Category: General

4/5 Star Review: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

This book by Grady Hendrix came recommended to me by a good friend, and I’m so glad that I decided to pick it up even though it’s not my usual genre of choice. This book was absolutely brutal and graphic – but also well written. I think if people who read it couldn’t relate to the book, they might have a difficult time seeing it as ‘horror’. It was moving in a way that I can’t really put into words, and the author took some obvious pains to learn their subject. It really showed (I know this all sounds quite cryptic, but I don’t want to give away the plot of the book). I did feel that there were some ‘over the top’ moments, but it didn’t feel like it was ‘too much’ considering the subject. It was a fantastic read.

4/5 stars

September 2025 Wrap Up

It feels like I never read as much as I want to these days, but I did get through a few books in September, and started some new ones. I picked up Strange House when it was on sale from Kobo, this book started out on YouTube and was originally in Japanese, but has been translated. I’ll make sure to post the details about each book when I do the reviews, but coming as no surprise – This Inevitable Ruin, book 7 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. 5 stars. Absolutely. It was a heavy read, but so well done.

I’ve re-started Onyx Storm a few times now, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the other books in the series that I have read, but I’m glad I finished it. I am hoping to get back to making more time for reading soon, but the next few weeks are incredibly busy and don’t leave me with a lot of free time. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

April 2025 Wrap Up

It was a pretty good month as far as reading goes, with some fantastic 5 star reads (that’s always lovely) even if some were on the lower side. I read 5 books, for a total of 1,375 pages along with 26.97h of audiobook. Most of my reads were fiction (no big surprise there) with an even balance between digital and print. I spent a LOT of time listening to The Butcher’s Masquerade, this is a huge one but I hope to finish it in May. As always, the statistics and awesome calendar come from The Story Graph, which you can find me at as Stargrace.

Happy reading!

April TBR (hopefully)

I’ve been holding pretty steady this year with the books per month that I read, and I’m hoping to continue that for April (but as always, we’ll just have to see). I have 6 books on my TBR pile for this month. The very first one is my BBBC book read for the month, “Strange Beasts” by Susan J. Morris. Two of the books are audiobooks (one from the library, one I’ve purchased) which include The Butcher’s Masquerade and The Third Gilmore Girl. The Prisoner’s Throne is one that I was finishing up from March, and the other two books were random recommendations I threw in. I can’t wait to read them and explore these new worlds. What are you working on for April? Have any book recommendations? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy reading!

March 2025 Wrap-Up

The awesome March calendar graphic comes from The Storygraph, which I’ve been using almost exclusively this year. You can see that I read 7 books – was currently still reading one (I just finished it, but that will get added to April), and I DNF one book (let me state how much I love these statistics, I appreciate that The Storygraph lets me track DNF and even how many pages I read).

No 5 star reads this month, but there were still some great books covered. I’ve been getting the reviews added to my physical reading journal, which I (at the time of this post) still have not updated for April, but I hope to, soon. The calendar also shows me where I focused on reading vs. audio books, and I appreciate that. I’ve got a great line up of books to read in April, and I might actually get a blog post or two done about that, too.

Up next? I’m currently reading When the Moon Hatched, by Sarah A. Parker, and my audiobook of choice is The Butcher’s Masquerade (Dungeon Crawler Carl #5) by Matt Dinniman.

February Reading Wrap Up

It’s that time of the month where I go over how I did in my reading stats! That’s right, a new feature because I’ve never actually done a reading wrap-up before. Why not start now?!

The graphics are from TheStoryGraph which is my book tracking site of choice these days. If you’re into statistics, this is where you want to be. They even include a calendar of all your reading updates. Looking at February, I see it was another big month for books and I really hope that carries over into March, but if it doesn’t that’s alright too. I read a total of 7 books (29% of those were audio books, the rest were physical & ebooks) and my average rating was 3.57 – I only had one 5 star read, and that was ‘What I ate in One Year’ by Stanley Tucci.

I’ve decided moving forward I’d like to devote an entire spread to any 5 star books I read, mostly because I don’t often have a lot of 5 star reads, and I think it would be a neat little bit of creativity I could toss into my reading journal. I’m not 100% pleased with how the journal went this year, but I am determined to keep with it (as best I can) and then next year I can implement changes like moving to a square journal and organizing some things better. Right now the journal is a lot of statistics, and while I do love stats, I’d like a little more creativity to flow.

In January I read 6 books (I may actually backdate a post to represent this) which I also thought was a lot for me, but hey maybe this is the year for massive reading (so I can protect my mental health with all of the crazy that is going on in the world these days). I certainly have no complaints – and I really hope that March involves just as many (if not more) amazing reads.

Still Here – Still Reading

Despite the fact that I rarely ever make it to actually posting on this damn book blog of mine – I have been reading this year. A LOT in fact. I’ve even been keeping up with my reading journal for once (gasp). Which is what the picture above is from. It’s two spreads that I’ve included, one that shows new releases for 2025 that I’m looking forward to, and the other spread (well, now it’s outdated, but I’ll get to that in a moment) talks about all of the books that I’ve purchased.

BookOutlet.ca also just happened to have a $7.99 sale and it coincided with the removal of taxes (temporarily) on some items. Some items being books. So I purchased 7 brand new books for $50 total, including free shipping. I was incredibly happy when they showed up. Which books? I’ll have to talk about that in a future post.

In the meantime, enjoy the pictures of my reading journal spreads.

Why I Switched to a Kobo

I know there’s a lot of controversy right now regarding Amazon’s decision to no longer let you back up your kindle books to any non-kindle devices but that is not the main reason that I decided to swap over to Kobo. Let’s face it, the Kobo isn’t exactly any better in letting you explore outside their ecosystem. We’re basically ‘renting’ books, and we don’t really own them.

The main reason that I decided to opt for a Kobo instead of the Kindle that I’ve used faithfully for years now is because in Canada, you cannot borrow library books on your Kindle. The Kobo has exclusive rights. This year I’ve been reading a LOT of books that I borrowed from the library, both in audiobook and e-book format. I’ve been keeping track of the money I saved, and if you space your requests out, it’s really not so bad. My small library has a lot of popular books (not all of them, but a larger selection than I was expecting). Some of them I’ve been waiting to borrow since December (it’s now almost March) but again if you space them out – not so bad.

Anyway. It might have been chance that I decided on this exact moment to swap over, but the issues with Amazon re: downloads certainly didn’t help the situation, it just wasn’t my only reason.