Read Game Craft

A Peoples’ History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian Release Date: March 19, 2019. Preorder it here. Synopsis : In the tight-knit community known as Heaven, a ramshackle slum hidden between luxury high-rises in Bangalore, India, five girls on the cusp of womanhood forge an unbreakable bond. Muslim, Christian, and Hindu; queer and straight; they are full of life, and they love and accept one another unconditionally. Whatever they have, they share. Marginalized women, they are determined to transcend their surroundings.   When the local government threatens to demolish their tin shacks in order to build a shopping mall, the girls and their mothers refuse to be erased. Together they wage war on the bulldozers sent to bury their homes, and, ultimately, on the city that wishes that families like them would remain hidden forever. Source: Received an egalley from Algonquin A People...

I'm coming up to the end of my semester which is a relief. The most exciting part is that I'll finally have time to read! I'm also planning on finally playing some of the video games that the Internet and my boyfriend have been telling me to play for forever.  I thought I would share with y'all the books I'm most looking forward to reading as soon as my exams are over.  Also, for the sake of transparency, the links in this post are affiliate links to Amazon. These don't change the price for you, but I do get a percentage of the cost of anything you buy through the link. It would be great if you used these links, but please feel free to buy these books however you want or get them at your local library.  I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver May 28, 2019 Buy from Amazon When Ben De Backer comes out to their parents as nonbinary, they're thrown out of their house and forced to move in with their estranged older sister, Hannah, and her husb...

I have already read and loved Emery Lord's other books and The Names They Gave Us was no different. It delicately balanced the lighthearted moments of a summer camp book with gut-punching, emotional moments. All of the characters had deep and carefully created backstories, inner lives, and motivations. That can be very difficult to balance when dealing with an ensemble novel like this one, but Lord handles it masterfully. When you have a larger number of characters, it can get to a point where the characters don't feel as fully fleshed out and are more like decorative pieces, but this is not the case in Names .  Some of my favorite parts of the story were the times when our main group of counselors would spend their evenings off and build a campfire. This was their time to unwind and vent about their days. I really enjoyed these parts because they served as wonderful and natural spaces for character development. They were also some of the funniest and most heartwarming sc...

                                    Photo by  NeONBRAND  on  Unsplash In high school, I studied Creative Writing. This entailed writing and reading and talking about writing for three hours every day. After graduation, I purposefully took a break from writing. I still loved it, but I was so spent. I needed to give my brain room to breathe. That's part of why I'm not majoring in English or writing even though I love both subjects. I love psychology just as much and I wanted to learn new things. So for a while I didn't write anything for myself. I've never read as much as the year in like tenth grade where I read 108 books. Even after I graduated high school and had more time on my hands. I started working a lot and have never had that same time and I've also picked up new activities (gaming, knitting, watching things I never got to living in the woods) that take up time that could ...

When I first started this blog, my guidelines for the books I would read were that they would be by and about women. Hopefully, I would maximize the amount that the books I read would include and focus on characters who are also otherwise marginalized. Recently I've been thinking about how this limits me, but I'm still not really interested in writing about a bunch of straight, white guys. Luckily, Henry Montague (Monty) is only two of those things and Percy is only one. I've also been thinking about changing the name of my blog, but I have no idea what I would change it to. So if you have any ideas let me know. You can order it from Amazon  here . This book follows Henry Montague and his best friend Percy and Monty's younger sister Felicity as they embark on a Grand Tour of Europe. Along their way, they're supposed to drop Felicity off at finishing school in Marseilles. Their tour is turned on its head when Monty steals something he thinks is just a useless...

Since my list of books I was looking forward to in the Fall was so popular, I thought I'd make a list of books that I'm looking forward to coming out this Spring. Most of these will be coming out in March and April and might give you some ideas for books to read over Spring Break.  Obsidio by Amife Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (Releasing March 13) Obsidio is the third installment in The Illuminae Files.  While you could mostly read the second installment before the first, it seems that the third is best read after the first two. This is not official, but is my opinion based on the synopsis.  Synopsis (May be spoilers for 1&2) Kady, Ezra, Hanna, and Nik narrowly escaped with their lives from the attacks on Heimdall station and now find themselves crammed with 2,000 refugees on the container ship, Mao. With the jump station destroyed and their resources scarce, the only option is to return to Kerenza—but who knows what they’ll find seven months after the invasion?...

