Always Me

Happy Tuesday everyone and welcome back to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish .  This week's topic is Beach Reads Week, which gives me a little leeway in what I want to do with it from great beach reads,  books I plan to read on the beach, beach reads for those who don't like typical beach reads, authors who are my go-to for beach reads, etc.  If you haven't already guessed, I don't normally go in for the typical "beach reads", so I'm going to list ten young adult books that are being released this summer that I'm the most interested in reading. June: Steeplejack ( Alternative Detective #1) by A.J. Hartley (June 14, 2016) - Set in an alternate version of Victorian South Africa with a great mystery and a diverse cast of characters.  Plus, just look at that cover! Mirror in the Sky by Aditi Khorana (June 21, 2016) - With the discovery of a Mirror Earth, nothing will ever be the same again on our Earth or i...

Welcome to the second stop of the Summer 2016 Review Train, a feature hosted by Brittany @ Space Between the Spines !  Today, I will be sharing my review of  Future Shock  ( Future Shock  #1) by Elizabeth Briggs , released April 1st, 2016, with you!  We have a lot of awesome bloggers and reviews to help get the Summer started!  Yesterday, Genni @ Ready, Set, Read kicked off the Train with her review of The Unexpected Everything  by Morgan Matson.  Tomorrow, the Train moves on to Laura @ Blue Eye Books  with her review of The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han, so be sure to follow it along it's track!  By the way, on Brittany's stop on the final day of the Train, June 8th, there will also be a giveaway, and who doesn't like a giveaway! ❋  ❋  ❋  ❋ Elena Martinez has to find a job before she turns eighteen or she will be homeless and on the streets when she ages out of the foster care system. She's deter...

Welcome back to Starting Sparks, a monthly writing link-up hosted by Emily @ Ink, Inc. and Ashley G. @ [insert title here] !  The idea behind it is to spark your creativity and write on a theme posted at the first of the month by the co-hosts.  You can write whatever you like be it a short story, a scene, a poem, a piece of dialogue, or simply an exploration of an idea.  This month the selected theme is the following: The Unexpected Lesson Today was shaping up to be one of those crazy days - the kind where everything that can go wrong does and with a vengeance - and it began with a phone call.  Unfortunately, I picked up on the first ring. "Jeez!  You still have a landline?!" I recognized the voice right away.  "No.  Not you.  Anyone but you." "I'm in shock - a landline! In 2016!" "Nick, first, how did you get this number; second, what do you want; and third, see you at school on Monday.  Bye."  I started to hang up th...

Happy Monday everyone and welcome back to Music Monday! Let's share some songs we've been enjoying lately!  If you would like to play and I really hope you do, please see the rules and link up below. Rules: Every Monday share one or two of songs you've been enjoying lately.  It doesn't have to be a specific genre, new, or one of your favorites - just something you'd like to share with others.  If possible, share a music or lyric video of the song and your thoughts on the song(s), artist(s), and/or music video(s). If you would like to participate in Music Monday, please join the link up by sharing your post's url. This week I'm spotlighting Dexys Midnight Runners.  These are the only two songs I really know by the group, but I love both of them. "Come On Eileen" (1982) - This is the most well known song by this group, at least in the US, and before I heard some of their other songs I thought they were a one hit wonder.  It turns out th...

❋  ❋  ❋ Twylla lives in the castle and is betrothed to the Prince, but she isn't a princess. In fact, she is the daughter of the Sin Eater and she is the Goddess embodied and acts as the royal executioner. She has poison in her veins and can kill with a single touch. Every month she kills the traitors to the crown - she's even been forced to kill her only friend. The prince, while immune to her poison because of his royal blood, actively avoids her - who could love a girl with murder in her blood. Her new guard, Leif, seems to be able to overlook the executioner and Goddess embodied and see the girl underneath. However, treasonous romance should be the least of their concerns because the queen has a plan to destroy her enemies that will require Twylla to make a huge sacrifice to protect her kingdom, that is, if she's not to busy thinking about her love story with Leif. The concept behind The Sin Eater's Daughter caught my attention from the moment I heard about ...

