Month: May 2017

May 31

May Wrap-Up & Best of the Bunch

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Best of the Bunch, Monthly Recap 28

My Goings On in May: My daughter turned 13. Another teenager in the house. Yikes! I volunteered at the Scholastic warehouse sale and earned LOTS of free books! The new swim season has started, so my two older kids (and I) are busy with practices and meets. Our house got robbed! My daughter won a writing competition for her cute short story! I finished the first draft of that new editing project that I’ve been working on. I finally started working out again, and watched 13 Reasons Why and The 100 while doing it. (I’ve also been watching Master of None with my mom and my husband, and I watched the first season of The Santa Clarita Diet with my mom.) On Instagram: Most Popular Posts: (From here on out, just assume that A Spoiler-Filled Discussion of Three Dark Crowns is my top post unless I say otherwise.) The April Wrap-Up Round-Up… Read more »

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May 30

Bite-Sized Reviews of The Names They Gave Us, The Crown’s Fate, Tell Me Three Things and We Were Liars

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Reviews 24

Today I’ve got bite-sized reviews of a few of my recent reads. This was a great batch of books, so I hope these bite-sized reviews will be enough to feed your fiction addiction! This book gave me all the feels and it was just what I needed right now. I’ve heard amazing things about Emery Lord, but I’ve never read her, and I have to confess that I was hesitant about this book because of the religious themes. Not because I don’t like religion in my books exactly, but because I’m always very nervous that Christianity is going to end up being slammed—it feels to me like contemporary books from non-Christian publishers tend to be skewed toward the idea that Christians are generally judgmental and possibly a little evil, so…. But I LOVED the progressive view of Christianity that was given in this book. It reminds us that Christians are not… Read more »

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May 28

Sunday Post & Giveaways Galore 5/28/17

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Sunday Post 33

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer ~ It’s a chance to share news~ A post to recap the past week on my blog and share news about what’s coming up in the week ahead. Last week on FYFA (and in my life): Much better week this week (no robberies, so you know…). We got to hang out with family at my niece’s confirmation last Sunday and then we spent a fun day at Six Flags amusement park later in the week. Yesterday the kids had a swim meet. And, best of all, we got our August vacation all booked! We’re super excited because we’re renting an RV and heading to Gatlinburg, Tennessee for about a week. We’ve always had a sort of pipe dream of actually living in an RV, so this is a chance for us to experience a tiny slice… Read more »

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May 27

May 2017 Wrap-Up Round-Up Link-Up

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Monthly Wrap-Up Round-Up 3

It’s time for the May Wrap-Up Round-Up! The April Wrap-Up giveaway is being hosted right here on FYFA. There are a few more days to enter so make sure you head over there! This is the link-up for our May wrap-up posts. If you don’t already know about the Monthly Wrap-Up Round-Up, read the information below: Every month, at the end of the month, I’ll put up a monthly wrap-up link-up post where everyone can link up their month end posts. There are no specific requirements for what needs to be in your post, as long as you have a book blog and your wrap-up summarizes your month in some way. Then, one week later, I’ll create a giveaway that encourages people to visit YOUR month end link-ups, giving entries for commenting and/or sharing. Anyone can participate in the giveaway – you won’t have to actually link up in order to… Read more »

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May 25

Star-Crossed by Barbara Dee: Review, Giveaway & Dee’s Top Ten Addictions

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Author Top Ten Lists, Giveaways (Ended), Reviews 8 ★★★★

This book is incredibly adorable and a perfect way to introduce MG readers to the concept of LGBT relationships. Since Mattie herself is unsure of how she feels, it gives the reader permission to be unsure with her, and it eases the MG reader into the idea that Mattie might be having romantic feelings for another girl. Because of that, a relatively simple book becomes powerful. What Fed My Addiction: Slow realization. At the start of this book it’s never even occurred to Mattie that she could be attracted to a girl—after all, she’s just getting over a crush that she had on a boy, and it’s not like she’s been questioning her sexuality her whole life. Because of that, we get to see the whole story from a realistically naive point of view. Mattie is confused at first about what she feels for Gemma. She certainly has no idea how Gemma feels about her…. Read more »

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May 24

Why Rating Middle Grade (and Sometimes YA) Is So Darn Hard for Me! Let’s Discuss.

