TOUR / REVIEW: Unnecessary Drama by Nina Kenwood

**I received an ARC from the publisher through Netgalley for this blog tour. These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.**

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Book: Unnecessary Drama by Nina Kenwood

Release Date: August 8, 2023

My Rating: 4 stars

Rep: sapphic side characters

CW: anxiety, mentions of alcoholism

Summary: From the award-winning author of It Sounded Better in My Head comes a deliciously entertaining enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy about two high school nemeses who end up sharing a house together their first year of college

Eighteen-year-old Brooke is the kind of friend who not only remembers everyone’s birthdays, but also organizes the group present, pays for it, and politely chases others for their share. She’s the helper, the doer, the maker-of spreadsheets. She’s the responsible one who always follows the rules—and she plans to keep it that way during her first year of college.

Her student housing only has one rule: “no unnecessary drama.” Which means no fights, tension, or romance between roommates. When one of them turns out to be Jesse, her high-school nemesis, Brooke is determined she can handle it. They’ll simply silently endure living together and stay out of each other’s way. But it turns out Jesse isn’t so easy to ignore.

With Unnecessary Drama, Nina Kenwood perfectly captures the experience of leaving home for the first time, dealing with the unexpected complications of life, and somehow finding exactly what you need.

REVIEW: The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer

**I received an ARC from the publisher through Netgalley. These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.**

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Book: The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer

Release Date: May 23, 2023

My Rating: 3.5 stars

Rep: lesbian protagonist and side characters

Summary: Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. Chatty, confident Clara from down the hall, who wants to be her friend; intense, determined Rachel from her poetry class, who is going to be a writer. Natalie doesn’t know what she wants. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone, who that someone even is.

Just as she is trying to find her footing, she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her. Natalie is drawn magnetically into Nora’s orbit. She begins spending more and more of her time off-campus at Nora’s perfect home living in her beautiful, quiet world. She lies to her floormates about her absence, inventing a secret boyfriend called Paul, and carefully protects this intimate, sacred adulthood she is building for herself. But when it becomes clear that Nora is lying, too, her secrets begin to take an insidious shape in Natalie’s life, even as Natalie tries to look away. What, or who, is Nora hiding?

REVIEW: See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon

**I received an ARC from the publisher (thank you, Simon Teen!). These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.**

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Book: See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Release Date: May 17, 2022

My Rating: 3.75 stars

Rep: plus-size Jewish main character, Jewish Japanese-American love interest; (Jewish author)

CW: PTSD, panic attacks, past sexual harassment, past bullying, mentions of drug addiction

Summary: From the author of Today Tonight Tomorrow comes a magical romance in the vein of Groundhog Day about a girl forced to relive her disastrous first day of college—only to discover that her nemesis is stuck in the time loop with her.

Barrett Bloom is hoping college will be a fresh start after a messy high school experience. But when school begins on September 21st, everything goes wrong. She’s humiliated by the know-it-all in her physics class, she botches her interview for the college paper, and at a party that night, she accidentally sets a frat on fire. She panics and flees, and when she realizes her roommate locked her out of their dorm, she falls asleep in the common room.

The next morning, Barrett’s perplexed to find herself back in her dorm room bed, no longer smelling of ashes and crushed dreams. It’s September 21st. Again. And after a confrontation with Miles, the guy from Physics 101, she learns she’s not alone—he’s been trapped for months.

When her attempts to fix her timeline fail, she agrees to work with Miles to find a way out. Soon they’re exploring the mysterious underbelly of the university and going on wild, romantic adventures. As they start falling for each other, they face the universe’s biggest unanswered question yet: what happens to their relationship if they finally make it to tomorrow?

LIST: pick an emoji and i’ll rec you a 2022 release (pt. 2)

We’re back with another “pick an emoji” post! I had a lot of fun with this one in particular; there are just so many great releases and emojis that pair perfectly with them. You know the drill at this point: pick an emoji and I’ll recommend you a 2022 release from April through June!

As usual, adult releases are marked as such; also, the emojis aren’t spoiler-y and are mostly attuned to the cover or the general summary of the book.

You can view all previous posts in this series here.

REVIEW: Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

**I received an ARC from the publisher through Netgalley. These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.**

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Book: Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

Release Date: April 5, 2022

My Rating: 3.5 stars

Rep: Chinese-American protagonists, lesbian Chinese-American protagonist, wlw Chinese-American protagonist, Chinese side characters; (Chinese-American author)

Summary: Ocean’s Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums, about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity.

History is told by the conquerors. Across the Western world, museums display the spoils of war, of conquest, of colonialism: priceless pieces of art looted from other countries, kept even now.

Will Chen plans to steal them back.

A senior at Harvard, Will fits comfortably in his carefully curated roles: a perfect student, an art history major and sometimes artist, the eldest son that has always been his parents’ American Dream. But when a shadowy Chinese corporation reaches out with an impossible—and illegal—job offer, Will finds himself something else as well: the leader of a heist to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures, looted from Beijing centuries ago.

