 hello hello everyone welcome to the channel my name is laura and this is laura's little library filmed a recent reads video i feel like it hasn't been that long like it's probably been two and a half maybe three months but it's interesting because what happened is i filmed that video at a chunk of time where i read like a few books not a lot and all of a sudden i started reading a whole bunch and i'm like oh my word i need to get this video done and then just time went by and i had other video ideas and now i'm finally doing it and i've read a lot of books i especially wanted to get this up right before the start of spooky season because i have such big reading plans i've got this big reading extravaganza so stay tuned as the explanation for that and the book haul for it will be coming on thursday so just in a couple days so make sure you subscribe and and you know hit the bell so you can be notified when it's uploaded thursday morning so i'm just gonna go over all the books that i've read give some of my brief thoughts because like i said it's a lot of books and you don't want to hear me babble on for 30 minutes about each book when i've got more than 20 books like seriously uh so i am picking up right where the last video left off as it's recent reads number four for the year and the first book that i finished since then has actually been the handmaid's tale and that was not one i was really expecting to read but a coworker of mine wanted to buddy read it with me so i said yeah sure why not and i haven't seen the tv show so that's kind of my next thing to do is to like watch the tv show and compare it to the book i am interested in reading the second book with her but we'll i actually gave it three out of five stars i i loved the idea and the premise of the story i just had such a hard time because it seemed like there were three timelines there were there was before the big societal shift the as she's preparing to be a handmaid question mark and then the current her at the guy's house and it and it would never explicitly say when we switched between times it would just be her kind of reflecting almost like a storytelling but like it was just it was really hard for me to follow like just sometimes they'd be flashbacks sometimes they'd just be stories inserts and it just i had such a hard time keeping track of things and i felt like there are so many dots that just didn't quite connect they came so close like the plot points in the indians came so close to connecting but it was like i still don't understand what you're getting at and where it came from like i needed more explanation but i feel like with more explanation it would have just been such a big info dump so hard hard line to walk i did not really get attached enough to any of the character i mean i liked one or two i liked two of the side characters but i was not attached enough to any of the main characters to actually care so that when the ending came around i was like i just didn't care so when we get this cliffhanger ending which would have been an amazing cliffhanger ending i sat there and i said if it goes this way great if not that way great whatever but because it didn't explicitly say i'm just not super attached i just i didn't need to know and that was very disappointing still like a solemnly written book i can see why a lot of people like it it's just not my personal cup of tea it's not the style that i enjoy it's not what i normally go for but i had a lot of fun reading it with my friend and we had lots of good discussions as well so it's it's still a three out of five stars it's the one i would recommend for people who do like that type of literature the next book that i finished was also a buddy read and that was a taste for love by jennifer yen i buddy read this with the enchanted reader so i will link her channel down below so that you can go and follow her and all of her social media she's so sweet and so amazing so we read this book together and i gave it four out of five stars it is very much like the great british baking show means the taiwanese american community and it was it was so interesting and so wonderful the thing about this book that made it amazing for right now is that there were so many like modern pop culture references again like the great british baking show music artists things like that that was like oh my word this is so great it's so relatable i understand everything i don't know how well that's gonna hold up in like five to ten plus years but it was it was enjoyable now i had an interesting journey with the uh i should probably tell you what this is so it's this girl and her mom owns a bakery her dad owns a restaurant they're kind of a joint thing she's really good at baking and her mom is obsessed with finding her a nice asian boyfriend and she is not super thrilled about it or at least by her mom's methods and she finds out that the competition that her family hosts every year has this year been a little bit tainted to only accept applicants who are eligible asian boys and i i was so funny i was so hilarious i loved reading the love interest outside of that plot point i did not like him at first and i and i know you weren't supposed to because the main character didn't like him but it wasn't strong enough for it to be like hate to love or enemies to lovers but it wasn't like pleasantness and so i i feel like he took a lot longer for me to warm up to than the main character which is kind of hard as a reader i'm just like i would definitely not warm up to him just by doing that just by him like doing that but she kind of did and i was like okay but there was a lot of damsel in distress moments where she would like physically trip and fall and he would catch her over and over again and it got a little repetitive in my opinion there is a nice sister relationship in this book and i wish we'd gotten more of it either in flashbacks or by like the sister actually being there when she was in the state and it kind of reminded me a little bit of my sister and our relationship because i understand what it's like to live in a different state than your sister it was a really nice dynamic to see and to read about and a very interesting element and i love