It's been a while since I've written a dedicated review post, so I feel like the fact that The Belles  has motivated me to write this already tells you how much I loved it. You should all go read it and go buy it now. I'd hoped to have a review up at its release date, but I'm in college and in midterms right now so things have been a bit crazy. Once I was able to dedicate some time to reading it though, I was able to read it in two or three sittings.  Synopsis: This is the official version and what you can find on Amazon, but I've shortened it because I think the full synopsis gives too much away and I'd recommend discovering it as you go along. Camellia Beauregard is a Belle. In the opulent world of Orleans, Belles are revered, for they control Beauty, and Beauty is a commodity coveted above all else. In Orleans, the people are born gray, they are born damned, and only with the help of a Belle and her talents can they transform and be made beautiful. B...

I would've preferred to have written this post a earlier in the month instead of almost halfway through, but I also figured that reading stories by and about black people should be limited to just this month. So I'd rather present this month as an opportunity to read and learn some new things and to continue that beyond just this month. If you only read one book off of this list this month you'll have plenty to read later as you go through the rest of the year. I also wanted to make sure I was sharing books by black authors because I and other white people have said enough and I'd rather take this as a chance to point you to the voices that you should lend an ear to. These authors are all doing really amazing things in literature and the world as a whole. I haven't read all of these because this list also serves as a reading list for me to educate myself. Dear Martin by Nic Stone Justyce McAllister is top of his class and set for the Ivy League—but none o...

This is going to be a round up of my favorite books, shows, and just general things of the year. I'm also going to include some of my hopes and goals for 2018.  Favorite Books of the Year The Star-Touched Queen  by Roshani Chokshi          This book was inspired by Hindu stories and tells the story of Maya who has been cursed by a bad horoscope her whole life. When she's 17, her father finally finds someone who is willing to marry her and she is whisked away to a kingdom like no other she has ever seen before.            The immediate description I think for this book is that it is absolutely beautifully written. The prose is gorgeously lyrical and richly written. Reading this book is a sensory experience like no other. I'm not someone who generally visualizes things as I was reading because that's not the way I think, but the details in this book were so beautiful and rich that I couldn't help but appreciate...

Now that it's getting into August and I start sophomore year of college in a few weeks, I'm looking forward to fall and winter. I'm looking forward to wearing sweaters, partially because last winter was so mild in Alabama that I barely wore any of the sweaters I got for Christmas. I'm also looking forward to some cozy fall reading. Not all books released in the fall are particularly autumnal, but some of them are and I love a good seasonal book. I'm sure I'll be rereading some of my cozy favorites (Harry Potter), but I'm also looking forward to some new books coming out this fall.  These are in no particular order, but I made sure they're all either very recently released or upcoming so that you won't have already read them. While I am trying to diversify my reading and read about important issues, these are all books I am genuinely planning on buying and reading. These are the ones I'm looking forward to the most: (photos and descriptions ...

I am certainly not an athlete and don't even watch or understand most sports, but I do sometimes fall victim to your usual high school athlete romance. Most recently, I've read Catching Jordan  by Miranda Kenneally, the first book of eight in her Hundred Oaks series. I wasn't sure I would like it but I did. I've also read books lately about swimming, gymnastics, and a few other sports. I'm also going to call ballet a sport here, because it is.  Catching Jordan  was my most recent sports-related read and I found it after reading Coming Up for Air . This one was about a girl playing high school football with dreams of becoming aI didn't know this was a series at first, but once I read the 8th book and enjoyed it, I decided I wanted to see what the other books were all alike. I wasn't sure I would like this one, because I have no interest in actual football, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I even found myself enjoying the book more as it...