His crew is every heist archetype one can imagine—or at least, the closest he can get. A conman: Irene Chen, Will’s sister and a public policy major at Duke, who can talk her way out of anything. A thief: Daniel Liang, a premed student with steady hands just as capable of lockpicking as suturing. A getaway driver: Lily Wu, an engineering student who races cars in her free time. A hacker: Alex Huang, an MIT dropout turned Silicon Valley software engineer. Each member of his crew has their own complicated relationship with China and the identity they’ve cultivated as Chinese Americans, but when Will asks, none of them can turn him down.

Because if they succeed? They earn fifty million dollars—and a chance to make history. But if they fail, it will mean not just the loss of everything they’ve dreamed for themselves but yet another thwarted attempt to take back what colonialism has stolen.

With poetic language, a fun, commercial hook, and a plot that spans the Western world, Portrait of a Thief is both a cultural heist and an examination of the Chinese American identity, as well as a necessary critique of the lingering effects of colonialism that readers won’t want to miss.

SONG SATURDAY: book recs + my top songs of 2021

It’s that time of the year: time to pair some of my most listened to songs this year with books! Like last year’s post, it was a bit difficult to pair my top 10 songs with books…and most of my top 100 honestly because the list was almost entirely BTS. I’m also reserving some of these songs for my next “BTS songs + books” posts, so I reused a couple from the first post, as well as some songs from the playlists I’ve posted this year.

This year, I hand-picked a few songs from my top 100 songs, as well as a couple of songs from my top 10 albums. So, the name of this post is a bit of a misnomer, but sometimes you have to do it for the quality of the book recs lol. Anyways, here are my top songs of 2021 paired with books!

LIST: pick an emoji and i’ll rec you a 2021 release (pt. 4)

We’re in the last quarter of the year, so that means the last post in this series for this year: pick an emoji and I’ll recommend you a 2021 release from October through December! You can see the other posts from this year here: part 1 (January through March), part 2 (April through June), and part 3 (July through September).

As always, adult and new adult releases are marked as such; also, the emojis aren’t spoiler-y and are mostly attuned to the cover or the general summary of the book.

REVIEW: The Donut Trap by Julie Tieu

**I received an ARC from the publisher through Netgalley. These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.**

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Book: The Donut Trap by Julie Tieu

Release Date: November 2, 2021

My Rating: 5 stars

Rep: Chinese-Cambodian-American protagonist and side characters, Chinese-American love interest, Vietnamese-American side character; (Chinese-Cambodian-American author)

Summary: Julie Tieu sparkles in this debut romantic comedy, which is charmingly reminiscent of the TV show Kim’s Convenience and Frankly in Love by David Yoon, about a young woman who feels caught in the life her parents have made for her until she falls in love and finds a way out of the donut trap.

Jasmine Tran has landed herself behind bars—maple bars that is. With no boyfriend or job prospects, Jasmine returns home to work at her parents’ donut shop. Jasmine quickly loses herself in a cyclical routine of donuts, Netflix, and sleep. She wants to break free from her daily grind, but when a hike in rent threatens the survival of their shop, her parents rely on her more than ever.

Help comes in the form of an old college crush, Alex Lai. Not only is he successful and easy on the eyes, to her parents’ delight, he’s also Chinese. He’s everything she should wish for, until a disastrous dinner reveals Alex isn’t as perfect as she thinks. Worse, he doesn’t think she’s perfect either.

With both sets of parents against their relationship, a family legacy about to shut down, and the reappearance of an old high school flame, Jasmine must scheme to find a solution that satisfies her family’s expectations and can get her out of the donut trap once and for all.

REVIEW: One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

**I received an ARC from a giveaway (thank you, St. Martin’s Press!). These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.**

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Book: One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

Release Date: June 1, 2021

My Rating: 4.5 stars

Rep: bisexual protagonist with anxiety, Chinese-American lesbian love interest, gay side character, Black sapphic side character, Black gay side character, Puerto-Rican-American trans side character, Black pansexual side character

Summary: From the New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue comes a new romantic comedy that will stop readers in their tracks…

Cynical twenty-three-year old August doesn’t believe in much. She doesn’t believe in psychics, or easily forged friendships, or finding the kind of love they make movies about. And she certainly doesn’t believe her ragtag band of new roommates, her night shifts at a 24-hour pancake diner, or her daily subway commute full of electrical outages are going to change that.

But then, there’s Jane. Beautiful, impossible Jane.

All hard edges with a soft smile and swoopy hair and saving August’s day when she needed it most. The person August looks forward to seeing on the train every day. The one who makes her forget about the cities she lived in that never seemed to fit, and her fear of what happens when she finally graduates, and even her cold-case obsessed mother who won’t quite let her go. And when August realizes her subway crush is impossible in more ways than one—namely, displaced in time from the 1970s—she thinks maybe it’s time to start believing.

Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop is a sexy, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.

LIST: pick an emoji and i’ll rec you a 2021 release (pt. 2)

Here we go again: pick an emoji and I’ll recommend you a 2021 release from April through June! You can see part 1 (January through March releases) here.

As always, adult releases are marked as such; as usual, the emojis aren’t spoiler-y and are mostly attuned to the cover or the general summary of the book.