-die sense of community, and her memories of growing up there. Ginger East isn’t what it used to be, though. After a deadly incident at the local arcade, all her closest friends moved away, except for Kate. But as long as they have each other, Nelo’s good.
Only, Kate’s parents’ corner store is vandalized, leaving Nelo shaken to her core. The police and the media are quick to point fingers, and soon more of the outside world descends on Ginger East with promises to “fix” it. Suddenly, Nelo finds herself in the middle of a drama unfolding on a national scale.
Worse yet, Kate is acting strange. She’s pushing Nelo away at the exact moment they need each other most. Nelo’s entire world is morphing into something she hates, and she must figure out how to get things back on track or risk losing everything—and everyone—she loves.
Read moreThe fifteen stories in The Loss of All Lost Things explore the unpredictable ways in which characters negotiate, experience, and manage various forms of loss. These characters lose loved ones; they lose their security and self-worth; they lose children; they lose their ability to hide and shield their emotions; they lose their reputations, their careers, their hometowns, and their life savings. Often depicting the awkward moments when characters are torn between decision and outcome, The Loss of All Lost Things focuses on moments of regret and yearning.
We’re incredibly excited to announce our March book for teatimereads — Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which has been on our radar since before its January release. We couldn’t be more excited to join Lily in 1954 Chinatown. For Last Night at the Telegraph Club, we highly recommend reading it with a cup of jasmine tea by your side!
“That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.” And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
Trigger warnings: abandonment, parental abuse, family trauma, sexism, misogyny, racism, racial slurs, deportation, death of a loved one, homophobia, internalized homophobia, miscarriage, police brutality
Links for Last Night at the Telegraph Club: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | Indiebound
As America is now well into its 11th month (!!!) of quarantine, I am currently having all of the wanderlust feelings. In non-COVID times, I didn’t have much time to travel with my work schedule. The extent of my travel consisted of weekend or week-long trips to visit my best friend in NYC a few times a year, or some day trips around Northern California. I love adventures and trying new things, and discovering new places, and while I’ve always had the desire to travel, I’ve been feeling it extra intensely lately. Though I can’t physically hop on a train or a plane and visit some new place, I can read about it which has definitely helped with this restlessness that I’ve been feeling. If you’ve also got the travel bug here are 7 books that you should read!
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Read moreWith her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.
This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.
In New York, she’s able to ignore all the annoying questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.
A major thank you to Wednesday Books for the opportunity to read and review this ARC! All thoughts and opinions are honest and my own, and were not influenced by the gifted ARC in any way.
Read moreEighteen-year-old Amelia Griffin is obsessed with the famous Orman Chronicles, written by the young and reclusive prodigy N. E. Endsley. They’re the books that brought her and her best friend Jenna together after Amelia’s father left and her family imploded. So when Amelia and Jenna get the opportunity to attend a book festival with Endsley in attendance, Amelia is ecstatic. It’s the perfect way to start off their last summer before college.
In a heartbeat, everything goes horribly wrong. When Jenna gets a chance to meet the author and Amelia doesn’t, the two have a blowout fight like they’ve never experienced. And before Amelia has a chance to mend things, Jenna is killed in a freak car accident. Grief-stricken, and without her best friend to guide her, Amelia questions everything she had planned for the future.
When a mysterious, rare edition of the Orman Chronicles arrives, Amelia is convinced that it somehow came from Jenna. Tracking the book to an obscure but enchanting bookstore in Michigan, Amelia is shocked to find herself face-to-face with the enigmatic and handsome N. E. Endsley himself, the reason for Amelia’s and Jenna’s fight and perhaps the clue to what Jenna wanted to tell her all along.
With Taylor Swift announcing the Fearless re-release (We’re counting down the days till April 9th), Caitlyn and I wanted to team up again to give you another book recommendations list! To us, Fearless reminds us of high school, fairytales – modern or not, self-discovery, and being completely honest and open with your emotions. Without further ado, here’s thirteen YA book recommendations that remind us of the Fearless era!
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Read moreRonin’s son is dead, and Maid Marion is gone. But a sorceress banished to the Woods can bring his son back if he and his Silver Raiders are willing to do something for her first. She finds there’s nothing Ronin Hood won’t do for his son…
Anika finds herself drawn to the mystery of the Woods and the thieves who live within, but the cost of associating with the Silver Raiders becomes higher than she’s willing to pay. The darkness of the Woods seeps into the Raider’s hearts, blurring the lines between hero and villain, until Anika’s fight for freedom turns into a fight to survive the magic of the trees that should have never been awoken.
This isn’t the tale of Robin Hood you remember.
Read moreComing 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.