Down the Rabbit Hole

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

It’s a brand new year and new books are coming out! I’m so excited for a bunch of titles I feel I’ve been waiting for forever, and some new titles I’ve more recently found but feel just as amped up about. It’s hard to pick sometimes but hopefully these first half of 2023 releases live up to expectation.

In no particular order (because that’d be even harder to figure out), let’s begin!

1. Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

Wealth. Power. Murder. Magic. Alex Stern is back and the Ivy League is going straight to hell in #1 New York Timesbestselling author Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent.

Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory―even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.

Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies’ most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.

Thick with history and packed with Bardugo’s signature twists, Hell Bent brings to life an intricate world full of magic, violence, and all too real monsters.

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3.5 star, YA

Review: Five Survive by Holly Jackson

January 9, 2023January 9, 2023 Andge @ Down the Rabbit Hole

The brand new unmissable crime thriller from Holly Jackson, best-selling, award-winning author of the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder trilogy.

Eight hours.
Six friends.
One sniper . . .

Eighteen year old Red and her friends are on a road trip in an RV, heading to the beach for Spring Break. It’s a long drive but spirits are high. Until the RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere. There’s no mobile phone reception and nobody around to help. And as the wheels are shot out, one by one, the friends realise that this is no accident. There’s a sniper out there in the dark watching them and he knows exactly who they are. One of the group has a secret that the sniper is willing to kill for.

A game of cat-and-mouse plays out as the group desperately tries to get help and to work out which member of the group is the target. Buried secrets are forced to light in the cramped, claustrophobic setting of the RV, and tensions within the group will reach deadly levels. Not everyone will survive the night.

Overall Recommendation:

Hard to compete with the super high bar Holly Jackson’s bestselling series brought, but Five Survive holds up well enough as a locked room type thriller. Secrets were fun to guess and the ultimate mastermind behind what should’ve been a fun road trip wasn’t immediately obvious. Kudos for branching out in the genre but I did wish for more suspense as there wasn’t really enough stakes for it.

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discussion

Let’s Talk Bookish – 2023 New Goals

January 6, 2023 Fives @ Down The Rabbit Hole

Aria @ Book Nook Bits is the new host for Let’s Talk Bookish! If you aren’t following her yet, good check out her blog and give her a follow!

January 6: 2023 Reading & Blogging Goals (Aria)

Prompts: What are your reading goals for 2023? Do you have a specific number of books, or particular genres you want to read? What are your blogging goals for 2023? What do you want to do differently with blogging than you did last year?

Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to another LTB here at DTRH, and unsurprisingly, it’s a new goal-setting session. While I am not usually one for resolution setting and all that, it is of course pertinent to project into the future and set some plans for this year, if not just in broad brushstrokes. It’s been a tough few years for everyone, and I really wonder if this will mean more ambitious goals or less in light of that. We’ll just have to see!

I don’t have too many reading goals for this year. I can’t believe I still haven’t done an audiobook; my friend did say it took her 4 to 5 books to really get used to it though, so maybe I just need to dive in and try something. I just love the visual aspect of reading so much, it’s so hard to give that up for just audio. I don’t know if others can relate to that. If you have switched to many audiobooks (but still prefer regular), how did you guys make the switch? I’d love to know.

I specifically set a less lofty goal this year for reading number. Last year I was barely around 30 (or maybe I was bad at keeping track this year) when I originally completed more than 50 the year before. School just got unexpectedly busy and it seems like I can’t handle all the readings on top of my readings. Still, I generally try to read as much as possible and I will make time for it when I can. There are just those periods of hibernation which are just inevitable with school.

With the blog, I definitely want to work that well into my schedule again. I think it hasn’t been too bad, but I’d like to improve from last year and be even more consistent and post more new content. This is of course all contingent on school not consuming my life, but that remains to be seen. A goal is just a goal after all!

I’m not sure what I would really do differently about blogging this year but I think I just generally want to try and prioritize more and see if I can be a bit more efficient with me time. Sometimes taking a break is just necessary though, so it’s definitely a balancing act between those two things! We shall see how that works out this year.

What are all your goals for this year?