While I was excited for this it did miss the mark for me a little. The reimagining of Snow White was a fun take although there wasn't enough of it for me and there seemed to be other fairytales/stories included so it was kinda off. The beginning was fairly slow, slower than I prefer, and it took a minute for me to understand what was going on. That being said, I do enjoy the characters and world that Kalynn created and found them to be interesting. 3.5 stars for me.

I really despise the use of lying and miscommunication in romances and this proved to be frustrating at best. The characters were fine for the most part and the romance was okay, it was all incredibly underwhelming, vanilla, and annoying. I'm giving it 3 stars because I love winter settings with cozy vibes and this did have that.

The opening was actually pretty hilarious and I loved crumpet to pieces. I would actually die of humiliation if that little scenario happened to me. I loved the setting, it had a perfectly whimsical winter wonderland feeling and the characters definitely made it feel like a Hallmark movie. That said, the romance was fairly vanilla and wasn't that entertaining and the storyline itself didn't hold my interest 100%. 3.75 stars though!

Definitely the best one of the series! We got so much more story, we got to watch characters grow and learn and grieve. We got a sweet happy ending with Ginseng and it was a wonderful closer to the series. I would love to see more books in this world! As usual, the illustrations were the BEST!!

This was such a sweet story about these sisters asking their father to tell them about their homeland because they had never been. You can feel the love and the sadness in this, from having such a beautiful and loving place to live to having to leave it to keep your family safe. The stories were interesting and at the end there is a small guide where Hannah tells you what certain words mean/are pronounced and there's also an emotional dedication about her family who was displaced and the hope of returning.

This was a heartbreaking and devastating look at the brutality of the genocide going on in Gaza right now. We have multiple different essays that are recent from 2021 and some that are older that crosses generations. We learn about the harassment of the soldiers and living in the houses of Palestinians while tormenting and torturing them every single day. A writer of one of the essays, Refaat Al-Areer has died recently from the ongoing genocide. This has been going on for so long and it shows just how much Palestine has been failed and continues to be failed. The poems made me cry and I think this was an important read.

3.75 stars rounded up. I think this was a cute, fun, fluffy romance with a lot of heart and laughter. It felt fairly relatable, with Samira's career/family/and love life being a bit confusing or muddled. I thought Samira handled her issues well, she considered her choices and did what she believed served her well. Personally, I wasn't too keen on her and Menem but it did grow on me and I'm happy with the outcome.

Shocking and heartbreaking accurately describe this book for me. I liked how the story jumped from Nadal's perspective present day, to her childhood memories, to her reading her uncle Amin's journal entries as a freedom fighter. We received a lot of insider information on Nadal's childhood under the British mandate as well as a look into the Zionist terror that her uncle Amin was fighting.

It was definitely just okay. It was casual and predictable and basic and boring. From the synopsis, Best was supposed to be this super grumpy dude but he really wasn't and Elisha was just whiny. The side characters were just okay and didn't add much to the story. The one thing I did like about this was that there was an overabundance of Christmas in this. Usually, we don't get a lot of that in holiday romances and this did have a Hallmark Christmas feeling to it.