Teaser & Top Ten Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Purple Princess of The Purple Booker. 

Here are the rules:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a page
3. Pick out 2 lines that are SPOILER FREE
4. Name the title, author, etc.

"Light was already growing, piercing through the spaces between my fingers and growing in front of me. I sucked in a breath and stepped forward into the light as the familiar feeling of weightlessness claimed me." p 65

TITLE: Heart of Stone
AUTHOR: Kelly Keaton
PUBLISHER: Self
GENRE: YA Paranormal
RELEASE DATE: February 14, 2015

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

This week's topic is: Top Ten Most Anticipated Releases for the Second Half of 2020

*starting in latest release date order

10. A SKY BEYOND THE STORM by Sabaa Tahir--oohhh the storm is COMING! It's FINALLY coming!!! SQUEE! 12/1

9. HOW THE KING OF ELFHAME LEARNED TO HATE STORIES by Holly Black--suuuper excited!! Standard copy has been ordered...waiting/hoping B&N puts theirs on sale at some point! 11/24

8. CARAVAL COLLECTOR'S EDITION by Stephanie Garber--I mean if this surprises anyone by now...WELCOME, WELCOME TO MY BLOG! Lol! 10/27

7. KINGDOM OF THE WICKED by Kerri Maniscalco--made myself finish SJTR series so I can read this one asap because OMG! 10/27

6. THE BRIGHTEST NIGHT by Jennifer L. Armentrout--absolutely devastated by this cover change. It's just ugh. And to do it on the LAST book in the series? So upsetting. Still excited for it though! 10/20

5. CRUSH by Tracy Wolff--YAAAAASSSSSS!!! MY PRECIOUSSSSSSSSS!!! MY VAAAAAAAMMMMMPIRESSSSS!! 9/29

4. THE WOODS ARE ALWAYS WATCHING by Stephanie Perkins--thrilled that Stephanie is writing another thriller! I loooooved TSIYH! This is a companion novel, so I'm guessing same world? Didn't sound like returning characters...but I guess we'll wait and see what happens!! 9/22

3. BLOOD & HONEY by Shelby Mahurin--oooomg! I finally read the first book this year and LOOOOVED it!! SUUUPER excited that this one comes out this year! 9/1

2. REIGN by Cora Carmack--pretty sure this one still releases this year. I feel like the buzz has been so quiet over it and it worries me a little! Lol. Can't wait to see how this one ends! 8/25

1. THE DAMNED by Renee Ahdieh--I mean duh! More vampires!! I loved the first book! I think people gave it a bad rap last year. I mean I get it in some sense, but I've read a lot of vampire books in my time and I found that one to be quite fun! 7/7--lucky in VAMPIRES!!! LOL!

It's Monday! What are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date. It's a fun meme where we gather to share what we've read last week and our reading plans for this week.

Last Week I FINALLY Finished:

Rage and Ruin by Jennifer L. Armentrout (5 stars)

Currently Reading:

Heart of Stone by Kelly Keaton

What I Might Read Next:

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Other Posts of Interest:

Teaser & Top Ten Tuesdays

Waiting on Wednesday

Random Thursday

Book Blogger Hop

Stacking the Shelves

Stacking the Shelves

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks! The meme is now hosted by Tynga's Reviews and Reading Reality.


Things are going pretty good at my new job. I'm picking up on a lot of information fairly quick, I feel like and my managers agree. I feel like I am going to do pretty good here! Other than work, not much has been happening and that's pretty much the norm for COVID-19 2020. 

This seems like it was a decent week for book getting too! Check out what I hauled in this week:

The Werewolf Dates the Deputy by Kristen Painter--I still have 3 other books to read in this series, but I decided to add this one to my kindle anyway! Love this series!

Wolf's Curse by Kelley Armstrong--been meaning to buy this one for awhile, but kept forgetting. Now I can at least binge the Kate and Logan story!

Seasons of the Storm by Elle Cosimano--SIGNED! Since I preordered this months ago with Amazon and the price never went down from FULL price, I canceled that order and then ordered a signed copy from One More Page bookstore! Totally worth it!

I also got exclusive swag! Character cards of the four seasons!

Then I got my preorder stickers for Aurora Burning:

THANK YOU Penguin TEEN!

 

 

 

 

And then I saved the best for last...

 

It is a HAND-PAINTED Caraval!!!

