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February Wrap Up

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I can’t believe spring is only two weeks away and that we’re already a full week into March. February was a really good month for me. In terms of media, this was a typical, slow month for me. I watched two movies this month: The Menu (★★★★★, fight me) and The Strays (★★); played an embarrassing amount of Dead by Daylight; and started the newest season of Diablo III (sorcerer class til death).

More importantly, I prided myself on reading ten books again for the month! I’m currently five books ahead of schedule to hit my reading goal for the year, which is a great feeling. I somewhat feel myself hitting a wall with reading, but I do think it’s simply because I’m slugging through a young adult fantasy when my bones are screeching and itching for more of this horror obsession that I’m currently in (this isn’t really any different than any other time of the year for me, but shh).

Most of my reads came from the Black History Month readathon I did, but I managed to sneak in three others. These are all the books I read in February with ratings below:

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January Wrap Up

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It’s crazy to me to think that an entire month of the new year is already gone! It passed so quickly, but it was honestly a pretty good month for me. I consumed more media than I normally do — I watched four movies: M3gan (★★★★★), Black Phone (★★★), A Dark Song (★★★★), and The Invitation (★★★). More importantly, I read TEN books this month, which I’m super proud of considering that’s more than I read in both November and December combined. Here are all the books I read this month, with ratings:

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Review: What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

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Summary: Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.

And they were liars.

For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.

Genre: thriller, mystery, horror
Rating: ★★★★

When I saw that What Lies in the Woods was a BookoftheMonth pick, I immediately added it to my box. The book is inspired by the Slenderman stabbing that happened in 2014, when two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times to appease Slenderman so he would reward them by taking the girls to his mansion. This story has always fascinated and confused me, so I was curious to see how a book inspired by that case would be.

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Review: The Girls are All So Nice Here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

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Summary: A lot has changed in years since Ambrosia Wellington graduated from college, and she’s worked hard to create a new life for herself. But then an invitation to her ten-year reunion arrives in the mail, along with an anonymous note that reads, “We need to talk about what we did that night.”

It seems that the secrets of Ambrosia’s past—and the people she thought she’d left there—aren’t as buried as she believed. Amb can’t stop fixating on what she did or who she did it with: larger-than-life Sloane “Sully” Sullivan, Amb’s former best friend, who could make anyone do anything.

At the reunion, Amb and Sully receive increasingly menacing messages, and it becomes clear that they’re being pursued by someone who wants more than just the truth of what happened that first semester.

Genre: Thriller, mystery
Rating: ★★★★

This is a book that you’ll either completely love or absolutely hate. There is no middle ground here. When I was reading reviews from other readers, the biggest point that stood out was that they despised all of the characters in this book. Ambrosia Wellington (I think her name alone says a lot about the type of person she would turn out to be) is insufferable, dependent on others’ validation, and a straight up bully. Her partner in crime, Sloane, is the type of cool girl that all the boys want and all the girls want to be, but she’s dangerous. These things are absolutely true about The Girls Are All So Nice Here, but what made me sink right into the heart of this story is how well-written these girls are.

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Review: If We Were Villains by ML Rio

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Summary: Oliver Marks has just served ten years in jail – for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he’s released, he’s greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago.

As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.

Genre: mystery, thriller, contemporary
Rating: ★★★★★

This is a PSA that dark academia has my heart completely and absolutely no other genre in the entire world can compare to how If We Were Villains makes me feel. I know I’ve been throwing out five-star reviews pretty frequently lately, but I truly have not been this enamored with a book since I read The Maidens by Alex Michaelides last year. I know that this book is going to stay with me for a long time, and even though I’m usually not someone who rereads, I cannot wait to revisit this and fall in love all over again.

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