❋  ❋  ❋  ❋   The Regional Office and its superpowered female assassins protect the world from the forces of darkness and annihilation. Oyemi and her oracles find new recruits and uncover evil plots. Then, a prophecy suggests that someone from within the Regional Office will bring about its downfall - and before you know it the Regional Office is under attack! Rose, the leader of the attack, was recruited from a defector on the inside and she is eager to strengthen her powers and prove herself. Sarah, defending the Regional Office, may actually have a mechanical arm and is devoted to the organization that took her in after her mother's disappearance. On the day of the attack, Rose and Sarah will collide and the world just might end. The Regional Office is Under Attack! by Manuel Gonzales is a whole lot of fun and just plain awesome! It's incredibly imaginative with the right amount of crazy and a healthy dose of humor. Plus, it packs quite an adrenaline rush. ...

❋  ❋  ❋ Dr. Leviticus Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine was designed to mine through the Alaskan ice to reach the gold discovered before the days of the Civil War. Unfortunately, the first test run went south when his machine destroyed many blocks of downtown Seattle and released a deadly underground gas. This blight gas, as it would come to be called, would kill those who had been exposed to it for too long, and for some unknown reason those dead may also return as zombie-like creatures. Now, sixteen years later, a wall has been built around the still toxic city center sealing off the blight gas and the hungry, undead rotters. Just beyond the wall lives Blue, Leviticus's widow, with her son, Ezekiel, just managing to scrape by. Then, one day Ezekiel takes it into his head to rewrite history and prove that both his father and his grandfather weren't the men everyone thinks they were, even though he never met either of them. That means going into the walled ci...

❋  ❋  ❋  ❋   ❋ Emma Carstairs is one of the best Shadowhunters of her generation and together with her parabatai, Julian Blackthorne, they patrol a Los Angeles that is on the brink of war. When the bodies of humans and fairies are found with the same mysteries markings that Emma's parents were found dead with, an uneasy alliance is formed, giving Emma the chance for the revenge she's always wanted and for Julian to see his brother, Mark, again for the first time in years. Now, all they have to do is solve the murder in two weeks, and just hope the murderer doesn't make them the next target. Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare is the first book in her new series, The Dark Artifices , and it's an excellent return to the world of Shadowhunters. It has so much going for it! The characters are great additions to the world, from the leads to the supporting characters. Emma and Julian make great parabatai, and I really felt for them from beginning to end. I also liked ...

Welcome to The Friday 56, a weekly meme hosted by  Freda's Voice . These are the rules: 1. Grab a book, any book. 2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. 3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. 4. Post it. 5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda's most recent Friday 56 post. I'm also taking part in Book Beginnings, a weekly meme hosted by  Rose City Reader .  The rules are pretty simple - you share the first sentence or so and your initial thoughts, impressions, or whatever else it inspires.  Don't forget to link up your post's url with Rose City Reader. This week I'm spotlighting one of my current reads, Ink and Bone  ( The Great Library  #1) by Rachel Caine.  I'm not very far into it yet, but I'm loving it so far!  As a librarian and bookworm,  I simply can't resist the idea of the Great Library of Alexandria still being in existence!   Beginning: ...

Happy Tuesday everyone and welcome to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish !  This week's theme is Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed (less love, more love, indifference, etc.).  This week I'm narrowing it down books that I've read relatively recently that I now feel more or less indifferent about.  I initially gave each book a positive rating and/ or review, but now I can't quite exactly remember why I enjoyed them so much in the first place.  Maybe that's a sign that I should reread these books! Schizo by Nic Sheff The Darkest Part of the Forest  by Holly Black Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler The Lying Game by Sara Shepard I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Clause by S.G. Browne Rivers  by Michael Farris Smith The Shadows  by Jacqueline West Uninvited by Sophie Jordan Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close  by Jonathan Franzen Repossessed  by A.M. ...

Happy Monday everyone and welcome back to Music Monday! Let's share some songs we've been enjoying lately!  If you would like to play and I really hope you do, please see the rules and link up below. Rules:  Every Monday share one or two of songs you've been enjoying lately.  It doesn't have to be a specific genre, new, or one of your favorites - just something you'd like to share with others.  If possible, share a music or lyric video of the song and your thoughts on the song(s), artist(s), and/or music video(s). If you would like to participate in Music Monday, please join the link up at the bottom of this post by sharing your post's url. This week I'm spotlighting an artist I've really been enjoying on the radio for the last few weeks, Ben Rector.  I hadn't heard of him before "Brand New" started to get air time, but I'm really enjoying listening to his new album. "Brand New" (2015) - When I saw this performanc...