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Let's Discuss 45

I have a MG review that’s scheduled to go up tomorrow (for Star-Crossed by Barbara Dee) and I really loved the book. Not only is it adorable and well-written, it highlights a middle grade girl who discovers that she has a crush on another girl (after having a crush on a boy), which is a topic that middle graders need to see. And let me tell you, this book was so hard for me to rate! Here’s the issue that plagues me: I am (obviously) not a middle grader. So sometimes I’ll find “issues” with a book that probably wouldn’t be issues at all if I were an actual middle grade reader. For instance, in this particular book, there was a focus on the romance in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. There was discussion about whether or not Romeo was actually in love with Juliet, and the main character defended the instalove in… Read more »

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May 22

A Start of Two Series: Bite-Sized Reviews of (the Start of) The Ruined Series and The Gold Seer Trilogy

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction All-Time Favorites, Reviews 25

Today I’ve got bite-sized reviews of two awesome fantasy series that I’ve started (they’re not done yet, so it’s actually not my fault this time that I haven’t finished them!). Hope these bite-sized reviews will be enough to feed your fiction addiction! On the surface, this book seems like it might be sort of derivative. It’s not. Well, okay, it sort of is. I mean, just based on the basic description, I feel like I’ve read this book before: Em’s parents were murdered because a power-hungry king is afraid of her people’s abilities, and she wants revenge. She decides to pass herself off as the prince’s bride-to-be (possible since they’ve never actually met), but she falls in love with the prince and starts to doubt her plan to betray him. It sounds vaguely familiar, right. But Tintera makes this series stand out because she doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Em’s no wronged angel, she’s a… Read more »

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May 21

Sunday Post & Giveaways Galore 5/21/17

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Sunday Post 56

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer ~ It’s a chance to share news~ A post to recap the past week on my blog and share news about what’s coming up in the week ahead. Last week on FYFA (and in my life): This week started out great, but then got strange fast. I’ll start with the good. I’m writing this post from a swim meet again (on Saturday). We love swimming, but there’s lots of downtime. But that’s okay because that means I have plenty of time to write my Sunday Post today. Last weekend, my daughter had a piano/voice recital and she also had a little ceremony because she was one of the winners of our library’s literary magazine contest. She wrote a really adorable short story for my homeschool writing class and entered it in the contest. I’m super proud and impressed… Read more »

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May 20

What You Need to Know Before You Open a NetGalley Account

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Blogging Tips, Let's Discuss 82

NetGalley is an incredible way to start receiving review copies of books. In general, getting approved for a book via NetGalley is much more likely than getting a physical ARC of that same book. Which makes sense—publishers can afford to give out digital ARCs a lot more freely than physical ARCs. Sometimes bloggers are scared to jump into NetGalley, but if you follow a few simple guidelines, you’ll see that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Opening a NetGalley account is incredibly easy, but I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times I’ve seen bloggers who talk about all the mistakes they made when they first joined (including me!). Most of us joined without really knowing what to expect and without understanding the “rules” (both written and unwritten) that apply to NetGalley. I haven’t written a post like this before because most of my readers aren’t just… Read more »

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May 19

The Truth About Happily Ever After by Karole Cozzo: Review & Giveaway

Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Giveaways (Ended), Reviews 14 ★★★★

Once again, Cozzo gives us a realistically romantic story of fairy tale proportions. A little note about the genre: The book is officially billed as YA, but the characters are all in college, so I think of it more as NA. I think it’s YA because there are no actual sex scenes (a few implied fade to black scenes) and it’s overall a sweet romance, appropriate for high schoolers, even younger ones (there is a bit of drinking with a fake ID, but nothing else that would be seen as particularly questionable). New Adult readers who want books that cover the college-aged experience and don’t focus on sex would find this to be a perfect match! What Fed My Addiction: Fairy tale setting. The book takes place at a Disneyesque theme park and it was really fun to read about the job and how the people who work there as characters feel about it… Read more »

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