Weekend Wrap-up #1

The Sunday post is a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Reviewer. It's a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week on your blog and showcase books and things you have received.

This weekend is a long one in Hungary because March 15 (Thursday this year) is a national holiday and everyone got Friday off as well. My cousin came to visit so we had a family get-together where we indulged in board games and home-made doughnuts.

The weather is a bit gloomy, I wouldn't mind to see the sun a bit more but I'm sure we'll get there.

Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch an NTLive screening of Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead. I'm so glad I could catch a screening because I've been planning to watch it for so long. I enjoyed it immensely, I'll write a post with more details about it in a few days. I'm very eager to share my highlights with you, it was a truly awesome experience.

Now onto the books. 

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews that makes it possible to share with other bookworms what books you added to your shelves – physical or virtual – during the week.

I acquired two new ebooks this week.

Purchased:

Title: The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum

Author: Kirsten Weiss

Source: Amazon

Goodreads 

Synopsis:

When Maddie Kosloski’s career flatlines, she retreats to her wine-country hometown for solace and cheap rent. Railroaded into managing the local paranormal museum, she’s certain the rumors of its haunting are greatly exaggerated. But a new ghost may be on the loose. A fresh corpse in the museum embroils Maddie in murders past and present.

With her high school bully as one of the officers in charge, Maddie doubts justice will be served. When one of her best friends is arrested, she’s certain it won’t be.

Maddie grapples with ghost hunters, obsessed taxidermists, and the sexy motorcyclist next door as outside forces threaten. And as she juggles spectral shenanigans with the hunt for a killer, she discovers there truly is no place like home.

ARC 

Title: The Stolen Girl (The Veil and the Crown #1)

Author: Zia Wesley

Source: NetGalley

Goodreads

Synopsis:

The legend of Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, has survived on three continents for more than two hundred years. The Stolen Girl tells the first part of her extraordinary story, her adolescence on the Caribbean island of Martinique, and her voyage to Paris where her hopes of finding a husband are shattered. Resigned to live as an old maid at the ripe age of eighteen, she decides to become a nun and sets sail to visit her relatives on Martinique one last time. On the journey, she meets and falls in love with a dashing young Scotsman. But fate had other plans for Aimée, ones that were foretold by an African Obeah woman when she was fourteen years old.

My review of Ain't He Precious (Sex and Sweet Tea #1) by Juliette Poe will be up tomorrow and then boom, another week is over. Seriously, time is flying, guys.

How was your reading week? What are you reading at the moment? 

Please leave your links below!

Have a nice weekend!

Book Beginnings on Friday and the Friday 56 #8

It's that day of the week again!

Let's rock n' roll!

Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56 are weekly memes hosted by Rose City Reader and Freda's Voice.

Rules: 

Book Beginnings: Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. 

The Friday 56: Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% in you eReader. Find any sentence (not spoilery) and reflect on it if you want.

The book I bring to you today is:

The Red Tent

by Anita Diamant 

Synopsis:

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that sustain her through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate connection with the past.

Book Beginning:

Prologue:

We have been lost to each other for so long. 

Chapter one:

Their stories began with the day that my father appeared.

In the prologue it is the reader the narrator addresses. I could feel an instant connection with Dinah, because she was talking directly to me right in the beginning. Then she starts telling her tale...

The Friday 56:

Whenever she saw running water, she lay down in it, hoping for the life of the river to inspire life within her.

Someone is very desperate for a baby :)

I have high hopes for this book to be good, so far it didn't disappoint.

What are you reading this Friday? Drop your Friday link in a comment below, please!

Creating the atmosphere

Lately I've started burning candles while reading, mainly beacuse I realised I own so many and I never use them (most of them were gifts from friends). I'm obsessed with them now... Looking at the flame has a calming effect on me and some of them have scents that fill my room, creating a perfect atmosphere for reading and relaxing.

Above you can see some of the candles I own. The one in the middle changes its colour every minute, I think that might be my favourite.

I'd really like to own some bookish candles in the future, the ones you can buy on Etsy and have book or character-inspired scents.

I have my eye on the Red London and Jamaica scents in LiberdeStella's shop that were created based on A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab and Voyager by Diana Gabaldon.

