My Rating: 5/5* I am speechless — okay, not exactly, but holy smokes. Though I rated the first book in this duology, Strike the Zither, at 4.5 stars out of 5, I very readily rate this one at 5. No contest; full stop. Sound the Gong readily picks up where its predecessor left off, and […]

My Rating: 5/5* **I don’t have enough thank you’s in the few languages I can say it in to express my gratitude to Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group and Feiwel & Friends for sending me a digital ARC of this novel via NetGalley for review. You guys made my year.** Let’s get our baduk stones on […]

My Rating: 5/5* Finishing R.F. Kuang’s, Babel, felt similar to when I first watched Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. If you’re unfamiliar with the latter, it is an animated and admittedly fairly highly fictionalized biopic about Jiro Horikoshi, the chief engineer of numerous Imperial Japanese fighter plane designs…including the infamous Mitsubishi A6M Zero, which would earn its […]

My Rating: 5/5 * NOBODY TOUCH ME, I’M EMOTIONALLY FRAGILE. **Thank you to Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group for granting me a digital ARC of this novel via Netgalley** This book…where do I even begin with this book? There’s so much that I want to word-vomit onto the page, that trying to collect my thoughts into […]

My rating: 4.5/5 * Wow. Wow. Wow. WOW. When I first saw that a fantasy novel was coming out that was riffing upon the Chinese classic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” I was more than a little intrigued. I’m by no means any kind of expert on Chinese classic literature, but I’m at least vaguely […]

Kill the King (Colomba Caselli, #3)by Sandrone Dazieri5* out of 5 **DISCLAIMER: I received a digital ARC of this novel from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review** Well, it’s finally here: the finale of Sandrone Dazieri’s “Caselli and Torre” series. It’s been quite a ride since we first met these characters in Kill […]

The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everestby Anatoli Boukreev, G. Weston DeWalt5* out of 5 I remember working at BARNES & NOBLE and always seeing large stacks of John Krakauer’s INTO THIN AIR appear during the “school reading season”; it was a very popular book chosen to be read by American high school students. And why not? A […]

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disasterby Jon Krakauer (Goodreads Author)5* out of 5 The sad part is that I had seen this book so many times while a bookseller at BARNES & NOBLE, but had absolutely no idea it was about. I was not familiar with the 1996 Everest disaster — hell, […]

Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1)by Leigh Bardugo (Goodreads Author) 5* out of 5 My favourite book by Leigh Bardugo thus far. Hands down. No question. When I went into Ninth House, I knew almost nothing about it; all I knew was that it was dark academia-type book involving secret societies at Yale. I didn’t even know there were […]