how she ended up being tied in at the end of the of the book it was kind of a i found this book to have a little bit of a weird pacing just because it took so long to get to the competition and then the competition it's like time just flew by like i think it like there was there were multiple days in between the different um elements of the of the competition between each round and in the book you would just read from round to round to round like there was no in between time and i felt like that was kind of weird especially for how far back in the book it was pushed but also like yeah like it just it was so weird because there was so much leading you spent the first half of the book not even talking about the competition very much and then you talked a lot about the competition and the competition ended up being this little thing with not a lot of detail um but it was the best part i loved it it was the best part of the book but yeah this was just jam packed full of drama it was very fun very exciting really hard to predict what was going to happen there was like it was such a twisty ending for contemporary which was really interesting because near the end of the competition you're starting to find out the backstories of people and everybody's motivations and it was just so twisty that you just couldn't predict it but so unique because that's not what a lot of contemporaries have they don't twist this way they have surprises and interesting things but they don't twist but this one this one twisted so yeah i said four out of five stars i very much enjoyed it i would highly recommend you pick it up if you like baking or boba or um yeah just a good contemporary i i liked this a lot i then actually read the first two volumes of a thing called fables it's a graphic novel and it's by bill willingham and it's it's so it's a graphic novel and it's the idea that fairy tale creatures are in the modern world with our like modern jobs like it's once upon a time but heavily influenced by other things so like the first one is really interesting like it's kind of a murder mystery and it's just a little bit more adult i think than the tv show once upon a time and the second volume was essentially animal farm just it was animal farm you had this farm with all the fairy tale animals that could still talk and they pulled an animal farm on the humans like it was exactly that and i mean i i rated it two and three stars for each volume because i just i just think it's not my cup of tea again um like other people would enjoy it i'm glad i read a little bit of it just to kind of see what other literature is out there but like was not one of my favorites the twists were okay i kept being told it would get better but it just never really did and it was it was so short that that's why i finished him and i read two of them but i just it's not something i would want to continue with i read with the fire on high by elizabeth osavados and i have read cop with new land and oh i loved this book as well i rated this what yeah i rated this five out of five stars like i loved it i just i love the characters and their dynamics with each other and who they are and what like their responses to situations so it's we follow this girl who had a baby when she was like 16 ish years old um and so she or was she even younger she is in high school and she's had a child and we're following her when the child is actually two years old baby girl she is adorable i love her um but she also lives with her abuela and it's just the just the three of them and she's just trying to get by and finish high school while juggling the responsibilities of having a job raising a daughter taking care of her abuela and she has this large passion for cooking and there ends up being this class at her school that is a culinary class and at the end of it you take a trip to spain for like spring break or something and she she kind of conflict she conflicts with what she wants she wants to cook she wants to have this experience she wants to pursue that passion with what she needs to do she needs to be home to take care of baby girls she needs to be home to take care of her abuela and it's just that grown up mature thought process in a young person and it was just fascinating to read about the food descriptions in here just made me want to eat it all like i would be at work in a cafeteria and i'd be reading this and i would just i'd be melting of hunger based off of these descriptions and there are recipes in here that are hilarious and i really would love to try them out sometime um but anything and everything about this i loved there wasn't something that i didn't like or i felt could have been done better it just was amazing and i would really encourage you to read it and then i talked about these next two books and other videos so i won't talk about them too much here but i read you had me and ola by alexa staria and to kill a kingdom by alexa christo both of these were books i read on our ecuador vlog um so like i said if you want to hear more in-depth thoughts of each of these books i talk about in that vlog where i actually read them i gave this one three out of five stars and i gave this one four out of five stars this is a telenovela meat soap opera with focusing on two actors who are trying to make it in their field and they have plenty of family drama and just things going along in their life and it's a not like hate to love but like a awkward encounter embarrassing to love story i would say while this is a little mermaid a darker little mermaid retelling about the mermaid who cuts out the hearts of princes but she does something to get her vanished to the human world so she is trying to uh go back home win her mother's favor and she ends up getting on a pirate ship with a bunch with the prince of one of the lands and it's that hilarious journey the banter was amazing i had a bit of a hard time with this book but i don't know if it was just the situation i was in so i might do a reread of this at some point in life but yeah ecuador vlog i'll have it linked down below you should check it out then i read a book that i don't have it is called zara hussein is here and this is by sabina khan and i loved this