 Hey guys it's Julia and welcome back to my channel and for today's video I'm good to be talking about some of my recent reads with you guys. So the last one I made was like two months ago so I'm very behind. In this video I'll be talking about 10 books and then in another recent reads I'm gonna be doing another 10. So yeah I don't own a lot of these books physically and I've talked about quite a few of these just a lot on my channel and different blogs and stuff but yeah let's get into it. A lot of these books I really enjoyed and some I really didn't so let's jump right into it. The first book I have here is The How and the Why by Cynthia Hand. In this book we follow a girl named Cass who her family life is okay but she gets very curious about her birth mother as she was adopted and she starts to kind of go through things and try to find her birth mother. So the other storyline follows a 16 year old girl who was pregnant and she went to like a little home that other pregnant girls were there, like other pregnant teens and stuff were there. And we follow, we go back and forth between Cass and try to unravel things. There is some trigger warnings with abortion just to talk topics about it. But this story does also talk about family which was one of my favorite parts of this story. I thought this was phenomenal in the way that it just explored things I feel like I learned so much. Yeah so this also just talks about teen pregnancy coming of age and such a good book. It was a huge surprise for me because it came out in like 2019 like I had an arc and like I just really really enjoyed it. It was a really good book and Cynthia Hand is such a talented writer. I think even though a lot of her stuff gets picked up a lot I still think she's kind of underrated just for how great she is. But yeah, I ended up giving this one like a 4.25 or 4.5 out of 5 stars. It's definitely on my favorites list for this year which is super awesome. Next up here I have Cheese Sweet Adventure, it's all in three. So if you guys have been here before you know that I really enjoy manga and then specifically cat manga is just super fun and like cute and this is one of them. It's a super cute art style and also the cat is just so cute like she's the cutest thing ever so I love picking these up. I think I ended up giving this one four stars like it was super adorable and like I'm always in a good mood when I read these. Well they make me in a good mood. I might not be in a good mood before. Next up here is a book I've talked about quite a bit but this book is called My Eyes Are Up Here and this one I got an arc from an E arc from Penguin Teen so thank you so much to them for sending this over to me. So we follow a 15 year old girl named Greer and like her coming of age story and she's also her bra size is a 30H and so she goes through some troubles just you know how people how people talk about her, how people look at her, how she views herself, finding bras that kind of thing and the thing that bothered me the most about this book is that her boobs are personified so we get their names throughout this whole book and like she'll be like oh Modern Mavis whatever and it's like that she's talking about her boobs. I don't know I thought that was super weird I even put a pull up on Twitter a while back just being like how do you feel if like an author personified certain body parts and everyone was like what like that's I just think it's really weird but I just felt super disconnected with this story I thought it was gonna be a really good coming of age novel about you know body positivity and finding yourself especially as a girl especially a 15 years old so I thought I was kind of explore that. I think the writing was pretty standard as well so I ended up giving this one like two stars and yeah I was pretty disappointed by this one unfortunately. Next up here I read A Crowded Loneliness by R. H. Sin. So R. Sin is a poetry author that I've been following for a while and he writes very simplistic poems that usually pack a punch or they're usually very relatable. This one was good it obviously like this one was good it wasn't my favorite of his I think I gave it like a three-star so it was like an average poetry collection for me. I don't really have too much to say about it I wish I could read you guys some but like I had a an e-copy and yeah I also would read you guys some poems but this one was just okay it's a three-star. R. Sin has some better work out there but I would definitely recommend over this one. So next up here we have All Boys Aren't Blue and by George M. Johnson. I'm so excited to talk to you guys about this. So this book I listened to the audiobook of. It is a manifesto memoir and we follow a black gay man and his experience is growing up and just him exploring sex, identity, sexuality. Also a big one is toxic masculinity. It is an absolutely phenomenal read. I think if you are going to pick up a book that like especially now when we like booktube specifically is really trying to prioritize black authors and I think that's great and I really hope it continues but I think if if you're gonna pick up a book by black author right now this is this should be on the top of your list. I think it's I think it's phenomenal. I think it's it was well written and it was such a powerful read and I would just highly recommend picking it up if it sounds interesting to you. I ended up giving it 4.5 stars which is super high for me and it's definitely gonna be on my favorites list. Next up here I have a book another book that I really loved and this is You Should See Me in a Crown by Lee Johnson. This book follows Liz and she has a plan for college but unfortunately her the financially like financially it kind of falls through and she's not really able to pay for it but the prom queen and king or the prom queen whatever. If you run for that which is not really her thing but if you run you can get a scholarship and so she's like okay I really want to go to school so I'm gonna run for the scholarship. Like I'm gonna run for prom queen so I can hopefully get the scholarship and she kind of falls for one of the girls that is also trying to be prom queen and it's just a really cool story a great like female female romance that was super durable. A super fun book that just kind of explored black joy which is really nice to see. I listened to the audiobook of this one and it was just a super delightful read. I would highly recommend this one as well. I ended up getting a four stars. Next I read pillow thoughts IV or stitching the soul. This is by Courtney Peppernell. I got this from neck galley. The pillow thoughts series that she wrote it's kind of just it gives advice like it's like if you are in need of blank or if you feel blank and it will kind of just give you some guidance and so it'll just be some nice poems about it that you could probably relate to and so this is the fourth and final installment in the series. It was super good I thought I thought it was great. It's kind of sad to see this series coming out of clothes but I actually like really liked a lot of the books in this and I think they're really great. But yeah the poems in this were so beautiful and I just really enjoyed it. I ended up giving this four to five stars. Second last one here we got be not far from me by Minnie McGinnis. Be not far from me follows a girl named Ashley who goes for a camping trip in the woods with her friends and her boyfriend and she catches her boyfriend cheating on her with his ex-girlfriend and things go down from there. It is a wilderness survival story and it's really interesting. It's really short and Minnie McGinnis has like such a nice like dark writing style that I really like. This is I quite liked. I gave it a 3.75 overall but it was a super like quick read, super engaging read and I really like wilderness survival stories. It could be like if you liked the girl who loved Tom Gordon by like Stephen King you'd probably like this one. So yeah if you like wilderness survival stories definitely check this one out it's probably right up your alley. This one was a little bit hard to read at times just because like there was some you know killing animals so it's tricky warnings for like you know killing animals that kind of thing but there was just there was a scene that with the animals that hurt me a little so yeah it was still good though. I gave it a 3.75 out of 5. Next up here my last two are so it's not second last shit. It's a motor crush rolling one and two. So these are about a girl named Domino who competes in motorcycle races and it's super badass super cool graphic novel series like I don't think the third one's out yet but the first two oof so good. I really love the art I love that it's like motorcycles is so cool and then there's this thing called crush that kind of makes your bike go faster and it's super rare so everybody kind of fights for it and so it also follows that and we have a black man character super badass like I just I loved it it was so good and it's described as like a sci-fi adventure series so if that sounds interesting to you definitely pick these up I think I've heard people talk about them but I still think they're a little underrated. I gave both of them 4.5 out of 5 stars. They were that good so yeah. Those are all the books that I've read recently I hope you guys enjoyed this video let me know your thoughts in the comments down below if you've read these if you want to read these that whole thing. As always all my links are in the description box including my social media and I don't know whatever else is in there but most importantly my description box there is a black lives matter card for you guys to get more educated look into things donate or help in any way you can so that is always linked down below and yeah thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you super soon. Bye!