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4 out of 5 Stars

“He had suddenly begun to have a sense that the reason he wanted the escape was not only in order to sacrifice thirty thousand on it and thus heal his scar, but also for some other reason. 'Is it because within my soul I am a murderer, too?' He had started to wonder. Something distant but burning had stung his soul.”

The new Dune movie (2022) proved to be a character development exercise.  I found myself longing for the galloping action style of the 1998 movie.  Though the action sequences were few

5 out of 5 Stars

“When I was seeing her out, in the ante-room, I thought she was about to cry.” 

Uniquely narrated by a fig tree, The Island of Missing Trees switches between two timelines to tell a story of love, heartbreak and a nation torn apart.  

What a powerful read. That this book exists is a miracle: originally written for a contest in 1930s Eastern Europe (in what is now Poland and Lithuania), these six essays were among hundreds hidden from the Nazis multiple times and eventually discovered in a church in 2017.

The Girls I've Been by Tess Sharpe

When seventeen-year-old Nora O'Malley, the daughter of a con artist, is taken hostage in a bank heist, every secret she is keeping close begins to unravel.

Winter’s Orbit, by Everina Maxwell, is an intricately plotted blend of space opera, court intrigue, and slow-burn romance. When the death of Prince Taam threatens to destroy a peace treaty that protects the Iskat Empire from alien invaders, the Emperor attempts to salvage the treaty by arranging for her grandson, Prince Kiem, to marry Taam’s widower, Count Jainan.

Girls of Paper and Fire paints a picture of a fantastical realm with animal people built on a caste system, with those at the bottom, those at the middle, and those at the top. Although this book appears at first to be a story of someone from the lowest caste falling in love with royalty, it is more so a story of the poorest getting revenge and rising up against tyranny. The world building in this book is excellent and reminds me a bit of Narnia mixed with various Asian cultures and royal aesthetic.

When Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves, opens, it’s 1867 and winter in Dove River,

An excellent and slightly supernatural story of revenge.

I'll Be The One by Lyla Lee

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Skye Shin has heard it all. Fat girls shouldn’t dance. Wear bright colors. Shouldn’t call attention to themselves. But Skye dreams of joining the glittering world of K-Pop, and to do that, she’s about to break all the rules that society, the media, and even her own mother, have set for girls like her.

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Ascendance of a Bookworm is a light novel series by Japanese author Miya Kazuki.