 Hey guys it's Julia and welcome back to my channel and for today's video I'm going to be doing another recent Reads video. I'm wondering Julia what are you wearing? This is my it's ice nine kills rain jacket thing, my boyfriend got this for me a while back. I haven't worn it yet but it's so cool and it has pennywise on the back. But it has pennywise on the back. I don't know if you can see that but yeah it has pennywise on the back. I'm really excited about it. I think it looks cute, we're working it. So today I have about six books to talk about some being graphic novels, one a few being arcs and things like that. So let's jump right into it. First book I have here to talk about is The Prom and this is mainly written by Sandra Mitchell. This is based off of the Broadway musical The Prom which I loved. Penguin took me to see it when I was in New York along with a bunch of other people. It was amazing. I loved it. If you don't know anything about the general premise of this musical and book it is mainly about this girl who this girl named Emma who is lesbian and she wants to bring her girlfriend to her high school prom and the student council and basically the parents will not allow this and they try to make sure she doesn't go to prom and make sure that she doesn't have a prom and this starts kind of a little uproar in Indiana where it's taking place. Follow a like a handful of Broadway stars as well on the side who are all very comical and funny and they are just described as really arrogant and obnoxious and they want good publicity for their Broadway musicals so they hear about this girl named Emma and what she's going through and the homophobia she's going through in Indiana and they decide this would be good press so they go to Indiana to help her out and that's what the story follows. This story has such a fantastic romance that I absolutely adore and I just aside from the musical we're just going to talk about the book because the musical I can rave on about and I might make a little like something for the musical I might talk about that more. Some of the lines from this were directly from the musical or which I really liked I think that was kind of cool. Writing could kind of like quirky and have that like humor side to it. I didn't like a lot of the slang that was used I just thought it was like you know when adults write a book but they try to sound like teens and they use like teen slang but it's like weird like they called people like oh gee they made some like gay jokes and stuff like that. Some of which were like funny but some of which were like really. Most of the jokes fall super flat in my opinion. I typically stay away from looking at reviews of other books before I write my own and this is just so I 100% put all my genuine thoughts into my review and then if I have to do research after I will do that and if there's I don't know just something I'll update it if I need to but usually I just write my reviews depending on the book of course. The problem with this one is that one of the main characters Alyssa the other girl is a lesbian in the Broadway musical but her sexuality is switched in the book and she is bisexual now so that is a lot where the criticism is coming for this book so far and this book comes out in September and a lot of the reviews like the average on Goodreads is like a 2.4 like it's extremely low because of this switch for like this sexuality switch that they did for Alyssa. It's kind of just a really bad decision and really ignorant on their part to do that because a lot of people are saying and it's obvious you can't just switch someone's sexuality they're not interchangeable you can't do that that's just not right so I do agree with that and that did affect my rating as well. I think without my prior knowledge of the musical it just would have fallen super flat for me this book like I think I enjoyed my reading experience a little bit more because I had that knowledge of the musical and it reminded me of the musical so like I think that's why I had a good reading experience but the writing lacked the characters again there was that whole sexuality issue and the characters weren't as fleshed out and the whole story wasn't just fleshed out. It's a pretty tiny book as well. There are some important themes in here as well like identity, bullying, sexuality which are all important to recognize. Anyways I ended up giving this book two stars and I was sent this by Penguin Teen. Up here I have two graphic novels to talk about one I don't like they go together but one of them I literally don't know what happened to it like it's probably somewhere on one of my shelves but like I lost it like I don't know where it is it's probably somewhere but like I can't find it right now. That is the Tea Dragon Society and the companion the Tea Dragon Festival. So I picked up the normal like the first book and this is an art copy of the companion that this one comes out in September I believe or yes so they gave both of them to me at book expos where I got them. I'm just talking about the series. The series is super fun, adorable. The art style is one of my favorites. It's like so unique it has a beautiful like little pastel color palette. I love it. I also love the Tea Dragons that are in this and you get all their names and like what they do and they like brew like they kind of like get you get tea leaves from them and it's really cool. Our main character in the other one is a blacksmith apprentice which I thought was really interesting that's not really a perspective that we see a lot. I really love the story so far in the first one and I thought I was just super excited because there's this really great romance sprouting and it's a female-female romance I believe so I was just so lovely to see that. Talking more about the Tea Dragon Festival I didn't mention but this is written by