Waiting on Wednesday #67

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be participating in Waiting on Wednesday, and meme originally created by Jill @ Breaking the Spine. Jill hasn't been active for a while, so Tressa @ Wishful Endings has adopted it! If you see posts by the name of "Can't Wait Wednesday," it's the same thing!

The book I'm looking forward to this week is Bookish Boyfriends by Tiffany Schmidt!

In this contemporary YA, a teenager’s favorite literary heroes woo her in real life

The first of two books in an intended paperback original series about a girl whose classic literary crushes manifest in real life. Merrilee Campbell, 16, thinks boys are better in books, chivalry is dead, and there’d be nothing more romantic than having just one guy woo her like the heroes in classic stories. She’s about to get the chance to test these daydreams when she, her best friend, Eliza, and her younger sister, Rory, transfer into Reginald R. Hero High, where all their fantasies come true—often with surprising consequences.

Goodreads

My (very late) January Wrap Up!

Hello everyone and welcome back (or to!!) my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be going over the books I read this January! As per usual for me, I set my goodreads goal to 100 books. Even though I'm already behind (school has been tough, family has been dramatic), but I don't think I'm going to lower it. The year is still young, and I have plenty of opportunities to keep up!

This year, I'm going to be including movies that I have also seen in the month. I'll be linking them to my reviews (if I wrote them), just like I will link my book reviews to the books if I got a review up!

Without further ado, here are the books I read and the movies I watched this January!

Books

1) My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories, edited by Stephanie Perkins

2) Stay with Me by Mila Gray

3) You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon

4) Oblivion: A Lux Novel by Jennifer L. Amrentrout

5) Busted by Gina Cioccia

6) Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

7) Road to Eugenica by AM Rose

8) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Waiting on Wednesday #66

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be participating in Waiting on Wednesday, and meme originally created by Jill @ Breaking the Spine. Jill hasn't been active for a while, so Tressa @ Wishful Endings has adopted it! If you see posts by the name of "Can't Wait Wednesday," it's the same thing!

The book I'm looking forward to this week is Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi!

For Penny Lee high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she somehow managed to land a boyfriend, he doesn’t actually know anything about her. When Penny heads to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer, it’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind.

Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him.

When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to see each other.

Goodreads

Top Ten Tuesday | Books I've Decided I'm No Longer Interested in Reading

Hey everyone and welcome back (or to!) my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be participating in Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Until this 2018, The Broke and Bookish hosted the meme, so give them so love as well! :)

The topic of this week are books we are no longer interested in. I have a ton of these books. When I first joined goodreads, I basically just added any book that mildly piqued my interest to my to-read shelf. And now, it's a huge compilation of books I actually want to read, and others I haven't thought about it quite some time.

Without further ado, here are 10 books I have lost all interest in!

BOOK REVIEW | Our Dark Stars by Audrey Gray and Krystal Wade

Title: Our Dark Stars
Authors: Audrey Gray and Krystal Wade
Series? Yes, at least I assume so from the ending!
Pages: 316
Publication Date: March 6, 2018
Publisher: Blaze Publishing
Source: I received an e-galley of Our Dark Stars via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own. :) Thank you to Netgalley and Blaze Publishing!

While she sleeps, the whole universe changes.

Princess Talia Starchaser has it all. Wealth. Status. Adoring citizens. But on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she’s forced to publicly betray her best friend, a companion mock she’s had since birth, setting events into motion that lead to the destruction of the humans, and the princess floating through space, a remnant of a time when humans ruled over droids.

One hundred years later, half-mock captain Will Perrault and his ragtag crew discover a device floating in space. When a very human Talia emerges from its depths, Will suspects she’s the key to buying his way back into the regiment he once commanded against the last remaining rebel humans—and the ruling mock queen’s good graces.

Both Talia and Will would rather get space-tossed than trust one another, but with the queen’s forces chasing them across the galaxy and the fate of both worlds hanging in the balance, they’ll forge the unlikeliest of alliances to survive.

