Happy Friday, friends! I'm back with this week's edition of Friday Faves. Make sure to join my Discord server and share your own weekly faves with everyone there!

My favorite book I read this week was Shapes of Love by L.V. Peñalba. I read this for the "Aspec Rep" square on my Pride Reading Bingo board, and it totally blew me away.

This is a YA novel about Sasha, a teen girl whose music goes mega viral on TikTok and makes her an international star. Everyone is trying to figure out who the love songs are about, but Sasha is actually aroace and the songs are all about her favorite characters in TV, books, etc.

This book so beautifully covers the many nuances of aromantic and asexual identities. This is woven in with the bright spotlights of viral fame, being a woman, coming out (or not), and navigating changing friendships through it all.

I really loved how Sasha pushed hard against the idea that friend love can't be as meaningful and important as romantic love. The book lets her make some mistakes around that belief as well, which I liked. Everyone in this book makes mistakes, learns, and has complex conversations about it all.

It is vanishingly rare to get portrayals of queerplatonic relationships in novels, let alone traditionally published ones. I'm so glad that Peñalba included a plotline exploring the possibilities of QPRs, along with a few other types of nontraditional relationships among the secondary characters.

On top of alll that, the characters are racially diverse as well, adding yet another layer to the complexity of coming out. Layers on layers on layers!

I really hope to see more from L.V. Peñalba in the future. This book has such a unique voice, telling a story that is practically absent from YA literature.

My non-bookish fave this week is that I got to go to a The Big Cake Exchange event. Basically, 300+ people all bring a cake, and then you get to go around and take home slices of as many as you can get your hands on. It was joyful chaos, and I had so much fun seeing and tasting everyone's work.

Happy Monday! For Must Read Monday this week, I'm featuring The Actual Star by Monica Byrne.

This is one of those books where I finished it and just kind of had to stare at the wall for awhile while I processed it.

The Actual Star is a massive undertaking, telling the stories of three sets of people in three timelines each a thousand years apart. We watch as their stories braid, repeat, differ, and merge. I saw elements of Ursula LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler, Simon Jimenez, and more from across decades of sci-fi and fantasy literature in this story (and know I do not invoke these greats lightly!)

Often with multi-timeline books, I find myself wishing to get back to a particular story, but here I felt deeply invested in each timeline, and was on the edge of my seat as the stories came together. It’s quite a feat to make a slow paced, 600+ page novel a page turner.

The worldbuilding is intricate but never bogged down in the details, and it weaves in a little sci-fi, a little fantasy, and a little mystery as you begin to piece together the overarching story.

Happy Friday! Here are my faves of the week - I hope you'll join my Discord server and share yours as well!

My favorite book I read this week was The Bloody and the Damned by Becca Coffindaffer.

This book reminded me a lot of one of my all time favorites, The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson. A young person fighting to keep themself and their loved ones alive in a hostile environment run by the ultra rich above and the brutal gangs below - sign me up.

I loved the way Val's world slowly expanded outward over the course of the book, bringing in more people and more history as we went along. Val is an excellent morally gray protagonist (who thankfully never becomes too broody about it). It's also casually but deeply queer on multiple fronts.

The writing is blunt and fast. You'll find yourself turning the pages as fast as you can. It's categorized as YA, and while the romantic elements stay firmly in that range, it's very dark and violent, as promised by the title.

A non-bookish fave this week is that I started watching Jujutsu Kaisen and I'm obsessed. I've never been a big anime person but this is so fun (and also a little creepy, ngl). I'd love to get your recommendations for what to watch next after I blow through this series!

Welcome to the first ever Must Read Monday! Every Monday, I'm going to spotlight a backlist book that I think didn't get the love it deserved.

Today's book is SOMETHING KINDRED by Ciera Burch.  

If you are a fan of authors like Jas Hammond or Courtney Gould, this book needs to go on your TBR right now. SOMETHING KINDRED is, at its core, about relationships between women and how generational trauma can affect them.

I loved all the women in this book, and watching them grapple with the choices they had made in their lives. These relationships dovetailed so beautifully with the exploration of small town life; how something can feel like home and be stifling at the same time. The imagery and feelings it evoked will stay with me for a long time. 

Amid all of this emotional plot, there is also a supernatural story happening at the same time. The grief is both real and unreal in this book, and I loved the way they interweaved.

Also, I haven't even gotten to the part where the main character is bisexual! This book truly has everything.

Welcome to Friday Faves! Each week I plan to share my favorite book I read during the past week, as well as any other stuff I've been enjoying. I would also like to invite you all to join my Discord channel, where there's a place for you to share your own Friday Faves. Let's fill each others' lives with wonderful things!

This week's fave read is a real "hey guys have you heard about this massively popular book??!" situation. It's HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell.

This is the most devastating book I've read in years. Just absolutely a tear your hair out and lay on the floor crying kind of book. I didn't want to keep reading it but I also couldn't stop reading it. Somehow, it feels like the events of the book are happening to you as you read it.

I particularly loved how it both mattered and didn't matter at all that Agnes' husband was William Shakespeare. Who cares, when you're that in the depths of grief? Agnes' touch of the supernatural also added another beautiful, painful layer to her story. I think I can say I've never quite met a character like Agnes.

A non-bookish fave thing for me recently is the video game Date Everything! I've been slowly playing this through over the past few months and it's so delightfully weird. It's a dating sim, but the twist is that the dateables are all of the objects in your house. It's silly, and punny, and voiced by all your favorite voice actors.

Now, I invite you to share your Friday Faves in the Discord chat! See you there!

Hello and welcome to my brand new Bindery community!

I am so excited to launch a bookish space outside of the Meta universe. No algorithms, just books!

I plan to use this space to chat about recent reads, anticipated releases, and probably also some non-bookish stuff I'm into as well (I will make everyone an NWSL fan if it kills me).

I also want to hear from you! What do you want from this space? What do you want to hear my thoughts on? What do you NOT want this space to be? Use the link above to join my Discord channel and let's get cooking!

June is almost here, which means it's time for my most anticipated June releases! I would also like to hear what you're looking forward to, because my TBR definitely needs a few more books stacked onto it.

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (6/2): In Kim's first full length novel, when someone immigrates, a copy of that person stays behind. Soyoung Rose Kang never heard from her other instance, until she calls Soyoung back to Korea after her grandfather's death.

Pool House by Mary H.K. Choi (6/9): Choi is a longtime favorite of mine. I adore the way she zeroes in on a relationship and picks out all the messy feelings within. POOL HOUSE is her first adult novel, focusing on a mother and daughter who are forced to move back in together.

Together We See by Ari Tison (6/16): The cover of this one is what first caught my eye, but then the summary sealed it. Ulá Dominguez is a Bribri-American teenager trying to discover the truth about her father's mysterious death. With her brother, she finds a dark world surrounding the work her father did as a land activist.