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Top Ten Tuesday: Hilarious Book Titles

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger Books2 Comments on Top Ten Tuesday: Hilarious Book Titles
Top Ten Tuesday: Hilarious Book Titles

You might have noticed that posts from me recently have been a little sporadic again. A book slump combined with working has slowed me down a little, but I’m working on it. Fortunately, this week’s Top Ten Tuesday tickled my fancy haha!

The Top Ten Tuesday tag was originally created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now held over on The Artsy Reader Girl. It’s a weekly tag where everyone is given a bookish prompt for bloggers to curate a top ten list. You can then share your blog post over on The Artsy Reader Girl’s post for that week. Just make sure you check out and comment on other people’s blog posts too!

This week we’re to share ten hilarious book titles. I haven’t read all these books, but they are all scattered across my house. Some belong to my sister, some to me. Honestly, I probably could’ve just gone through a list of light novels for this one. They have some ridiculous titles. Some of these might not be laugh-out-loud funny, but they do make me grin whenever I see them. I’m just going to list the titles this time as for some of them, that’s literally all I know. But the titles are random enough that if you’re curious, you should easily be able to give them a search. So let’s do this!

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Adult, ARC, blog tour, books, Review

Blog Tour: Time After Time by Louise Pentland

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger BooksLeave a Comment on Blog Tour: Time After Time by Louise Pentland
Blog Tour: Time After Time by Louise Pentland

I’ve read a few chick-lit novels in the past with time travel as a premise. It’s usually a lot of fun, and Time After Time sounded like no exception. I hadn’t read Louise Pentland before, so I was excited to try. I was lucky enough to get a proof of this from Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Tours. Thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this tour. I’m so glad I had a chance to read this early.

Tabby is stuck. Every day is the same, and though she happy’s about where she is in life most of the time…sometimes she wishes she could go back and start over. When she meets a free spirit called Bea, she gets a chance to see her life in a different light and wants to be more like her. Only it’s clear that when she’s with Bea…she’s been transported back to the 1980s. Torn between the past and her present, Tabby needs to figure out who she is and what she wants from life.

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ARC, books, Review, Young Adult

Book Review: The Drowned Woods by Emily Lloyd-Jones

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger Books4 Comments on Book Review: The Drowned Woods by Emily Lloyd-Jones
Book Review: The Drowned Woods by Emily Lloyd-Jones

I was so lucky to be sent an early copy of this book. The team at Hodder and Stoughton were offering limited proofs to Welsh bookish content creators. I’m not Welsh, but I am very interested in the fae, and Celtic folktales and lore. Whilst we see a lot of Scottish-inspired fae stories, we don’t tend to see Welsh or Irish. I mentioned all this in my request email, and I was sent an early finished copy! So thank you so much to the publisher. I adored this book as much as I expected I would, and I have a lot that I’m going to go into.

I’m labelling this post a review, but I’m also going to take this chance to talk about the use of folklore and fae in this book. I want to dive into some of the legends that were mentioned and just talk about whether I’d heard of them or not and tell you a bit about them.

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Adult, ARC, books, Review

Book Review: The Do-Over by Sharon M. Peterson

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger BooksLeave a Comment on Book Review: The Do-Over by Sharon M. Peterson
Book Review: The Do-Over by Sharon M. Peterson

I’ve been in a chick-lit and romance mood recently, so when I saw The Do-Over on Netgalley I thought…why not give this one a go? It sounded cute and like a fast read. I got exactly what I wanted from this book.

Perci was just dumped by her boyfriend on the radio. On New Year’s Eve. Spending the night with her best friend, it’s decided that she needs to try something different. This year she won’t date, she won’t try to please her mother, and she won’t attempt to lose weight, among other things. She’s not sure she can do it. Yet in an attempt to complete one of them, she lies to her family pretending that she’s dating her next-door neighbour. When he finds out, he agrees to play along. What could possibly go wrong?

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anticipated releases, books, Will I Like This Book?, Young Adult

Will I Like This Book? – The Agency For Scandal by Laura Wood

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger BooksLeave a Comment on Will I Like This Book? – The Agency For Scandal by Laura Wood
Will I Like This Book? – The Agency For Scandal by Laura Wood

I’ve definitely been picking up more historical books recently. I’m slowly finding more that I enjoy set in the past, and this is another one that I’m excited about. There were ARCs of this available at YALC that I didn’t win, but I did pick up a sampler that included this book in it. The moment that I finished this sample, I emailed the publisher asking for an ARC in the hope they had more. It doesn’t sound like they did, so I’ll just have to wait. Sigh. I’m definitely going to read this book as soon as I can.