My friend Nikole posted a copy of this awhile back and of course I bombarded her with questions and discovered that the amazing talented H.T. King at KingdomBookDesigns decorated it for her, so  I quickly placed an order for one and it arrived this week and I was beyond excited for this!! Look at how gorgeous the details are! Omg, I was having happy tears as I looked it over! Can't wait to add this to my shelves! I'll have to tuck my Goldsboro Caraval into line so this one can stand out! 

I am already narrowing down where I'll be ordering my next custom bookcase and even though that's all I did, I'm excited because THIS will be my Caraval case as my current one is sadly not holding up. Likely literally. Two shelves have crashed on me and luckily no decorative pieces were damaged, but I don't want to risk that as I add more copies...hence the need to shop around! The current Caraval case might be turned into a JLA case, as I've a lot of editions of her books and I don't think any of them are super tall, so shelf height hopefully won't be an issue!

And that was it for me this week! Not too shabby if I do say so myself! What did you all get?

 

 

Review--Rage and Ruin by Jennifer L. Armentrout

Dangerous secrets and forbidden desires lead to shocking consequences… Don’t miss book two of the fantastical Harbinger trilogy from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L. Armentrout.

“Jennifer L. Armentrout’s intoxicating new fantasy is her best yet!” — New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter on Storm and Fury

A half human, half angel and her bonded gargoyle protector must work with demons to stop the apocalypse while avoiding falling in love. The Harbinger is coming…but who or what is it? All of humankind may fall if Trinity and Zayne can’t win the race against time as dark forces gather.

As tensions rise, they must stay close together and patrol the DC streets at night, seeking signs of the Harbinger, an entity that is killing Wardens and demons with no seeming rhyme or reason. Forbidden to be with each other, Zayne and Trinity fight their feelings and turn to unusual sources for help—the demon Roth and his cohorts. But as deaths pile up and they uncover a sinister plot involving the local high school and endangering someone dear to Zayne, Trin realizes she is being led…herded…played for some unknown end. As anger builds and feelings spiral out of control, it becomes clear that rage may be the ruin of them all.

Well, I finally finished Rage and Ruin, Jennifer L. Armentrout's second installment of The Harbringer trilogy and oh my goodness it was everything! And I mean EVERYTHING!!! Jennifer never ceases to amaze me with the books she writes. I always feel like I have a favorite book when it comes to her but each and every release continues to prove me wrong! She is just that outstanding!!

So yeah, I read Storm and Fury as an ARC last year, was denied an ARC at every turn for this one, so my memory was rough for this one since I had that 1+year wait for it. I had my notes though which were helpful and I tried taking more for this book because omg this is soooo not a middle book at all! It's a second installment!!!

Trinity and Zayne the ever complicated duo who both seem to feel things for the other, but yet they each seem to hold back from the other for their own reasons. But their emotional turmoil will have to take a backseat for there's too much going on in their lives to take a timeout for romance. The Harbringer is still at large causing havoc and chaos, killing Wardens left and right. Every night they go hunting for it, but every night they come up with nothing.

In the meantime, there's still the mystery of what is going on with the senator and the renovations at the high school, just what is being planned there and all that. Where did Bael go? Is he behind any of the Harbringer's recent acts lately? So many questions, and not enough answers to be honest. I mean we get answers to the great majority of them, but there was still one that made me go what's up with that factoid?!

A decent chunk of time is spent (sporadically, so not in one or two heapings) on the relationship between Zayne and Trinity. They have a lot of personal trust issues, it would seem, to work out before they can commit to anything with the other. It seems when one is ready, the other isn't. There's a lot of back and forth you have to get through before the sparks fly and the feelings get revealed and hashed out. But then of course, you have to remember, this is book two in a trilogy, there's still a WHOLE other book we have to get through, that's 500+ pages of more turmoil we'll be subjected to folks! And I am soooo ready for it! Because yes, Jennifer seems to like to tease he readers with these clashes of...emotions, shall we say? But in all the books I've read from her, she never ENDS a series wrong or heartbreakingly...so yeah, I have faith in her!

I truly loved that Layla and Roth and even Cayman came back in this series. Roth had a good chunk of scenes and it felt like these guys were pretty heavily involved in what what going on in the plot. They were all coming together to try to find the big bad and stop it.

Which brings us to the legendary Harbringer himself! We finally meet this guy and just whoa! You're not going to see this one coming! I mean, I didn't...Trin definitely didn't either! Lol.

