BookishlyFaith

I received an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review (Thanks!)  Guys, this book is so freaking WHOLESOME. There are so many scenes where the characters are baking and there were so many good pop culture references (i.e., Mean Girls, Gossip Girl, Taylor Swift). This is a YA rom-com filled with sugary descriptions and memes (yes they fall in love while making MEMES. If this isn't so 2019/20, IDK what is). It is a very sweet PG romance (if you care about the steaminess of the romance).  While this is an adorable love story, it does focus a lot on the characters figuring out what they want to do after high school. It also deals with family issues (specifically feeling like you're living in the shadow of your sibling and how to deal after a divorce).  Overall,  Tweet Cute  is a wonderful coming of age story perfect for teens today. It perfectly encaptures the current online landscape teens face while creating an adorable teen romance.

Rating: 4.5 stars.  I received an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. (Thanks!) I will admit, this book did stress me out a ton. Mei's life is quite stressful. She skipped a year in school, so she's a year younger than everyone else and is now starting college. Her parents want her to become a doctor but Mei loves dance and secretly dreams of running a dance school. She doesn't try to pursue this dream because her brother is a disappointment to her parents since he is going to marry an infertile girl. But when Mei meets Darren, he challenges her parents' ideas and encourages her to pursue her dreams. 

Rating: 4.5 stars.  I received an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. (Thanks!) I love this new wave of YA books set in college, mostly because I'm currently in university.  Emergency Contact is about these two college students who are each other's go-to person for random or deep conversation (i.e. Emergency Contact). Penny is just starting university and is distancing herself from her trying-to-be-cool mom. Sam just found out that his love-hate ex-girlfriend is pregnant. Penny and Sam meet when Sam has a panic attack and they both realize that they need a friend they can tell anything to. 

Rating: 4.5 Stars.  Super cute! Highly recommend it if you're looking for a diverse YA contemporary romance unlike anything you've ever read before. 

Rating: 3 stars The Night Circus is an experience! I'm not joking, Erin Morgenstern is amazing at making the reader feel like they are actually in the scene she is describing. Even though I read this book 2 months ago, I distinctly remember the descriptions of smells and sights of the circus the most. The smells of cotton candy and caramel corn are now Night Circus smells in my mind. The Night Circus follows the lives of Celia and Marco, two talented people who can do magic. Their guardians put them in a magical contest to the death and the circus is the setting of this battle.  But what the guardians did not count on was the length of this contest and the fact that the two contestants would start to fall in love. I did like this book, but I think it was overhyped by Booktubers for me. Every video I saw was people who were in love with this book, but I wasn't as in love with it. It could be that I read this book over a month instead of in like a week, but I felt k...

Rating: 1.5 stars.  I received an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for a honest review. (Thanks!) You know that feeling you get sometimes when you are watching a foreign film? The feeling that something of the importance that is happening is a bit lost on you because you're missing that context? That's sort of how I feel about this book. I would say that this novel was definitely unique, but I just wasn't knocked off my feet by it. I'm sure some people will like it, but I just don't think the writing was for me. Welcome to the Slipstream is about Van, a girl who moves a lot because of her mother's mental illness. Van's mom is a genius, but her mental illness makes her a bit difficult for people to deal with so she constantly changes jobs. The constant in Van's life is her surrogate grandmother, who helps to keep her mother sane. They move to Vegas, where Van discovers her dream of being in a band. But when her mother goes off to a self-help cult,...

Rating: 4 stars.  Are you sick of YA mystery novels yet? Had enough of stories whose plots revolve around a teenager going missing? Over Gossip-Girl like plots? Well, let me tell you, this book will actually blow your socks off because it has none of those things!  City of Saints & Thieves  is about Tina, a Congolese girl whose mother was murdered. Ever since, she has become part of a gang and is trying to get revenge for her mother's murder. But when she gets caught by someone from her past, she starts to question her mother's past and who she can trust. She must navigate the world of oil industry men to find out why her mother was killed.  The first awesome thing about this book is that it is set in Kenya. I have never read a book set in Africa and it was so interesting! The author is knowledgable in the field of refugees in Africa and it really shines through in her writing. There was one scene where the main character and her friends have to trav...