MelonCat
Here for swashbuckling adventures and feet-kicking romance ⚔️🥰 Bonus points for sassy cats 😼 Easily distracted by mind-bending comedy 🐬 | she/her - 1993 - ♾️| Current ratings under review
3964 points
September 2026
3.27 average · 284 reviews
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The gold standard of morally grey MMCs and the only sane response from a FMC to one. I've only read the first Shadow and Bone book but I jumped into this series having watched the TV show and had no problem following along. It does dump you right into world and magic system so I would suggest checking out at least one of the above before reading. This was a very satisfying read. I love all the characters and the setting. So much diversity without it feeling like a shallow, box-ticking, marketing exercise. Everyone felt genuine in their motivations, flaws and struggles. Such a fun adventure of a book with real soul and substance.
So a lot of you probably don't need help filling your TBRs 😅, however, if you are looking for a fun way to expand your reading horizons I stumbled across a method today which has helped me discover a lot of new books I've never heard of.
So it started from another post about what shelves PB members have. Someone shared that they have a shelf for book covers they love. I thought this was cool and yoinked the idea for myself. Then I decided to do the same with cool book titles, book titles that made me stop and want to read the blurb. I've discovered so many cool books today whilst making these shelves that I feel giddy 😍
To stop this feeling overwhelming I suggest you start by going through the Quests one by one and add books to your 'book cover' shelf and your 'book title' shelf. You can search through a new quest everyday. The discover section with the daily emoji books also is a great place to look. Then move onto Lists. I'm also finding this method useful for books that appear on my feed when I don't have time to go and read the blurb, I just stick them onto one of theses shelves and come back to them later to decide if I want to add them to Interested or TBR.
At the end of it, you have two shelves stuffed with amazing books that reflect your taste in covers and titles, and hopefully you'll discover a bunch of new reads along the way. (Don't feel you need to restrict yourself to only adding books you would actually read to these shelves, I don't read horror but I found some amazing horror covers which I've added to my book cover gallery 🖼️ )
(I hope this doesn't sound completely ridiculous and obvious. I had a lot of fun doing this today after a really shitty morning so I hope it brings you joy too 🥰)
MelonCat commented...
I struggle with this too and I know this will be unpopular, but I can't really see what the problem is with repeat posts (please don't hurt me 😅). I'm not in the Jane Austen forums so maybe I've just not experienced the full overwhelm of a much discussed book. However, I feel most people are not going to have an entirely unique take on a book but their way of expressing it will be different and in some cases more appealing, funnier, clearer. I think it will eventually stifle people if they feel they can't post about something if it's already been said before and all they can do is comment "Yeah I thought that too." (because I imagine people would find it rude if you restate the point they made in a better way in their comments 😅)(Not saying that my takes are better than anyone else's, but I often come across posts where other people put something I've heard dozens of times in such a perfect way and it's like finding a gem 💎).
I find the forums quite hard to navigate with the whole percentage thing and not being able to specify a start and end point (yet), so I end up using the feed to have discussions about books, but only for books I've already finished because I'm too afraid of spoilers.
I’ve seen quite a few posts since I’ve joined PB about forum etiquette, and one of the most prominent sentiments I’ve seen is to avoid making repeat posts. I agree with this idea and see why it’s important, but my reading preferences are going to make it difficult for me to put this into practice.
This is because I’m an extremely spoiler-averse reader. Seeing any spoiler, even a small one, will impact my enjoyment, as progressing through a book blind and discovering all it has to offer for myself is an important part of reading for me. This is a problem for checking if something I want to post is a repeat idea because percentages can vary so widely across different editions/formats of a book. If a forum post just has a percentage marker in the title, I won’t want to look at it until my own percentage is 5-10% higher than the post’s to be sure I avoid spoilers. There are some forum posts that include a chapter in the title, which solves my issue (thank you so much to everyone who does this!!), but unfortunately a lot of posts don’t include this.
So I’m at a bit of a loss for how to handle this. I don’t want to be that person who makes a bunch of repeat posts, but I also don’t want to run the risk of unintentionally coming across spoilers either. Participating in the forums has also been enhancing my reading experience, so I would rather not avoid the forums entirely. Does anyone have any tips for how to handle this dilemma I’m having??