❋  ❋  ❋  ❋   ❋ I received a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review. Don't think that just because Amanda Lester is descended from Inspector G. Lestrade that she's interested in going into the family business. She wants to be a filmmaker, not a detective, although admittedly her film club isn't really coming together since her control freak tendencies are driving members away. Amanda's life changes dramatically don't give her any choice and suddenly enroll her in a boarding school for the descendants of well-known detectives - and it's halfway around the world in the United Kingdom. She resists as much as she can when she gets there, but once she and her new friends notice blood droplets and a strange pink substance in weird places she realizes she has to know what's really happening. Is it part of a real mystery or part of an elaborate class project the teachers assign each year? When Amanda's father goes missing and the school c...

Welcome to The Friday 56, a weekly meme hosted by  Freda's Voice . These are the rules: 1. Grab a book, any book. 2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. 3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. 4. Post it. 5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda's most recent Friday 56 post. I'm also taking part in Book Beginnings, a weekly meme hosted by  Rose City Reader .  The rules are pretty simple - you share the first sentence or so and your initial thoughts, impressions, or whatever else it inspires.  Don't forget to link up your post's url with Rose City Reader. This week I'm spotlighting one of my current reads, Future Shock ( Future Shock  #1) by Elizabeth Briggs .  This book was released this April 1st and I listed it as one of most anticipated YA debuts of 2016 .  All I needed to know to put this book on my tbr in the first place is that it features time travel!    ...

❋  ❋  ❋  ❋ Agent 093762 is moving up in the ranks in a world torn apart by war. Things are going well until a mission goes south and she's left for dead in an explosion. She quickly realizes that her partner was actually assigned to take her out and make it look like an enemy attack. Now, she finds herself on the run beyond the city, but hope isn't lost. She meets Logan, a man fighting his own demons and together they will try to accept their past actions and look toward the future for redemption. Redemption by Elora Mitchell is brutal and quite abrupt, but I was hooked every step of the way. It's a YA dystopian, but rather than dealing with revolution and regime changes it focuses on a girl who is running from her past as a part of that regime as an interrogator (read: torturer). Our main character's entire world has been has been torn apart and she has to rebuild her entire life - physically, mentally, and emotionally - on her path to redemption. Overall, I hi...

❋  ❋ Chased by the new king, a power-hungry and psychotic Maven, Mare sets out to find other Newbloods, plus recruit fellow Reds and Silvers not happy with the status quo, in order to build an army with enough strength to take out their oppressors. As Mare continues down this path, she is at risk of turning into the same kind of monster that she's willing to defeat. She will either shatter like a glass sword under the weight of her mission, or she will find that she has hardened her heart to the treachery and betrayal she has encountered first hand. I wanted to like Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard more than I did. Although, I wasn't completely impressed by Red Queen , the first installment in the series, I enjoyed it well enough. I couldn't resist the X-Men and The Hunger Games similarities. While Glass Sword retained some of the elements of both, more so of the X-Men in this case, it just didn't quite have what I liked about Red Queen . My favorites parts...

Happy Tuesday everyone and welcome back to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish .  The topic this week is Books I Picked Up On A Whim, but I've narrowed it down to books I've read on a whim.  Here we go, in order of date read beginning with the most recent: Last Rites  by Perry Michael Smith (March 19 - April 27, 2016) -  I found this novel at an antique show - how could I pass by a book with a cover like that? Unstoppable by Bill Nye (February 8 - 9, 2016) - I had no idea that Bill Nye was coming out with a new book until it showed up at the library - a great new non-fiction title.  I rarely read science books, but this one is worth it. Blur by Steven James (November 8 - 11, 2015) - A coworker had great things to say about this author and this novel - I picked it up knowing very little about it was pleasantly surprised by how much I, too, enjoyed it. Legacy of Kings  by Eleanor Herman (October 1 -5, ...