Let’s stop pretending that book covers don’t matter. For just a second, let’s all be honest with ourselves: we do judge books by their covers, to at least some degree. When you’re perusing and looking for a book without a recommendation, what gets you to pick up a book is the cover, the spine, and/or the title. Covers matter. They’re important and they absolutely sell books. Okay, now that we’ve all admitted that to ourselves (right?), let’s talk about what makes a cover good, at least in my personal opinion.

ype can be a double-edged sword, though; on one hand, it got me excited for the book, but on the other, it raised my expectations to unbelievable levels. So the question for today’s post is: did The Shadow of the Gods live up to the hype? Let’s get into that in today’s spoiler-free review of the first book of John Gwynne’s Bloodsword Saga!

Last week, I released part one of a two-part series discussing Young Adult books. In that post, I talked specifically about the arguments against Young Adult novels that are often presented and aren’t necessarily genre-specific. I countered them, but also discussed their merits. Today, however, I’m going to be addressing a lot of pros for the Young Adult genre as I see them. This is the last planned part of this two-part series, so I’ll wrap up with my final thoughts on the matter at the end of it.

ne week. It was easy at times, stressful at others, but all around the result at the end was notable. I’ll be talking about how the experience went, my pitfalls and struggles, and finally how I’m feeling now that this little experiment is over!

I finished reading John Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen and… well, I have some thoughts. This is going to be a spoiler-free review, but I may do a spoiler talk in the future if I’m up for it regarding my feelings on this series as a whole. For now, though, we’re going to stick to a straightforward review of the final book in the high fantasy quartet. Wrath, the final book in the series, was exciting and brought the story to a well-earned conclusion. I had a good time reading it, though I personally found that I enjoyed Ruin a bit more. We’ll get into that and more in this spoiler-free review of the book!

In the book reading community, across the board, there’s an argument that I’ve seen prevail, and it’s about young adult books: books that are written with a target audience of people who are between 13 and 18 years old. I’ve heard and read tons of different arguments regarding whether or not these books are good or bad as a whole, so I decided to take some time, do some research, and put together a post about this idea that YA books are objectively bad by default.