The Agency for Scandal follows eighteen-year-old Isobel, a young woman who is trying hard to hide from the society that her family is penniless. She works with a women’s detective agency to right wrongs and digs up scandals about the powerful men who deserve to be bought down. What she doesn’t expect is that one day a case will tangle her up with the Duke she’s been nursing a crush on, who doesn’t seem to know she exists. It’s coming out from Scholastic in January 2023.

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books, Will I Like This Book?, Young Adult

Will I Like This Book? – This Book Kills by Ravena Guron

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger Books2 Comments on Will I Like This Book? – This Book Kills by Ravena Guron
Will I Like This Book? – This Book Kills by Ravena Guron

I wrote about going to YALC last week, and one of the opportunities this afforded me was to gather up so many book samplers. I don’t pick up samplers in book shops too often, so it was nice to get the opportunity to preview a few more books.

One of the samplers I picked up was for Usborne. It wasn’t a big sampler, and there were previews for a few different books. The one that interested me the most is the one I’m going to talk about today.

This Book Kills is a YA thriller coming out in January 2023. It’s UKYA, something that I know I do not read enough of. In this book, we follow Jess, a scholarship student who winds up the focus of an investigation when a popular boy from her school winds up dead. Killed in the exact way a character in her short story was. When she receives a mysterious text thanking her for the inspiration, Jess knows she’ll have to solve this mystery soon. If not, she could wind up dead too.

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ARC, books, Review, Young Adult

Book Review: This Vicious Grace by Emily Thiede

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Book Review: This Vicious Grace by Emily Thiede

Hodder and Stoughton publish some seriously amazing YA fantasy. This Vicious Grace is no exception. I’ve been excited about this book for a while and I was lucky to get an e-arc from NetGalley. But I did wait until I got my Fairyloot edition to read it physically. I’m glad I did, as this was an amazing book I raced through, so I’m happy I have a beautiful copy.

This Vicious Grace follows Alessa, a young woman whose gift from the gods means that with the right partner, she can use their powers to defeat the evil coming. But she’s killed three possible partners so far. The people are starting to believe that the only way to save them could be to kill her. In response, Alessa hires a guy from the streets, Dante, to be her bodyguard. As she spends time with him, she begins to fall for him and realises that he might actually help her survive this all.

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Adult, ARC, books, Review

Book Review: The Book of Gothel by Mary McMyne

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger Books2 Comments on Book Review: The Book of Gothel by Mary McMyne
Book Review: The Book of Gothel by Mary McMyne

It really is no secret that I adore fairytale retellings. I’m always seeking them out, and the recent trend of retellings from the villain’s perspective, like Malice or Little Thieves, has made me very happy. When I discovered The Book of Gothel, I knew it was another book I needed to read. Fortunately, Nazia from Orbit was kind enough to send me an early copy.

The Book of Gothel follows the story of Haelwise, a girl who, on the death of her mother, stumbles upon a hidden tower named Gothel. There she discovers she is magic and befriends a pregnant girl called Rika. This tower is both of their havens until something happens that sets Haelwise off on a journey to reveal secrets people would kill for.

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ARC, books, Review, Young Adult

Book Review: A Little Bit Country by Brian D. Kennedy

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger BooksLeave a Comment on Book Review: A Little Bit Country by Brian D. Kennedy
Book Review: A Little Bit Country by Brian D. Kennedy

A cutesy queer YA romance is the perfect summer read for me, so what better way to greet the sun than with A Little Bit Country. This is Brian D. Kennedy’s debut novel and everything you could hope for. I was lucky enough to get a physical proof of this through the Harper360 newsletter, and I positively devoured it.

A Little Bit Country follows Emmett and Luke, two boys who couldn’t be more different. Emmett wants to be country music’s biggest gay superstar, and Luke has issues with the genre stemming from his family. When both wind up working at Wanda World, an amusement park owned and run by country sensation Wanda Jean, they wind up exploring their attraction. But as Luke’s family secrets come to light, they must work together to figure out what they need to do for the best.

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Adult, books, Young Adult

Try A Chapter Tag

by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger BooksLeave a Comment on Try A Chapter Tag
Try A Chapter Tag

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these! My last post like this was over a year ago now. I might try to do one of these every few months with a different challenge. It might help me weed out some of the books I’m no longer interested in, and it’s also just a lot of fun!

Today’s books were all picked for me by other people. I asked two family members and two friends to pick a book for me off owned TBR shelf on GoodReads. I didn’t know which books any of these guys would pick, and I was pleased when three of them picked out books that I’d owned for a while. The fourth book was a more recent purchase but is also the most anticipated release on this list. So it’s a good mix there.

Genre-wise…this list is all fantasy. I do own a lot of fantasy books, so this wasn’t a huge surprise. But it would have been nice to have a little something else on there. Especially when two of the books are very political fantasies involving marriages…yeah.

I will say that I mostly had good luck with this pile. So let’s get started!

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