julie – Book Dust Magic

If You Like This, Try This – Book Recommendations (Bout of Books Challenge)

It is Day 4 of Bout of Books read-a-thon and today’s challenge is to give some book recommendations on the “If you like this, try this” base.

So, without further ado, here are my book suggestions:

If you like chick-lit series with clumsy heroines that will get under your skin, books that will make you feel better even if you had a bad day, try I heart series by Lindsey Kelk.

i heart

If you like books with time travel that will keep you on the edge and make you want to speed up your reading so you could turn those pages fast enough, try Tempest series by Julie Cross.

tempest series

If you like books with setting so well described and mental landscape pictures so tempting that you will want to transport yourself in the story so you could be there and see the beauty of the place with your own eyes, try My Map pf You by Isabelle Broom.

my map of you

If you like books that will make you feel emotional and you will think about the story for days after finishing it, try The Second Love of My Life by Victoria Walters.

the second love

If you like books that give you glimpse of past while following the present, books that will make you think of other people’s reasons behind their actions, with a chance to wrack judgments you have, try Christmas at Tiffany’s by Karen Swan.

karen swan

If you like hot, swoon worthy feel good young adult contemporary reads, try On the Fence by Kasie West.

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Welcome to my Tea Party (aka An Invitation to Tea – Love-a-Thon challenge)

loveathon

As you, and all the birds on the branch already know, this weekend is a Love-a-Thon weekend.
This event is hosted by these wonderful bloggers: Alexa from Alexa Loves Books, Cee from The Novel Hermit, Hazel from Stay Bookish and Mel from The Daily Prophecy.

I wasn’t going to to participate in this challenge, but an inspiration hit me, and I wanted to share my silliness and creepiness with you.

I admit: I had so much fun writing this and there’s a chance some of you (or many of you) won’t like it, but it doesn’t matter. What matters in the end is that we all have fun during this Love-A-Thon.

Welcome To My Tea Party!

Welcome to my Tea Party! Don’t be shy!
Have a cup, or two, we could dance,
but be careful, ’cause there’s a chance;
After that, you’d want to die!
(Now imagine a wicked grin)…

We are here, in NeverNever;
A perfect place, full of fairies;
trolls and witches, can’t be better;
but be careful, don’t eat berries.

If you do so, we’ll never let you
to go back home, leave this place.
Food from here is magical, ties you here,
to be our slave!

Now when I’m done with this silly poem (what can I say, seeing all those poems in challenge number three, I felt inspired for some silliness), let me tell you about my tea party.

I decided to organize my fictional tea party in the faery world, in the land called NeverNever.
That is my favorite fictional world, and you can read about it, as well as about my guests in these books, written by Julie Kagawa:

My guest here are all faeries: Megan Chase, Prince Ash, Robin Goodfellow (aka Puck, and you might know him from Shakespeare’s play).
That grey cute cat you see is also a fairy. His name is Grimmalkin and trust me when I say this: HE KNOWS EVERYTHING.
That good looking guy with white hair is Keirran. Be careful with him. You never know when he might stab your back!
They never lie, they aren’t able to. But they twist the truth, so you have to pay attention.
They also like to bargain, but don’t fall for that, because you might regret it.
They are good fairies, but you never know for sure if they’ll need a slave for „the better cause“.

If you wonder where is their creator, Julie Kagawa, let me tell you: We didn’t invite her. We wanted to leave her in the human’s world, where she’ll write other stories, so humans would enjoyed them. We care about her too much to tie her to this place forever.

Wait! Can you hear that? A male voice, so soft, beautiful, keeping rythm with acoustic music.
That is James Bay on his guitar, playing „Need The Sun To Break“ at the moment. We kidnapped him, took him with us to be our slave. Someone has to keep us entertained, after all!

I bet you wonder what am I doing here, in this creepy world free willingly. Am I right?
Let’s just say I always wanted to be a fairy. And I found the way to be a new queen of winter.
Ash forgave me. At least I think he has.

Food vector designed by Freepik

Book Review: The Iron Warrior by Julie Kagawa

the iron warrior

Title: The Iron Warrior

Series: The Iron Fey: Call of the Forgotten #3

Author: Julie Kagawa

Publisher: Harlequin Teen

Date: October 27th, 2015

Pages: 384

Format: Paperback

Source: Purchased

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

The Iron Prince—my nephew—betrayed us all.

He killed me.

Then, I woke up.

