Review: Artemis by Andy Weir

This book is everywhere. It’s all over my Instagram. It’s all over my Twitter. It’s front and center in every bookstore in my city. It won for best Sci Fi on Goodreads. The cover is interesting, eye catching, and cool! The hype around this book is real. People are basically fighting to read this book.

So imagine my luck when I found it on the ‘Lucky Day’ display at my local library! I immediately check it out and was excited to see what all the fuss was about.

Sci Fi isn’t a genre that I read a lot of but I love science and space and I loved The Martian (film, I haven’t read the book yet). The hype (in that moment seeing it at my library) was real for me. I grabbed it and headed home to start reading.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Continue reading “Review: Artemis by Andy Weir”

Review: Murder on Astor Place (Gaslight Mystery #1) by Victoria Thompson

My mom has been after me for years to read this book series. She has repeatedly send me copies of this book via inter district mail on a regular basis and then constantly asks me when I am going to start reading it.

The series has also continued to pop up on my Goodreads recommended books page as well, so yes I had this book series on my TBR list for quite some time. I love all things gaslight and was excited when an opportunity arose that I could start it now rather than ‘someday’.

Mother dear, AKA my biggest fan, should be thrilled to see this one is being reviewed finally!

After a routine delivery, midwife Sarah Brandt visits her patient in a rooming house and discovers that another boarder, a young girl, has been killed. At the request of Sergeant Frank Malloy, she searches the girl’s room, and discovers that the victim is from one of the most prominent families in New York and the sister of an old friend.

Continue reading “Review: Murder on Astor Place (Gaslight Mystery #1) by Victoria Thompson”

Review: Hearts of Resistance by Soraya M. Lane

This if my first official book of 2018….the first one that I read and reviewed this year. I read Lane’s earlier novel, Wives of War, back in June and was really impressed with her ability to write interesting characters and a romance that I was invested in.

When Hearts of Resistance came up, it was an easy yes for me to review and I was thrilled to read it and see how Lane’s writing grew in the next book and what sort of romance was in store.

At the height of World War II, three women must come together to fight for freedom, for the men they love—and for each other.

When Hazel is given the chance to parachute into Nazi-occupied France, she seizes the opportunity to do more for the British war effort than file paperwork. Alongside her childhood friend, French-born Rose, she quickly rises up the ranks of the freedom fighters.

Continue reading “Review: Hearts of Resistance by Soraya M. Lane”

Review: The Lost Season of Love and Snow by Jennifer Laam

This is my first book review of 2018 and I couldn’t have picked a better book to kick things off with. Though I read this in 2017, I am ringing in the new year with love and snow!

There is something about Jennifer Laam’s writing that I find so lovely and elegant. It’s hard to describe but her books are consistently good and well written which made me all the more anxious to read this one!

At the age of sixteen, Natalya Goncharova is stunningly beautiful and intellectually curious. But while she finds joy in French translations and a history of Russian poetry, her family is more concerned with her marriage prospects.

It is only fitting that during the Christmas of 1828 at her first public ball in her hometown of Moscow she attracts the romantic attention of Russia’s most lauded rebel poet: Alexander Pushkin.

Enchanted at first sight, Natalya is already a devoted reader of Alexander’s serialized novel in verse, Evgeny Onegin. The most recently published chapter ends in a duel, and she is dying to learn what happens next. Finding herself deeply attracted to Alexander’s intensity and joie de vivre, Natalya hopes to see him again as soon as possible.

Continue reading “Review: The Lost Season of Love and Snow by Jennifer Laam”

Review: The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy #1) by S.A. Chakraborty

As 2017 comes to an end, I couldn’t ask for a better book to close out the year with.

This book was all over my Instagram feed for weeks and it was also on Book of the Month so it basically got a lot of hype. I was really hesitant because of the hype, but believe me when I say—the hype is real!

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles.

But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to accept that the magical world she thought only existed in childhood stories is real. For the warrior tells her a new tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire, and rivers where the mythical marid sleep; past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises, and mountains where the circling hawks are not what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass?a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

Continue reading “Review: The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy #1) by S.A. Chakraborty”