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ya-world-challenge · 15 hours

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Buzzing by Samuel Sattin, illustrated by Rye Hickman. Little, Brown Ink, 2023. 9780316628419. 218pp. including an author's not on his own OCD and a look at The Quest for Greenmoon campaign notes and the player's character sheets. https://www.powells.com/book/-9780316628419?partnerid=34778&p_bt

Isaac has OCD, and his worst impulses and bad thoughts about himself buzz around his head, unseen by everyone else, whispering to him and distracting him. After class one day Micah introduces herself and her friend Jaime to him. They're both wowed by Isaac's sketch of a dragon (and so is Jaime's couldn't-be-more-different twin, Carmen), and they invite him to play Swamps & Sorcery with them. Carmen tells him to prepare to venture to the Tower of Greenmoon. Isaac is excited, and clearly a little attracted to Micah; the feeling seems to be mutual.

But his older sister Miriam thinks their mom might have issues with role-playing games, which she thinks lead to compulsions. And she does worry about that and everything else about Isaac's life, so much that Miriam can't get her mom's attention for more than a moment. It feels explosive even though his mom lets him attend a few gaming sessions, and it all comes to a head when Isaac gets a bad grade.

I loved the crush, the sibling relationship, and of course the D&D-like adventures. Every gaming group I've ever been a part of has at least one person who can draw better than everyone else, someone who asked to draw everyone's characters, and that's Isaac. Minor spoiler: It was tough to see his mom take that away from him, but heartening to see how others (including Miriam) help and support him in the end.

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ya-world-challenge · 2 days

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Did something happen to Libby/Overdrive this weekend? It's logged me out and ALL library accounts I use (about 3) now give me 'expired' errors. I highly doubt all my cards expired at the same time. <_<

I'm wondering if this is happening to anyone else.

#library #libby #overdrive #library cards

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ya-world-challenge · 2 days

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'Dulhaniyaa', my desi lesbian romance, is out now!

You can order it now on Amazon!

Desi lesbians

Bollywood inspiration

Like "CRA" if it was queer

Arranged Marriage, Forbidden Romance and Runaway Bride

Cis protagonist with a trans love interest

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ya-world-challenge · 6 days

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Dear Wendy by Ann Zhao

Dear Wendy's Sophie and Jo, two aromantic and asexual students at Wellesley College, engage in an online feud while unknowingly becoming friends in real life, in this dual POV Young Adult contemporary debut from Ann Zhao

Sophie Chi is in her first year at Wellesley College (despite her parents' pleas that she attend a "real" university, rather than a liberal arts school) and has long accepted her aromantic and asexual (aroace) identities. She knows she'll never fall in love herself, but she enjoys running an Instagram account that offers relationship advice to students at Wellesley. No one except her roommate can know that she's behind the incredibly popular "Dear Wendy" account.

When Joanna "Jo" Ephron (also a first-year aroace student at Wellesley) created their "Sincerely Wanda" account, it wasn't at all meant to take off or be taken seriously-not like Wendy's. But now they might have a rivalry of sorts with Wendy's account? Oops. As if Jo's not busy enough having existential crises over gender, if she'll ever truly be loved, and whether her few friends will find The One and forget her!

While tensions are rising online, Sophie and Jo grow closer in real life, especially once they realize their shared aroace identity and start a campus organization for other a-spec students. Will their friendship survive if they learn just who's behind the Wendy and Wanda accounts?

Exploring a-spec identities, college life, and more, this platonic comedy, perfect for fans of Alice Osman's Loveless, is ultimately a love story about two people who are not-and will not-be in love!

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ya-world-challenge · 6 days

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@thedisabilitybookarchive

hi. my wattpad YA fantasy is now complete (!) offering you many hours of free procrastination

So I’ve been playing with a YA contemporary/urban fantasy novel for years.

It’s about disabled teens (like my protagonist, I’m an amputee) who discover they may have access to healing magic. Including healing themselves. But if they choose to be healed, they lose their power to heal others. (X)

Dear Son,

If you are reading this letter:

1. We are dead. 2. You are currently wondering who you are and what your name is. 3. You’re probably in a hospital. If so, they will be coming for you any moment.

[ PLZ READ on Wattpad ]

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ya-world-challenge · 9 days

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Hello everyone! I'm announcing my first novel in a new series, Mana Mirror, by me (Tobias Begley). It's a Progression Fantasy novel with strong influences in Magical Academia, some Xianxia influence, and a huge mage focus! It can be found here, or at the last link below!

This is the novel's description: When Malachi Baker stumbles into an offer of apprenticeship from the esteemed and powerful Occultist Orykson, he's left in shock and jumps at the chance to learn... Even if it means taking out a few loans.

Unfortunately, his new teacher sees him more as a tool than a student, and has set Malachi near-impossible goals before he becomes worthy of Orykson's full attention, and Malachi's innate power is only somewhat above average.

Worse, it turns out that Orykson has enemies more powerful than Malachi had ever imagined – and now their attention has landed solidly on him.

Torn between the mage who can offer him everything, and a strange old woman who offers him the chance to guide his own path, Malachi is left scrambling to find his purpose as a new mage.

What to expect: - Slowburn to Power - Slice of Life - Queer Content

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tobiasbegley

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYHQG7L4

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ya-world-challenge · 9 days

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Feel free to name any favorite not on this list, or see what I already have!

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ya-world-challenge · 11 days

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Messengers are back in stock!

