The Dos and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar – ARC Review

The Dos and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar

Series: N/A

Publisher: Dreamscape Media

Expected publication June 6, 2023

Genres: LGBTQIAP+,  Romance,  Teens & YA

Pages: 336

Format: ARC – Audiobook

Buy: Amazon

* Received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you very much! This doesn’t affect the review in any way. My opinions are, as always, my own.*

A pun-filled YA contemporary romance, The Dos and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar finds a teenage girl competing in a televised baking competition, with contestants including her ex-girlfriend and a potential new crush – perfect for fans of The Great British Bake Off and She Drives Me Crazy !

“Welcome to the first ever Junior Irish Baking Show!”

Shireen Malik is still reeling from the breakup with her ex-girlfriend, Chris, when she receives news that she’s been accepted as a contestant on a new televised baking competition show. This is Shireen’s dream come true! Because winning will not only mean prize money, but it will also bring some much-needed attention to You Drive Me Glazy, her parents’ beloved donut shop.

Things get complicated, though, because Chris is also a contestant on the show. Then there’s the very outgoing Niamh, a fellow contestant who is becoming fast friends with Shireen. Things are heating up between them, and not just in the kitchen.

As the competition intensifies , Shireen will have to ignore all these factors and more― including potential sabotage―if she wants a sweet victory!

This book is about Shireen, a Bangladeshi-Irish young girl competing in a Junior Irish Bake-off show!

It’s in general a coming of age story that includes “Mentions of racism and fatphobia, depictions of anxiety (specifically anxiety and panic attacks and spiraling thoughts), and online harassment” according to the author’s website.

Shireen is still hurting from a recent breakup with Chris and this show is the only thing that can put her in a good mood, until she knows she has to be paired with her ex!

Even with her heart broken Shireen is excited to get more attention to her parents’ donut shop and hopefully help her dreams come true!

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Books I’m Thinking of Buying!

Hi guys!

I was browsing my bookstore and taking inventory of every book that had a good synopsis so this is the list I made! Hope you like it and if you’ve read any of them please comment and say your opinion!

Also, all links lead to Goodreads!

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
• Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
• The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan
• Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
• Mika In Real Life by Emiko Jean
• Love Stories by Trent Dalton
• Yerba Buena by Nina Lacour
• The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
• Love & Saffron by Kim Fay
• The Summer Switch- Off by Beth Reekles
• Fake Dates and Mooncakes by Sher Lee
• The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
• Yours Mine Ours by Sinéad Moriarty
• Careering by Daisy Buchanan
• Things I Wanted To Say But Didn’t by Monica Murphy
• 99% Mine by Sally Thorn
• Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl by Brianna R. Shrum and Sara Waxelbaum
• Out of Character by Jenna Miller
• Forget Me Not by Alyson Derrick
• If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come by Jen St. Jude
• This is Gonna End in Tears by Liza Klausmann
• Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin

These is form the manga Store I visited, a lot of Junji Ito I have yet to read and some other finds!

• Blue Flag by Kaito
• Blood Lad by Yuuki Kodama
• Ramen Wolf & Curry Tiger by Emboss
• Polar Bear Café by Aloha Higa
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime by Fuse
• Yon & Mu by Junji Ito
• Tokyo Revengers by Ken Wake
• Fragments of Horror by Junji Ito
• Dissolving Classroom by Junji Ito
• Remina by Junji Ito
• Venus in the Blind Spot by Junji Ito
• Shiver by Junji Ito
• Deserter by Junji Ito
• Frankenstein by Junji Ito
• No.6 by Atsuko Asano
• Rose Versalles by Riyoko Ikeda
• Overlord by Kugane Maruyama
• Don’t Toy with Me Miss Nagatoro by Nanashi
• Forbidden Scrollery by Zun
• Burn the Witch by Tite Kubo

And these are some of the ones I checked online and am interested in buying!

• Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire
• Immortality: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz
• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
• Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
• The Tress Grew Because I Bled There by Eric Larocca
• Ever Since by Alena Bruzas
• Secretly Yours a by Tessa Bailey
• Unfortunately Yours by Tessa Bailey
• Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood
• Part of Your World by Abby Jimineez
• Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
• Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
• If it Bleeds b y Stephen King
• Florida by Lauren Groff
• Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
• All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages edited by Saundra Mitchell
• Fresh Ink edited by Lamar Giles
• The Measure by Nikki Erlick
• Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
• Trust by Hernan Diaz
• So Happy for You by Celia Laskey
• Mother Mother by Annie Macmanus
• People Person by Candice Carty-Williams
• Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

That’s it guys! Hope you enjoy adding some of these to your TBR and don’t forget to comment below if you’ve read any and what’s your opinion!

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh – Review

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Series: N/A
First published July 10, 2018
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Pages: 289
Format: Paperback
Buy: Amazon

It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

This is in my opinion, about a girl battling depression. With her parents dead and an inheritance that goes a long way, she starts abusing pills for sleep, or rather hibernate like she said. She wants to sleep for a year and wakeup rejuvenated, anew.

But pills don’t solve everything and she stars spacing out and loosing herself to them, including sleep walking and forgetting about everything she did while sleeping.

She has a friend who is toxic, a on-and-off boyfriend that is abusive and a psychiatrist that enables her to take pills.

This can’t end well or can it?

After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid – Review

After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Series: N/A
First published July 1, 2014
Genres: Romance, Fiction
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Buy: Amazon

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, comes a breath taking novel about modern marriage, the depth of family ties, and the year that one remarkable heroine spends exploring both. When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes. Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for? This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do is the story of a couple caught up in an old game-and searching for a new road to happily ever after. Don’t miss the new novel from Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto is Back, out now

Lauren and Ryan have been together for eleven years.

At first they’re madly in love. But just because a relationship starts off that way doesn’t mean it will automatically stay that way forever, especially when you let it go monotonous. It takes work. But they have been doing it all wrong, fitting and putting themselves first in all occasions instead of understanding each other.

When you get to this point, it’s really hard to go backwards.

That’s when Lauren and Ryan decide to take a year off from each other with no contact whatsoever, with the freedom to see other people.

Will they get back together or will time have made them realise they are better with someone else?

Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz – Review

Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz
Series: The Anatomy Duology
First published January 18, 2022
Genres: Historical Fiction, Gothic
Pages: 338
Format: Paperback
Buy: Amazon

Edinburgh, 1817. Hazel Sinnett is a lady who wants to be a surgeon more than she wants to marry. 

Jack Currer is a resurrection man who’s just trying to survive in a city where it’s too easy to die. 

When the two of them have a chance encounter outside the Edinburgh Anatomist’s Society, Hazel thinks nothing of it at first. But after she gets kicked out of renowned surgeon Dr. Beecham’s lectures for being the wrong gender, she realizes that her new acquaintance might be more helpful than she first thought. Because Hazel has made a deal with Dr. Beecham: if she can pass the medical examination on her own, the university will allow her to enroll. Without official lessons, though, Hazel will need more than just her books – she’ll need bodies to study, corpses to dissect. 

Lucky that she’s made the acquaintance of someone who digs them up for a living, then. 

But Jack has his own problems: strange men have been seen skulking around cemeteries, his friends are disappearing off the streets. Hazel and Jack work together to uncover the secrets buried not just in unmarked graves, but in the very heart of Edinburgh society.

A gothic tale full of mystery and romance about a willful female surgeon, a resurrection man who sells bodies for a living, and the buried secrets they must uncover together.

Hazel Sinnett is a 17 year old from a wealthy family living in Scotland in the early 1800’s.

She always wanted to became a physician/surgeon. But at the time such thing is unheard of. She is supposed to marry her cousin, the viscount’s son, and live the life of the Lady as she is supposed to.

She sneaks into a surgical presentation and decides that the only way is to impersonate her dead brother and pass her physician exams so she can finally be who she wants to be. There is a plague going around called the Roman Fever, and she hopes to find a cure for it.

Along the way, she meets Jack Currer, who is a “resurrection man”, aka someone who robs graves to sell the recently dead bodies to those practicing surgical techniques.

But grave robbery is difficult and one can do only so much with a dead body. That’s when people start missing, or appearing with wounds they don’t remember anything of. Someone is kidnapping the poor, knocking them unconscious, and practicing on them against their will, sometimes even leading to death.