I can't help but look at other smaller details more closely in this one too. Peanut spends an unusually large amount of time with a girl downstairs who can see him, and I keep wondering about that. Is there something there? Another story, perhaps? Or is it just something Peanut can do off page and have a bit of an interesting afterlife? Only time will tell, I mean Jennifer does like to do series spin-offs and I am all for them! I love staying in these worlds that I love so much, yet seeing them in new ways too, so they're actually like--wait for it--...a whole new world! LOL!

The ending though was what you can usually expect from a book two out of three cliffhanger, and honestly, from Jennifer. Lol. She does like to keep her readers hanging! It's one that shocked me to my core, but then I remember what I told myself about her books, and I'm hoping she doesn't let me down. We shall see. Needless to say the ending is the very definition of heart-racing!

Though it took me far longer to read this one than I would've liked with my new job, I did enjoy it immensely! It was exceedingly well paced. While it does take a large amount of time for the Harbringer to appear, it seems warranted. If they found him to early, a lot would be left out of the story. While this did have the paranormal man hunt going for it, there was still a good emphasis put on the emotional parts between a Warden aka gargoyle and a half human, half angel girl. There's the right balance of action and suspense too, a healthy dose of secrets to keep things edgy and of course, the spine-tingling, heart-burning romances that are truly an art form with Jennifer at the pen!

Rage and Ruin proves to yet again cement Jennifer L. Armentrout as one of the queens of the YA book world! She takes beloved characters and puts them through all the reigns of hell with her readers along for the ride and yet we always come back clamoring for more! She has pretty much put herself on my autobuy list for life! 

This is most definitely a series I would recommend again and again to the reader looking for a YA paranormal book with paranormal beings outside the norm of vampires and werewolves--who are equally awesome too by the way! You don't have to have read The Dark Elements series prior to this either, you pretty much get the lowdown of character history in the first book to understand the previously conceived connections certain characters have. So be sure to dive head first into Storm and Fury asap then read this so we can all commiserate that we now have 11 months to wait for the next and final installment! 

Kudos to Jennifer for yet another amazingly written and certified  GREAT read!



Overall Rating 5/5 stars

 

Book Blogger Hop

This meme is hosted by Billy at Ramblings of a Coffee Addict!

 

 

This week's question is: When you run out of bookshelf space, what do you do? (submitted by Elizabeth @ Silver's Reviews) 

 

 

 

MY ANSWER: Buy another bookcase! Lol.

 

While that's the case every blue moon, normally, it's deciding what books I want to keep on the shelves and which ones I would be okay with putting into storage--aka a box, a cabinet, a closet...wherever I can find room really. Every once in awhile I decide on a few that I will donate...but these days, it's mostly if I pick up a TBR book and don't finish it due to whatever reasons, those get donated or traded or whatnot.

 

So basically I make room for books wherever I can by whatever means necessary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Random Thursday

Let's take another trip into Weird But True by Leslie Gilbert Elman and see what fascinating new facts we can learn about letters and such. Yeah, it's a weird one that is focusing on letters of certain words. Let's see what this is all about!

Since this is the first time I wrote a post with the new Blogger interface, I realized it totally f***ed things up! Not only is one of my fonts gone and replaced with one of the same name but is actually freaking TIMES NEW ROMAN again, they also took away several colors that I used. I think they cut 25% of the color choices. Since I am now forced into this new format beyond my control, I have to readjust a few things.

(image borrowed from Etsy)

According to the Official Word List approved by the National Scrabble Association for tournament play, there are seventeen 3-letter words that end in "u." AAmong them is "ulu," which is a type of knife used by Eskimo women to clean and skin fish and is the only 3-letter word with two u's.

I did not know that was a word at all!

(image borrowed from Wikipedia)

In 2006, the revised Official Word List was issued to include 101 two-letter words accepted in Scrabble tournaments in the US. Among the accepted words are "za," a shortened name for pizza, and "aa," a type of lava.

Za I knew, but not aa!

(image borrowed from Hobby Lobby)

The symbol for potassium on the periodic table is the letter K. This name comes from the Latin word kalium which comes from qali, the Arabic word for ashes.

FUN FACT: One would think potassium would be marked with the letter P, but when potassium was discovered in 1807, the periodic table already had a P, which stood for phosphorous, which was discovered in 1669.

I always wondered why potassium got a K! Lol.

(image borrowed from Science Photo Library)

In 1898 Scottish chemist, Sir William Ramsay and English chemist Morris M. Travers (pictured) discovered krypton. But by then K was already spoken for, much like P was spoken for when it came to potassium. Krypton then received the symbol Kr.