book i rated it five out of five stars it it just was amazing it it's one of those ones where it takes me a minute to think about because it was it was just so moving it follows a muslim family and all the crap that they go through just in turn like they live in the united states but like when their immigration is threatened and when people threaten them because of their religion and just just for being who they are they get criticized and just how they handle with it how they go through it how they push through and persevere was just so moving and i would encourage everyone to pick this up if they haven't already read it it was so good and again i love the characters i love their growth and there just was nothing wrong with it then the next book i read was honey and issues guy to fake dating and this was by adiba digirdar i also rated this well i rated this four out of five stars and the thing is that i knew going into it that like friend not like friend abuse but just like friends not accepting who their friend is and being really annoying about it i knew that was a huge factor of the book going in and yet i still had a hard time with it so it follows honey and issue and honey is decided that she's going to come out to her friends as bi and then her friends are like you've never dated a girl you don't know if you're bi like no and they're just being totally horrible human beings to their friend and then there's issue and issue wants to get had girl except she's so straightforward that she she has a hard time making friends and people don't like her kind of hard to be had girl when people don't like you so they decide that honey and issue are going to help each other out honey is going to help issue become more likeable so she can win head girl and issue is going to date honey to prove to her friends that she is bi and that she is interested in girls there was a lot going on in the book because you have like that story plot but then you have issue and situations with her older sister and her family one thing i didn't really like was that i mean okay this goes to sided i don't like that they didn't handle the idea of issue coming out to her family but at the same time i appreciate that that was not the main point of the story because there are so many like coming out stories um but i just felt it hard to believe that issue could just continue to hide it from her family and not address it at all and then honey her father is a politician and so he's trying to you know be elected to the next position in ireland that he's trying to get both of them by the way are south asian families living in ireland so there's also that element of you know honey's friends don't understand her sexuality but they also don't understand her uh ethnic background and like the traditions and how she is muslim and how she wants to actually practice her faith and her friends are just like you you shouldn't do that and honey's like oh i want to and then can't because she wants to keep her friends and it's just it's heart breaking but it was so much so and there were so many other things that it just it wasn't a five out of five stars for me i felt like it could have been done a little bit better but again that's my personal opinion take with a grain of salt go ahead i still highly recommend that you read it moving on i did read the next two books in the teen dragon society series trilogy i don't know there are three out i read the first one much closer to when it came out and then i recently bought the second and the third one and i immediately read the second and the third one both are rated five stars both are phenomenal the artwork is gorgeous the story is amazing the dragons are the love i wish there was a little bit more in both of these about the care of the dragons because i feel like the first one was all about taking care of the dragons and then the second and third one were more about the people taking care of them and less about actually caring for the dragons and like drinking their tea and experiencing memories and just so i wish there was a little more on the dragons but either way still beautiful still moving obviously highly recommend um but yeah so we have spring summer fall i don't know if there will be more i hope there are because i would pick them up in a heartbeat and read them immediately afterwards then i read love and luck by jenna evans walsh i i rated this one 3.5 out of five stars it's about this family who goes to ireland for her their aunt's wedding and she something happened over the summer so there are four boys and one daughter and the youngest boy and the daughter are very close i mean obviously they're all close because they're siblings um but something happened over the summer and they get in an argument and it ends up coming out at the wedding a little bit and so then their mom is like you know as punishment both of you are going to go to italy because she was going to go to italy to meet her friend and you're going to fix your relationship otherwise you can't do sports and for both of them sports is like the big thing in their life um and then all of a sudden something happens and they don't exactly go to italy but i gave it 3.5 out of five stars so it was a really great hook i from the very beginning i was engaged with it i was loving reading it but then i kind of slowed down when you got to like almost immediately after we had the intro it felt like it slowed down and it took a little bit of time for things to get moving again i also didn't like how it's like there's this mysterious thing involving a boy that happened between the two of them and it just it took so long to reveal that i was i had made up my own idea of what happened and i lost interest in what the real thing was because i had my own version because that came quicker it just took so long to reveal and i was really bored about it i love the other elements of the book but yeah and then along their ways they meet a guy named roan and he was great i loved his character he was hilarious he was exactly what the book needed but i do wish there was a little bit more of him in the book it is very much a road trip book so if you need a road trip book i would recommend it for