Guess who crashed yet again last night? …Me. It was me. (I really should stop doing that.)
Spell the Month in Books is a monthly post created and hosted by Jana @ Reviews from the Stacks. I started participating in it a few months ago. It’s typically a Saturday post (as I might have mentioned above), but let’s all agree the Mar had a busy day yesterday and maybe, accidentally fell asleep before they could post.
It’s finally December, the heart of the holiday season and the end of the year. Baking intensifies 🍪 and Christmas decorations are everywhere 🔔 and trees are up🎄and snow is sometimes on the ground ❄️⛄- not to mention gifts 🎁🌟 and friendship.
But yeah, let’s get to spelling December with books.
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Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding, The
AUTHOR: Alexandra Bracken
RELEASE DATE: 5 September 2017
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
The first in a “devious and delightful” new series by Alexandra Bracken, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Darkest Minds, soon to be a major motion picture.
“I would say it’s a pleasure to meet thee, Prosperity Oceanus Redding, but truly, I only anticipate the delights of destroying thy happiness?”
Prosper is the only unexceptional Redding in his old and storied family history – that is, until he discovers the demon living inside him. Turns out Prosper’s great-great-great-great-great-something grandfather made-and then broke-a contract with a malefactor, a demon who exchanges fortune for eternal servitude. And, weirdly enough, eight-hundred-year-old Alastor isn’t exactly the forgiving type.
The fiend has reawakened with one purpose – to destroy the family whose success he ensured and who then betrayed him. With only days to break the curse and banish Alastor back to the demon realm, Prosper is playing unwilling host to the fiend, who delights in tormenting him with nasty insults and constant attempts to trick him into a contract. Yeah, Prosper will take his afterlife without a side of eternal servitude, thanks.
But with the help of his long-lost uncle, Barnabas, and his daughter, Nell, a witch-in-training, it seems like Prosper has at least a fighting chance of ridding himself of Alastor before the demon escapes and wreaks havoc on his family.
Little does Prosper know, the malefactor’s control over his body grows stronger with each passing night and there’s a lot Alastor isn’t telling his dim-witted (but admittedly strong-willed) human host?
From #1 New York Times best-selling author Alexandra Bracken comes a tale of betrayal and revenge, of old hurts passed down from generation to generation. Can you ever fully right a wrong, ever truly escape your history? Or will Prosper and Alastor be doomed to repeat it?
My review of The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding
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Evermore
AUTHOR: Alyson Noël
RELEASE DATE: 3 February 2009
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Don’t miss Evermore, the first book in Alyson Noël’s #1 New York Times bestselling The Immortals series. Enter an enchanting new world where true love never dies…
After a horrible accident claimed the lives of her family, sixteen-year-old Ever Bloom can see people’s auras, hear their thoughts, and know someone’s entire life story by touching them. Going out of her way to avoid human contact and suppress her abilities, she has been branded a freak at her new high school―but everything changes when she meets Damen Auguste.
Damen is gorgeous, exotic and wealthy. He’s the only one who can silence the noise and random energy in her head―wielding a magic so intense, it’s as though he can peer straight into her soul. As Ever is drawn deeper into his enticing world of secrets and mystery, she’s left with more questions than answers. And she has no idea just who he really is―or what he is. The only thing she knows to be true is that she’s falling deeply and helplessly in love with him.
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Curse for True Love, A
AUTHOR: Stephanie Garber
RELEASE DATE: 24 October 2023
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Two villains, one girl, and a deadly battle for happily ever after…
Evangeline Fox ventured to the Magnificent North in search of her happy ending, and it seems as if she has it. She’s married to a handsome prince and lives in a legendary castle.
But Evangeline has no idea of the devastating price she’s paid for this fairytale. She doesn’t know what she has lost, and her husband is determined to make sure she never finds out.
But first he must kill Jacks, the Prince of Hearts. Blood will be shed, hearts will be stolen, and true love will be put to the test.
My review of A Curse for True Love
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Erased
AUTHOR: Kei Sanbe
RELEASE DATE: 21 February 2017
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Twenty-nine-year-old Satoru Fujinuma is floundering through life. Amid his daily drudgery, he finds himself in the grip of an incredible, inexplicable, and uncontrollable phenomenon that rewinds time, a condition that seems to only make his drab life worse. But then, one day, everything changes. A terrible incident forever changes Satoru’s life as he knows it…and with it, comes a “Revival” that sends Satoru eighteen years into the past! In the body of his boyhood self, Satoru encounters sights he never imagined he would see again–the smile of his mother, alive and well, his old friends, and Kayo Hinazuki, the girl who was kidnapped and murdered when he was a boy the first time around. To return to the present and prevent the tragedy that brought him back to his childhood in the first place, Satoru begins plotting a way to change Hinazuki’s fate…But up against the clock and a faceless evil, does eleven-year-old Satoru even stand a chance?
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Mooncakes
AUTHOR: Suzanne Walker, Wendy Xu (Illustrator)
RELEASE DATE: 15 October 2019
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
A story of love and demons, family and witchcraft. Nova Huang knows more about magic than your average teen witch. She works at her grandmothers’ bookshop, where she helps them loan out spell books and investigate any supernatural occurrences in their New England town. One fateful night, she follows reports of a white wolf into the woods, and she comes across the unexpected: her childhood crush, Tam Lang, battling a horse demon in the woods. As a werewolf, Tam has been wandering from place to place for years, unable to call any townhome. Pursued by dark forces eager to claim the magic of wolves and out of options, Tam turns to Nova for help. Their latent feelings are rekindled against the backdrop of witchcraft, untested magic, occult rituals, and family ties both new and old in this enchanting tale of self-discovery.
My review of Mooncakes
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Book Thief, The
AUTHOR: Markus Zusak
RELEASE DATE: 18 December 2023
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME
The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times.
When Death has a story to tell, you listen.
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.
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Everlost
AUTHOR: Neal Shusterman
RELEASE DATE: 1 October 2006
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Nick and Allie don’t survive the car accident…
…but their souls don’t exactly get where they’re supposed to get either. Instead, they’re caught halfway between life and death, in a sort of limbo known as Everlost: a shadow of the living world, filled with all the things and places that no onger exist. It’s a magical, yet dangerous place where bands of lost children run wild and anyone who stands in the same place too long sinks to the center of the Earth.
When they find Mary, the self-proclaimed queen of lost kids, Nick feels like he he’s found a home, but allie isn’t satisfied spending eternity between worlds. Against all warnings, Allie begins learning the “Criminal Art” of haunting, and ventures into dangerous territory, where a monster called the McGill threatens all the souls of Everlost.
In this imaginative novel, Neal Shusterman explores questions of life, death, and what just might lie in between.
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Ruin and Rising
AUTHOR: Leigh Bardugo
RELEASE DATE: 17 June 2014
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Enter the Grishaverse with Book Three of the Shadow and Bone Trilogy by the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom.
Soldier. Summoner. Saint. The nation’s fate rests with a broken Sun Summoner, a disgraced tracker, and the shattered remnants of a once-great magical army.
The Darkling rules from his shadow throne while a weakened Alina Starkov recovers from their battle under the dubious protection of the zealots who worship her as a Saint. Now her hopes lie with the magic of a long-vanished ancient creature and the chance that an outlaw prince still survives.
What books have you been reading lately? Have you been reading any with an autumnal theme? What have you thought of them?
Thanks again for reading, and have a wonderful day/night!
See ya ~Mar