FUN FACT: Krypton comes from the Greek word kryptos which means "hidden."

(image borrowed from Wikipedia)

Superman first made his appearance in Action Comics #1 in June 1938. As we know, Superman came from the planet Krypton. No one really knows why Jerry Siegel and Jose Shuster--the creators--chose to name Superman's home planet after an odorless, colorless gas.

Perhaps they threw a dart at the periodic table and it landed on Kr! LOL!

Waiting on Wednesday

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted at Wishful Endings, to spotlight and discuss the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. It's based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by the fabulous Jill at Breaking the Spine.

In the terrifying sequel to The Haunted, Hendricks discovers that even though Steele House is gone, the hauntings in Drearfield are far from over — and it’s up to her to stop them.

Following the devastating blaze at Steele House, Hendricks and her friends are trying to return to normal. Prom is coming up and the school is in full preparation mode. Hendricks tries to pitch in, to mimic Portia’s enthusiasm, but the events of the last few months still haunt her. Steele House. Raven. Eddie.

Hendricks believes Eddie is still out there. She just has to find a way to reach him. Together with her friends, she forms a circle of seven and attempts to summon his spirit. Suddenly things start happening again. Flickering lights in the school library. Mysterious girls roaming the halls. The same song playing on a loop wherever she goes.

It all culminates in a violent attack and Hendricks realizes what they summoned may not be Eddie at all. The one thing she does know is that Steele House was only the beginning. And whatever they’ve unleashed is more dangerous than anything they’ve ever seen before.

I still need to read The Haunted which I thought was a standalone. So I'm kinda excited that there's already more to come!!

TITLE: The Unleashed

AUTHOR: Danielle Vega

PUBLISHER: Razorbill

GENRE: YA Horror

RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2020 

 

Teaser & Top Ten Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Purple Princess of The Purple Booker. 

Here are the rules:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a page
3. Pick out 2 lines that are SPOILER FREE
4. Name the title, author, etc.

Yup, another teaser from Rage and Ruin! Sadly, I didn't get to read this one much last week, so I'm still reading it now.

"My gaze flickered over him. There were dark smudges splattered along the tattered remains of his shirt.

Blood. Warden's blood." p. 281

 

TITLE: Rage and Ruin
AUTHOR: Jennifer L. Armentrout
PUBLISHER: Inkyard Press
GENRE: YA Paranormal
RELEASE DATE: June 9, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

This week's topic is: TTT 10th Anniversary! Top Ten Books By My Favorite Author that I Still Haven't Read (9/25/18)

*I was pleased to find that I read a good amount of what was in my original post. I had 3 that were still there and 1 was a series I still need to read more of, but I read the initial one mentioned in 2018!

**in no particular order

The Re-Runs--aka ones that were in the original post

10. THE RETURN by Jennifer L. Armentrout--yes I still need to read this series. Hopefully sometime soon now that I won't be in an office with more males than females. Still feel like I need a hideacover for this size though. Lol.

9. IT TAKES ONE by Kate Kessler--another series I still need to start! I loved Kady's books in the YA area, I have a few other of her adult books in my TBR still too. 

8. THE SHADOW by Marianne Curley--this is a series I will need to re-read before I can read this new installment. Still excited to do so!

7. THE REAPER RESCUES THE GENIE by Kristen Painter--I had the previous installment in the series on my last time around, so now I need to read this one! And get caught up with the rest of the series too! There's currently 11 books with book 12 coming out this year, this is book #9.

The New Picks:

6. FROM BLOOD AND ASH by Jennifer L. Armentrout--finally got my physical copy, now I just need to get in the queue!

5. HOUSE OF EARTH AND BLOOD by Sarah J. Maas--perhaps when I can take an actual staycation that didn't involve constantly caring for my mom's dogs, I might work this one in!

4. RENEGADES by Marissa Meyer--it started as a duology I planned to binge, then turned trilogy and thought might as well wait. Now I've just run out of excuses! Lol.

3. WATCHER IN THE WOODS by Kelley Armstrong--I love Kelley's books, I'm not sure how I fell behind again.

2. LAIR OF DREAMS by Libba Bray--I think the size of this one always intimidated me. This is a series of big books...and I've had this one since I started my last job way too long ago! Eek!

1. ARCHANGEL'S SHADOWS by Nalini Singh--another series I realllllly loved and I fell behind again...somehow!