something like that but really the ending was just kind of meh um like it resolved but it was kind of weird and it just like i kind of liked it but i kind of felt like it wasn't anything special so like at 3.5 it was a solidly written book it was nice it very much fulfilled my want of ireland because i read this like right after reading honey and you shoes guide set in ireland and so i was like oh wait where did i need all of the ireland so it satisfied that but outside of it it wasn't too much of a good book so but i would still like recommend it especially since it is part of like a three book companion series it's love and luck love and all of love and gelato and i believe they're all connected through like one book's main character is another book side character type thing so i don't know if i'd read the other ones just because it's not really my kind of thing but yeah if you read them comment down below let me know if i should read like love and all lives love and gelato but yeah it was it was just a solid book then i read the mermaid by christina henry this was one of the books that i had started reading a year ago i think it was only a year ago but it had been marked on my goodreads it started since then and it just oh it took me so long to pick back up i was trying to like read it only during the summertime because it's mermaid based um and i wanted to read it initially by water but at this point i was like you know what i just need to finish it i'm kind of interested in it i just need to finish i gave this two out of five stars i was not a fan it is a pt barnum story so it's like a circusy story but the main character is a real mermaid she falls in love with the man stays he disappears so she loses him and then uh she gets approached by one of barn someone who works for pt barnum and she's like sure i i would love to make money and travel the world so sure and so it's kind of her just like revealing that she's a mermaid for pt barnum and like going off of that like i initially thought it was going to be her pretending to be a mermaid even though she's actually a mermaid but it was like legit like she's a mermaid come look at it um which was a little less fun um but i really i really wanted to know more about amelia's world and where she came from so much of it was just focused on like pt barnum and her reflecting back on her relationship with her husband and there just was nothing before that and i wish there was a little bit more before that because it was like slightly magical but not super magical and i was kind of annoying i feel like sometimes amelia knows better and sometimes she doesn't like she she lived in a human world for so long that she knows things but then like when she comes with simple situations it's like she forgot everything that she learned about living in the world and it was just it felt very inconsistent she felt like a very inconsistent character and same with the love interest for her i don't remember his name i know i kept reading his name wrong so then i refused oh i kept reading his name is lovey when it's levi but for some reason i read it as lovey um so i called him that but his name is levi wasn't a super big fan of levi's character i felt he too was very inconsistent um it reads really slow and it repeats a lot of useless information and it just got to be really annoying and i came so close to dnfing it a couple times but i pushed through um really hated the ending i gotta say like the last 40 pages i did not like them the characters were not themselves the romance was bad and loveless it felt like it just it made no sense i felt no attachments it was kind of sad um and there were some sentence there were quite a few sentences here that had like really bad grammar or read awkwardly like i had to sit there and reread the sentence over and over again to try and understand what i was trying to say and then i would sit here and i was like if you reverted it this way or changed the punctuation it would make a lot more sense so it just didn't feel like that great of a book like there are just so many things that i didn't like and very few things that i did so i rated it two stars not a fan if you see this i don't even if you're doing a mermaid themed reading vlog just don't because it's not mermaidy enough and then i read you should see me in the crown by leo johnson and i rated this 4.5 stars so on good reads it's 5 out of 5 stars but on sorghuf and in my head it's really a 4.5 out of 5 stars it was really good she wants to get a music scholarship to go to this music college but she doesn't get it and so she's like okay how how am i going to pay for college and then she realizes that oh prom queen comes with a scholarship yep yep i need to win prom queen queen if i'm going to go to my dream college and study music so she decides to go from someone that nobody really knows to not only being prom queen but also a new girl moves to school and she's she's interested in the new girl like she's cute she's unique she's fun and the queer community is not something that is uplifted in her community it's very much like down on there is a little bit of queer hate in here um the book overall is obviously pro queer community but just trigger warnings noting for that that not everybody has that view but yeah it was just such an enchanting little story of a girl winning prom queen and getting the girl um yeah i think i listened to the audiobook of this in a in a day like i just listened to it all day long with everything i did i loved it when you start reading it it really gets into the plot and the ideas pretty quickly which was very much appreciated like it was a fast-paced book things would happen there were a couple things that i felt like the book kind of mentioned the beginning and then dropped like the fact that she had a job at a music store i felt like it was mentioned once and she went there once and then since then it wasn't really paid attention to all that often and she kind of never went again i guess um but it very much reminded me of the book dumpling just in the way of i didn't read dumpling but i watched the movie and i know that's terrible heresy i'm sorry i want to read dumpling i'll get there um but it