I'd also be really happy with PretAGeek's Lady Macbeth inspired scent or the one that smells like Mrs Weasley's cookies! 

There are so many awesome bookish candles out there and right now I want to own them all. I better start saving money I guess.

Do you ever burn candles while you read? Do you own any bookish candles?

WWW Wednesday #8

Hey Friends! What a lovely Wednesday we have awoken to! 

I hope you're all having a wonderful day!

As you've probably noticed, I have a brand new banner up for which I added a fitting button too (see on the sidebar). My rating system changed as well, check out the delicious pinapples I'll use from now on under the 'Review Policy' option above!

With the banner the blog's whole theme changed, from angelic to Caribbean bliss I know, but I felt I needed to rethink the paradisian concept a little bit – we all need changes from time to time.

How do you like it? Do you prefer the new banner or should I change back to the old one? Your opinion matters!!

What am I up to these days reading-wise? My regular WWW post will answer this question:

WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Taking on a World of Words. 

WWW stands for three questions:

What are you currently reading?

It's unlike me, but I'm currently reading three books at the same time. 

The Red Tent

by Anita Diamant

As I mentioned before this is a biblical story told from the perspective of Dinah, daughter of Jacob. In the Bible she was raped and her brothers slaughtered a whole town to avange her tainted virtue. I have a feeling there will be a twist in this book compared to the original story, but I'm still in the beginning. We'll see... I love how the author describes the life of the women's community, there is a very strong bond between the females in this novel.

 



The Lightning Thief

(Percy Jackson and the Olympians #1)

by Rick Riordan 

I'm reading this with my little brother (I purchased the book for his 10th birthday). He reads a few pages aloud, then I read a few. We did this before, with the Harry Potter series. He usually doesn't sit down with a book alone but he enjoys reading like this a lot. I love it too because it means I can spend quality time with him. He is a sweetheart.

Ain't He Precious?

(Sex and Sweet Tea #1)

by Juliette Poe

I heard about this series on Lexxie's blog, Unconventional Book Views. It consists of novellas that are set in Whynot, a small town in South Carolina. This first instalment follows Trixie and Ryland, two people who were a couple in the past but broke up because they couldn't agree on where to settle down. Rylan comes to visit Trixie to help her out with a legal case. I suspect soon the southern sunshine won't be the only thing that turns the air hot in Whynot.

What did you recently finish reading?

Song of Blood & Stone

(Earthsinger Chronicles #1)

by L. Penelope

Since I was asked to join the blog tour of Song of Blood & Stone, my review will arrive closer to the publication date. All I'll say now is that it was a great adventure!

What do you think you'll read next?

I'll leave this blank here for now. I'll let my mood dictate when the time comes.

What are you in the middle of right now? What's next? Leave your link to your WWW post below, so I can visit your blog!

Some quotes to brighten your day

  

I'm your avarage bookworm who uses sticky notes to mark her favourite lines in a book. (Talking about sticky notes, don't you just hate when you run out of them? Because I do, arggghh. They are quite expensive where I live too... Rant over.)

I collect quotes like I collect books. These two are inseparable, are they not? Today I'll share with you some of my all time favourite quotes that stuck in my head and will probably stay with me always. Here they are:

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The other day I had a silly thought: I imagined what would happen if I turned blind all of a sudden (I noticed that my eyesight is a tiny bit worse than it used to be and the thought followed). When I realised that would mean I'd lose my ability to read I panciked for a moment until I reminded myself it is unlikely to happen. Reading is like breathing for us booklovers, it's hard to imagine living without the stories we dive into each day.

"Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse."

Passion by Jeanette Winterson

If you haven't read this book yet, I highly recommend you to do so. The writing is out of this world and Ms Winterson analyzes the human condition in a very unique way. The quote above has a personal meaning for me these days, therefore I'm very fond of it. (Read my review of The Passion here.)

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Oh, I could rain so many Shakespeare quotes on you... I'm obsessed with his plays. But this one will suffice for now. It rings true, doesn't it?

 "I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell, I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world." 

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

So poetic. I will never get over this book. Did I mention I bawled my eyes out during the last twenty pages? I read it years ago but nothing has compared to it since then.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

My dear Gatsby. I've read this book twice; first time I didn't like it, the second time I couldn't shut up about it. That is what a few years do to a reader. Pick it up if you haven't yet, it will stay with you, I promise.