Goodreads 

Waiting on Wednesday #65

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be participating in Waiting on Wednesday, and meme originally created by Jill @ Breaking the Spine. Jill hasn't been active for a while, so Tressa @ Wishful Endings has adopted it! If you see posts by the name of "Can't Wait Wednesday," it's the same thing!

The book I'm looking forward to this week is Sanctuary by Caryn Lix!

Alien meets Alexandra Bracken’s The Darkest Minds in this thrilling debut novel about prison-guard-in-training, Kenzie, who is taken hostage by the superpowered criminal teens of the Sanctuary space station—only to have to band together with them when the station is attacked by mysterious creatures.

Kenzie holds one truth above all: the company is everything.

As a citizen of Omnistellar Concepts, the most powerful corporation in the solar system, Kenzie has trained her entire life for one goal: to become an elite guard on Sanctuary, Omnistellar’s space prison for superpowered teens too dangerous for Earth. As a junior guard, she’s excited to prove herself to her company—and that means sacrificing anything that won’t propel her forward.

But then a routine drill goes sideways and Kenzie is taken hostage by rioting prisoners.

At first, she’s confident her commanding officer—who also happens to be her mother—will stop at nothing to secure her freedom. Yet it soon becomes clear that her mother is more concerned with sticking to Omnistellar protocol than she is with getting Kenzie out safely.

As Kenzie forms her own plan to escape, she doesn’t realize there’s a more sinister threat looming, something ancient and evil that has clawed its way into Sanctuary from the vacuum of space. And Kenzie might have to team up with her captors to survive—all while beginning to suspect there’s a darker side to the Omnistellar she knows.

Goodreads

GIVEAWAY + BOOK REVIEW | Road to Eugenica by A.M. Rose (Blog Tour!!)

Title: Road to Eugenica
Author: A.M. Rose
Series? Yes, not sure how many
Pages: 285
Publication Date: Frebrary 5, 2018
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Source: I received an e-galley of Road to Eugenica via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Entangled Teen and Netgalley!

Two dimensions - And the girl who connects them.

Yesterday, Drea Smith couldn’t do anything spectacular—even walking and texting at the same time was a challenge. But today, she suddenly has more answers than Google, can speak and understand numerous languages, and she can fight. Like a boss.

Super freaky.

Drea has no idea where her encyclopedic knowledge has come from, but she’ll take it when she discovers someone out there knows her secret and wants her badly. And that they’ve been searching for her since she was born.

Since she was created.

With the help of her best friend Dylan, who just wants to keep her safe, and Maddox, a mysterious new boy who is prepared to get her answers, Drea will have to push her new skills to their limit as she uncovers nothing is quite what it seems.

As she uncovers…Eugenica.

Goodreads | Buy the Book!

Waiting on Wednesday #64

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be participating in Waiting on Wednesday, and meme originally created by Jill @ Breaking the Spine. Jill hasn't been active for a while, so Tressa @ Wishful Endings has adopted it! If you see posts by the name of "Can't Wait Wednesday," it's the same thing!

The book I'm looking forward to this week is Lizzie by Dawn Ius!

Seventeen-year-old Lizzie Borden has never been kissed. Polite but painfully shy, Lizzie prefers to stay in the kitchen, where she can dream of becoming a chef and escape her reality. With tyrannical parents who force her to work at the family’s B&B and her blackout episodes—a medical condition that has plagued her since her first menstrual cycle—Lizzie longs for a life of freedom, the time and space to just figure out who she is and what she wants.

Enter the effervescent, unpredictable Bridget Sullivan. Bridget has joined the B&B’s staff as the new maid, and Lizzie is instantly drawn to her artistic style and free spirit—even her Star Wars obsession is kind of cute. The two of them forge bonds that quickly turn into something that’s maybe more than friendship.