The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson – Review



The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson
Series: N/A
First published May 3, 2022
Genres: Mystery, YA
Pages: 405
Format: Paperback
Buy: Amazon

Enter Iris Adams, Alice’s tutor. Iris has her own reasons for wanting to disappear, though unlike Alice, she doesn’t have the money or the means. That could be changed by the hefty reward Brooke’s grandmother is offering to anyone who can share information about her granddaughter’s whereabouts. The police are convinced Steve is the culprit, but Alice isn’t so sure, and with Iris on her side, she just might be able to prove her theory.

In order to get the reward and prove Steve’s innocence, they need to figure out who killed Brooke Donovan. And luckily Alice has exactly what they need–the complete works of Agatha Christie. If there’s anyone that can teach the girls how to solve a mystery it’s the master herself. But the town of Castle Cove holds many secrets, and Alice and Iris have no idea how much danger they’re about to walk into.

Alice belongs to Mains: a popular group of the school. Untill she’s dumped by her boyfriend who starts dating her best friend Brooke. After that, she disappears and comes back five days later as if nothing has happened.

Iris; belongs to Zones, a least popular group at school. Raised by her mother who is a bartender, barely making ends meet. She starts tutoring Alice to earn enough money to disappear because some THING is threatening her family.

When Alice’s ex friend Brooker is missing, the two girls team up to solve the mystery. Alice thinks the police isn’t doing enough and Iris needs the reward money, so it’s a win win.

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett – Review



The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
Series: N/A
First published October 8, 2019
Genres: Dystopia
Pages: 407
Format: Paperback
Buy: Amazon

THE RESISTANCE STARTS HERE.

No one speaks of the grace year.
It’s forbidden.
We’re told we have the power to lure grown men from their beds, make boys lose their minds, and drive the wives mad with jealousy. That’s why we’re banished for our sixteenth year, to release our magic into the wild before we’re allowed to return to civilisation.
But I don’t feel powerful.
I don’t feel magical.

Tierney James lives in an isolated village where girls are banished at sixteen to the northern forest to brave the wilderness – and each other – for a year. They must rid themselves of their dangerous magic before returning purified and ready to marry – if they’re lucky.

It is forbidden to speak of the grace year, but even so every girl knows that the coming year will change them – if they survive it…

A critically acclaimed page-turning feminist dystopia about a young woman trapped in an oppressive society, fighting to take control of her own life.

This book feels to me, like a mix of Handmaid’s tale and Lord of the Flies.

In this town, girls that complete 16 years old are banished to the wilds and they call it their “Grace Year”.

They have to do that in order to purge themselves of their dangerous “magic”. This magic is said to have the ability to seduce men, lure them to sin.

Once out in the wild, the girls need to survive the elements, evade the poachers who are looking to harvest their body parts, and try to not kill each other when they start going crazy.

One Night Only by Catherine Walsh – ARC Review

One Night Only by Catherine Walsh

Series: N/A

Publisher: Bookouture

Expected publication: July 30th 2021

Genres: Romance, Contemporary, Adult

Format: ARC

Buy: Amazon

* Received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you very much! This doesn’t affect the review in any way. My opinions are, as always, my own.*

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Who could have predicted this? Being at the same wedding. In Ireland. There’s a reason one-night stands are one-night stands. You’re not supposed to see each other again, especially not when you’re the maid of honor, and he’s the groom’s brother…

Sarah Anderson has never been more excited about anything in her life. She’s going to her best friend’s wedding. And not just any wedding. An Irish wedding. Goodbye New York, hello rolling green hills and men with beautiful accents and twinkling eyes.

But Sarah should have known that not all guests are fairy-tale princes…

There’s the chinless Uncle Trevor, whose idea of small talk is to claim climate change is a conspiracy.

Then there’s Great Aunt Eileen, who doesn’t talk at all (she’s too busy replacing the hotel cutlery with her own set).

Worst of all, there’s Declan Murphy. Best man. Brother of the groom. And the man Sarah last saw naked.

Is there anything more mortifying than bumping into a one-night stand halfway across the world? Especially as Declan seems determined to embarrass Sarah at every turn. At least when the wedding’s over she’ll never have to see him again.

But, back in New York, Sarah finds the more she tries to forget Declan, the more she can’t shake the thought of that infuriatingly charming smile and the way he wears a tux…

Was he really just for one night only, or might Declan Murphy be The One?