What are some of your favourite quotes? Do you mark your favourite passages in your books? How?

Review - Sawbones by Melissa Lenhardt

Title: Sawbones (Sawbones #1)

Author: Melissa Lenhardt

Synopsis:

Outlander meets post-Civil War unrest in this fast-paced historical debut.

When Dr. Catherine Bennett is wrongfully accused of murder, she knows her fate likely lies with a noose unless she can disappear. Fleeing with a bounty on her head, she escapes with her maid to the uncharted territories of Colorado to build a new life with a new name. Although the story of the murderess in New York is common gossip, Catherine's false identity serves her well as she fills in as a temporary army doctor. But in a land unknown, so large and yet so small, a female doctor can only hide for so long.

My Thoughts:

I received a free ebook copy of this book from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Life at the Frontier in post Civil-War America was not a bed of roses, least of all if you happened to be a qualified doctor AND a woman. This is what Melissa Lenhardt proves us in Sawbones, the first book in her western trilogy that runs under the same name.

Catherine has to leave New York behind urgently after she gets accused of murder. She has no idea why one of her former patients holds a grudge against her, however she has no choice but flee if she doesn't want to hang. She believes her best chance to disappear is in the west but her journey through the Colorado prairie is paved with danger. She has to build her life from zero again in no man's land among people she is not sure she can trust, bearing the stigma of a woman who practices what was considered a man's profession at the time.

For me the strongest quality in Sawbones was the plot. Although it took some time, I got to the point where I was genuinely interested what happens next. Ms Lenhardt is good at building up tension and she doesn't shy away from major plot twists either – when I was only a few chapters in, the story took a totally different course than I thought it would in the beginning. First I wasn't sure if I liked the new situation but soon I became immersed and couldn't stop guessing what would come next.

The second best component I'd say was the romance. Captain Kindle, the love interest, is a very entertaining flirt. He strongly reminded me of Rhett Butler from Gone With the Wind (that's a compliment in my book). I liked that his and Laura's (Catherine's) acquaintance actually went back to the war and yet they started out as strangers to each other.

Catherine, the heroine, however was a character I simply couldn't like. Her being a representation of an issue – the way men treated (smart) women at the time – stole away any possiblity of character development. She is without flaw from the beginning and she mainly does what she was created to do: comes up with snarky remarks whenever she is verbally attacked (mostly by men). Don't get me wrong, I like her sharp tongue, but I think the situations when she has to use it are unnecessarily numerous in the book. I hope I'll see some changes later so I can grow to like her in the sequels to come.

The villain was mysterious in the first half of the novel and he had a decent backstory, which I appreciated. I also liked most of the side-characters and the way life in the fort was described.

I'd like to continue on with the series because of the gripping plot. I don't read enough western anyway, which is a shame...

Goodreads | Amazon

Stacking the Shelves #8

 

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews that makes it possible to share with other bookworms what books you added to your shelves – physical or virtual – during the week.

This week I had three new additions to my e-library. 

ARCs

Title: Nothing But Sky

Author: Amy Trueblood

Source: NetGalley

Goodreads

This book is set in the 1920s and is about female wing walkers, what's more to ask? There is nothing better than reading about daring women. I keep my fingers crossed that Amelia Earhart appears in this story somehow. That would be cool.

Title: The Last Sun (The Tarot Sequence #1)

Author: K. D. Edwards

Source: Edelweiss

Goodreads

This is the very first time I got approved through Edelweiss, so this book is somewhat special to me. 

The Last Sun is an LGBTQ fantasy set in New Atlantis. It's a debut novel which makes me even more excited for it. The author took the Tarot deck as inspiration when writing the book, I'm curious how the cards or their meanings fit in the story.

Freebie:

Title: Ghost Hand (The PSS Chronicles #1)

Author: Ripley Patton

Source: Amazon

Goodreads

Ghost Hand's protagonist is Olivia, a goth girl, who was born with a rare birth defect: her hand is made of ethereal energy, not flesh and blood. 

Her life is not easy, it's hard for her to blend in, but she manages to keep things together until one day she loses control over her own hand and she has to run for her life.

What books did you put your hands on this week? Let me know in a comment below!