But when her parents try to restrain Lizzie from living the life she wants, it sparks something in her that she can’t quite figure out. Her blackout episodes start getting worse, her instincts less and less reliable. Lizzie is angry, certainly, but she also feels like she’s going mad…

Goodreads

BOOK REVIEW | American Panda by Gloria Chao

Title: American Panda
Author: Gloria Chao
Series? No
Pages: 320
Publication Date: February 6, 2018
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Source: I received an e-galley of American Panda via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review! Thank you! All thoughts and opinions are my own. :)

An incisive, laugh-out-loud contemporary debut about a Taiwanese-American teen whose parents want her to be a doctor and marry a Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer despite her squeamishness with germs and crush on a Japanese classmate.

At seventeen, Mei should be in high school, but skipping fourth grade was part of her parents' master plan. Now a freshman at MIT, she is on track to fulfill the rest of this predetermined future: become a doctor, marry a preapproved Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer, produce a litter of babies.

With everything her parents have sacrificed to make her cushy life a reality, Mei can't bring herself to tell them the truth--that she (1) hates germs, (2) falls asleep in biology lectures, and (3) has a crush on her classmate Darren Takahashi, who is decidedly not Taiwanese.

But when Mei reconnects with her brother, Xing, who is estranged from the family for dating the wrong woman, Mei starts to wonder if all the secrets are truly worth it. Can she find a way to be herself, whoever that is, before her web of lies unravels?

Goodreads 

Mini Movie Reviews | Call Me By Your Name, Happy Death Day, Paddington

Hi everyone and welcome back (or to!) my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be doing some movie reviews. And maybe your seeing this and thinking "Another set of movie reviews?" But I have an answer! I LOVE movies. Just like reading, they transport me to another world and I love how movies can make me feel. Movies are a close second to the passion I have for young adult fiction, and I'm either reading or watching movies in my free time now.

So there will be more movie reviews this year! I hope you like them, because I want to share my passion and I love talking and reviewing them!!

Without further ado, here are some reviews of the three movies I saw this January weekend. (I saw three movies in the span of two days, and it was amazing)

Call Me By Your Name
Release Date: November 24, 2017 (limited) January 19, 2018 (wide)
Run Time: 2 hours, 12 minutes
Genre: Drama/Romance (Coming of age gay romance!)
Rating: R

I've been wanting to watch Call Me By Your Name since it's release, and once the movie got Oscar nominations, it started to play at some local theaters in my hometown! So when I went home for the weekend, I knew I had to watch it, and I'm so happy and thankful I did. 

If you don't know what Call Me By Your Name is about, it takes place during the summer of 1983 somewhere in Italy. Elio (a 17 year old) and his family go to Itlay for the summer and holidays, and during the summer his father brings a graduate student to help with his research. This year, the graduate student is Oliver, and a love story ensues between him and Elio.

When I came out of the theaters, I knew I liked the movie. It took me until the next morning though to realize that I loved the movie. Since then, I cannot stop thinking about it and I've been replaying the movie in my mind. Every person I have seen today, I have somehow brought this film up. I probably won't have the opportunity to see this in theaters again, but I cannot wait to to own this! The romance is done so well, and it builds so slowly to the point where even a brush of hands meant something. There was so much tension and I was completely invested in their relationship.

Call Me By Your Name is achingly beautiful. The location of the film, a small town in Italy, perfectly encapsulates this finite and perfect summer. Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer are marvelous as Elio and Oliver, and so was Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Elios father. This movie and everyone working on it deserve the praise and awards they receive. Honestly, I have no words to encapsulate how much I love this movie.

I give Call Me By Your Name an A+.

BOOK REVIEW | Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Title: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
Author: Becky Albertalli
Series? No, but there are books about other characters in here!
Pages: 303
Publication Date: April 7, 2015
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Source: I checked out the hardcover edition at my local library!

Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now Simon is actually being blackmailed: if he doesn’t play wingman for class clown Martin, his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing, will be compromised.

With some messy dynamics emerging in his once tight-knit group of friends, and his email correspondence with Blue growing more flirtatious every day, Simon’s junior year has suddenly gotten all kinds of complicated. Now, change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out—without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met.

Goodreads