Waking after a month on the brink of death, Ethan Chase is stunned to learn that the Veil that conceals the fey from human sight was temporarily torn away. Although humankind’s glimpse of the world of Faery lasted just a brief moment, the human world has been cast into chaos, and the emotion and glamour produced by fear and wonder has renewed the tremendous power of the Forgotten Queen. Now, she is at the forefront of an uprising against the courts of Summer and Winter—a reckoning that will have cataclysmic effects on the Nevernever.

Leading the Lady’s Forgotten Army is Keirran himself: Ethan’s nephew, and the traitor son of the Iron Queen, Meghan Chase.To stop Keirran, Ethan must disobey his sister once again as he and his girlfriend, Kenzie, search for answers long forgotten. In the face of unprecedented evil and unfathomable power, Ethan’s enemies must become his allies, and the world of the fey will be changed forevermore.

vrpca

Review:

So the day has finally come. The day I finished the last book of my favorite series… I will miss my faeries… 😦

Hanging with Ethan, Kenzie and Keirran was an amazing experience and I would do it all over again if I could.

This world, that Julie Kagawa created, is my favorite world of all the fictional ones, and while other bookworms are waiting for their letter from Hogwarts, I am waiting for a faerie creature to come and take me to NeverNever. I could be a slave to faeries, I don’t mind! I could sing to them. I even know how to play harmonica.

In this series, not only did I find my not-anymore-new book boyfriend, but my favorite OTP.
Ethan and Kenzie are just amazing together and I really like their chemistry.

This book had a lot of action and it was a quick read.
Some situations brought meto tears, some made me emotional and swoon, but all in all, I was happy how it all wrapped up in the end.
I knew I was saying goodbye to the characters, which made me want to read it really, really slowly, just so I could spend as much time with them as I could.

Although this is not the best book in the series (The Lost Prince is, in my opinion) I still enjoyed it so much.

If you haven’t read this series yet, I strongly suggest you to do so. You won’t regret, I promise!

My first blog post in which I am discussing how I started reading in English and my 2016 bookish resolution

Once upon a time, there was a girl who liked to read. Although reading was her favorite hobby, there were still things she liked to do as well: going out with her friends, watching movies and tv, listening to music, knowing everything that happens in the celebrity culture, traveling and just being alive.

Then, the year 2013 came. The girl stummbled upona website called Goodreads, where she learned about books she never heard of. They all looked so appealing to her, but there was just one problem: most of them weren’t translated into Croatian, the girl’s native language.

The girl figured out that, in order to read them, she has to learn English. She already knew some basics from school, but she was never good enough when it came to using them.

That didn’t discourage her. The girl went to a bookstore, bought herself a copy of the spin-off of her favorite series (it was a Bloodlines by Richelle Mead and no, it is still not translated to Croatian L ), took a dictionary and a pen , and started reading.

It took her almost a month to finish that book and after she was done with it, she bought herself a copy of The Golden Lily.

It took her around two weeks to finish that one and, when she was finally done with it, she grabed herself a copy of The Fault in our Stars.

Then came Anna and the French Kiss which made her fall in love with books in a whole new level, and after that, more and more books she read, faster and faster of a reader she became, more and more hungry for a great fiction she was.

As you probably figured out by now, the girl was me and, although I still enjoy all of the mundane things, reading is what I love the most and feel a great passion about.

These days I am not only reading in English (although I still do enjoy reading in my native language) but writing reviews and discussing books in it as well.

Although I am a pretty active user on Goodreads , I decided to start my own blog and to be a part of a bookish community (I also got a twitter account for that purpose).

These are my 2016 bookish resolutions:

To be a part of bookish community
Not to set up myself a Goodreads challenge (because this year I don’t want to stress myself whether I would reach it or not, but just want to relax and enjoy reading as I once did)
To participate in Read-a-Thons
To read more classics
To re-read more (once upon a time re-reading was what I loved the most. To me, it was even better then first-time-reading. Since discovering Goodreads and so many new books, I kind of lost the habit of re-reading and I started to miss it)
To read books I still haven’t from authors I consider as my favorite (Richelle Mead, Julie Kagawa, Katie McGarry, Jane Costello, Lindsey Kelk, J. A. Templeton, Cynthia Hand, Madeleine Wichkam (aka Sophie Kinsella)

When it comes to my blog, I am still in process of learning everything but I hope I will manage to handle everything pretty soon.

In the next few days I will post some of my old reviews that I am obligated to publishers, some of my old reviews because I want them to be here on my web-space, as well as new ones that I still have to write.

Anyway, I hope to be here a long time, to be able to call myself a blogger, and to get on well with other book bloggers.

Thank you for reading this.