Hoi!
It's the end of February, so it is time to show you guys the books that I bought and received for review.
I know you guys know the drill anyway, but I feel like I always need to explain it at the beginning just in case.
Alright, I've decided to start with poetry.
I went to a Pan Macmillan Christmas party a couple of months/weeks ago.
We did a quiz and my team won, so I had 10-pound book voucher.
I went to Foyles and got myself a copy of "Milk and Honey" by Rupi Kaur.
Rosianna actually talked about this in a video, put up quite recently, about how she read this and liked it,
and I want to get more into modern poetry.
I studied a lot of poetry for my literature course
so I'm reasonably familiar with the classics, but I want to read some new stuff.
This has lots of illustrations in it.
It's divided up into four parts: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing,
and it starts with this poem:
"my heart woke me crying last night
how can i help i begged
my heart said / write the book".
The next one is one that I am quite excited about.
I've also been working on it at my job, which is at Penguin.
And it is "Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls".
Oh my gosh, I've been looking forward to this being out for such a long time.
This book basically highlights a hundred amazing women from throughout history up until the modern day
and all the illustrations are done by different female illustrators from around the world.
It is so cool!
[It is] a collection of women that you will already have heard about and ones that you might not have heard about before,
and it goes from Michelle Obama to Astrid Lindgren, who was one of my favourite children's authors.
I'm actually going to read it like all the way through,
but it is also really good for just dipping in and out of if you need a bit of inspiration.
Let's continue the feminist theme with this new YA proof copy.
This is set in a world where there are just women and no men.
It's a coming of age story, main character is the teenage girl.
I read this amazing Dutch book when I was a kid, it is called "Children of Mother Earth".
It is set in society where women rule, and I remember reading that as like a 10-year-old and going 'What is this?'.
And obviously there's been quite a few, like, books experimenting with that topic
so I'm very curious to see how this tackles it.
Then, as you guys, know I love Garth Nix.
He wrote the Old Kingdom series.
But I've never actually read any of his stuff outside of that and he has a new book out called "Frogkisser",
which was very kindly sent to me by Hot Key Books.
Obviously this is great if you love fairy tales.
Fairy tales for me, sometimes I love them, sometimes I'm not that interested.
I'm really curious to see how I feel about this one.
Look at these end papers though, they're so, so gorgeous.
Also if I'm not mistaken, this one is probably for like slightly younger readers than The Old Kingdom series.
But yeah, I'm gonna try it out.
Next up, I have two books that both center around immigration.
First one is "American Street".
Now this is a YA book that I've seen so much about on Twitter.
It's not out in the UK, so I ordered it through the magic of the internet.
It's a story of a girl who comes to America from Haiti, and she's with her mom,
but her mother gets stopped by immigration, and so basically
it's about her sort of, I think, ending up living with her cousins
and having to deal with this whole new world by herself.
And the next one I have is "Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid.
You might recognise that name since he is the author of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist".
The opening of the description of the book is:
"In a city swollen by refugees, but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war,
two young people notice one another."
It seems to be like a combo of a love story and sort of a story of hope and compassion
And this is a bit that's kind of the most interesting:
"Rumours are spreading of strange black doors in secret places across the city,
doors that lead to London or San Francisco, Greece or Dubai."
I wonder if this also contains some magical realism, but I'll figure that out soon enough.
And I got this from Penguin as a review copy.
And then finally, I got this box in the mail, which says 'Let's talk about sex...'
And on the inside was Hannah Witton's book "Doing It".
Hannah Witton is one of my YouTube friends, if you haven't checked out her channel yet, definitely do.
This is her first book. She makes a lot of sex ed videos and that is the topic of this book as well.
I think it has a lot of like testimonials and letters from friends who have like different experiences in it as well.
So I'm very excited to give this read.
Alright, so that was my February book haul.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Links, as usual, will be in the description if you want to know more about any of these books.
If you've already read some of the books in this video, do let me know in a comment,
I'm always curious to hear what you guys think.
And I'll talk to you later!
Doei!