A Certain Hunger || Chelsea G. Summers ★★★★☆ Started: 21.12.2024 Finished: 28.12.2024 Food

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter || Brandon Sanderson ★★★★★ Started: 15.02.2025 Finished: 23.02.2025 Yumi comes from a land of gardens, meditation, and spirits, while Painter lives in a world of darkness, technology, and nightmares. When their lives suddenly become intertwined in strange ways, can they put aside their differences and work together to uncover the mysteries of their situation and save each other’s communities from certain disaster? The second one of Sanderson's secret projects that I read (after Tress of the Emerald Sea, another five star read), and Yumi is just as good, if not better - the narration is similarly humorus, the world is completely different yet still whimsical and meticulously thought out, and the characters - simply lovable - you can't help but root for Yumi and Painter from start to finish. The action does take some time to truly pick up the pace, but the payoff is absolutely worth it!

HI HI HI I LOVE YOUR ART SO MUCH HIIIIIIIII

ANY AEQUA DOODLE!! because i love her so bad and also again i just want to say that i saw your art and it made my day and i am losing my mind i am so happy thank you for existing

Aah thank you so much!! I LOVEEEEEE Aequa so much! I would love to draw her more and I've been wanting to design different outfits for the different festivals and events we see in the book. Thank you so much for requesting her bc she deserves so much love aaaaaah I know there's a lot more going in in the story and she's not the biggest character ever but I think she's so interesting. I like to imagine her as trying very hard to achieve and surpass the standards set before her, but trying to find how she can do it her way. She's a mix of confidence in her skill but also doubtful. She's got every reason to be suspicious, but stays true. I just love how even though she has a smaller role, you get so much of a sense of who she is. I hope we see more of her next book! P.S. the colors might be wonky bc of my ipad. like no matter what i do the colors always turn out soooo different when it comes from there raah

Book Lovers || Emily Henry ★★★★☆ Started: 09.02.2025 Finished: 12.02.2025 Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby. Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute. If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves. As someone who hardly ever picks up a romance novel, I had a really good time with Book Lovers, despite being a narrow-eyed sceptic at first. The humorous banter between the main characters was a real highlight, as was the subversion of your run-of-the-mill Hallmark movie plotlines. Sometimes an overachieving workaholic can just be that, without converting to the Small Town Ways, and that's ok! And even though, for the most part, I could see where the novel was going, I still really enjoyed the experience.

blood over bright haven by m.l. wang

because good people can turn desperate when the horrors are upon them—especially people whose culture of plenty has left them with no systems to cope with scarcity or cataclysm. good people will turn monstrous when it’s down to their survival or someone else’s.

Autobiography of Red || Anne Carson ★★★★★ Started: 25.01.2025 Finished: 22.02.2025 “There is no person without a world.” And, it turns out, there is no monster without a world. An immensely rich, if, by his own admission, somewhat monochromatic inner world. "Autobiography of Red" is not so much a typical contemporary mythological retelling, and more a tale of self discovery, painful love, and, inevitably, acceptance, set against a relatively modern backdrop (read: not the Ancient Greece the namesakes of these characters inhabited). More than anything else, it's the writing itself that elevates this work into a true masterpiece: concise, evocative, at times heart-wrenching, unfailingly exquisite. It is no easy task to fit so much meaning into so few pages, most authors veer into empty purple prose in attempts to justify their retellings, but not Anne Carson - therein lies her strength as an author. She doesn't simply rehash the myth as we know it, but reinvents it, brings it into the new age, makes it speak to the modern audience. In her novel "A Short History of Myth", Karen Armstrong argues the following: “A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.” Following this logic, it wouldn't be unfair to say that, where most contemporary retellings fail "Autobiography of Red" achieves a roaring, resounding success.

We || Yevgeny Zamyatin ★★★★★ Started: 22.02.2025 Finished: 23.02.2025 Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel. In the totalitarian society of the OneState of the great Benefactor, in a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, is a world where people are numbers, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life has been reduced to a mathematical perfectly balanced equation, an ongoing process of mathematical precision. Free will is a disease. Primitive passions, instincts, and creativity have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier, and whatever alien species are to be found there, will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State… the discovery, or rediscovery, of inner space, and that disease the ancients called the soul, and Love. If you are interested in dystopian literature in the vein of Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, We is a must read!