these are written by Katie O'Neill. So this one again is an art. This one comes out in September. I'm super excited for everyone else to read it because it was so so good. I gave both of these four stars. I love the concept. This one had to do more with a friendship and I had this memory loss component and it was just overall like stunning like not just the art but the story the plot everything was beautiful and I loved it. The series is just really really good for a graphic novel series like I'm really liking it and I think it's just the perfect amount of like fantasy with romance with light hearted contemporary feels and it's just really really nice. So like yeah anyways love this. Next up here I have Nocturnal by Wilder and this is a poetry collection that I was sent by Andrews McMeal Publishing so thank you so much to them. This collection is divided into four sections known as Dusk, Northern Lights, Howl and Lucid Dreams. All of these sections have their own like little theme but the main overall arching premise of this book is like nocturnal. It talks about the dark and it's very woodsy. That's not the right word but like it's very atmospheric, very nature-centered and really talks about the night and a lot of metaphors to darkness physically metaphorically. It's a great time. Formatting is beautiful. I think the contrast from the black to white pages and the contrast on each page was absolutely stunning. Like I loved this with my entire soul but I'm super picky so I didn't give it five stars. Beautiful collection. I love the writing, the formatting. I didn't love like every single like I didn't love every single poem. It's not a five-star poetry collection for me because like I never give up five stars but this was amazing. I would highly recommend it. Finally I have to talk to you guys about one more graphic novel that I picked up a book expo and this one is called Moonstruck and this is volume one. This is written by Grace Ellis and Shay Beagle I think is how you pronounce it. I'm probably wrong. Oh this got a two-star rating from me for various reasons. There was definitely things, there was a few things I liked but mostly things that I did not enjoy about this collection. With what I did like, I did like the romance. I thought it was starting off really great. Basically this collection is very magical and whimsical fantasy-esque. It has werewolves and like ghouls and like that kind of stuff. It has a lot of paranormal creatures in it and we follow two and there is a female-female romance. I read so much female-female romance this month and that's great because June's Pride Month but it's important to read it all the time but I've just never read so much female-female romance and like a short period of time before so I'm really happy about that. So also recommend me your favorite female-female romances. I think that's important to acknowledge because the amount of people that just read male-male it's really significant as opposed to female-female and then other types of lgbt qip plus representation. Somebody made a great video on it. I'm going offshore a little. Somebody made a great video on it was Jesse and they talked, Jesse from Bowtie's and Books, they talked about how Booktube sucks that pride a little bit and how it's just the lg instead of bt qip plus. Like it's just the lesbian gay that's usually represented and the rest should be more acknowledged. So that was a lovely video. I'll link it down below. Super insightful. Highly recommend watching it. I like the romance. I think it was enjoyable. It was something new that was spreading. It kind of had those like new romance like honeymoon kind of feelings, the whole honeymoon stage. And I also really liked the art. It was just a really nice art style overall. I think it was really pretty. Here are some of the panels. There was definitely pages that I really liked that were like tarot-esque, witchy-esque. So those were really nice. What I didn't like about it, the humor. The humor was so bad. Books fell flat for me. They were cringy. They were just not good, in my opinion. This other story within this story that has other graphic novel bits that one of the characters is reading and it's like a knockoff archie comic in the middle of this and it made no sense to me to the actual plot and what's actually going on. And it just randomly switches art styles between the current story and this other story. But I see no correlation and I'm like why? So I was confused. Not even that but just why? And it looks weird kind of tacky. Like it's like old archie comic style graphic novel in the middle of this one that is like witchy and fantasy-ish. It was just weird. Like why? Had a similar. The plot is where I had some issues as well. This was super similar to me to like the Jirachi like Pokemon movie, which I love by the way. But this was kind of like oh a spell is cast. Oh no, we have to get it reversed. It was like the main plot of this. It just wasn't that great, in my opinion. And there was also this Q&A section in the middle. Where was Q&A's with random celebrities? I don't understand why it was there. Literally why? I'm giving this one two stars. Realistically it's more of like a 1.5 star read. If that I just didn't enjoy that much at all. So there you guys have it. Those were some of my recent reads. Let me know your thoughts on these books down below if you're going to pick any of them up. If you've read any of them, your thoughts, all that stuff. So thank you so so much for watching. Make sure to check me out on any other social medias if you feel like it. My links are always down below. Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads, even my Patreon. So thank you so so much for watching. I really appreciate it from the bottom of my soul. I'm in a weird mood today. So thank you guys so so much for watching and I'll see you super soon. Bye!