Shop->https://gesshokudesigns.etsy.com

#shop stuff

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ya-world-challenge · 12 days

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Had to bring two characters from the dead and one from hiding just to do this lineup of Polsterreich folk dress. The designs were inspired by my home, Silesia.

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ya-world-challenge · 12 days

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Book Review - Our Lady of the Nile (🇷🇼 Rwanda)

[image1: book cover - a light indigo cover with a sketch in pale green of a woman's elongated face; image2: a map showing Rwanda, a very small country in central Africa; image3: a still from the 2019 movie - three girls in school uniform laugh and dote over a Black Virgin Mary statue]

Our Lady of the Nile

Author: Scholastique Mukasonga

Review

Our Lady of the Nile takes place in a Catholic girl's boarding school, isolated atop a mountain, in 1970s Rwanda. This school is, as the book's description says, a microcosm of "a society hurtling toward horror." There is the leader and militant defender of the revolution, Gloriosa; the Tutsi girls ever aware of their precarious position and the growing racism around them; the ones who choose sides to preserve themselves or their families. A worldbuilding fantasy couldn't be more perfectly set up, but this one is real.

I wish the book was set up in a more novel-style narrative, rather than the literary-style anecdotal flow it has most of the time. I might have been more engrossed in the characters lives that way, though the narrative does all flow together in the end.

Still, the book is masterful in its setup. It shows us life for the privileged girls in Rwanda - days at the boarding school, pastoral life in the villages where the scholarship girls come from, minor happenings and anecdotes... while slowly building up to the inevitable - culminating in an incident with echoes of the genocide to come and cutting away there, like a horror movie trailer.

This is a great book to help understand the origins of the Rwandan genocide of the 90s (especially if you are sensitive and don't want to read details about the genocide itself). While it is fiction and I can't speak for the total accuracy (not my expertise), the author sympathetically portrays all sides and also does not leave blameless the white colonizers who favored races and created rifts with their "anthropology" studies.

The text is very readable and I came away with a deeper understanding of this tiny country.

★ ★ ★ ★ 4 stars

Other reps: #Catholic

Genres: #historical, 20th century #school #political #social issues

#book review #rwanda #booklr #reading challenge #historical 20th century #school #political #social issues #literary #christian #catholic #africa

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ya-world-challenge · 13 days

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Ava and Eleanor having a girls night, from my manga Reverie

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ya-world-challenge · 14 days

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(i Will go back to everlasting haitus if that GFM slows down too much btw, seeing it to its goal ASAP is my primary focus right now)

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ya-world-challenge · 14 days

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Cover Art | Dragonfruit by Makiia Lucier

From acclaimed author Makiia Lucier, a dazzling, romantic fantasy inspired by Pacific Island mythology.

In the old tales, it is written that the egg of a seadragon, dragonfruit, holds within it the power to undo a person’s greatest sorrow. But as with all things that offer hope when hope had gone, the tale came with a warning.

Every wish demands a price.

Hanalei of Tamarind is the cherished daughter of an old island family. But when her father steals a seadragon egg meant for an ailing princess, she is forced into a life of exile. In the years that follow, Hanalei finds solace in studying the majestic seadragons that roam the Nominomi Sea. Until, one day, an encounter with a female dragon offers her what she desires most. A chance to return home, and to right a terrible wrong.

Samahtitamahenele, Sam, is the last remaining prince of Tamarind. But he can never inherit the throne, for Tamarind is a matriarchal society. With his mother ill and his grandmother nearing the end of her reign. Sam is left with two choices: to marry, or to find a cure for the sickness that has plagued his mother for ten long years. When a childhood companion returns from exile, she brings with her something he has not felt in a very long time-hope.

But Hanalei and Sam are not the only ones searching for the dragonfruit. And as they battle enemies both near and far, there is another danger they cannot escape…that of the dragonfruit itself.

Artwork by Tran Nguyen

Release date | Apr 9, 2024 Storygraph

#oceania #fantasy #pacific islander

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ya-world-challenge · 15 days

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Whaaat is this why have I not seen this before

And this cover is beauuutiful.

Vā: Stories by Women of the Moana, edited by Sisilia Eteuati & Lani Young

#pacific authors #5 stories in and they are good #on kindle #pacific islander #oceania #samoa #aotearoa #tonga #fiji #vanuatu #anthology #indigenous

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ya-world-challenge · 16 days

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A couple weeks ago I rolled Georgia on the randomizer for my up next, so now I'm reading:

🇬🇪 Georgia - Giorgiland Fables (2-book series) by Tamuna Tsertsvadze

Shall I roll again?

Let's try....

🎲

Roll 1...

98 - Japan

Already read this one! Try again...

🎲

Roll 2...

85 - Hawai'i

🌺

Ooh, interesting! I don't have a set book I want to read to Hawai'i, so I'll have to look through some lists.

And I just realized that it's April, so I think that means I've been doing this challenge for 2 years now! Maybe I'll make a 2-year summary post later.

#updates #randomizer #currently reading

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ya-world-challenge · 17 days

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they r in love ur honor

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ya-world-challenge · 17 days

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Trying to make a global queer books list. (Cuz god knows why I need more lists)

Claude was so kind as to make me a goodreads web scraper to mine books for LGBT tags. Thanks, bot. :D

#“ai” art is shit but #programming assistant is an acceptable use for an algorithm imo #it could use a little more tweaking

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