just kind of reminded me of that of like someone being uplifted and uplifting her entire community with her um which was very very sweet to me there was a mention to steak and shake in here and i love steak and shake so obviously you know i had to have some bonus points bonus points about that for me there was a trope of hiding my significant other and then the significant other getting mad and i didn't like that very much because i just don't like that trope it's not for me and i wish this book hadn't had done it because i felt like it was so good in every other aspect i did love the ending of it i felt like it was such like a heartwarming like the family ending and it just it was great it was great so i highly recommend this especially if you're starting school just because it's a good like academic contemporary read um and if you love music like yeah you should definitely read this so then i listened to two books on audio and these are the two books i listened to during my thrill to the weekend vlog so i talk about them quite a bit there so if you are interested in that the link will be in the description as always so you can get my more in-depth thoughts there because i'll just briefly mention it here because i'm pretty sure this video is long enough so the first book i read for that was my sister the serial killer and this is by when yin can break the water i probably said the name wrong i'm sorry i very much did try but it was a very short little novella of a book the audiobook was four hours so i listened to it in about two hours and i rated it four point five stars i thought it was really good but there were some elements that did annoy me that i think could have been written better um i wish there was a little bit more sister bonding at the beginning and throughout kind of the entire book like not even just like the characters had to be like close sisters but just having that history of them being sisters and having this attachment because the main character is like i love my sister and that's why i clean up after her murders but then like there was no backing behind it especially when it does get into their backstory and you see like how part of the life they had um and i wasn't a big fan of how the love story ended like this book it's obviously like a murder book because you know my sister the serial killer uh but there was a lot like love and romance had a huge part to play in the book and in the end i just was not satisfied with the ending about it but other than that the book was amazing i was hooked from the beginning i love the characters the concept was so interesting um just oh my word and like because it's a short fast read obviously like there could have been more to it but i'm kind of glad there wasn't and i think it was it was very nice everything was great it was very much worth the time the thing is it didn't take a lot of time to read because it's so short so it was definitely worth it you know and i would definitely um i would suggest that people pick this up like oh my goodness it was so good and so unique then the other book that i read was the cabin at the end of the world and this was by paul trend blay and i gave this 3.75 stars sorry about the angle change and now that it's the whole tilted thing again i had to switch devices because my other device just kept running out of storage which it shouldn't be running out of storage but anyway i was talking about this book and i'm just gonna finish up by saying i love the twist ending it or not the twist ending the cliffhanger i love the cliffhanger i am reading the second book i am loving it i highly recommend it super and then i was just gonna briefly tell you about my current read which is beach read by emily henry this was one i really wanted to read this summer and that i started but i didn't quite get to finish so as of this day i have i'm going to finish it today i have less than an hour left in this book um i've got less than 100 pages so i'm going to finish it today and i love it very very much there is so much banter between the characters so it takes place in michigan in my home state which i love um but the two main characters one is a literary fiction writer and the other is a romance slash women's fiction writer and they went to college together and they didn't really like each other very much and so they meet again here in the uh lake michigan cabin area and they decide that they are going to switch genres so she is going to try literary fiction he's gonna write a romance novel and they decided to help each other out by doing activities and research to help each other figure out and whoever sells their book first wins like i said i love the banter this book just makes me want to write my own book which is something i should be doing but i'm not but i i should be doing and i've been wanting to do so this is very encouraging i love it so much there's literally nothing going wrong i think right now it's a five out of five stars if the ending is good or better then it's going to be a five star if the ending is decent or worse it might be a four point five but right now it's like a very solid five stars and like i thought i'm almost done so i just wanted to throw that in there so that i i probably won't talk about it in my next recent reads just because well spooky season is just starting so i will be talking about spoo spooky books for the next month and a half so i just wanted to add that in there as right before i really get into spooky season so i'm just there you go those are all my recent reads thank you all so much for watching this video i hope you enjoyed it comment down below what some books are that you have been reading or you want to read give the video a thumbs up if you liked it subscribe if you haven't already i post two videos a week right now normally i post just on thursdays but i'm also posting thursdays and tuesdays uh hit the bell so that you get notified when i post and yeah that should be everything all of my social media is in the description below so you can go ahead and follow me on there and keep up to date with my book reviews and just things that i'm doing in life and until i see you all in the next video i wish you a happy reading