In 2020, March had 365 days instead of the ordinary 31, and being at home in lockdown didn’t help. But I’m not here to talk about these bad days we are living in. No, for that you can turn on the news. In this house, sadness stays outside the door, and if it dares to come in, I’ll fight it with a movie, a game, and a book (in no particular order). For now, I’m going to stick with the books that made my March more bearable and enjoyable. I participated in two blog tours in March. The first one was for Happy Family by James Ellis. The book is set in Spain where the main protagonist, Germaine, goes to try to break out from isolation the creator of the virtual reality game Happy Family. I’ve read books about VR games in the past, but none of those can compare …

April is just around the corner, which means the Magical Readathon is about to start. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the Magical Readathon is run by G from the YouTube channel BookRoast during the entire month of April. The marathon is themed around the O.W.L.s (Ordinary Wizarding Level) and N.E.W.T.s (Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests) held at Hogwarts. There is a Wizarding Career Guide with all the different careers available, and each one has different classes that you need to take to graduate. And this year, it was added a list of courses and seminars for extra credit. Despite everything about this readathon being related to Harry Potter, it’s possible to read any genre. For a muggle like me, this is the cherry on top of the cake. I’m not a Harry Potter fan, but everything was so well created that it’s a shame not to participate. I …

There is nothing like escaping Earth, and a sci-fi book is perfect for that. Vulcan’s Forge by Robert Mitchell Evans takes the reader to Nocturnia, a newly populated world with the last colony after Earth’s destruction. My many thanks to Anne Cater and the author for allowing me to be part of this tour. Author: Robert Mitchell Evans Publisher: Flame Tree Press Pages: 288 Genre: Sci-fi, Romance, Crime Publication: 26th March 2020 Synopsis: Jason Kessler doesn’t fit in the society of Nocturnia, the sole colony that survived the Earth’s destruction. Between the colony’s dedication to a distorted vision of mid-twentieth-century Americana, its sexually repressive culture, and the expectation that his most important duty is marriage and children Jason rebels, throwing himself into an illicit and dangerous affair with Pamela Guest, but Pamela harbours a secret. Soon the lovers are engaged in a lethal game of cat and mouse with the …

Games and books are two of my favourite hobbies. Whenever a book is about a game, I don’t miss a chance to read it. Happy Family by James Ellis wasn’t an exception. My many thanks to Anne Cater, the author, and the publisher for allowing me to be part of this tour. Author: James Ellis Publisher: Unbound Digital Pages: 304 Genre: Fiction, Humour, LGBT Publication: 6th February 2020 Synopsis: Germaine Kiecke was a foundling, an orphan, brought up by the infamous ‘Motherhood’ in a Belgian orphanage. Now she is a successful art academic who defines herself by her profession and prefers to experience the world through art and an augmented reality game called Happy Family. But when the artist Tom Hannah, the creative force behind Happy Family, moves to Spain, surrounds himself with high walls, three large guard dogs called Harpo, Chico and Groucho, and a runaway who teaches him …

Two months into the new year and my reading mood are as good as ever. At this point, I’m just waiting for a reading slump to hit me hard. Meanwhile, I’m taking advantage of it as much as I can! February had one more reading day this year, and even though it still has fewer days than January, I read six books one more than the month before. For someone that was reading one to two books a month, this is pretty awesome! Wrap-Up When I was presented with the opportunity to review another book by Karl Drinkwater for a blog tour, I had to grab it. Chasing Solace is the continuation of Opal’s scavenge through the universe, and I wanted to reread the first book, Lost Solace, to refresh my memory on everything that happened. I enjoyed Chasing Solace even more, and now that I know there is a …

Once again is time to explore the universe of lost ships in the second book of the Lost Solace series, Chasing Solace by Karl Drinkwater. My many thanks to Anne Cater and the author for allowing me to be part of this tour. Author: Karl Drinkwater Pages: 314 Genre: Sci-Fi Publication: 15th April 2019 Synopsis: The legendary Lost Ships exist, and they harbour nightmarish horrors. Opal knows. She barely survived her first encounter with one. Despite escaping, she failed to find what she was looking for: her lost sister. Now Opal must board a second derelict Lost Ship to seek answers, and it’s even more monstrous, a sickening place of death and decay. To make things worse, the military government wants her, dead or alive. Considering their reputation, dead may be better. To find her sister, Opal will risk everything: her life, her blood, her sanity. There’s always a price …

About a year ago, I was testing out different apps to help me learn Japanese. And now, I’m coming back with two other resources that I’ve been using and enjoying a lot. Before I explore into each one individually, I want to start by talking about the SRS. No, it has nothing to do with your car’s airbags or software development, SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System. This is a learning mechanism to help you memorize vocabulary by increasing the interval between reviews every time you are correct. The idea of the system is to focus on the vocabulary that you are struggling with instead of wasting time with the ones you already know. The system kind of works in levels. For every right answer, the word goes up a level while answering wrong brings it down. And the higher the level, the less frequent the word appears in the …

Today is Valentine’s Day, and instead of doing something corny and super romantic, I decided to review two questionable romance books. I’m talking about Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James and After by Anna Todd. Truth is I had no idea what to post, and I’ve been meaning to write reviews for both of these books, and Valentine’s Day is as good as any other day to do it. I decided to review both books together not only because both come from fanfictions, but because both have questionable relationship dynamics and belong to the same genre. Even though they are similar, each book still has very different storylines, but I’ll get to that later. First, let me review each one separately. In review: Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James I’m just gonna put it out there, and I don’t care what people might think. I really really really …

I can’t take it anymore. I need to talk about Hello Neighbor, and I need to talk about the prequel to the game, Missing Pieces by Carly Anne West. I read this book a month ago, and I became obsessed. I loved everything about this book, so excuse me if I’m going to fangirl hard from now on. About the game: To give you a little bit of context, Hello Neighbor is a horror and “escape the room” type of game, where you actually don’t want to escape any room, but instead getting into the neighbour house. The objective of the game is to discover what the neighbour is hiding in the basement without getting caught. And here is when all the mystery starts. As the game was being developed, several version were released to the public to help improve the game and work out bugs, something that is becoming …

Finally, January is over! I don’t know about you, but it felt it took forever to end. And the proof of that is the amount of book I managed to read. Last month, I read five books total and each one of them was amazing! I had a great start on my reading year, and I’m going to tell you all about it because it’s time to wrap-up January. Wrap-Up On my last wrap-up, I say that I had already read my first book of the year and that it was a favourite. Not only that, but it also motivated the only purchase I’ve done this month. I’m talking about Missing Pieces by Carly Anne West. This middle-grade book is the prequel to the famous game Hello Neighbor, being the first book in a series with the same name. And since I love games as much as I love books, …

Science-fiction has been growing over the years, gathering more viewers and getting more and more ambitious as technology evolves. Slowly, I’ve been diving into the movies from “the good old days” when my mother was old enough to watch them, and I probably wasn’t born yet. When Independence Day came out on theatres, I was one-year-old, a tiny little person that couldn’t even speak, let alone be interested in sci-fi. I wanted to eat and sleep, those were my priorities, so it was many years later that I stumbled across this movie. I don’t remember exactly when I first saw it, but since then I’m probably on my 4th rerun of this great sci-fi piece. And just last week it was on TV again, so I saw it as an opportunity to refresh my memory and do a review. Synopsis: The communication systems worldwide are experiencing atmospheric interference caused by …