Prepare to laugh until you cry with this perfect feel-good romantic comedy about taking a chance on love. Fans of Sophie Ranald, Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes won’t be able to put this down!

This book gripped me from the very beginning! It’s so freaking fun! Sarah is Annie’s best friend and her maid of honor. She is incredibly excited about that and the fact that it’s going to be in Ireland! Except, when she gets there, the groom’s brother is her last one-night stand! And as if that wasn’t enough, he doesn’t leave her alone and keeps trying to embarrass her! Could it get any worse?!

I really enjoyed Sarah for how relatable she is. She is afraid of compromises due to a bad breakup and the divorce of her parents. So she opted for another way that would break her further – one-night stands. But this time things didn’t really go as planned. Enter, Declan! I freaking loved him. He is incredibly funny and easy going. You can see he has his demons but overall he has such a charming personality! I loved seeing them together bickering and learning about each other. I couldn’t stop reading and smiling for how cute it was.

I also really liked Annie’s and Sarah’s friendship. They were so important to each other and I could feel it through the pages. They are very different and that made it even more interesting. Sarah is forward and is not afraid of showing who she is and taking what she wants. While Annie is more shy and more cautious.

I loved that there was a lot more to their story than just the romantic aspect. It really made it not only more relatable with all that was happening but more exciting and complex. And I mean who doesn’t want to read about a big messy Irish family? I know I do.

I found the plot really interesting and although at times I could guess what was going to happen, it was still entertaining and a lot of fun! I really liked the humour and I laughed quite a bit with this one. Especially due to Declan! Did I mention I loved him??

The writing was easy and gripping and the development was just what I needed at the moment. It’s an easy and fun book full of drama, chaos and love, and I could totally see myself re-reading it.

Fave quote: “”We’re taking things slow”. “Have you slept with him?” “Of course,” she says, and reclines on her elbows “slow, not stationary”.”

What did you think of it? Have you read it? Let’s discuss it in the comments below!

The Dragon Festival by Katie O’Neill

The Dragon Festival by Katie O’Neill

Series: Tea Dragon #2

Publisher: Oni Press

Expected publication: September 17th 2019

Genres: Graphic Novel, Fantasy, LGBTQ+

Pages: 136

Format: ARC

Buy: Book Depository | Amazon

* Received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you very much! This doesn’t affect the review in any way. My opinions are, as always, my own.*

Rinn has grown up with the Tea Dragons that inhabit their village, but stumbling across a real dragon turns out to be a different matter entirely! Aedhan is a young dragon who was appointed to protect the village but fell asleep in the forest eighty years ago. With the aid of Rinn’s adventuring uncle Erik and his partner Hesekiel, they investigate the mystery of his enchanted sleep, but Rinn’s real challenge is to help Aedhan come to terms with feeling that he cannot get back the time he has lost.

No Sad Songs by Frank Morelli

 

No Sad Songs by Frank Morelli
Series: N/A
Publisher: Fish Out of Water Books
Published February 20th, 2018
Genres: YA, Realistic Fiction
Pages: 228
Format: Paperback
Buy: Book Depository | Amazon

Following a family tragedy, 18-year-old Gabe LoScuda suddenly finds himself thrust into the role of caregiver for his ailing grandfather. Between the shopping trips and the doctor visits with Grandpa, Gabe and his friend John try to salvage their senior year, meet girls, and make the varsity baseball team. It doesn’t take long for Gabe to realize that going to school and looking after a grandfather with Alzheimer’s is more work than he ever imagined. And when long-lost Uncle Nick appears on the scene, Gabe soon finds that living with Nick and Grandpa is like babysitting two grown men. Aside from John, the only person who truly understands Gabe is Sofia, a punk-rocking rebel he meets at the veteran’s hospital. When these three unlikely friends are faced with a serious dilemma, will they do what it takes to save Grandpa? If there’s a chance of preserving the final shreds of Grandpa’s dignity, Gabe may have to make the most gut-wrenching decision of his life—and there’s no way out.

* Was offered a digital copy* from the Author in exchange for an honest review. Thank you very much! This doesn’t affect the review in any way. My opinions are, as always, my own.* *I did buy the book myself